- Ed Curtin: The Coming War To End All Wars
Authored by Edward Curtin via GreanvillePost.com,
“The compulsive hatred of Putin by many who have almost zero idea about Putin or Russian history is disproportionate to any rational analysis, but not surprising.
Trump and Putin are like weird doppelgangers in the liberal imagination.”
—John Steppling, “Trump, Putin, and Nikolas Cruz Walk into a Bar”
The Trump and Netanyahu governments have a problem: How to start a greatly expanded Middle-Eastern war without having a justifiable reason for one. No doubt they are working hard to solve this urgent problem. If they can’t find a “justification” (which they can’t), they will have to create one (which they will). Or perhaps they will find what they have already created. Whatever the solution, we should feel confident that they are not sitting on their hands. History teaches those who care to learn that when aggressors place a gun on the wall in the first act of their play, it must go off in the final act.
These sinister players have signaled us quite clearly what they have in store. All signs point toward an upcoming large-scale Israeli/U.S. attack on Lebanon and Syria, and all the sycophantic mainstream media are in the kitchen prepping for the feast. Russia and Iran are the main course, with Lebanon and Syria, who will be devoured first, as the hors d’oeuvres. As always, the media play along as if they don’t yet know what’s coming. Everyone in the know knows what is, just not exactly when. And the media wait with baited breath as they count down to the dramatic moment when they can report the incident that will compel the “innocent” to attack the “guilty.”
Anyone with half a brain can see the greatly increased anti-Russian propaganda of the past few weeks. This has happened as the Russia-gate claims have fallen to pieces, as former CIA analyst Raymond McGovern, the late Robert Parry, Paul Craig Roberts, and others have documented so assiduously. All across the media spectrum, from the big name corporate stenographers like The New York Times, CNN, National Public Radio, The Washington Post to The Atlantic and Nation magazines and other “leftist” publications such as Mother Jones and Who What Why, the Russia and Putin bashing has become hysterical in tone, joined as it is with an anti-Trump obsession, as if Trump were a dear friend of Putin and Russia and wasn’t closely allied with the Netanyahu government in its plans for the Middle-East. As if Trump were in charge. “Russia Sees Midterm Elections as a Chance to Sow Fresh Discord (NY Times, 2/13), “Russia Strongman” (Putin) has “pulled off one of the greatest acts of political sabotage in modern history (The Atlantic, Jan. /Feb. 2018), “”Mueller’s Latest Indictment Shows Trump Has Helped Putin Cover Up a Crime” (Mother Jones, 2/16/18), “A Russian Sightseeing Tour For Realists” (whowhatwhy.com, 2/7/18), etc.
I am reminded of the turn to the right that so many “muckrakers” made during and after WW I. Afraid of a revolt from below, bewitched by their own vision to articulate the world’s future, heady over their own war propaganda, and wanting to be on the safe side of the government crackdown on dissent (The Espionage Act, the Palmer Raids, etc.), many progressives of the era embraced a jingoism similar to the anti-Russia mania of today.
Only someone totally lacking a sense of humor and blind to propaganda would not laugh uproariously at today’s media nonsense about Russia, but such laughter would be infused with a foreboding awareness that as the Middle East explodes and U.S./NATO backed Kiev forces prepare to attack the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, the world is entering a very dangerous period. And of course Trump has said, “The U.S. has great strength and patience but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea.” Totally destroy 26 million human beings. While his bully buddy in Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, recently said at the Munich Security Conference that Iran is “the greatest threat to the world,” compared it to Nazi Germany, and claimed it was developing ballistic missiles to strike deep into the United States. “Iran seeks to dominate our region, the Middle East, and seeks to dominate the world through aggression and terror,” he said. And he vowed to act against Iran and anyone who supported it – i.e. Lebanon and Syria (Russia).
Putin also, like all the mythic bogeymen, is portrayed as the new Hitler intent on conquering the world. If the American public wasn’t so “sophisticated” and adept at seeing through lies – pause and laugh – we could expect some World War I posters with Russian soldiers (like The Huns), sharp teeth glistening, gorilla strong and beastly, holding American women in preparation for the kill or rape.
Last year, when Oliver Stone did the world the great service of releasing his four-part interview with Putin, he was bashed, of course. Just as he was with his film JFK, the only movie in history to be reviewed and panned one year before its release by a Washington Post reviewer who didn’t see the movie but had a purloined preliminary script as his source. The Washington Post: the object of the latest film drivel, The Post, portraying it falsely as the savior of the nation through the publication of the Pentagon Papers (which is another story). The Washington Post – the CIA’s dear friend.
In his Putin interviews, Oliver Stone, a man of truth and honor, lets viewers catch a glimpse of the real Vladimir Putin. Of course Putin is a politician and the leader of a great and powerful nation, and one should receive his words skeptically. But watching Stone interview Putin for four hours, one comes away – but I doubt few have watched the four hours – with a reasonably good sense of the man.
And putting aside one’s impressions of him, he makes factual points that should ring loud and clear to anyone conversant with facts.
One: that the U.S. needs an external enemy (“I know that, I feel that.”).
Two: the U.S.A. engineered the coup d’état in the Ukraine on Russia’s border.
Three: the U.S. has surrounded Russia with US/NATO troops and bases armed with anti-ballistic missiles that can, as Putin rightly says to Stone, be converted in hours to regular offensive nuclear missiles aimed at Russia.
This is a factual and true statement that should make any fair-minded person stand up in horror. If Russia had such missiles encircling the United States from Cuba, Mexico, and Canada, what American would find it tolerable? What would CNN and The New York Times have to say? Yet these same people readily find it impossible to see the legitimacy in Russia’s position, resorting to name calling and illogical rhetoric. Russia is surrounded with U.S/NATO troops and missiles and yet Russia is the aggressor. So too Iran that is also surrounded. These media are propagandists, that’s why. They promote war, as they always have. They are pushing for war with Russia via Syria/Lebanon/Iran and Ukraine, and they are nihilistically demonizing North Korea (as part of Obama’s pivot toward Asia and the encircling of China, as John Pilger has brilliantly documented in his film The Coming War on China) in what can only be called a conspiracy to commit genocide, as Dr. Graeme MacQueen and Christopher Black make clear in their Open Letter to the International Criminal Court.
We are moving toward a global war that will become nuclear if an international anti-war movement doesn’t quickly arise to stop it. Most people bemoan the thought of such a war to end all wars, but refuse to analyze the factors leading to it. It happens step-by-step, and many steps have already been taken with more coming soon. It’s so obvious that most can’t see it, or don’t want to. The corporate mainstream media are enemies of the truth; are clearly part of the continuation of the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird, and those who still rely on them for the truth are beyond reach.
Douglas Valentine, in The CIA as Organized Crime, says the CIA has long aimed to use and co-opt the “Compatible Left, which in America translates into liberals and pseudo-intellectual status seekers who are easily influenced.” And he adds that the propaganda is not just produced by the CIA but by the military, State Department, and red, white, and blue advertisements that are everywhere. Nothing has changed since the Church Committee hearings in the 1970s. Valentine adds:
All of that is ongoing, despite being exposed in the late 1960s. Various technological advances, including the internet, have spread the network around the world, and many people don’t even realize they are part of it, that they’re promoting the CIA line.
“Assad’s a butcher,” they say, or “Putin kills journalists,” or “China is repressive.
They have no idea what they’re talking about but spout all this propaganda.
William Blake said it truly:
In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear
How to break the chains – that is our task.
- And America's Dirtiest Metropolis Is…
Well, you guessed it, New York City of course – this dirty city has more pests and litter than any other large metropolis in the United States, according to newly compiled government data by the cleaning-services company Busy Bee.
The cleaning company ranked 40 large cities across the United States based on data from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the American Housing Survey (AHS), and the U.S. Census Bureau to create an informative infographic to determine just how shitty America really is. Factors include litter, pests such as mice and cockroaches, population density, particulate matter air pollution, and nitrogen dioxide air pollution.
