- South African Politician Blasts "Racist" Australia For Harboring Fleeing White Farmers
In perhaps the most Orwellian statement of the day, the head of South Africa’s radical Marxist opposition party – who declared his party was “cutting the throat of whiteness” – called Australia a “racist country” for offering fleeing white farmers a refuge.
As we have detailed previously, last month, South Africa’s parliament voted in favour of a motion, brought by the EFF and supported by the ruling African National Congress, to begin the process of expropriating white-owned land without compensation.
As Simon Black noted, this is likely to end badly.
That’s exactly what Zimbabwe did.
Seeking to correct similar colonial and Apartheid-era injustices in his country, Zimbabwe’s president Robert Mugabe initiated a land redistribution program in 1999-2000.
Thousands of white-owned farms were confiscated by the government, and the farmers were forced out.
Bear in mind that Zimbabwe used to be known as the breadbasket of southern Africa. Zimbabwe’s world-class farmers were major food exporters to the rest of the region.
But within a few years of Mugabe’s land distribution, food production plummeted.
Without its professional, experienced farmers, the nation went from being an agricultural export powerhouse to having to rely on handouts from the United Nations’ World Food Programme.
Hyperinflation and a multi-decade depression followed.
If there’s an economic model in the world that you DON’T want to follow, it’s Zimbabwe.
And you’d think that the politicians in neighboring South Africa would know that.
They had a front-row seat to the effects of Mugabe’s land redistribution, not to mention they had to absorb millions of starving Zimbabwean refugees who came across their borders.
Yet this is precisely the policy that they want to adopt.
The problem is – a 2017 government audit found white people owned 72 per cent of farmland in South Africa. According to the 2011 census, there are about 4.6 million white people in South Africa, accounting for 8.9 per cent of the population.
And as Australia’s News.com reports, the racially charged issue of land rights and farm murders has been the subject of fierce debate in the country and internationally.
According to civil rights group Afriforum, which represents around 200,000 white farmers largely from the Afrikaner minority, 82 people were killed in a record 423 attacks on farms last year. In 2018 so far, there have already been 109 attacks and more than 15 murders.
Afriforum says it is forced to compile its own numbers because the South African government — which denies the attacks are racially motivated or that white farmers are killed in disproportionate numbers — stopped releasing farm murder statistics in 2008.
“Our rural areas are trapped in a crime war,” Afriforum head of safety Ian Cameron said in a statement, adding that torture with irons, blowtorches, melted plastic and boiling water often continued for hours during the attacks.
“Although the South African government denies that a violence crisis is staring rural areas in the face, the numbers prove that excessive violence plague these areas. Government cannot deny the facts — our people are being mowed down.”
Which is why, earlier this month, Australian Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton floated the idea of fast-tracked humanitarian visas for white South African farmers, saying they faced “horrific circumstances” and needed help from a “civilised country.”
“We’re looking at ways we can help people to migrate to Australia if they’re finding themselves in that situation.”
And despite the facts of savage attacks on white farmers, this statement outraged South Africa’s government who claimed “the threat did not exist” and accused Mr Dutton of being an “out and out racist.”
But today the rhetoric heated up further as Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) leader Julius Malema, who recently declared his party was “cutting the throat of whiteness”, denied white farmers were being killed, telling a packed crowd that “we don’t know violence, we know negotiations.”
Malema, who was convicted of hate speech in 2011 for singing the apartheid-era revolutionary song Shoot the Boer, Kill the Farmer and in 2016 told supporters he was “not calling for the slaughter of white people‚ at least for now”, said farmers should “leave quietly”.
“We’re too busy,” he said. “Don’t make noise, because you will irritate us. Go to Australia. It is only racists who went to Australia when Mandela got out of prison. It is only racists who went to Australia when 1994 came. It is the racists again who are going back to Australia.”
But he said they would be “poor in Australia”. “They are rich here because they are exploiting black people. There is no black person to be exploited in Australia, they are going to be poor.
“They will come back here with their tail between their legs. We will hire them because we will be the owners of their farms when they come back to South Africa. As to what we are going to do with the land, it’s our business, it’s none of your business.
“We want Africa back. Africa belongs to our people.
“We are saying that which our people were killed for … has not been achieved, and therefore we will continue with that struggle. When we say so, they say we are racist, they say we want to kill white people. Why would we kill white people?
“Our mothers and fathers are not murderers. The white settlers found them here, they killed them, they forcefully removed them, yet our people kept on saying: ‘Let’s talk.’
“Today we say: ‘Let’s talk like our parents kept on saying to you. Let’s talk about how we are going to expropriate land without compensation.’ Then when we say so, they say we want to kill them.”
The Transvaal Agricultural Union of South Africa (TAU SA), a commercial farmers union in the region, warned the country is in danger of traveling the same path as Zimbabwe, which “plunged into famine after a government-sanctioned purge of white farmers in the 2000s,” said the Russian Times.
“Where in the world has expropriation without compensation coupled to the waste of agricultural land, resulted in foreign confidence, economic growth and increased food production?” Meintjes said, via Australia’s news.com.au.
