Jun 25

Today’s News 25th June 2018

  • Americans Now Own 40% Of The World's One Billion Guns

    At the end of 2017, there were approximately 1 billion firearms in over 230 countries around the globe, 84.6 percent of which were held by civilians, 13.1 percent by state militaries, and 2.2 percent by law enforcement agencies – with Americans the dominant owners, according to a study released Monday.

    Of the 857 million guns owned by civilians, the Small Arms Survey says 393.3 million are held in the United States, which is “more than those held by civilians in the other top 25 countries combined.”

    To clarify – there are more civilian-owned guns in the US than there are people.

    And while headlines have proclaimed a slowdown in gunmaker revenues, as @StephenGutkowski noted, the numbers are still astounding – In May alone, American civilians bought somewhere around 2 million firearms.

    Table 1: Estimated total civilian-held legal and illicit firearms in the 25 top-ranked countries and territories, 2017

    “The key to the United States, of course, is its unique gun culture,” the report’s author, Aaron Karp, said at a news conference.

    “Ordinary American people buy approximately 14 million new and imported guns every year,” Karp told a news conference at UN headquarters in New York City.

    The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution preserves the right of the people to keep and bear arms. This enables Americans to have access to powerful and cheap firearms that are not commercially available in other regions around the world due to strict laws.

    “Why are they buying them? That’s another debate. Above all, they are buying them probably because they can. The American market is extraordinarily permissive,” he said.

    The estimated rate of gun ownership around the world significantly varies, with 120.5 firearms for every 100 residents in the United States. Second on the list is Yemen, with 52.8 firearms per 100 residents, 39.1 in Montenegro, and 34.7 in Canada.

    Table 2: An estimated rate of civilian firearms holdings in the 25 top-ranked countries and territories, 2017 (firearms per 100 residents)

    The report mentioned out of the 1 billion firearms worldwide, 133 million weapons were held by government military forces and 22.7 million by police agencies.

    Infographic: Tons of Guns | Statista

    You will find more infographics at Statista

    Karp said the new estimate of global firearms is significantly higher than the 875 million weapons determined in the 2007 survey, with 650 million civilian-held guns at that time.

    After the American-led interventions in the Middle East and the 2008 financial crisis, citizens of the world have been rushing to stockpile guns. This alarming trend was significantly noted in the United States as civilian gun ownership soared from 2007 to 2017.

    However, the U.S. is fifth today in military firearms holdings, behind Russia, China, North Korea and Ukraine. The report also indicates it is fifth in law enforcement holdings, behind Russia, China, India, and Egypt.

    Small Arms Survey director Eric Berman emphasized that the Geneva-based research and policy institute is not an advocacy organization, but would rather educate governments about the global distribution of civilian firearms.

    “We don’t advocate disarmament. We are not against guns,” he said. “What we want to do, and what we have done successfully for the last 19 years, is to be able to provide authoritative information and analysis for governments so that they can work to address illicit proliferation and reduce it — and to reduce also the incidents of armed violence.”

    Anna Alvazzi del Frate, the institute’s program director, said that “the countries with the highest level of firearm violence — they don’t rank high in terms of ownership per person.”

    “So what we see is that there is no direct correlation at the global level between firearm ownership and violence,” she said.

    But “the correlation exists with firearm suicides, and it is so strong that it can be used, at least in Western countries, as a proxy for measurement,” Alvazzi del Frate said.

    While it is evident that global civilian arms holdings have rapidly expanded post-2008, it seems as the majority of the increase came from the United States.

  • How The US, Under Obama, Created Europe's Refugee Crisis

    Authored by Eric Zuesse via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    The current US President, Donald Trump, claimed on June 18th, that Germany’s leadership, and the leadership in other EU nations, caused the refugee-crisis that Europe is facing:  

    “The people of Germany are turning against their leadership as migration is rocking the already tenuous Berlin coalition. Crime in Germany is way up. Big mistake made all over Europe in allowing millions of people in who have so strongly and violently changed their culture!”

    The US Government is clearly lying about this.

    The US Government itself caused this crisis that Europeans are struggling to deal with. Would the crisis even exist, at all, if the US had not invaded and tried to overthrow (and in some instances actually overthrown) the governments in Libya, Syria, and elsewhere — the places from which these refugees are escaping?

    The US Government, and a few of its allies in Europe (the ones who actually therefore really do share in some of the authentic blame for this crisis) caused this war and government-overthrow, etc., but Germany’s Government wasn’t among them, nor were many of the others in Europe. If the US Government had not led these invasions, probably not even France would have participated in any of them. The US Government, alone, is responsible for having caused these refugees. The US Government itself created this enormous burden to Europe, and yet refuses to accept these refugees that it itself had produced, by its having invaded and bombed to overthrow (among others) Libya’s Government, and then Syria’s Government, and by its aiding Al Qaeda in organizing and leading and arming, jihadists from all over the world to come to Syria to overthrow Syria’s Government and to replace it with one that would be selected by the US regime’s key Middle Eastern ally, the Saud family, who own Saudi Arabia, including its Government, and who are determined to take over Syria.