The City that Never Sleeps ranked the highest in three out of five categories, placing it as shittest-city-in-the-nation of 427.9 on Busy Bee’s “dirtiness index.” The next closest competitor for all the wrong reasons is Los Angeles, which has a dirtiness index of 317.8. To complete the top five list, the remaining dirtiest cities are Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Francisco.
Busy Bee Cleaning Service is one of New York’s premier commercial cleaning services, but in their latest report, they might have angered the millennial generation who just moved out of their parent’s basements into overpriced homes across America’s inner cities, to only now discover their new environment is trash. Busy Bee does a great job tearing apart the narrative that everything is awesome in America’s inner cities, and perhaps, the ‘City that Never Sleeps’ should take a night off to realize just how much trash its citizens are living in. The report further verifies that America’s empire is rotting from within, as its culture and lifestyles from its major metropolises are producing a toxic environment that is softly killing its citizens from within.
The New York Patch highlights just how toxic these inner cities are:
Some 904,000 homes in the city have litter on nearby streets or properties, and nearly 2.3 million homes have seen signs of mice, rats or cockroaches in the past year, Busy Bee’s review shows. New York also ranks first for population density, with 28,000 people per square mile.
New York has less air pollution than some other large cities. EPA figures show the city’s air has a one-hour average concentration of 60 parts per billion of nitrogen dioxide, a harmful chemical that can cause breathing problems. Los Angeles leads the nation in that category, with a one-hour average of 77 parts per billion.
Pittsburgh is the worst city when it comes to particle pollution, which the EPA says can give harmful substances a way in to a person’s lungs or bloodstream. The Steel City shows a 24-hour average concentration of 40 micrograms of particles per cubic meter of air, double New York City’s average of 20 micrograms per cubic meter of air.
Even if New Yorkers get used to the grime, that doesn’t change the fact that the city is still far dirtier than many others. Take Jacksonville, Florida, which was the cleanest city Busy Bee reviewed. Just 44,000 homes there reported litter and 90,000 had evidence of pests, the company’s review shows.
- Newsflash: Teachers Are Already Armed!
Authored by Tom Mullen via The Foundation for Economic Education,
Maybe we should just stop disarming them…
In the wake of yet another mass shooting in a public school, a host of familiar recommendations have resurfaced about how to “prevent this from ever happening again.” Predictably, both conservatives and liberals are looking to the government for a solution.
Americans have somehow arrived at a point where they cannot conceive of human action that is not either prohibited, mandated, or, at the very least, centrally planned.
Just Like Drugs
The first problem is the goal. It is absurdly unrealistic to believe any set of rules is going to prevent anything from “ever happening again.” If you doubt that, I invite you to examine the war on drugs. Many decades ago, politicians decided American citizens taking heroin was never going to happen again. They banned that drug completely. You aren’t allowed to possess or sell it under any circumstances. Not after a background check. Not with a doctor’s prescription. Not at all.
Today, that drug is at the center of what the same government calls an opioid “epidemic.” Epidemic. So much for heroin overdoses “never happening again.”
Yet, despite this evidence, liberals still suggest what they’ve always suggested: further restrictions on gun ownership. A good portion of them believes that only government employees charged with national defense or public safety should be allowed to carry guns. Ban them completely for the civilian population, they say, and mass shooters won’t be able to obtain them.
You know, just like drugs.
Arm and Train?
The conservative answer to liberal prohibition (oxymoron?) is to “arm and train the teachers.” While no one has come out and suggested mandating teachers carry firearms or be trained in using them, every suggestion seems to suggest “we” (i.e., the government) need to do the arming and training.
Here’s a little newsflash for both sides: the teachers are already armed.
No, not every teacher carries firearms and perhaps not as high a percentage of teachers do so as the percentage of the general population that carries. But there are over three million teachers in public schools and some percentage of them have concealed carry permits. It would be unlikely that there aren’t at least some members of every faculty in America that have a concealed carry permit.
It’s not a matter of arming teachers, but rather to cease disarming them when they report to work.
To the extent conservatives acknowledge this option at all, they seem trapped in the same box as liberals in feeling the need to point out there are teachers who are also retired military, in the reserves, or former law enforcement officers. That’s probably true. But there are also tens of millions of Americans, and likely tens of thousands of teachers, who both own firearms and never served in the military or police.
An armed civilian population constitutes that “well-regulated militia” the 2nd Amendment refers to. What makes a militia a militia is the members not being part of the regular army.
Four Little Words
I’ve often said the greatest danger to liberty is not a foreign army, terrorists, or even a homegrown tyrant. It is four little words. And they aren’t, “Up against the wall!” That comes later.
They are, “Something must be done.”
Instead of the government “doing something” about mass shootings, it should stop doing something. It should stop prohibiting teachers from carrying into school the same firearms they are licensed and trusted to carry in most other places. It is the path of least resistance to providing realistic protection for schoolchildren. It requires no one to do anything they aren’t already doing.
No, this will not ensure that mass shootings “never happen again.” Nothing will. And not every teacher with a firearm, confronted with the pressure of an active shooter situation, will calmly dispatch the shooter. But as we saw in Parkland, FL, neither will every trained police officer.
The Failures of Government
Broward County Sheriff’s deputy Scot Peterson was assigned to the school as a resource officer and was on the school grounds during the entire incident. He heard the shooting inside the school, but videos show he remained outside for four minutes during the six-minute mass shooting, which claimed seventeen lives.
Peterson wasn’t alone. Three other armed law enforcement officers were on the scene and failed to enter the school before backup arrived.
This wasn’t the only government failure in this case. Local police had been called to Nikolas Cruz’s home thirty-nine times over the past seven years, according to documents obtained by CNN. Members of the family he lived with after his mother’s death report he routinely introduced himself as “a school shooter.”
It wasn’t just local police who dropped the ball on Cruz. The FBI was warned multiple times about Cruz, including by “an unidentified woman close to Cruz” who called the FBI a month before the incident, warning of her fears he would “get into a school and just shoot the place up.” The FBI was also called in September 2017 by a video blogger who said a user named “nikolas cruz” had posted a comment on one of his videos, saying, “I”m going to be a professional school shooter.”
Hopefully, this will inspire more than mere outrage at government incompetence. Americans should take a long, hard look at how much of what should be personal and private they have allowed government to become involved in and how badly it has failed them. And if government can’t run education or health care, it certainly shouldn’t be trusted with something as important as the defense of one’s own life.
Let’s Try Freedom
Thomas Paine began his pamphlet, Common Sense, widely credited with convincing a critical mass of colonists to support American independence, by making a crucial distinction:
“SOME writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins.”
He went on to say, “Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one.”
It’s time Americans remembered the miracles possible within that blessing called society and the limitations of an institution based on nothing more than consolidated brute force. Mass shootings are horrible situations under any circumstances, but they may be rendered less horrible if the victims have options other than to call the government and wait.
Repealing the federal Gun-Free School Zones Act will at least let states consider giving the right and the responsibility for self-defense back to teachers and other school employees. Allowing them the option to carry firearms will both act as a deterrent to future shooters and give teachers a reasonable chance to defend their students and themselves the next time the need arises.
The government has had its chance. It has failed. It’s time to try a little freedom.
- Breaking Ground? Trump Border Wall Begins Construction In Calexico
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers started construction Wednesday to replace a decaying stretch of a 2.25-mile Mexico–United States barrier, swapping it out for a new and improved 30-foot high bollard style wall.
This is the first border wall contract awarded in the Trump administration outside the eight prototypes that were built last year near Tijuana, Mexico.
According to CBP Public Affairs, the 2.25-mile project will stretch from the Calexico West Port of Entry extending westward beyond the Gran Plaza Outlets and include all-weather roads paralleling the new wall.