“If Mr Ramaphosa is set on creating an untenable situation, he should actively create circumstances which will promote famine. His promise to expropriate land without compensation sows the seed for revolution. Expropriation without compensation is theft.”
Freedom Front Plus leader Pieter Groenewald warned,
“If you continue on this course, I can assure you there is going to be unforeseen consequences that is not in the interest of South Africa.”
The Coming Civil War in South Africa explained:
- Salisbury, Skripal, And Novichok – A Local's View
Authored by Lesley Docksey via TruePublica,
From the moment the news came out that on Sunday March 4th in Salisbury, one of England’s revered cathedral cities, a Russian spy and his daughter had been poisoned by some form of ‘nerve agent’, my reaction was ‘Oh dear’.
Jeremy Corbyn correctly reminded Parliament of Tony Blair’s attempt to frighten people into going to war with Iraq with his ‘’dodgy dossier’ and 45 minutes claim. But most have forgotten that, four days before the huge demonstration in London the Army very visibly arrived at Heathrow airport, because there was a possible threat of planes being hit by al Qa’ida missiles. They disappeared after a day or so as it was obvious the protest by millions would go ahead anyway.
The ever-increasing hysteria of the government and mainstream media in the days that followed the Salisbury incident was giving off the same nasty smell. All the ‘news’ was evidence-light and full of anomalies that no one addressed. It seems that once again, a government is trying to scare everyone, this time to make us point the accusing finger at Russia.
Then I read a comment by a Salisbury resident: “It’s like a ghost town.” The government’s reaction had so frightened everyone that people weren’t coming to the city. Shops and businesses were suffering. I don’t exactly live a million miles from Salisbury, so I hopped on the train to see for myself how it was coping.
Visit Salisbury at any time of the year and it will be heaving with people coming to shop, to eat at one of the many cafes, restaurants and pubs, to visit the Cathedral and to walk through the ancient narrow streets. Not now, it isn’t. From the moment I walked out of the station towards the city centre I was struck by the lack of people. Plenty of traffic winding its way through the narrow medieval streets but pedestrians? No.
I made my way to the Maltings where Skripal and his daughter had been found, collapsed on a bench. It’s a pedestrianised area, with a central green area (where that bench was) beside a river, surrounded by some big stores and lots of little, individual shops. Walk through it from the car parks and you come out into the old city centre with its ancient timber-frame and brick buildings. It’s not just popular with the locals, it is tourist heaven.
On my way in there was a policemen on duty and blue-and-white cordon tape. Further in were more police guarding cordoned-off areas and some media – cameras and reporters making their filmed reports to Sky News or whoever. I overheard one of them saying “She is due to arrive…” Could I possibly have arrived just before our useless Prime Minister Theresa May finally came to Salisbury? I would have to wait and see.
I filled in time with looking at some of the shops. There were five within the cordon, forced to close for nearly two weeks, and no end in sight. Beyond them, just outside the cordon, was an Original factory Shop Factory Shop with open doors. I didn’t go in. I didn’t want to face the embarrassment of being the only person in a large store not standing behind a counter. Sainsbury’s supermarket, on the edge of the Maltings, wasn’t faring much better.
I tried the little shops, loved by visitors to Salisbury. It is nearly Easter. Windows were filled with Easter displays, and no public to enjoy them. In each was a lonely person waiting in vain for customers. I asked one of them how bad the trade was. “It’s twice as bad as it was last week,” she said, “and it’s getting worse.” Depressed, I went back and stood by the bridge over the river, waiting for May.
The press were gathering, more cameras, microphones held ready. A Wiltshire policeman passed me and grinned. “We don’t usually have exciting things happen in Salisbury!” he said cheerfully. But Salisbury really could do without this thrill.
May appeared with Chief Constable Pritchard and was immediately surrounded by the press. I heard an animated conversation going on behind me. It was Jon Snow of Channel 4 News, talking to some local people. They only realised who he was after he walked off, back to the city centre and away from the media scrum. Sensible man.
Two schoolgirls passed May on their way back to school after lunch, one of them saying, “I don’t really care about her.” May went on a tiny walk-about and met one or two shop owners, probably handpicked for being Prime Minister-friendly. Then it was off to the Guildhall for a meeting with first-responders.
The empty Guildhall Square at lunchtime – every building in the photo is a café, pub or restaurant!
Outside was a crowd, rubber necking, along with lots of police, some noisy police dogs, and a fire engine. Hovering overhead were helicopters and a drone. No wonder Salisbury residents and visitors are becoming fearful and staying away. Apart from the crowd standing outside the Guildhall, the large Guildhall Square was almost deserted, and this at lunchtime when offices empty and people fill the cafes, restaurants and pubs that surround the Square and it’s hard to find a free table anywhere. Now they were almost all free.
Here and there I saw large signs outside the shops declaring, ‘Open for Business’. I had never seen the city like this and it broke my heart. It is scheduled to get worse. On Monday March 12th the Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner said that all the cordoned areas (of which there are several around the city) could remain in place for weeks, and that more could be set up.