    Trump blames Angela Merkel for — in essence — having been an ally of the US regime, a regime of aggression which goes back decades, and which Trump himself now is leading, instead of his ending, and of his restoring democracy to the United States, and, finally, thus, his restoring freedom (from America), and peace, to other nations, in Europe, and elsewhere (such as in Syria, Yemen, etc.). He blames Merkel, not himself and his predecessor — not the people who actually caused these refugees.

    Hypocrisy purer than that which Trump there expressed, cannot be imagined, and this hypocrisy comes from Trump now, no longer from Obama, who, in fact, caused the problem.

    As the 2016 study, “An Overview of the Middle East Immigrants in the EU: Origin, Status Quo and Challenges” states in its Abstract:

    “EU has the most inhabited immigrant population; it has up to a population of 56 million foreign-born people. And due to the perennial war and chaos in the Middle East, the amount of relocated population in the region, especially the number of refugees, ranks the No.1 all over the world. … There are a large number of refugees and asylum seekers heading to EU countries; it can be divided into four stages. Since the Arab Spring, especially after the outbreak of the civil war in Syria in 2011, and the rise of the “Islamic State” in 2013, the whole EU area have experienced the biggest wave of refugees since World War II.”

    All of these invasions have been, and are, invasions of countries where the US regime demands regime-change.

    In order to understand the deeper source of this problem, one must understand, first, the US regime’s continuing obsession to conquer Russia after its communism and Warsaw Pact military alliance, had ended (click onto that link to see the documentation); and, second, one needs to understand the US regime’s consequent and consistent aim after the supposed end of the Cold War, to take over control of Russia’s allied countries, including not only those within the Soviet Union and its military Warsaw Pact, but also within the Middle East, especially Syria and Iran, and even countries such as Libya, where the leader was nominally Sunni but nonetheless friendly toward Russia. (The link there provides documentation not only of what’s said here, but it also documents that the alliance between the two aristocracies, of the US and of Saudi Arabia, is essential to the US aristocracy’s Middle-Eastern objective; and Israel’s aristocracy serves as an essential agent of the Sauds in this crucial regard, because the Sauds rely heavily upon the Israeli regime to do its lobbying in Washington. In other words: America’s consistent objective is to isolate Russia so as for the US regime to emerge ultimately in a position to take over Russia itself. That’s the deeper source of Europe’s refugee-crisis.)

    Back at the start of the promised post-Cold-War period, in 1990, the US regime, under its then-President, George Herbert Walker Bush, privately and repeatedly agreed with the USSR regime, under its then-President Mikhail Gorbachev, to end the Cold War — agreed that NATO would not expand “one inch to the east” — that there would be no expansion of the US military alliance against the USSR (soon to become against Russia alone). The US regime’s promise was that NATO would not take in and add to NATO’s membership, any of the countries that then were either in the USS.R’s military alliance the Warsaw Pact (Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Romania) or in USSRitself other than Russia (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Byelorussia, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kirghizia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldavia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan), except for the eastern part of Germany. The US regime simply lied. But the Russian Government followed through on all of its commitments. Russia was now trapped, by Gorbachev’s having trusted liars, whose actual goal turned out to be world-conquest — not peace.

    Currently, the membership of NATO includes all of the former Warsaw Pact nations, and now the US regime aims to bring in also to “NATO membership: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Ukraine.” Georgia and Ukraine are the first parts of the former USSR republics — not merely parts of the Warsaw Pact but parts now of the USSR itself — to join the anti-Russian military alliance, if either of them gets allowed in. The very possibility of this happening, goes beyond anything that the naive, trusting, Mikhail Gorbachev, would ever have imagined. He hadn’t the slightest idea of how evil was (and still is) America’s Deep State (that which controls America). But now we all know. History is clear and unambiguous on the matter.

    The NATO mouthpiece, Brookings Institution, headlined on 15 November 2001, “NATO Enlargement: Moving Forward; Expanding the Alliance and Completing Europe’s Integration” and pretended that this expansion is being done in order to help Europeans, instead of to conquer Russia.

    Ukraine has the longest of all European borders with Russia and so has been America’s top target to seize. But before seizing it, the US had tried in 2008 to turn Georgia against Russia, and the Georgian Mikheil Saakashvili was a key US agent in that effort. Saakashvili subsequently became involved in the violent coup that overthrew Ukraine’s Government in February 2014. Saakashvili organized the Georgian contingent of the snipers that were sent to Ukraine to shoot into the crowds on the Maidan Square and kill both police and demonstrators there, in such a way so that the bullets would seem to have come from the police (Berkut) and/or other forces of Ukraine’s democratically elected Government. (Click on this link to see two of the Georgian snipers casually describing their participation in the coup, and referring tangentially to former Georgian President Saakashvili’s role in it. Here is a more comprehensive video compilation describing and showing the coup itself.