KESQ-TV, an ABC-affiliated television station for the Coachella Valley licensed to Palm Springs, used their Newsdrone to survey the area where the new wall construction is underway.
CBP states that the construction is located in the El Centro Sector, which is one of the “Border Patrol’s highest priority projects.”
The current barrier in Calexico was erected several decades ago from recycled scraps of metal and has been proven to be widely ineffective in preventing illegal cross-border activities.
The unlawful cross-border activities in the El Centro Sector are stunning. CBP provides a breakdown of seizures made by officers for the fiscal year 2017:
The El Centro Sector apprehended 18,633 illegal aliens, seized 5,554 pounds of marijuana, 483 pounds of cocaine, and 1,526 pounds of methamphetamine and 2,521 ounces of heroin. During that fiscal year, there were 21 assaults against El Centro Sector agents.
CBP spokesman Carlos Diaz told the Washington Examiner on Wednesday, the project was fully funded by fiscal 2017 appropriations, which will also fund projects in Southern California, New Mexico, and in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas.
Back in November, the Trump administration awarded the $18 million contract to replace the barrier in Calexico to SWF Constructors of Omaha, Nebraska.
And lastly, the administration is trying to find $18 billion in funding to extend and complete the Mexico-United States border wall. Recent funding efforts to pay for the entire stretch failed last week in the Senate.
The one question we ask: Will the Trump administration have the border walls erected in time to thwart a Mexican drug cartel war spillover into the United States? Don’t be shocked if the Trump administration labels the drug cartel wars just south of the border as a national security threat. Perhaps, that would be enough to spur emergency funding to pay the entire stretch…
- Venezuela's Petro: Stable Coin For Crypto-Economy Or Illegal Oil Futures?
Authored by Thomas Meyer via CoinTelegraph.com,
Starting in late 2017 Venezuela’s President Nikolas Maduro began expanding heavily into media space in an attempt to promote a new payment instrument– the government-issued cryptocurrency Petro.
On Feb. 20 the pre-sale of Petro was launched and has already raised $735 mln, according to Maduro’s Twitter. Total amount of PTR issued for sale is 100 mln and is worth $6 bln. The pre-sale will end on March 19.
The following questions are raised by this controversial project: what is Petro in an economic context and what would be its possible real use in the global economy? Is it a cryptocurrency, a stable coin, oil futures, new government debt instrument or something else? What is its possible economic impact? Which legal issues could follow?
image courtesy of CoinTelegraph
Having carefully studied the Petro white paper and other data available, we present below the results of the analysis.
Venezuela now
According to Maduro, Petro being backed by the Venezuelan crude oil is one of the best ways to use new technologies to restore the financial condition of Venezuela. For many years, the country has been suffering from hyperinflation by thousands of percent per year, while US sanctions cut off Venezuela from international capital markets.
A huge deficit of US dollar monetary supply has led to the absence of basic goods and a tenfold price discrepancy between official and black market currency exchanges for the Venezuelan bolivar and US dollar. That said, this financial catastrophe coincides with Venezuela’s status as possessing the largest volume of readily retrievable proved oil reserves as assessed by OPEC, being well ahead of well-known oil producers such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and others.
But it seems even more alarming news are boiling up. The US administration was urged to impose a full embargo on Venezuelan oil in the near future. According to export statistics, US is the main market for Venezuelan oil and a primary source of ‘hard currency’- US dollars. The excluding of the market from the oil export structure could lead to an even more dramatic economic situation in the country.
The idea of issuing cryptocurrency by the government has been suggested before (Japan, UAE, Russia, and some others), but has so far fallen short of authorization by top officials and practical implementation.
Petro has received official recognition from the Venezuelan government. President Maduro has signed a white paper clearly specifying the conditions and dates of the tokensale. Its activity is aimed at both internal and external markets and carried out at ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America) and OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) levels as well.
El Petro white paper
The original white paper, published on the official website of Venezuela’s government describes the process of issuing Petro. The initial disbursement will be made on the Ethereum platform as a standard ERC20 token. It also states that the Petro price will be correlated with one barrel of Venezuelan crude oil.
The basic items of Petro are mentioned in the white paper as follows: (all the information in this table is the white paper summary and the details are stated as they are in the original document):
Petro: general information
Petro is not solely a token equal to the raw oil barrel price. They are looking at more broad functioning:
- A transitory asset for exchange to goods and services, and also fiat money
- A digital platform for emittance and trade of stable crypto assets backed up by raw minerals
- A store of savings and an investment tool
Unfortunately, the Whitepaper is drafted in common language without any detail on an assumed technological base to launch a full-stack digital platform. Plans to develop such a platform are also absent.
Petro: initial emission and distribution information
100 mln coins will be emitted at launch. Their initial distribution is planned as follows:
- 38.4% presale
- 44% public sale
- 17.6% will be stored in possession of Venezuela’s Superintendence of Cryptocurrencies and Related Activities (SUPCACVEN)
El Petro’s minimum unit is called the ‘mene’ and equals 10-8 Petro. ‘The total emission of El Petro is to be carried out at the initial coin offering,’ further down in the document we find that ‘an additional emission can be made as per the result of El Petro holders vote: 1 coin equals one vote.’
Petro: economic use cases
The project’s architecture is aimed at El Petro’s maximum involvement into settlements between economic agents. The main use cases are as follows:
- As means of payment for Venezuelan oil via direct exchange of cryptocurrency to real oil dispatch
- As a legal means of payment on the territory of Venezuela, which allows for tax payments, exactions, duties and official acceptance as the settlement by individuals and businesses. To intensify the use there is a special discount index (Dv)**:
Acceptance price of petro = PriceOil/Bolivar*(1-Dv)
**Dv will be at least 10%
Apparently, this means that paying taxes and any other settlements with state bodies would be at least 10 percent cheaper in El Petro at the current exchange rate than in traditional currency (i.e. in Bolivars).
In the future, the use of Petro is planned to be expanded into other payment markets promoting its use in the world as a stable currency backed up by a real resource.
Petro: legal aspects
As the document states, Petro will fully comply with Venezuela’s legislation. However, the opposition in the National Assembly publicly claimed that issuing Petro was illegal. Some operations with Petro, such as initial sales, subsequent exchange to oil and other assets at ‘authorized exchange sites’ will be carried out in strict compliance with KYC/AML, yet the standards for these are not stated in the document.
Overall the document goes well beyond the scope in which Petro was covered by the media in late December and early January. Earlier it was considered to be simply a cryptocurrency backed up by oil. However, over the course of deeper investigation into the white paper, one could see that it also announces future creation of a platform for e-commodities (digital representation of goods/raw materials), greatly expanding the concept.
At the same time, some parts of the Whitepaper lack fine details, and some statements are not backed by any sufficient explanation. Some items feature information that could seem contradictory. A more thorough white paper with extra technical details would probably spark much more interest and trust in global crypto community.
Economic aspects
Petro could be described as ‘a legal payment instrument’ or ‘a legal tender’ applicable by the government. The concept raises the question of determining the use of a single currency as a legal payment instrument for goods and services to businesses, individuals and the government. This leads to several basic assumptions:
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Any individual or business must accept this medium of settlement as payment in a private or public transaction
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All taxes, levies, duties and excise duties as well as other payments to state bodies can be made solely in this currency (currencies)
In the case of Petro, the government, businesses, and individuals can (but are not obliged) to accept it as the currency for all the payments and levies. Despite the fact that the whitepaper declares the maximum intensification of Petro use – up to the discount index, which actually makes it more beneficial for use on the market compared to the Bolivar – we still cannot confirm that Petro fully corresponds to the concept of a legal means of payment. It is a payment instrument that has the attributes of a legal means of payment but is not necessarily such.
In reality, the value of emitted currency is to be ‘secured’ by the liability of Venezuelan government on providing the goods, i.e. the oil, and by its acceptance as the payment to state bodies. In theory, Petro looks more like the currency of the gold-standard period that is technically implemented by virtue of Blockchain technology.