But Salisbury has had enough and is fighting back. In a narrow street going towards the cathedral I found a shop window with a message strung across it: #SALISBURYISOPEN. Naturally I went in and asked the woman behind the counter what it meant. And it all came pouring out. “We’ve just recovered from all the ‘regeneration work’ on the car parks and the Maltings, when this happens,” she said, while explaining her message.
The Salisbury Journal, the city’s weekly paper, is one to be envied by other places. The March 15th issue has a 12-page focus on the incident which puts the hyperventilating national press to shame. The Journal is also doing what government has failed to do. Ministers might insist Salisbury is ‘safe’, but that doesn’t match their scare-mongering. So the Journal launched the ‘Salisbury is Open’ campaign. That is what the ‘Open for Business’ signs are about.
I was told how Salisbury residents are too frightened to come into the centre to shop. I was told of suspect vehicles being taken by the military to Porton Down, a fact confirmed by the Journal. The Journal carefully lists them: ambulances, police cars (some unmarked) and two vehicle recovery vans, over several days.
Altogether, about 10 or 11 vehicles, for the scientists at Porton Down to examine for the presence of a ‘nerve agent’. Scientists there must be tired of this, having apparently refused to identify it as Russian-made.
But the real question, says the lady in the shop, is ‘What about Skripal’s car?’ a red BMW series 3. Why was it taking so long for the police to find it? Surely they would look in the Sainsbury’s car park first? They cordoned off the car park, but not until 8 days after the poisoning. Later they came back and cordoned off the ticket machine.
It is known Skripal’s car entered the car park at about 1:40 pm on March 4th. When was it taken to the Ashley Wood Recovery Garage, and by whom? And indeed, why, unless to get it out of the way?
Why did ‘incident response units’ examine a red BMW at the Garage on Thursday March 8th, remove an Ashley Wood recovery van from Winterslow village on Monday 12th, return to the Garage on Tuesday 13th, remove another recovery van from a Dorset town on Thursday March 14th and only then on Friday, 12 whole days after the incident, it is officially identified as Skripal’s car, and the Journal reports that it is being removed from Ashley Wood Recovery Garage, with the national media limping in a day later.
12 days. If this nerve agent is so very dangerous why is there so little to show for so much activity, and so many delays in dealing with it? Doesn’t it look like an exercise in propaganda?
Are the counter terrorism police going trace all those who used the car park ticket machine? Are they going to cordon off any place (the cemetery is already out of bounds) where Skripal may possibly have been? Are they going to spin this out even more and gradually put all of Ashley Wood’s vehicles in Porton Down, and all its staff in hospital? Another local business ruined to further the UK’s anti-Russia campaign.
There is no thought for the city of Salisbury and its people in any of the government’s actions, so focussed are they on their unsubstantiated accusations against Russia. A Foreign Office statement claimed:
“Russia’s response doesn’t change the facts of the matter – the attempted assassination of two people on British soil, for which there is no alternative conclusion other than that the Russian State was culpable.”
The Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, said it was a ‘state-sponsored murder attempt’. But which ‘state’ are we talking about?
It’s been clear for months that the government was using the Brexit shambles to hide the fact that they couldn’t govern the country and tackle its pressing issues – the health crisis, homelessness and lack of social housing, poverty and the awful results of its austerity programme. Now it seems that the government is using Skripal to hide the fact that they can’t govern Brexit either.
And while they’re sorting out their fantastical mess, and if you live anywhere near Salisbury, go visit, eat out and buy something in the shops.
- White House Soap Operas Distract From Real Global Dangers
Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,
In the liberty movement, we often refer to the historical tactic of the Roman “bread and circuses” when describing the deliberate mass distraction of the public of today. In the era when Roman emperors supplanted the senate and dominated political and social life, it was deemed advantageous to create various forms of “entertainment,” often violent, in order to keep the citizenry preoccupied and thus less likely to physically act against the power structure as the empire suffered economic decline.
The use of bread and circuses continues into our era, but the method has been refined and the manipulations have become in some ways more subtle.
For example, in ancient Rome the horrors of the Colosseum were meant to keep the public’s attention AWAY from the government.
Today, the soap opera of government keeps people’s attention away from the true power brokers within global finance.
The White House itself has been molded into just another reality TV show, and mainstream media coverage has been relentless. With Donald Trump (no stranger to reality TV) at center stage, it is difficult for the citizenry to gauge what is politically legitimate and important. What we are bombarded with is an ever escalating drama between Trump, his staff, and the media, and instead of ignoring the theater many people are desperately seeking to interpret the meaning behind a show that is actually meaningless.
Every two weeks or so another episode develops in which Trump, playing the character of the brash and aggressive “populist,” fires one of his cabinet as if The Apprentice never ended, but was simply transferred to the Oval Office. Some people find this entertaining as it is Trump doing what he is most recently famous for doing. Those on the political left interpret this as reckless abandon and confirmation that their fears over Trump being ill suited to the presidency are justified. Still others in the liberty movement who originally supported Trump’s campaign are perhaps desperately looking for vindication. They wanted so badly to avoid the inevitable evils of a Clinton regime that they are now willing to give Trump a pass on almost anything, and they argue that the endless turnover in the Trump White House is Trump fulfilling his election promise of “draining the swamp.”