    As I have pointed out, the testimony of these two Georgian snipers is entirely consistent with what the investigation by the EU’s Foreign Ministry had found out on 26 February 2014 about the snipers, that “they were the same snipers, killing people from both sides” and that these snipers were “from the new coalition government” instead of from the government that was being overthrown — that it was a coup, no ‘revolution’ such as Obama’s people claimed, and Trump’s people now assert).

    The US regime has agents in all regions of the former Russia-affiliated bloc — not only in Western Europe.

    Obama’s coup to grab Ukraine away from its previous neutrality and to make it immediately a neo-Nazi rabidly anti-Russian country, has destroyed Ukraine — not only from the standpoint of the EU, but (and click on the link if you don’t already know this) from the standpoint of the Ukrainian people themselves. Who wouldn’t want to leave there?

    Europe has refugees from the Ukrainian operation too, not only (though mainly) from the Middle Eastern ones.

    Europe’s enemy isn’t Russia’s aristocracy, but America’s aristocracy. It’s the billionaires who control America’s international corporations — not the billionaires who control Russia’s international corporations — it is specifically America’s billionaires; it is the people who control the US Government; these, and no Russians at all, are the actual decision-makers, who are behind bringing down Europe. In order for Europe to win, Europeans must know whom their real enemies are. The root of the problem is in the US, Europe’s now fake ‘ally’. Today’s America isn’t the America of the Marshall Plan. The US Government has since been taken over by gangsters. And they want to take over the world. Europe’s refugee-crisis is simply one of the consequences.

    In fact, Obama had started, by no later than 2011, to plan these regime-change operations, in Libya, Syria, and Ukraine. But, in any case, none of the regime-change operations that caused the current unprecedented flood of refugees into Europe started because of what Europe’s leaders did (other than their cooperating with the US regime). Today’s American Government is Europe’s enemy, no friend at all, to the peoples of Europe. Trump’s blaming this crisis on Europe’s leaders isn’t just a lie; it is a slanderous one.

    And this fact is separate from Trump’s similar slanderous lie against the refugees themselves. On May 8th, Germany’s Die Welt newspaper had headlined “Number of crimes falls to lowest level since 1992” and reported that Germany’s Interior Minister, Horst Seehofer, announced the 2017 national crime statistics, and he said, “Germany has become safer,” the safest in the last 30 years. Seehofer happens to be a member of Chancellor Merkel’s Administration who is angling to replace her as Chancellor by appealing to the strong anti-immigrant portion of their own conservative party, but even he had to admit, essentially, that the anti-immigrant slur that Trump subsequently made on June 18th is a bald lie; it’s even the exact opposite of the truth. Trump’s tweeted comment then was a lying slander not only against Merkel and other European leaders, but also against the refugees that the US regime itself had produced. How depraved is that? How depraved is Trump?

    The refugee crisis isn’t due to the refugees themselves; and it’s not due to Europe’s leaders; it is due to the almost constantly lying US regime – the people who actually control America’s Government and America’s international corporations.

    On June 21st, Manlio Dinucci at Global Research headlined “The Circuit of Death in the ‘Enlarged Mediterranean’” and he opened by saying, “The politico-media projectors, focussed as they are on the migratory flow from South to North across the Mediterranean, are leaving other Mediterranean flows in the dark – those moving from North to South, comprised of military forces and weapons.” But the world’s biggest international seller of weapons is the US, not the EU; so, his placing the main focus on European billionaires was wrong. The main culprits are on Trump’s own side of the Atlantic, and this is what is being ignored, on both sides of the Atlantic. The real problem isn’t across the Mediterranean; it is across the Atlantic. That’s where Europe’s enemy is.

    On 7 August 2015, I headlined “The US Is Destroying Europe” and reported that: 

    “In Libya, Syria, Ukraine, and other countries at the periphery or edges of Europe, US President Barack Obama has been pursuing a policy of destabilization, and even of bombings and other military assistance, that drives millions of refugees out of those peripheral areas and into Europe, thereby adding fuel to the far-rightwing fires of anti-immigrant rejectionism, and of resultant political destabilization, throughout Europe, not only on its peripheries, but even as far away as in northern Europe.”

    It’s continuing under Trump.

  • Japan Suspends Missile Evacuation Drills

    While the American media is still uncomfortable proclaiming that President Trump achieved anything in Singapore, it appears the Japanese are willing to believe it made a difference.

    As Frank Sellers reports at The Duran, in solidarity with the peace making process, the Japanese are willing to suspend certain missile evacuation drills…

    Following a meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore, US President Donald Trump announced that the North Korean threat was no longer a nuclear one and that he was suspending certain military exercises in the area on the basis that they are both expensive and a ‘provocation’.

    The Japanese, however, haven’t been too thrilled about the the idea, as they seem to like the idea of applying pressure on the North Korean regime. But, in solidarity with the peace making process as it has moved along thus far, the Japanese are willing to suspend certain missile evacuation drills.