Petro concept
The concept of Petro seems to be both simple and complicated. Up until now, there has been no precedent of issuing cryptocurrencies with such broad functionality to the mass market by the government. Petro is the ‘intersection’ of several familiar concepts from the world of conventional finance.
In Venezuela, Petro stands close to the concept of a legal settlement medium, and in global trade, it is basically a conditionally-stable crypto asset (oil also has specific volatility) that is in fact an oil future without a specific delivery date. Petro could also be assessed as an instrument for tax and levies payment with discounts in a concrete jurisdiction (in the ICO world: a token discount on the unique goods or service of the project). From the investors perspective, at the time of running the crowd sale, the purchase of future oil delivery (the futures) is made with the nominal discount.
New monetary aggregate
That being said, Petro can be conventionally viewed as a new monetary aggregate in the structure of Venezuelan monetary mass. Unlike the Bolivar, it is expected to be easily converted into the US dollar as well as other currencies, which will help Venezuela in export trade.
Therefore, it all comes down to ‘a special monetary aggregate for international payments’. Since it is planned to issue 100 mln coins with each coin equal to one oil barrel (~$60), its total capitalization will amount to $6 bln.
This cost will be actually created during the initial offering with the Venezuelan government receiving several billion of real US dollars from investors. Taking into account the correlation with the oil price and based on the price range starting from 2008 ($30-$150 BBL), we could claim that this monetary aggregate will amount to somewhere between $3 bln and $15 bln. The white paper doesn’t have any grounding on why this specific amount of coins is issued. However, this amount should probably be calculated according to the country’s demand in US dollars and foreign trade transactions.
Payment in Petro
From now on by order of Nicolás Maduro the oil state corporation PDVSA is obliged to carry out transactions in Petro. Moreover, all public and private services like hotels or services of the Venezuelan consulates can now legally accept Petro as means of payment. At the same time, the circulation of digital currency has not even started yet, but Maduro is already preparing a full-fledged legislative and actual infrastructure for future acceptance of Petro.
Questions arise
Many questions arise upon scrutinizing the project, and finding answers to them might clear up the future of Petro. Here we’d like to list some major concerns:
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Is it a currency or an oil future? And to what extent is it legal? Taking into account Venezuela’s condition under economic sanctions, it’s highly unlikely that this monetary tool will be easily accepted by the global community. And if it is not, Petro investors and users could get into trouble with the law in jurisdictions outside Venezuela.
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Whats are the risks of money laundering through Petro? There’s a clear possibility that it could be purchased with the funds that were received illegally at crypto exchanges or privately, and then exchanged to oil that can be ‘laundered’ and documented to eventually be sold under above-board business practices in various jurisdictions.
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Taking into consideration the political and economic situation in Venezuela and the level of corruption, it’s very likely that KYC/AML could become a rather byzantine procedure. Another question is whether major crypto exchanges would agree to list a token that is contradictory in terms of legal compliance.
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The project is initially issued at a digital platform. However, there is zero information on the technical parameters of the future blockchain system.
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What is the discount index going to be like? The white paper states that ‘no less than 10 percent’ will be available. This could be a point of leverage for Petro’s popularity in the country.
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It should be noted that introduction of Petro could put Venezuelan national currency Bolivar into even more miserable condition.
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The issue of additional issuance is not fully transparent. If it is done with consideration to holders’ votes, then apparently the government will profit from accumulating >50 percent of the coins and sooner or later start disseminating whichever amounts it chooses. On the one hand, it is useful for Venezuela’s economy: it could actually put into full swing the printing of ‘hard currency,’ on the other hand, a trust issue could arise.
To be continued…
Petro has set a precedent of bringing a cryptocurrency to the market which was created by and government and secured by a physically tangible resource. This instrument features broad functionality that is close to regular money and conventional financial instruments.
However, at the moment the project raises a lot of concerning questions and provides few answers. It still looks more like a beautifully crafted concept than a real and viable financial instrument which could operate worldwide.
It should be noted that initially, the cryptocurrency world is in the state of post-industrial economy, i.e. an economy of communities which independently emit the values determining cost on their own. Therefore, any attempt to secure the cost by virtue of some kind of liabilities is pretty risky. As history shows, the emitters of money like to renege on financial liabilities. Taken Venezuela’s negative reputation on world financial markets, one might think twice about the promise of Petro.
So the big question is still there: is Petro a stable coin for the world’s crypto economy or merely an illegally emitted oil future? It remains to be seen.
- How Long Before Rising Inflation Leads To A Recession: Deutsche Answers
While inverse vol funds were the immediate catalyst for the February 5 market crash, the market’s recent jittery behavior has coincided, and often been blamed on, the recent uptick in inflation. That said, as Deutsche Bank’s Binky Chadha writes, whether this was cause and effect is debatable. Nonetheless, late in the business cycle with a tight labor market, “strong coordinated growth”, a lower dollar, higher oil prices and a fading of one off factors, all point to inflation moving up.
As a result, two key questions have emerged: What does higher inflation mean for equities? And how long until higher inflation translates into a recession.
Here, Deutsche Bank makes some preliminary observations. First, and conceptually, higher inflation is ambiguous.
From a pricing vs cost perspective, whether higher inflation leads to higher or lower margins depends on the relative strengths of price vs wage and other input cost inflation. It depends on the relative importance of variable vs fixed costs. And on the extent to which corporates can increase productivity in response to cost pressures. It is notable that while markets seem to have been surprised by the recent uptick in wage inflation, corporates have been noting it for at least a year. Finally, inflation does not occur in a vacuum. The drivers of higher inflation matter and when it reflects strong growth, it implies not only higher sales but operating leverage from fixed costs can raise margins and amplify the impact on earnings.
In other words, inflation in itself is not a death sentence to bull markets. What is just as important is overall economic growth (rising inflation is benign if overall economic growth is higher), as well as the impact of inflation on profit margins – i.e. the ability to pass inflation through to the end consumer – and most importantly, how the Fed reacts to inflation, or namely does the Fed think it is behind the curve.
Ultimately, it all boils down to whether future inflation will be higher (or much higher) than currently.
Here one of the reasons why the Fed has been gingerly hiking rates at a glacial pace in recent years is that persistent inflationary pressures have largely been absent during this bull market cycle. However, recent data points indicate that any inflation surprises over the coming months will most likely be to the “upside.” And, judging by its quotes, the Fed is also taking noticing as well, potentially realizing that it is behind the curve, as highlighted by the change of tone in the quotes below:
- Nov 1, 2017: “…the Committee is monitoring inflation developments closely”
- Dec 13, 2017: “…the Committee is monitoring inflation developments closely.”
- Jan 31, 2018: “The Committee will carefully monitor actual and expected inflation developments relative to its symmetric inflation goal.“
Making matters worse, while the Fed has raised rates 4 times since Sept. 2016, increasing the discount rate by 1.00%, the 2Y Tsy has increased by 1.70% over the same period, suggesting that bond vigilantes see the Fed as behind the curve, literally.
Furthermore, as Investec points out in a recent note, although both headline and core inflation appear tame – a key leading indicator from the New York Fed, the Underlying Inflation Gauge (UIG), is pointing towards increased risks ahead, having hit 3.00% in January, up from 2.94% in December and the highest level since 2007.
Furthermore, as Investec adds, the UIG has proven especially useful in detecting turning points in inflation trends, and has shown high forecast accuracy when compared with core inflation measures. As shown in the chart below, the UIG has been indicating far higher levels of inflationary pressure relative to Core CPI since over the past year.
The divergence between the core CPI and UIG is notable, and reached a differential in excess of 1% in recent months. Based on historical patterns, such a wide divergence has been followed by increasing pressures in official inflation statistics, prompting the Federal Reserve to become more aggressive in their actions.