It is important to note that Trump is NOT draining the swamp of elitism in Washington D.C. The public is so focused on who Trump gives the boot they are forgetting to pay attention to the institutions that never leave. But what do I mean by this?
Let’s look at the some of the more widely publicized staff changes at the White House. Dina Powell, a Goldman Sachs alumni, was recently replaced as National Security Adviser, and so, the argument that Trump is “draining the swamp” persists. Yet, Powell was replaced by H.R. McMaster, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and hardly a stranger to elitist circles.
Gary Cohn, another Goldman Sachs agent, has left his post as Chief Economic Adviser and has been replaced by “conservative” Larry Kudlow, ostensibly as Trump is “cleaning house” and removing globalist influences in preparation for his war to balance the trade deficit. Yet, Kudlow is was a campaign coordinator who worked closely with the likes of Bill Clinton and John Podesta, as well as other major Democrat personalities. He began his career as a staff economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and oversaw the fall of Bear Stearns which was one of the sparks that launched the 2008 credit crisis. This guy is in no way a true conservative, nor is he some kind of anti-globalist replacement for Gary Cohn.
Rex Tillerson’s firing, one of the most recent dramas, has led to the position of Secretary of State being filled by CIA Director Mike Pompeo. Pompeo is often portrayed as a former “Tea Party congressmen”, yet he is a rabid supporter of mass surveillance of the American people by the NSA through FISA related programs, and has referred to Wikileaks as a “non-state hostile intelligence service.” First, this only proves further the “Tea Party” label has been so thoroughly co-opted by the establishment that it is laughable to refer to it in any relation to true conservatives and liberty champions. Second, it also shows that Trump has no intention of making any significant changes to the Beltway; only cosmetic changes are allowed.
And so it goes on and on. If one looks closely at the Trump administration, they will find that the people within the cabinet are changing constantly, but the elitist and globalist organizations and ideologies those people represent are always present within the White House. They never leave.
The swamp is not being “drained,” it is simply being shifted around so that the American people can’t keep up with the names of the swamp creatures and the positions they hold.
Ever since the days of Woodrow Wilson, a president purportedly controlled from within the White House by adviser Col. Mandel House (the founder of the Council On Foreign Relations), it has been common practice for globalists to use presidents as proxies. That is to say, the president is generally a mascot held up to the public as a target for political criticism or as a rallying tool to push the population in a particular direction. All the while, the true power brokers work from behind the curtain, dictating policy towards the paths of either globalization or disaster.
Trump is an interesting case as far as this 4th generation warfare is concerned. Never in modern times has a president’s rhetoric been so openly hostile to the globalists, while at the same time harboring those very same globalists within his administration. Never before has a fabricated battle between the White House and globalization as an ideology been used as a distraction from globalism itself. This is something entirely new.
The issue is something I warned about consistently before Trump was even elected, and it is the reason I predicted that he would become president. Trump, in my view according to the evidence so far, is controlled opposition. He is a foil for the globalist battle against ideas of conservatism, sovereignty and nationalism. Instead of attacking these ideas outright (a losing battle), the elitists have presented a strawman in the form of Donald Trump. Trump’s actions seem to follow conservative guidelines but his policies are poorly executed, which sets the stage for future failures on an epic scale.
As I mentioned in my article Trump Trade Wars A Perfect Smokescreen For A Market Crash, the timing of Trump’s initiatives could not be more perfect…for international financiers and central banks, that is.
Currently, the Federal Reserve and other central banks around the world are embarking on a process of tightening stimulus measures that have been artificially propping up stock markets and bond markets since the 2008 crash. In particular, the Fed’s move to continue hiking interest rates and cut its balance sheet as negative economic data rolls in has set light to the fuse of a fiscal explosion. Market dependency on cheap debt is total. Corporate debt levels are at all time highs as companies sink further and further into the red in a desperate attempt to inflate their own stock prices through stock buybacks. The Fed has been facilitating this market manipulation for quite some time, but now the party is over.
With each new rate hike and balance sheet reduction markets become more volatile and unstable. The Fed under new chairman Jerome Powell is well aware of what it is doing, considering Powell warned of the consequences of this as far back as 2012. It is highly unlikely though that when the economy crashes central bankers will get the blame.
As March rolls into April, it is also important to note that the Fed’s balance sheet reductions are slated to expand to $30 billion per month or more. So far, the Fed has shown a habit of cutting far beyond their publicly stated goals. With markets dropping by thousands of points every time there is a balance sheet reduction, the instability is only going to increase exponentially.
Also, is it just a coincidence that every new Trump tariff and trade war announcement seems to take place at the same time as the Fed’s rate hikes and balance sheet cuts? This sure does make it appear as though Trump is the cause of the subsequent stock market declines rather than the central bank, doesn’t it?