    United Press International reports:

    June 22 (UPI) — The Japanese government confirmed Friday it will cancel future missile evacuation drills involving civilians, but announcements over the satellite-based J-Alert system would continue.

    Tokyo’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said the drills are not necessary at present, citing the easing of tensions, South Korean news service Newsis reported.

    “The urgent situation of Japan’s guarantee of security has been alleviated by the U.S.-North Korea summit,” Suga said. “We will for the moment hold off on nine kinds of civilian evacuation drills in Tochigi and Kagawa Prefectures.”

    But the government will continue to “train in information delivery through the nationwide instant alarm system,” Suga said.

    J-Alert provides early warnings to more than 200 Japanese municipalities in the Chugoku and Shikoku regions. It transmits alerts to mobile phones and televisions and warns people to take shelter.

    Japan has conducted 29 evacuation drills, beginning March 2017.

    Tokyo is keen to begin negotiations over the issue of Japanese abductees. The government claims North Korea abducted 17 people from Japanese coastal areas between 1977 and 1983, and maintains North Korea is still holding prisoners.

    North Korea may have been planning a rapprochement with Japan last year.

    According to the Nikkei, there have been plans in North Korea to work toward diplomatic normalization with Tokyo as early as October 2017.

    A source in North Korea told the Nikkei there were internal discussion at the Korean Workers’ party last fall on ways to approach the United States, China, South Korea, Russia and Japan.

    The North Koreans discussed ways to reach out to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s administration through secret contacts, then request the easing of sanctions, if Japan requests to send a team of investigators on the abduction issue, according to the Japanese newspaper.

    Abe has previously said economic assistance to North Korea would be considered only on the condition the abduction issue is resolved.

    The Japan angle is a thorny one in the sense that Japan wants the US to remain in the area as a security guarantor, particularly in their own case. However, America’s military presence happens to be part of what makes the North Korean regime somewhat nervous, and could pose as a sticking point in the nuclear disarmament and peace negotiations process, and has the cheerleading of the Japanese regime, complete with the pom-poms.

    Therefore, even though the Japanese are following suit with America’s actions on the process so far, the question is whether their insistence of the American military presence going to be a big enough of an influence in the matter to complicate the peace process if the Japanese insist on perceiving it as a non negotiable while the DPRK sits on the other end of the see-saw insisting that the US military’s absence is a non negotiable matter, necessary as part of a security guarantee component of the nuclear disarmament process?

     

  • Trump's Doomsday Gamble In China Trade War

    Authored by Finian Cunningham via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    President Trump dramatically resumed a trade war footing this week with Beijing, threatening to impose tariffs on virtually all imported Chinese goods to the US.

    After earlier negotiations this month appeared to avert a clash, the Trump administration is back to full trade war mode. With fiery language, the US president and his trade advisors said they have run out of patience with what they claim to be “predatory practices” by Beijing.

    For its part, China quickly hit back, condemning “unacceptable blackmail” by Washington. Beijing said it will not hesitate to respond in kind with counter-tariffs on American exports.

    Markets in Asia, Europe and America tumbled, with companies and investors panicked by the prospect of a full-blown trade war between the world’s two largest economies, and the uncertain repercussions from such a titanic clash.

    Trump is gambling big time. He is betting that China will be the “first to blink”, as the New York Times reported. That’s because the Trump administration reckons that with China’s huge trade surplus, Beijing has much more to suffer financially if it goes toe-to-toe with the US in a trade showdown.

    “China has a lot more to lose than we do,” said Trump’s trade advisor Peter Navarro, who is a hawk when it comes to dealing with Beijing. Navarro, like Trump, has continually accused China of ripping off the American economy and workers through alleged unfair trade practices and theft of intellectual property from US tech companies.

    During his election campaign, Trump fired up voters with tirades slamming China for “raping America”. Recently, the president railed against “China taking $500 billion out of our economy every year”.

    But typical of Trump, the emotive charges and figures are not what they appear to be.

    For a start, the US economy has been running a chronic trade deficit with the rest of the world for the past four decades. That’s largely because of a structural change in American capitalism whereby US companies and investors bailed out of the country to set up in cheaper labor territories, such as China.

    To accuse China of being the problem is a deceitful distraction from the way American capitalists have historically cheated US workers with layoffs and downsizing. One of those capitalists profiting very nicely from setting up in China is Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka whose clothes business profits from manufacturing in China and exporting to the US, thereby contributing to the American trade deficit.

    Another issue is that whatever complaints the Trump administration may have about trade with China it should settle those disputes through the legal mechanisms of the World Trade Organization. If Trump thinks he has a case against unfair Chinese practices then he should trust the multilateral trading authority. Otherwise it’s a recipe for international chaos and a slippery slope to conflict, as history has shown.