And while one can argue whether higher inflation is bad, one thing is guaranteed: rising interest rates are the nemesis of an aging bull market. Nothing has killed more bull markets than a deteriorating monetary climate with a relentless uptrend in interest rates; in fact, as we have shown previously, virtually every single Fed tightening cycle has always ended with a recession or some “event.”
Once started down the track of tightening, the conclusion seems all but inevitable. Out of 11 past tightening cycles, nine have resulted in a recession while only two created a soft landing that allowed the Fed to ease and avoid a recession.
Here another observation from the historical record: the Fed has a dismal track record of slowing the economy and at the same time avoiding a full blown recession. As investec ominously points out, “while each cycle has its own unique characteristics, the odds are not favorable that the current Fed tightening cycle is going to end happily for investors.”
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Which brings us back to the key question: how long before rising inflation results in a recession?
For the answer, we go back to Deutsche Bank, which looks at the role inflation has a leading indicator of recession. Specifically, the German bank asks “Is the inflection in inflation a leading indicator of the end of the cycle? How
long is the lead?” It answer: On average 3 years… but the Fed’s reaction is key. Here are the details:If the recent uptick marks the typical mid-to late-cycle inflection up in inflation, how long after did the next recession typically occur? On average 3 years, which would put it in late 2020. But the timing is likely determined critically by the Fed’s reaction.
Historically, a Fed rate-hiking cycle preceded most recessions since World War II, with recessions occurring only after the Fed moved rates into contractionary territory. Arguably the Fed did this only after it was convinced the economy was overheating and it continued hiking until the economy slowed sufficiently or went into recession.
At the current juncture, core inflation has remained below the Fed’s target of 2% for the last 10 years and several Fed officials have argued for symmetry in inflation outcomes around the target, i.e., to tolerate inflation above 2%. It is thus likely that the Fed will welcome the rise in inflation for now and simply stick to its current guidance, possibly moving it up modestly. It also means that if indeed the Fed intends on running the economy hot, equity investors may want to consider jogging quietly for the exits, especially before the vol-targeting, inverse vol, Risk parities, CTAs and the rest of the systematic funds decide to make another sprint for it.
- Eight Sacrilegious Reflections On Russiagate
Authored by Paul Street via Counterpunch.org,
The Russians were…flocking to Bernie Sanders Facebook sites, and they were saying to Bernie Sanders supporters… ’if you voted for Sanders, you have to understand Hillary Clinton is crazy, she’s a murderer, she is terrible,’ all kinds of horrible, horrible things, about Hillary Clinton…it was an effort to undermine American democracy and to really say horrible things about Secretary Clinton…we have to say to the Russians. You are doing something to undermine American democracy; you are not going to get away with it. This is a major assault. If you do that there will be severe, severe consequences.
— Bernie Sanders, Face the Nation (NBC), February 18, 2018
Neo-McCarthyite liberals and other dismal Democrats are clucking about how Robert Mueller’s indictment of 13 untouchable Russians for “defrauding” the U.S. by buying some Facebook ads and employing some Internet trolls to “say horrible things” (imagine!) about Hillary Clinton (a horrifically bad politician who was accurately described as a “lying neoliberal warmonger” by a leading U.S. left intellectual trying to get leftists to hold their noses and vote “for” her as the lesser evil) “proves” that Russia engaged in relevant meddling to undermine U.S. “democracy” on Donald Trump’s behalf during the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Please note eight things you will not hear from the Russia-mad Democrats and their many media allies at places like the Washington Post, the New York Times, CNN, and MSDNC:
1. There is No Real Democracy to Subvert in the United States.
As the distinguished political scientists Benjamin Page (Northwestern) and Marin Gilens (Princeton) show in their important new volume Democracy in America? What Has Gone Wrong and What We Can Do About It (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, November 2017):
“the best evidence indicates that the wishes of ordinary Americans actually have had little or no impact on the making of federal government policy. Wealthy individuals and organized interest groups—especially business corporations—have had much more political clout. When they are taken into account, it becomes apparent that the general public has been virtually powerless . . . The will of majorities is often thwarted by the affluent and the well-organized, who block popular policy proposals and enact special favors for themselves . . . Majorities of Americans favor . . . programs to help provide jobs, increase wages, help the unemployed, provide universal medical insurance, ensure decent retirement pensions, and pay for such programs with progressive taxes. Most Americans also want to cut ‘corporate welfare.’ Yet the wealthy, business groups, and structural gridlock have mostly blocked such new policies [and programs].”
Mammon reigns in the United States, where “government policy . . . reflects the wishes of those with money, not the wishes of the millions of ordinary citizens who turn out every two years to choose among the pre-approved, money-vetted candidates for federal office.”
Thanks to this American “oligarchy” ( Page and Gilens’ term), the United States ranks at or near the bottom of the list of rich nations when it comes to key measures of social health: economic disparity, inter-generational social mobility, racial inequality, racial segregation, infant mortality, poverty, child poverty, life expectancy, violence, incarceration, depression, literacy/numeracy, and environmental sustainability and resilience.
It’s a vicious circle. “When citizens are relatively equal [economically],” Page and Gilens write, “politics has tended to be fairly democratic. When a few individuals hold enormous amounts of wealth, democracy suffers.” Savage inequality and abject plutocracy are two sides of the same class-rule coin in New Gilded Age America.
Some political scientists have argued that regular elections that generate competitive contests for citizens’ votes are all that is required for a nation to be a democracy. But “elections alone,” Page and Gilens note, “do not guarantee democracy” in a nation where the electoral and policy processes run in grooves made and greased to serve an unelected dictatorship of concentrated wealth.
Russia didn’t “undermine American democracy” in 2016. There was no real system of popular self-rule in place to subvert. This is, and has long been, a corporate and financial oligarchy.
2. Interference Made Obvious Sense for Russia.
Insofar as Russia interfered in the 2016 election (and it did to a minor degree), there was nothing remotely shocking about its intervention. What was all that surprising, strange, or nefarious about the Russians wanting to see Hillary Clinton defeated? Mrs. Clinton was and remains an arch-imperialist Russo-phobic warmonger determined to provoke and humiliate Russia in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. She has long been a strong advocate of NATO‘s ever more menacing and eastward presence on Russian’s long-invaded western border. She is a strong backer of right-wing, neo-Nazi, and anti-Russian coup regime the Obama administration helped create in Ukraine.
Let’s say the tables were turned. Would a weaker United States seek to influence national elections in a foreign global superpower that helped engineer a coup that gave rise to a viciously anti-U.S., government in Canada – and that was placing deadly military hardware, personnel, and alliances in alliances in Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean? Would Washington try to do whatever it could to favor actors inside the foreign superpower who seemed least disposed to threaten the U.S. “homeland”? Would the U.S. scheme to weaken that superpower’s legitimacy and influence on the global stage?
The answer to all three questions is “you betchya!” One doesn’t have to be any kind of fan (I’m certainly not) of the corrupt state-capitalist autocrat Vladimir Putin to understand his obvious realpolitik interest in the defeat of the blood-soaked Queen of Chaos (sorry for “saying horrible things” about her, Bernie!) Hillary Clinton.
Insofar as Putin “interfered” in “our democratic elections,” his “meddling” should be understood as predictable and fairly modest electoral “blowback” elicited by U.S. global aggression and empire.
3. The Rest of the World Has a Frankly Legitimate Interest in U.S. Politics.
Why shouldn’t other nations try (however imperfectly) to influence the political process inside the U.S.? For seven-plus decades now, big bad Uncle Sam has stomped and strode across the planet as a criminal, arrogant, gun- and mass-murderous bomb-slinging imperial hegemon, convinced of his own special God- and/or History-ordained mission to run the world as his own possession. Millions upon millions have been murdered and maimed by “exceptional” America’s “benevolent” agents of “peace” and “freedom.” Still by far and away world history’s most extensive Empire, the U.S has at least 800 military bases spread across more than 80 foreign countries and “troops or other military personnel in about 160 foreign countries and territories.” The U.S. accounts for more than 40 percent of the planet’s military spending and has more than 5,500 strategic nuclear weapons, enough to blow the world up 5 to 50 times over.