Trump’s continued soap opera theater is building up the narrative of a slapdash presidency run by a bumbling novice. Trump’s initiation of a trade war without necessary preparations, such as giving corporations incentives to move manufacturing back to the U.S. and creating production independence, is an excellent smokescreen for a collapse of stock markets and a dumping of U.S. Treasury bonds by foreign creditors.
For those wondering why globalist elements would deliberately crash the American economy, I suggest they read my article The Economic Endgame Explained. To summarize, in order to reach their openly stated goals of a one world currency system, as well as total centralization of global economic administration, certain appendages of the current system must be sacrificed. One of those appendages is the American economy as it exists now, along with the U.S. dollar as the world reserve currency.
Such an attack on our country and our society would not go without notice or possible retaliation. Therefore, the banking elitists need a scapegoat. I have said it before and I’ll say it again — there is no better scapegoat that the Trump White House. Why? Because the Trump White House has been painted since the election as a symbol of stalwart conservatism, even though it is not. The demonization of conservative principles such as limited government, true free markets, personal liberty, etc. becomes much easier when globalists can attach them to an international catastrophe such as a financial collapse.
And, since Trump has been set up as the strawman for conservative ideals, attaching catastrophe to Trump also vicariously attaches catastrophe to the rest of us.
The only way to undermine this 4th generation warfare tactic is for conservatives to ignore the White House soap opera and to question Donald Trump’s policies publicly when they do not meet logical or practical standards. Blindly supporting Trump because of his rhetoric only harms our cause in the long run, and refusing to acknowledge the fact that he has surrounded himself with the very globalists he is supposedly at war with only sets us up for tragedy. If we remain skeptical and maintain our principles, however, it becomes much harder for the mainstream media or anyone else to implicate us in any great calamity that Trump is blamed for.
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- Facebook Fines Not Enough: Open Markets Institute Demands Full-Restructuring "To Protect Democracy"
It appears Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s non-apology apology statement and robotic CNN interview, that he feels bad and is sorry, were not enough to quell the concerns of both shareholders and regulators as the Open Markets Institute demands that The FTC restructure Facebook and lays out 9 steps to achieve that…
Since news broke that a data analysis firm with ties to the Trump campaign harvested personal information from tens of millions of Facebook users, much of the speculation has focused on whether the Federal Trade Commission will fine the corporation for violating a 2011 deal to protect user privacy.
But the pressing nature of America’s Facebook problem, especially the way the corporation’s actions have endangered basic democratic institutions, means the FTC should go much further.
“Facebook has too much power over America’s communications infrastructure. And Facebook’s failure to manage that power responsibly has made it too easy for Russian hackers to spread propaganda and disinformation, even while making it too hard for trustworthy American journalists and editors to do their jobs. This is a direct threat to American democracy, and the government must act now,” said Barry Lynn, Executive Director of Open Markets.
If the next set of FTC commissioners truly are serious about making Facebook serve the interests of the American public, here is a set of actions they should begin to take on day one.
Every one of these action has a strong foundation in US law and practice:
1) Impose strict privacy rules on Facebook, perhaps using Europe’s new General Data Protection Regulation as a guide.
2) Spin off Facebook’s ad network. This will eliminate, in one swoop, most of the incentive that Facebook now has to amass data and to interfere and discriminate in the provision of information and news.
3) Reverse the approvals for Facebook purchases of WhatsApp and Instagram, and re-establish these as competing social networks.
4) Prohibit all future acquisitions by Facebook for at least five years.
5) Establish a system to ensure the transparency of all political communications on Facebook, similar to other major communication networks in the United States.
6) Require Facebook to adopt open and transparent standards, similar to conditions the FTC imposed on AOL Messenger in the AOL-Time Warner merger settlement in 2001.
7) Establish whether Facebook violated the 2011 consent decree and, if so, seek court sanctions.
8) Threaten to bring further legal action against Facebook unless top executives immediately agree to work with the FTC to restructure their corporation to ensure the safety and stability of our government and economy.
9) Establish whether top executives enabled, encouraged, or oversaw violations of the 2011 consent decree and, if so, pursue personal fines against them.
Rather than simply carve away some of Facebook’s huge profits, the FTC should immediately move to restructure the corporation to ensure this now essential medium of communication really serves the political and economic interests of American citizens in the 21st century.
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Shareholders are not happy…
Could it really happen again?
- Trump Suspends Tariffs On Multiple Nations (Not China Or Japan) Until May
After unleashing the first shots in the global trade war, and facing some retaliation from China tonight, President Trump has decided to exclude multiple nations (and The EU) from steel and aluminum tariffs through May 1st.
This action confirms what Ambassador Lighthizer suggested earlier in the evening, which perhaps explains the negligible response to this modest retreat in the trade war.
Full White House Statement:
President Trump Approves Section 232 Tariff Modifications
WASHINGTON – Today, based on ongoing dialogues, President Donald J. Trump authorized the modification of the Section 232 tariffs on steel and aluminum imports to suspend the tariffs for certain countries before they take effect. These suspensions are based on factors including ongoing discussions regarding measures to reduce global excess capacity in steel and aluminum production by addressing its root causes.
The tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from the following countries are suspended until May 1, 2018, pending discussions of satisfactory long-term alternative means to address the threatened impairment to U.S. national security:
- Argentina;
- Australia;
- Brazil;
- Canada;
- Mexico;
- the member countries of the European Union; and
- South Korea.
By May 1, 2018, the President will decide whether to continue to exempt these countries from the tariffs, based on the status of the discussions. The European Union will negotiate on behalf of its member countries.
The President retains broad authority to further modify the tariffs, including by removing the suspensions or suspending additional countries. Any country not currently suspended remains welcome to discuss a possible suspension with the United States based on a shared commitment to addressing global excess steel and aluminum capacity and production.
The Administration will closely monitor imports of steel and aluminum imports from exempted countries, and the United States Trade Representative, in consultation with the Secretary of Commerce and the Director of the National Economic Council, may advise the President to impose quotas as appropriate. Further action by the President would be needed to implement any quota the President might decide to adopt.
The tariffs proclaimed in Presidential Proclamations 9704 and 9705 will go into effect on 12:01 a.m. on Friday, March 23, 2018.
The process for directly affected parties to apply for an exclusion for specific steel or aluminum products that they need remains in place, as announced in the two Presidential Proclamations and subsequent Federal Register notices by the U.S. Department of Commerce. Secretary Ross, in consultation with other Administration officials, will evaluate exclusion requests for products, taking into account national security considerations. In that evaluation, the Secretary will consider whether a product is produced in the United States of a satisfactory quality or in a sufficient and reasonably available amount.
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While few would have expected any China exemption – that’s the whole point – it was perhaps notable that Japan was not exempted.
- Brother Of Pablo Escobar Releases ‘Dietbitcoin’ As Alternative To ‘CIA’s Bitcoin Scam’
Submitted by CoinTelegraph
The brother of late Columbian drug lord Pablo Escobar, Roberto Escobar, has released his own alternative to Bitcoin (BTC), a BTC hard fork called dietbitcoin (DDX).
image courtesy of CoinTelegraph
Roberto Escobar’s connection to dietbitcoin has been independently confirmed by a spokesperson for Escobar Inc., Roberto Escobar’s investment company, to TheNextWeb today, March 22.
Roberto De Jesús Escobar Gaviria’s website for dietbitcoin includes a 281 page book, available as a downloaded PDF, entitled “The True Story by Roberto Escobar: Pablo Escobar’s Dietbitcoin” and subtitled, “After making $100 bln dollars, Roberto Escobar launches the dietbitcoin ‘DDX’ cryptocurrency.”
If one does not have time to read the full version, which includes chapters entitled “The Other Peruvian Plane,” and “Noriega, The Traitor”, interested parties can download the white paper laying out the impetus for the creation of DDX in a short introduction:
“I am the first person in the world, Roberto De Jesus Escobar Gaviria, to publicly come out and claim that Bitcoin was created by the American Government, and I am not going to be the last person to say this. The world is going to wake up. The world is going to see that this was created by them. And when they see it, it is too late, and when the CIA founds out that the world knows about this, the CIA is going to sell all of their coins, and they will destroy the value of Bitcoin…That’s why I am creating my own cryptocurrency called dietbitcoin (DDX).”
Dietbitcoin is currently running an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) that consists of three rounds with 1 mln DDX coins as the cap for the crowdsale. The pre-ICO round 1 offers a total of 300,000 coins for $2 a coin, a sale price from the $50 originally listed, pre-ICO round 2 offers 300,000 coins for $100 each, and the ICO will have 400,000 tokens for $1000 each.
However, the total number of coins is written as 1.8 mln, with a supply cap of 21 mln.
According to Roberto Escobar’s book, it was the elusive Satoshi Nakamoto that approached him about cryptocurrencies initially:
“I get a phone call, this time it is from El Conejo [nickname]. El Conejo is telling me that he is talking to Satoshi Nakamoto. He is not just talking. He is with him right now in Lima, Peru. I said, ‘El Conejo, I do not know who this man is. Bring him to my house.’ El Conejo responded “OK.”
I kept reading in the newspapers about this cryptocurrency called Bitcoin. I didn’t know what it was all about. I didn’t care. Until El Conejo called me again. This time, he told me that we are doing our own cryptocurrency. I didn’t understand. He told me that the founder of Bitcoin wants to do a cryptocurrency with the family of Pablo Emillio Escobar Gavirira. I said, ‘OK. I approve the deal.’”
However, Roberto Escobar then explains that Nakamoto approaching him was actually “a setup by the American Government to infiltrate Escobar Incorporated,” and thus his dietbitcoin is the superior coin as it will not allow the “Americanos” to track users’ purchases.
Escobar was also apparently in contact with another well-known figure in the crypto community, John McAfee in the hopes of creating a cryptocurrency together, but eventually turned the deal down for being “too small:”
“I didn’t like the guy; small guy. I never heard of him before. Nobody in Colombia knows his name. I do not know if the world knows about him or not, but I do not know about him.