    But, as with many other facets of this administration, there is a contempt for multilateralism, and a resort to high-handed unilateralism. Rules, laws, what’s that? As one White House official was quoted recently as saying of the Trump’s administration’s attitude towards the rest of world: “We’re America, bitch!”

    Trump is playing hardball with China in the belief that its bullying will see Beijing cave to its demands for rectifying trade imbalances. The Americans are trying to solve their structural, inherent flaws by strong-arming China into making concessions. Because China’s $500 billion annual exports to the US are about four-fold what the US sells to Beijing, Trump is betting that his Mad Max approach will scare into submission.

    Trump’s browbeating manner is also grandstanding for his voter base in rustbelt states, who might feel a patriotic surge in sticking it to the Chinese. Mid-term congressional elections in November are no doubt on Trump’s mind to get the Republican vote out.

    However, the president’s best laid plans are in danger of veering into a political train wreck.

    Beijing has said it will not back down to intimidation. In an editorial in the Global Times, which reflects government thinking, the tone was combative: “It is US arrogance to believe that a trade war will exhaust China. But the boot is on the other foot. Trade is mutually beneficial to both the US and China. Scuppering bilateral trade would cause similar suffering to both sides.”

    The options at Beijing’s disposal could wreak havoc for the US economy and Trump’s political future. Trump’s inability to see that speaks to his and his advisors’ petulance.

    If China goes ahead with threats to impose counter-tariffs on US agricultural products, such as soybeans, corn and meat, the impact on farm states like Iowa, Idaho and Illinois across the mid-west will be severe. Voters from these states were crucial to Trump getting elected to the White House in 2016. By taking the US into a trade war with China, Trump will end up hitting his own political base hardest.

    Another repercussion is higher retail prices for consumer goods like televisions and footwear imported from China, if Trump slaps on punitive tariffs. That will inflate consumer prices and crimp household budgets, especially among the lower-income population, who again tended to vote for Trump. Net result is that the fragile American economy would likely tank from cash-strapped consumers, who are already living on the edge. 

    The far-reaching injurious effects of a trade war seem to have escaped the Trump administration’s planning. The president seems to have been carried away with a hubristic notion of American power and an irrational ideological hostility towards China. It’s all very well for him and his rich advisors to antagonize China over perceived wrongs. What about ordinary Americans though? So much for the famed deal-maker. Trump’s short-term recklessness betrays someone who is playing tiddlywinks instead of chess.

    Yet, in this accounting, the real pain hasn’t even begun. China’s ultimate trade weapon is its massive holdings of US Treasury bonds. With nearly $1.2 trillion-worth in holdings of US federal debt, China is by far the world’s largest creditor for Washington. US-based news outlet Bloomberg calls it Beijing’s “nuclear option”.

    “It can just stop buying US Treasury debt,” warns Bloomberg. “China is the world’s biggest Treasury investor, keeping US borrowing costs low, helping us buy more stuff from China. Ending this symbiotic relationship just when US budget deficits are soaring would devastate the US economy.”

    Bloomberg adds that such a “doomsday” option “could blow up” China’s economy too. It compares the abysmal scenario to “mutually assured destruction”.

    Arguably though, such mutually devastating economic consequences for China are moot. It has the alternative sphere of Eurasian economic integration and the new Silk Roads it has busily been building with Russia and others over the past decade.

    If Trump pushes Washington’s belligerence too far with Beijing, the economic ramifications will be wide-ranging and dire for the globe.

    China may just survive to trade another day with the rest of the world.

    But one thing seems sure. With its chronic debts, deficits and dodo-like dollar, America will be ruined beyond salvation. Ruined by a president who brags about his “art of the deal”.

  • Visualizing The Population Pulse Of A Manhattan Workday

    In cities around the world, the offices and storefronts of the downtown core fill up with people during the workday to keep the wheels of commerce turning.

    But, as Visual Capitalist’s Nick Routley shows below, nowhere is this phenomenon as pronounced as in Manhattan, which swells to an incredible four million people during work hours.

    Today’s animation, created by Justin Fung, is a dramatic, eye-opening look at the “pulse” of America’s largest city.

    Also, check out the fancy interactive version of this visualization.

    This dramatic shift in population on a daily basis is made possible by Manhattan’s unparalleled carrying capacity, or its ability to facilitate an inflow of millions of people who come for all sorts of reasons. Many of the metropolises with the most dramatic daytime population spikes, such as Washington, D.C. and New York, also have much higher rates of transit ridership than the average city.

    Not surprisingly, three surrounding boroughs have the largest daytime population decreases in the entire country.

    OUTSIDE THE BIG APPLE

    While many parts of Manhattan remain lively in the evening, many downtown cores around the country simply empty out.

    This stark contrast is particularly noticeable in low-rise communities with large employment hubs such as Redmond, Washington or Palo Alto, California, both of which are home to sprawling tech campuses.

    In the case of the nation’s capital, the city is a powerful magnet for talent. As well, Washington’s unique position between state lines means that people have the option of residing in Virginia or Maryland and easily commuting in.