Think it’s all in place to ensure peace and democracy the world over, in accord with the standard boilerplate rhetoric of U.S. president, diplomats, and senators? Seriously? Do you know any other good jokes?
The world knows better. Of course other nations seek to have some kind of say within the belly of the beast of the planet’s only global-reach Superpower.
Please see my latest Truthdig and Common Dreams essay, titled “The World Will Not Mourn the Decline of U.S. Global Hegemony” – a chilling and I hope useful reflection on savage and authoritarian, “democracy-deterring” (Noam Chomsky) U.S. imperial arrogance and criminality since 1945.
4. Russian Interference Was Nothing Compared to that of the Superpower’s Homegrown Oligarchy.
Russian interference in U.S. politics is a tiny drop in the bucket compared to the regular authoritarian intervention of the United States’ own homegrown “deep state” corporate and financial oligarchy. I don’t pretend to know that Russian intervention was completely irrelevant in a race that was ultimately by decided by under 78,000 votes in the swing states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. We can be quite sure, however, that Russian and Russia-duped trolls and activists were infinitesimal factors balanced against the influence wielded by the leading financial institutions and corporations in “America, the best democracy money can buy.”
Here I am thinking less of the money that Trump got from renegade right-wing moguls like Robert Mercer and Sheldon Adelson than of how Mrs. Clinton’s longstanding allegiance and captivity to Wall Street helped make her a loser in an anti-establishment election colored by deep popular outrage at American hyper-inequality and plutocracy.
Also relevant is the $5 billion worth of free media exposure that the despicable orange beast got from the U.S. corporate media during the 2016 election cycle. Russia didn’t do that. CNN and the rest of the commercial media’s news and entertainment empire did.
6. Republican Vote Suppression was a Much Bigger Deal.
Russian interference was a minor matter compared also to the impact of the reactionary and racist voter suppression laws and practices passed and conducted by Republican authorities in key swing states.
7. Other Noxious but Officially U.S.-Allied States Invest in U.S. Politics and Policy.
There’s a revealing contrast between the endless outrage the Democrats and liberals express over Russia’s real and alleged engagement in the U.S. political process and their comparative silence about the longstanding political influence exercised by vicious U.S.-allied states like Israel and Saudi Arabia. Where’s the liberal and Democratic outrage over Israel’s big-time interference in our great democracy? In a recent excellent Counterpunch report, professor Mel Gurtov writes that:
Saudi Arabia has played the influence game just as aggressively as the Russians, and for much longer. Saudi money has effectively lobbied in Washington for many years, often relying on former members of Congress. The Saudis also seek to influence US politics by funding NGOs (e.g., the Clinton Foundation), think tanks, law firms, social media, and even political action committees. Saudi investors, including members of the royal family, may have as much as a half-trillion dollars invested in US real estate, the stock market, and US treasury bills. At the time of Trump’s visit in May the Saudi leadership committed to another $40 billion in infrastructure investments, though whether or not that will actually happen is another matter….The payoff for the Saudis is arms acquisitions that have usually put Saudi Arabia first on the US arms export list. The $110 billion arms deal announced while Trump was in Saudi Arabia came on top of billions more weapons sold during the Obama years—and consistent US political support since before World War II of the royal family’s authoritarian rule. The Saudis have also bought continued US support of the Saudi air war in Yemen—a humanitarian disaster that probably amounts to war crimes. For the US, cultivating Saudi Arabia yields not only low oil prices and a reliable arms customers but also an easing of Arab pressure on Israel and leadership in Sunni confrontation of Shiite Iran and Iran’s partner, Hezbollah.
When does Robert Mueller’s Saudigate investigation begin?
7. The Russians Did Not Make the Deplorable, Dollar-Drenched Democratic Party Establishment Rig the Primaries against Bernie Sanders
…thereby undermining the only one of the two top Dem candidates who (as I freely admit despite my left criticisms of Sanders) could have defeated Dolt45 (even I would have had to forego third-party voting if Sanders had been allowed to defeat horrid Hillary). What about the Hillary campaign and the Clintonite DNC’s “meddling” against Bernie? (Sadly but predictably, Sanders has aligned himself [see this essay’s opening quote] with the neo-McCarthy-ite Russia-gate narrative. This validates his early Left critics, who took significant undeserved abuse from fellow progressives for having the elementary decency to note that Bernie the Bomber was a stealth Democratic Party company man and a dedicated Empire Man)
Russian interference wasn’t a complete “nothing burger,” but it was sorely skimpy fare compared to the immeasurably bigger and beefier servings of democracy-killing intervention delivered by American Big Business, Republican-controlled states, and the Democratic Party establishment.
Where’s the beef stroganoff? Scattered on the margins of a much bigger plate of homegrown prime ribs.
8. “We” (the U.S.) Interfere(s) in Elections Around the World for “Our” Own Authoritarian Purposes.
In a recent remarkable report titled “Russia Isn’t the Only One Meddling in Elections. We Do It, Too,” the nation’s imperial newspaper of record, The New York Times, made and reported what might have seemed like some startling admissions about Uncle Sam’s longstanding and ongoing history of interfering in other nations’ elections. Lengthy quotation is merited:
Most Americans are understandably shocked by what they view as an unprecedented attack on our political system. But intelligence veterans, and scholars who have studied covert operations, have a different, and quite revealing, view.
“If you ask an intelligence officer, did the Russians break the rules or do something bizarre, the answer is no, not at all,” said Steven L. Hall, who retired in 2015 after 30 years at the C.I.A., where he was the chief of Russian operations. The United States “absolutely” has carried out such election influence operations historically, he said, “and I hope we keep doing it.”
Loch K. Johnson, the dean of American intelligence scholars, who began his career in the 1970s Investigating the C.I.A. as a staff member of the Senate’s Church Committee, says Russia’s 2016 operation was simply the cyber-age version of standard United States practice for decades, whenever American officials were worried about a foreign vote.
“We’ve been doing this kind of thing since the C.I.A. was created in 1947,” said Mr. Johnson, now at the University of Georgia. “We’ve used posters, pamphlets, mailers, banners — you name it. We’ve planted false information in foreign newspapers. We’ve used what the British call ‘King George’s cavalry’: suitcases of cash.”
…the Russian campaign in 2016 was fundamentally old-school espionage, even if it exploited new technologies. And it illuminates the larger currents of history that drove American electoral interventions during the Cold War and motivate Russia’s actions today.
A Carnegie Mellon scholar, Dov H. Levin, has scoured the historical record for both overt and covert election influence operations. He found 81 by the United States and 36 by the Soviet Union or Russia between 1946 and 2000, though the Russian count is undoubtedly incomplete….. “We had bags of money that we delivered to selected politicians, to defray their expenses,” said F. Mark Wyatt, a former C.I.A. officer, in a 1996 interview.
Covert propaganda has also been a mainstay. Richard M. Bissell Jr., who ran the agency’s operations in the late 1950s and early 1960s, wrote casually in his autobiography of “exercising control over a newspaper or broadcasting station, or of securing the desired outcome in an election.” A self-congratulatory declassified report on the C.I.A.’s work in Chile’s 1964 election boasts of the “hard work” the agency did supplying “large sums” to its favored candidate and portraying him as a “wise, sincere and high-minded statesman” while painting his leftist opponent as a “calculating schemer.”
C.I.A. officials told Mr. Johnson in the late 1980s that “insertions” of information into foreign news media, mostly accurate but sometimes false, were running at 70 to 80 a day. In the 1990 election in Nicaragua, the C.I.A. planted stories about corruption in the leftist Sandinista government, Mr. Levin said. The opposition won.