I said to El Conejo, ‘How can you make a company with a guy that nobody knows about except you?’ El Conejo said ‘It’s not like that.’ I replied ‘Well that is the way that it looks to me. John McAfee I never heard of him. I never heard of his name. It’s a worthless name. You know the name that you need is my name. Not the name of this man.’”
Robert Escobar also explains in his book why he does not think that Ethereum (ETH) is a legitimate coin, mentioning the youth of Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin as a factor:
“Ethereum is a complete scam. This is nice technology, but it was created by a small child. Who cares about this child? I do not care. He can come here and talk to me in my face. I will say ‘Sir, you are a gringo. You think I care about the gringo coin? I don’t care.’ All of these other coins and tokens; do not even get me started on tokens.”
Earlier this year, another big name, actor and “zen master” Steven Seagal, attached his name to the new cryptocurrency “Bitcoiin2gen,” which also posits itself as a “superior or more advanced version of [Satoshi Nakamoto’s] Original Bitcoin.” However, New Jersey has since sent a cease and desist letter concerning Bitcoiin2gen’s ICO, alleging that “unregistered securities” were offered in violation of securities laws.
- Techlash – Is Facebook Doing More Harm Than Good?
Amid the ongoing debate about whether or not companies such as Facebook and Twitter are responsible for the spreading of disinformation or “fake news” on their platforms, the world’s largest social network finds itself at the center of yet another scandal related to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. According to information leaked to the Observer and reported by The Guardian, a data analytics firm exploited a loophole in Facebook’s API to obtain the personal information of 50 million Facebook users in order to target them with personalized political ads.
The company, Cambridge Analytica, was working closely with the Trump campaign and is also said to have played a role in the pro-Brexit campaign ahead of the United Kingdom’s EU referendum in 2016. “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons”, Christopher Wylie, a former Cambridge Analytica employee turned whistleblower, told the Observer.
As Statista’s Felix Richter notes, it is not the first time that Facebook has unwillingly but rather naively enabled misuse of its platform as Josh Constine of Techcrunch interestingly points out in a recent article.
“Facebook has naively put its faith in humanity and repeatedly been abused, exploited, and proven either negligent or complicit”, Constine writes, adding that the company lacks “cynics and diverse voices who might foresee how its products could be perverted or were conceptualized foolishly in the first place”.
Facebook is currently facing massive criticism for its handling of the Cambridge Analytica affair, its stock price is tumbling and the hashtag #DeleteFacebook is trending on Twitter. Even before the most recent scandal, many people had started questioning whether the world’s largest social network might have gotten out of control.
You will find more infographics at Statista
In a poll conducted in December by CB Insights, 59 percent of the respondents said that they expect Facebook to be considered a net negative for society in ten years’ time.
- The Iran-Pakistan Corridor Is A Geopolitical Powder-Keg
Authored by Dr, Lawrence Sellin via The South Asia Program at Hudson Institute,
The Iran-Pakistan border contains all the ingredients for a geopolitical explosion – regional rivalries, Sunni-Shia conflicts, ethnic insurgents, espionage, drug smuggling and human trafficking.
China considers the stability of the region so important that it brokered a series of border security meetings between Iran and Pakistan over the past year.
Much of China’s multi-billion-dollar investment in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) hinges on the commercial viability of the Pakistani port of Gwadar, near the Iranian border, for which it has a 40-year operational lease. Moreover, CPEC is the regional linchpin of the Belt and Road Initiative, an ambitious plan to connect Eurasia, the Middle East and Africa to China through a series of land-based and maritime economic zones.
Additionally, the planned Chinese naval base on Pakistan’s Jiwani peninsula, even closer to the Iranian border and located at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, is a critical military node in China’s “String of Pearls” facilities designed to dominate the strategic sea lanes in the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean.
Such ambitions present a direct economic and military threat to India. Commercially, Gwadar competes with joint Iranian-Indian development of the port of Chabahar, just 150 miles to its west.
According to numerous reports, Saudi Arabia contributes to the instability of the border region by sponsoring virulently anti-Shia Sunni militant groups, such as Jaish al-Adl, who launch attacks on Iran from safe havens in Pakistan.
Iran retaliates by supporting the Baloch Liberation Front (BLF), an ethnic separatist group, whose sanctuaries and leader, Dr. Allah Nazar Baloch, are claimed to be inside Iranian territory and routinely conduct cross-border operations against Pakistani government targets. Members of the BLF are suspected to be in contact with Iranian intelligence, often through drug lords acting as intermediaries. BLF members are occasionally confused with their anti-Shia counterparts. Some months ago, a BLF team was mistakenly attacked by Iranian border guards. One member, shot in the encounter, was taken to Imam Ali Hospital in Chabahar for treatment, but later died of his wounds. The other team members were subsequently released by Iranian forces.