    HIGHER RESTING HEARTBEAT

    Thanks to a renewed interest in urban living, many cities are starting to see an uptick in the number of residents who choose to skip the long commute and just live where the action is.

    This trend is particularly pronounced in Canadian cities such as Vancouver and Toronto. The latter city’s downtown population is expected to double over the next 25 years, while Vancouver’s sustained real estate boom has added tens of thousands of residents to the downtown area.

    In the U.S., Seattle has demonstrated significant urban residential growth. Since 2010, the population of downtown and surrounding neighborhoods has grown by an impressive 18%, and 1-in-5 people moving to the city choose to live in the downtown area.

    The 2020 U.S. Census will provide a much better clearer picture of how this trend is playing out.

  • The World Transformed And No One In America Noticed

    Authored by Martin Sieff via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    The world transformed and nobody in the West noticed.

    India and Pakistan have joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The 17 year-old body since its founding on June 15, 2001 has quietly established itself as the main alliance and grouping of nations across Eurasia. Now it has expanded from six nations to eight, and the two new members are the giant nuclear-armed regional powers of South Asia, India, with a population of 1.324 billion and Pakistan, with 193.2 million people (both in 2016).

    In other words, the combined population of the SCO powers or already well over 1.5 billion has virtually doubled at a single stroke.

    The long-term global consequences of this development are enormous. It is likely to prove the single most important factor insuring peace and removing the threat of nuclear war over South Asia and from 20 percent of the human race. It now raises the total population of the world in the eight SCO nations to 40 percent, including one of the two most powerful thermonuclear armed nations (Russia) and three other nuclear powers (China, India and Pakistan).

    This development is a diplomatic triumph especially for Moscow. Russia has been seeking for decades to ease its longtime close strategic ally India into the SCO umbrella. This vision was clearly articulated by one of Russia’s greatest strategic minds of the 20th century, former Premier and Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov, who died in 2015. In the past China quietly but steadfastly blocked the India’s accession, but with Pakistan, China’s ally joining at the same time, the influence of Beijing and Moscow is harmonized.

    The move can only boost Russia’s already leading role in the diplomacy and national security of the Asian continent. For both Beijing and Delhi, the road for good relations with each other and the resolution of issues such as sharing the water resources of the Himalayas and investing in the economic development of Africa now runs through Moscow. President Vladimir Putin is ideally placed to be the regular interlocutor between the two giant nations of Asia.

    The move also must be seen as a most significant reaction by India to the increasing volatility and unpredictability of the United States in the global arena. In Washington and Western Europe, it is fashionable and indeed reflexively inevitable that this is entirely blamed on President Donald Trump.

    But in reality this alarming trend goes back at least to the bombing of Kosovo by the United States and its NATO allies in 1998, defying the lack of sanction in international law for any such action at the time because other key members of the United Nations Security Council opposed it.

    Since then, under four successive presidents, the US appetite for unpredictable military interventions around the world – usually bungled and open-ended – has inflicted suffering and instability on a wide range of nations, primarily in the Middle East (Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen) but also in Eurasia (Ukraine) and South Asia (Afghanistan).

    The accession of both India and Pakistan to the SCO is also a stunning repudiation of the United States.

    The US has been Pakistan’s main strategic ally and protector over the past more than 70 years since it achieved independence (Dean Acheson, secretary of state through the 1949-53 Truman administration was notorious for his racist contempt for all Indians, as well as for his anti-Semitism and hatred of the Irish).

    US-Pakistan relations have steadily deteriorated even since the United States charged into Afghanistan in November 2001, but through it all, US policymakers have always taken for granted that Islamabad at the end of the day would “stay on the reservation” and ultimately dance to their tune.

    The United States has courted India for 17 years since President Bill Clinton’s state visit in 2000, which I covered in his press party. Current Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed a Joint Session of Congress in 2016, the ultimate accolade of approval by the US political establishment for any foreign leader.

    US policymakers and pundits have endlessly pontificated that India, as an English speaking democracy would become America‘s ideological and strategic partner in opposing the inevitable rise of China on the world stage. It turned out to be a fantasy.

    During the era of the Cold War, the “loss” of any nation of the size and standing of India or Pakistan to a rival or just independent ideological camp and security grouping would have provoked waves of shock, hurt, rage and even openly expressed fear in the US media.

    However, what we have seen following this latest epochal development is far more extraordinary. The decisions by Delhi and Islamabad have not been praised, condemned or even acknowledged in the mainstream of US political and strategic debate. They have just been entirely ignored. To see the leaders and opinion-shapers of a major superpower that still imagines it is the dominant hyper-power conduct its affairs in this way is potentially worrying and alarming.

    The reality is that we live in a multipolar world – and that we have clearly done so at least since 2001. However, this obvious truth will continue to be denied in Washington, London and Paris in flat defiance of the abundantly clear facts.