…For the 2000 election in Serbia, the United States funded a successful effort to defeat Slobodan Milosevic, the nationalist leader, providing political consultants and millions of stickers with the opposition’s clenched-fist symbol and “He’s finished” in Serbian, printed on 80 tons of adhesive paper and delivered by a Washington contractor.
Vince Houghton, who served in the military in the Balkans at the time and worked closely with the intelligence agencies, said he saw American efforts everywhere.
Similar efforts were undertaken in elections in wartime Iraq and Afghanistan, not always with success. After Hamid Karzai was re-elected president of Afghanistan in 2009, he complained to Robert Gates, then the secretary of defense, about the United States’ blatant attempt to defeat him, which Mr. Gates calls in his memoir “our clumsy and failed putsch.”
At least once the hand of the United States reached boldly into a Russian election. American fears that Boris Yeltsin would be defeated for re-election as president in 1996 by an old-fashioned Communist led to an overt and covert effort to help him, urged on by President Bill Clinton. It included an American push for a $10 billion International Monetary Fund loan to Russia four months before the voting and a team of American political consultants (though some Russians scoffed when they took credit for the Yeltsin win).
In recent decades, the most visible American presence in foreign politics has been taxpayer-funded groups like the National Endowment for Democracy, the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute, which do not support candidates but teach basic campaign skills, build democratic institutions and train election monitors….The National Endowment for Democracy gave a $23,000 grant in 2006 to an organization that employed Aleksei Navalny, who years later became Mr. Putin’s main political nemesis, a fact the government has used to attack both Mr. Navalny and the endowment. In 2016, the endowment gave 108 grants totaling $6.8 million to organizations in Russia for such purposes as “engaging activists” and “fostering civic engagement.” The endowment no longer names Russian recipients, who, under Russian laws cracking down on foreign funding, can face harassment or arrest.
What the C.I.A. may have done in recent years to steer foreign elections is still secret and may not be known for decades. It may be modest by comparison with the agency’s Cold War manipulation. But some old-timers aren’t so sure.
“I assume they’re doing a lot of the old stuff, because, you know, it never changes,” said William J. Daugherty, who worked for the C.I.A. from 1979 to 1996 and at one time had the job of reviewing covert operations. “The technology may change, but the objectives don’t.”
Wow. Radical truth-telling at The New York Times?
No, not really.
There’s a catch. It’s very simple. The caveat is that “we” (U.S. foreign policymakers and their supposedly benevolent institutions – the CIA, the IMF, the NED, the Carnegie Endowment, etc. – are good and only interfere to advance democracy, while they are bad and interfere for authoritarian reasons. We good. They bad. Get it?
It’s kind of like how we killed 3-5 million Southeast Asians out of “good intentions” between 1962 and 1975 but the Soviet Union crushed internal dissent and waged war in Afghanistan out of purely evil designs.
When Washington kills civilians in Syria it’s for good reasons. When Moscow does the same it’s for bad reasons.
“Equating” U.S. interference in other nations’ elections with the Russians’ (much more minor) interference in the 2016 U.S. election, Steven Hall told Times reporter Scott Shane, “is like saying cops and bad guys are the same because they both have guns — the motivation matters.” (Imagine thinking that cops could be bad guys!).
“It’s not just apples and oranges,” Kenneth Wollack informed Shane, “It’s comparing someone who delivers lifesaving medicine to someone who brings deadly poison.” Wollack is president of the National Democratic Institute, a key non-profit engaged in U.S. “democracy promotion” and election interference abroad.
Shane fails to subject these transparently absurd assertions to the slightest hint of critical scrutiny. That’s because he and/or his editors have had their brains marinated in the toxic, mind-numbing doctrinal sauce of nationally narcissistic American Exceptionalism. As a result, they take it as a matter of self-evident truth that “we” are noble and benevolent, far-seeing agents of popular sovereignty. “We” are healers and “good cops.” “They” are nefarious “bad guy” bearers of authoritarian poison.
You must be a gullible victim of American state propaganda to believe something as patently preposterous as this, of course. Today as in previous decades. U.S. foreign policy, including election interference operations, is all about advancing perceived U.S. national interests, strongly conflated with the imperatives of U.S. and global capitalism. It is about defending and expanding U.S. global primacy by any means deemed necessary. It has nothing whatsoever to do with spreading democracy. Indeed, it is fundamentally about “deterring democracy” (the title of Noam Chomsky’s masterpiece volume on the basic underlying continuity in U.S. foreign policy as the post-Cold War era dawned) since most of the world’s politically cognizant populace has no interest in subordinating themselves to U.S. dominance and the selfish imperatives of American transnational corporations.
Sadly, untold thousands of U.S. liberals open the Times to drink up American Exceptionalist doctrine along with their daily Starbucks each morning. Too many of them are being fed the related neo-McCarthyite notion that serious dissent and conflict within the U.S. reflects “outside” (Russian) interference, not established steep and domestic modes of inequality, oppression, and authoritarian rule. This is dangerous messaging indeed, great fuel for the expansion of the military police state and its ever-burgeoning cybernetic surveillance apparatus.
The fact that so many Democrats and Democratic Party-affiliated groups and media organs are helping spread this conspiratorial and xenophobic madness is yet another reminder that the radically regressive Republicans and the deplorable dollar Democrats are “two wings of the same bird of [corporate and imperial] prey” (Upton Sinclair, 1904) – both lethal, murderous, plutocratic, and authoritarian in their own different ways.
Think Bernie represents some portside exit from this state-capitalist and imperialist nightmare? Dream on.
Still, it is perhaps worth it to pressure him to speak up against plans for a possible U.S. war on Venezuela, whose great populist hero (Hugo Chavez) Bernie insultingly described as a “dead communist dictator” in March of 2016.
Hillary, by the way, is a murderer, terrible to say.
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Please help Street keep writing here.
- PCR Asks: Does The ACLU No Longer Defend Civil Liberty?
Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,
There are many signs of American collapse. One of the most scary is the fact that the American Civil Liberties Union no longer knows what are the civil liberties it purports to defend. Identity Politics has transformed civil rights into privileges for victim groups.
Yesterday (February 22, 2018) I received a 50-state survey from the ACLU. The envelope in which the questionnaire arrived said the survey was about how “to protect civil liberties during the Trump Presidency.” However, the survey (essentially a fundraiser) did not mention a single civil liberty contained in the Bill of Rights and added as amendments to the US Constitution.
Nothing about the sweeping away by the criminal Bush regime of habeas corpus with indefinite detention. No mention of the criminal Obama regime’s kill list, which swept away due process by executing US citizens on allegation alone without trial, evidence, and conviction. Nothing about the sweeping away by both criminal regimes of the prohibition against spying on citizens without warrants. No mention of the shutdown of free speech and protest or of the destruction of civil liberties by unaccountable police who brutalize, rob, and murder Americans at will.
In place of civil liberties, the ACLU has Identity Politics. The ACLU “civil rights” survey is concerned with the civil rights of illegal aliens, of women to have abortions and publicly financed birth control, the “fundamental rights of LGBT people,” and Muslim bans. The civil liberties listed in the Constitution do not qualify for concern; only invented rights that are not listed in the Bill of Rights.
The letter accompanying the questionnaire does mention the First Amendment and suppression of free speech “emanating from the White House.” I mean, really, the Bush and Obama regimes decimated free speech and imprisoned whistleblowers. Julian Assange has been imprisoned for years in the Ecuadoran embassy in London for publishing leaked material revealing criminal and deceitful behavior of the US government. By the time of Trump’s election, the First Amendment was a dead letter civil right.