There are also narco-terrorists groups on the Pakistani side of the border with indirect links to the government in Islamabad. Lashkar-e-Khorasan, a alleged Islamic State affiliate, has been reportedly involved in “cleansing” western Balochistan of Sufi Zikris, Shia Hazaras, Hindus, Christians, Ahahmadis, Sikhs or anyone else who refuses to convert to the extreme form of Sunni Islam. The purported leader of Lashkar-e-Khorasan is Mullah Shahmir Bizenjo, a resident of Turbat, whose cousin is Senator Hasil Bizenjo, a member of the National Party and currently Pakistan’s Minister of Maritime Affairs. According to the Daily Beast, one of the drug world’s most notorious opium traffickers, also from Turbat, is Imam Bizenjo aka Imam Bheel, a National Party financier, whose son, Yaqoob Bizenjo, served as a member of the Pakistan National Assembly until 2013.
A more ominous portent of Iran-Pakistan border instability, is the return of the “Zainebiyoun” brigade. As a result of its involvement in the Syrian conflict, Iran created a unit composed of Pakistani Shia volunteers trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corp (IRGC), who have gained extensive combat experience fighting for the Assad regime against Sunni militants. It is rumored that “Zainebiyoun” members are now infiltrating back into Pakistan to provide the cadre for a Hazara self-defense force, a community long under attack by virulently anti-Shia extremist groups in Pakistan.
Chinese efforts towards Iran-Pakistan reconciliation has borne some fruit. In recent months, there has been a flurry of agreements in trade, defense, weapons development, counter-terrorism, banking, train service, parliamentary cooperation and, most recently, art and literature.
Iran seeks to separate Pakistan from Saudi Arabia, while Pakistan tries to balance relations with both states. China benefits by reducing tensions among all the regional players in order to advance its wider economic and military aims.
The lesson for the United States is that Afghanistan is swimming in a sea of instability and not, as we seem to presume, the focal point of that instability. American policy should be focused on burden shifting, managing and, when appropriate, exploiting instability to thwart Chinese hegemony.
- Starbucks Chairman: "We Took A Walk On Madison Avenue. It Reminded Me Of The Financial Crisis In 2008"
Back in June 2009, in one of our earliest posts in the aftermath of the financial crisis, we took a “random walk down Madison Avenue” and found empty storefront after empty storefront after empty storefront.
In retrospect, the ghost town that was New York’s “Golden Mile” was not surprising: after all the US economy had just been hit with the worst recession since the Great Depression, and only an emergency liquidity injection of trillions of dollars prevented a global financial collapse.
What is more surprising is why nearly 9 years later, at a time of what is supposed to be a coordinated global recovery, a walk along Madison Avenue reveals the exact same picture.
But don’t take our word for it: here is Starbucks Executive Chairman Howard Schultz speaking during the company’s annual general meeting on Wednesday, and making some stunning observations.
From the transcript:
… let me shift just quickly into the business a bit and what’s going on in terms of the seismic change that we’re all witnessing in terms of consumer behavior in Retail.
No, I wasn’t clairvoyant three years or four years ago, but I did notice something and you didn’t have to be a genius to figure it out that the e-commerce effect of things was going to have a dramatic effect on people physically shopping for goods and services. And that has resulted in a tremendous level of compression in terms of the amount of retailers that are serving customers today because less customers are coming into their stores and that has resulted in unfortunately many, many stores national, regional, and local going out of business.
Now this is a photo as you can see of a mall that is very, very busy with people shopping for goods and services. Unfortunately, that was then, this is now. And it’s a dramatic change. And what it means and you saw this today and what we’ve tried to present to you is that we’ve got a push for reinvention and innovation and we have to do – everything we can to become a primary destination.
Now, as a result of what we’re witnessing, we’re also seeing something else and that is, there is a proliferation around the country right now of empty storefronts. We took a walk in New York two weeks ago from 59th street to 79th on Madison Avenue, and we lost count of how many empty storefronts there were in Manhattan. It reminded me of the cataclysmic financial crisis in 2008. But what’s happening is very simple, the rent structures for the last 5 to 10 years, have been rising at historic rates and retailers do not have the amount of customers they had during these last 5 to 10 years and could no longer economically survive.
So they’re closing stores and as a result of this, I can promise you just like I predicted in 2014 that rents are coming down and landlords are going to have to get religion, or else their stores are going to stay empty. And we’re already beginning to see a different level of reception in terms of what we believe the cost of occupancy should be. And this is going to bode extremely well, specifically for us. We’re adding almost 700 new Starbucks stores a year. And so we are going to take full advantage of the economic reality of this situation. And as we go forward two, three, four, five years out even though labor is going up in terms of cost of labor, we believe rents are going down and the economic model of Starbucks is going to be enhanced as a result of this macro situation. And we’re just at the beginning of this trend.
In other words, if 2017 was the year the “retail bubble burst” as Urban Outfitters CEO Richard Hayne said one year ago, 2018 will be the year when not only the retail sector slides into purgatory, but the deflationary shockwave that is being unleashed as rents finally hit a brick wall, will lead to the next, and far more violent crash in commercial real estate, and the hundreds of billions in debt that prop it.
Don’t believe us? Just take a walk on Madison between 59 and 79th…
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