  • Visualizing The Global Export Economy In One Map

    President Trump has loudly complained for quite some time about U.S. trade deficits with the world, most recently following the latest G7 summit in Canada. Trump’s rhetoric implies that other countries are enjoying massive surpluses at the expense of American workers. This got us thinking about how the U.S. actually compares as an exporter in the world economy, so HowMuch.net  created the following map.

    Source: HowMuch.net

    As HowMuch.net explains, the numbers sre from the World Trade Organization (navigate to the Statistics Database to locate the original data). The WTO tracks the total value of physical goods each country sends across its borders. Remember, these numbers exclude services – we are only focused on physical items. To create our map, we changed the size of the country depending on the value of exports, and we likewise added a shade of blue for easy reference. This approach highlights the outliers and identifies several key trends.

    Top Ten Countries with the Most Exports in 2017 ($B)

    1. China: $2,263B

    2. United States: $1,547B

    3. Germany: $1,448B

    4. Japan: $698B

    5. Netherlands: $652B

    6. South Korea: $574B

    7. Hong Kong: $550B

    8. France: $535B

    9. Italy: $506B

    10. United Kingdom: $445B

    The most obvious insight that our map contains about international trade is how unequal it is. A few countries dominate the very top of the list, and everybody else falls far behind. The top exporter, China, has 32% more exports than the second-place Americans. The top three countries generate more exports than the rest of the top 10 combined ($5,258B vs $3,960B). You can see this inequality on our map in how China, the U.S. and Germany dominate the visual forefront.

    The second interesting takeaway is that there are several surprise countries, including most notably the Netherlands in the 5th spot ($652B). What could the Dutch possibly export to the rest of the world that would land them so high on our list (and give their country such a prominent place on our map)? It turns out they manufacture a lot of heavy machinery and oil, both of which spread far and wide on the international market.

    There are also more than a few surprises at the other end of the spectrum. Several countries in Southeast Asia are extremely well known for having export-dependent economies, and yet none of them are anywhere near the top of the list. Go check to see where the things in your closet were made—we bet most of the items came from Vietnam, Malaysia or Indonesia. None of these countries crack $250B in total exports. But also look at Africa, where only a handful of countries have enough exports to make it on our map. Our visualization tells a sad story about the development of these economies.

    And finally, it’s easy to believe listening to Trump’s rhetoric that the U.S. hardly sells anything to the rest of the world. Our map demonstrates how that’s just not true. With more than $1.5T in annual exports, Americans stand a lot to lose if a trade war continues to escalate and eventually becomes a reality.

  • John McAfee 'Outs' "Wanted Sex Trafficker" In Post-Poisoning Tweetstorm

    Update 3: It appears Mr McAfee is recuperating well from his near-death poisoning experience…

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    Update  2: That did not take long. McAfee now claims to know the identity of the motorcyclist and “I want him” explaining that he is a “wanted sex trafficker.”

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    Update 1: It appears John McAfee has a suspect in mind and is offering a reward for details…

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    John McAfee’s “enemies” recently tried to poison him, the cybersecurity pioneer claims. However, John McAfee isn’t as easy to kill as his myriad “enemies” had hoped. To help drive this point home, the creator of the eponymous computer security software tweeted an alarming picture of himself lying in a hospital bed with an oxygen tube affixed to his mouth.

    McAfee

    His tweet came accompanied with a warning to the unnamed parties who allegedly carried out the attack: “You will soon understand the true meaning of wrath.”

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    I know exactly who you are.” So if you or somebody you know was behind this latest alleged attempt on McAfee’s life (he has reportedly been the subject of 11 attempts on his life, along with a “conspiracy” by Belize authorities that he was involved in the death of a neighbor while living in the tropical South American state) be wary: McAfee is coming for you.

    McAfee

    This isn’t the first time McAfee has been in the news this week: the tech entrepreneur tweeted earlier this week that he would no longer be promoting ICOs due to a warning from the SEC, which has lately been cracking down on celebrity endorsements of the often dubious ICOs. But according to RT, McAfee has been promoting Docademic, which is focused on “reshaping the medical world.” He credited the company with urging him to seek medical assistance after his latest poisoning. It appears he made a quick recovery, as he followed up news of his poisoning with a tweet announcing his new crypto wallet.

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    The “doctors said no” when McAfee asked to leave the hospital. But he checked himself out anyway, it appears.

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    Of course, after spending so much time promoting obviously scammy ICOs, we imagine there’s a large pool of people who’ve bought into these scams who probably don’t have the warmest feelings toward McAfee. And let’s not forget his promise to “eat his dick” on national television if bitcoin doesn’t hit $500,000 by the end of 2020.

  • Ben Rhodes Admits Obama Armed Jihadists In Syria In Bombshell Interview

    Someone finally asked Obama administration officials to own up to the rise of ISIS and arming jihadists in Syria. 

    In a wide ranging interview titled “Confronting the Consequences of Obama’s Foreign Policy” The Intercept’s Mehdi Hasan put the question to Ben Rhodes, who served as longtime deputy national security adviser at the White House under Obama and is now promoting his newly published book, The World As It Is: Inside the Obama White House.