In the ACLU’s Identity Politics, white people, especially white heterosexual males, have no rights. They are not protected by quotas, political correctness, or hate speech prohibitions. No one has to worry about offending a white by destroying statures of white males or church plaques commemorating George Washington and Robert E. Lee. Try destroying a stature of Martin Luther King. A white person can be called every name in the book, and is. White DNA is said to be an abomination. Anyone who said black DNA or homosexual DNA was an abomination would face hate crime charges.
Even men-hating white feminists jump on the anti-white bandwagon, denouncing white heterosexual–not homosexual–males as misogynist. The feminists reserve their hate for the men attracted to women.
War is the greatest destroyer of civil liberty. Indefinite detention, execution without due process, spying without warrants, suppression of the First Amendment are all consequences of the use of 9/11 to put the US on a war basis. The replacement of civil liberty with a police state is said to be necessary in order to protect us from Muslim terrorists, expanded to include undefined “domestic extremists.” Currently the US is being put on an even greater war basis with Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and even Venezuela declared as threats to America.
The ACLU shares responsibility for the explosion of the threat level from al Qaeda to every country that “threatens” America by having its own independent foreign policy and insisting on its sovereignty. It was Trump who said he was going to normalize relations with Russia, and it was the ACLU and the entirety of the liberal/progressive/left who jumped on the anti-Trump bandwagon and went after him with the orchestrated conspiracy of Russiagate. What the liberal/progressive/left did was to drive Trump into the arms of the military/security complex.
Clearly, the liberal/progressive/left and the ACLU are a greater menace to the Bill of Rights than Donald Trump.
- Here's How Regulators Are Inadvertently Laying The Groundwork For The Next Housing Crisis
Only a few weeks ago, we pointed out a remarkable development in the US mortgage market that has significant implications not only for mortgage borrowers, but perhaps the broader economy as a whole: Wells Fargo, formerly America’s foremost mortgage lender, had seen its share of the market eclipsed by Quicken Loans – the Detroit-based, nonbank lending behemoth that pioneered applying for mortgages on the Internet with its now-famous Rocket Mortgage (readers will remember RM’s celebrity-packed SuperBowl spot).
Many factors (aside from Wells’ own criminality, which recently drew a strong, but ultimately meaningless, rebuke from the Fed) have contributed to this shift, as Bloomberg points out.
But as it turns out, the rising dominance of nonbank lenders like Quicken could portend a massive, bad-debt fueled binge reminiscent of the circumstances that led up to the housing crisis. That is to say, a wave of bad debt could create a cascading wave of defaults with repercussions far beyond the housing market.
Considering all the restrictions that Dodd-Frank and other post-crisis regulations slapped on mortgage lenders, one might wonder how this might be possible.
Of course, as Bloomberg explains, instead of making the market safer, regulators are inadvertently enabling the rise of lenders like Quicken who aren’t bound by many of the rules that restrict banks’ mortgage-lending practices. As a result, Quicken Loans is effectively free from many of the regulations that have forced some of the biggest mortgage lenders into a period of retrenchment…
Make no mistake, regulators have done plenty to rein in the mortgage business since the 2000s. New rules require that lenders carefully assess borrowers’ ability to pay, and that mortgage servicers — which process payments and manage other relations with borrowers — give troubled customers plenty of opportunity to renegotiate their debts before resorting to foreclosure. The Federal Reserve performs regular stress tests to ensure that banks have enough capital to weather defaults.
Problem is, the requirements have weighed most heavily on traditional, deposit-taking banks. The added hand-holding required in mortgage servicing, for example, has roughly quadrupled the cost of handling delinquent loans, turning them into major loss-makers. Together with stringent capital requirements, this has all but guaranteed that banks will lend only to people with the most pristine credit. In some cases, they have given up the business entirely: Late last year, Capital One announced it was exiting mortgage origination because it was “structurally disadvantaged.”
Because they’re not FDIC-backed, the shadow (aka “nonbank”) mortgage lenders have much more latitude to approve mortgages to borrowers with lower credit scores. This is a huge advantage in a market where supply is limited, which has helped squeeze home prices to their highest levels on record – surpassing even the pre-crisis peak from June 2006.
As we’ve pointed out many times (but most recently last month), with home prices in 80% of US cities growing twice as fast as wages, American working- and middle-class families are finding it increasingly difficult to support their families – let alone afford a home.
Just the other day, we highlighted the cognitive dissonance between data showing US household debt of about $13.15 trillion, of which nearly $1 trillion is the credit card debt alone. Households, it seems, are truly on a dangerous debt binge. Yet, as the economists keep telling us, the US economy has almost never been in better shape…
…Of course, the reality is that the economy looks just peachy if you’re a wealthy individual who owns lots of financial securities…
…This has accounted for the bulk of assets gained during the recovery, as the hart above illustrates…
Meanwhile, nonbank lenders are happily courting these already debt-burdened borrowers by signing the up for mortgages with higher interest rates, even though many banks – who will now only deal with borrowers with the most pristine records – won’t touch these customers. This has caused the average FICO score for loan originations at these lenders to fall precipitously, as Bloomberg adds.
The non-banks’ growth has been breathtaking. At the end of 2016, such unaffiliated mortgage companies accounted for more than 40 percent of new conventional mortgages (those eligible for sale to government-controlled guarantors Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac), twice the share they accounted for just eight years earlier. They’re also responsible for a decline in credit standards: The average FICO score at origination stood at 730 at the end of 2017, down from 750 five years earlier. For loans guaranteed by the Federal Housing Administration — an area where the non-banks’ share is greatest — the average FICO score has fallen to 680.
And the shift has been even more extreme among companies that provide mortgage-servicing…
The shift has been even more extreme in mortgage servicing. Non-banks now service about 51 percent of all loans packaged into new Freddie Mac securities, according to mortgage analytics firm Recursion Co. That’s more than double the share of just five years ago. For securitized FHA loans, the share stands at a staggering 83 percent. Again, banks are leaving the business: Last year, CitiMortgage announced it would exit by the end of this year, transferring the servicing rights for about 780,000 mortgages.
Quicken Loans and its ilk might argue that their gains are a result of their cutting-edge technology (offering mortgages over the Internet?, the banks say. Why didn’t we think of that!). But this simply isn’t true.
What accounts for the non-banks’ appetite? They might argue that their processes and technologies give them greater confidence in their underwriting. But one can’t ignore the reality that, thanks to relative lax regulation, they also have less at stake. By operating with less capital, they can reap very large returns in good times. In bad times, however, they might not have the capacity to withstand losses or deal with the servicing burden created by widespread delinquencies. As a result, a large swathe of the country’s lending and servicing system could implode when the next crisis hits.
The only sensible solution, Bloomberg posits, would be to level the playing field by adopting additional regulations specifically aimed at these non-bank lenders. But this, too, would come with risks that could potentially harm consumers…
The only solution is to level the regulatory playing field between the banks and the non-banks. This means raising capital requirements for the latter, and subjecting them to stress tests. Difficult as this might sound, the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation actually created an institution tailor-made to handle such systemic issues: the Financial Stability Oversight Council. The council should put non-bank mortgage lenders at the top of its agenda this year.
Of course, given what looks like a market peak, this might not be such a bad thing…
* * *
Another factor enabling this expansion is the continued dominance of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. All together, Fannie and Freddie guarantee some $4 trillion in residential mortgages, accounting for some 40% of the US market. And as we pointed out late last year, the hope that the two mortgage giants – which were nationalized during the crisis following a $187 billion taxpayer bailout – could be wound down under federal oversight has all but vanished.
Today, Senators on both sides of the aisle have concluded that they are too big and too risky to replace. Proposed legislation in 2018 will see them maintain their position as the beating heart of the US mortgage industry, rather than replacing them, like the Senate tried and failed to do four years ago.
Once again, government regulations – that were intended to protect consumers – are instead creating the unintended consequence of making consumers increasingly vulnerable to the same types of predatory lending practices the regulations were initially designed to stamp out.
Make sense?
We didn’t think so…
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