    Deputy National Security adviser Ben Rhodes and President Obama. Image source: AP via Commentary Magazine

    Rhodes has been described as being so trusted and close to Obama that he was “in the room” for almost every foreign policy decision of significance that Obama made during his eight years in office. While the Intercept interview is worth listening to in full, it’s the segment on Syria that caught our attention.

    In spite of Rhodes trying to dance around the issue, he sheepishly answers in the affirmative when Mehdi Hasan asks the following question about supporting jihadists in Syria:

    Did you intervene too much in Syria? Because the CIA spent hundreds of millions of dollars funding and arming anti-Assad rebels, a lot of those arms, as you know, ended up in the hands of jihadist groups, some even in the hands of ISIS.

    Your critics would say you exacerbated that proxy war in Syria; you prolonged the conflict in Syria; you ended up bolstering jihadists.

    Rhodes initially rambles about his book and “second guessing” Syria policy in avoidance of the question. But Hasan pulls him back with the following: “Oh, come on, but you were coordinating a lot of their arms.” 

    The two spar over Hasan’s charge of “bolstering jihadists” in the following key section of the interview, at the end of which Rhodes reluctantly answers “yeah…” — but while trying to pass ultimate blame onto US allies Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia (similar to what Vice President Biden did in a 2014 speech):

    MH: Oh, come on, but you were coordinating a lot of their arms. You know, the U.S. was heavily involved in that war with the Saudis and the Qataris and the Turks.

    BR: Well, I was going to say: Turkey, Qatar, Saudi.

    MH: You were in there as well.

    BR: Yeah, but, the fact of the matter is that once it kind of devolved into kind of a sectarian-based civil war with different sides fighting for their perceived survival, I think we, the ability to bring that type of situation to close, and part of what I wrestled with in the book is the limits of our ability to pull a lever and make killing like that stop once it’s underway.

    To our knowledge this is the only time a major media organization has directly asked a high ranking foreign policy adviser from the Obama administration to own up to the years long White House support to jihadists in Syria.

    Though the interview was published Friday, its significance went without notice or comment in the mainstream media over the weekend (perhaps predictably). Instead, what did circulate was a Newsweek article mocking “conspiracy theories” surrounding the rapid rise of ISIS, including the following:

    President Donald Trump has done little to dispel the myth of direct American support for ISIS since he took office. On the campaign trail in 2016, Trump claimed—without providing any evidence—that President Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton co-founded the group and that ISIS “honors” the former president.

    Of course, the truth is a bit more nuanced than that, as Trump himself elsewhere seemed to acknowledge, and which ultimately led to the president reportedly shutting down the CIA’s covert Syrian regime change program in the summer of 2017 while complaining to aides about the shocking brutality of the CIA-trained “rebels”.

    Meanwhile, mainstream media has been content to float the falsehood that President Obama’s legacy is that he “stayed out” of Syria, instead merely approving some negligible level of aid to so-called “moderate” rebels who were fighting both Assad and (supposedly) the Islamic State. Rhodes has himself in prior interviews attempted to portray Obama as wisely staying “on the sidelines” in Syria.

    But as we’ve pointed out many times over the years, this narrative ignores and seeks to whitewash possibly the largest CIA covert program in history, started by Obama, which armed and funded a jihadist insurgency bent of overthrowing Assad to the tune of $1 billion a year (one-fifteenth of the CIA’s publicly known budget according to leaked Edward Snowden documents revealed by the Washington Post).

    It also ignores the well established fact, documented in both US intelligence reports and authenticated battlefield footage, that ISIS and the Free Syrian Army (FSA) jointly fought under a single US-backed command structure during the early years of the war in Syria, even as late as throughout 2013 — something confirmed by University of Oklahoma professor Joshua Landis, widely considered to be the world’s foremost expert on Syria.

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    Syria experts, as well as a New York Times report which largely passed without notice, verified the below footage from 2013 showing then US Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford working closely with a “rebel” leader who exercised operational command over known ISIS terrorists (Ambassador Ford has since acknowledged the relationship to McClatchy News): 

    This latest Ben Rhodes non-denial-cum-sheepish-affirmation on the Obama White House’s arming jihadists in Syria follows previous bombshell reporting by Mehdi Hasan from 2015.

    As host of Al Jazeera’s Head to Head, Hasan asked the former head of Pentagon intelligence under Obama, General Michael Flynn, who is to blame for the rise of ISIS? (the August 2015 interview was significantly prior to Flynn joining Trump’s campaign).

    Hasan presented Flynn with the 2012 Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) declassified memo revealing Washington support to al-Qaeda and ISIS terrorists in Syria in order to counter both Assad and Iran. Flynn affirmed Hasan’s charge that it was “a willful decision to support an insurgency that had Salafists, Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood…”. 

    Soon after, The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald appeared on Democracy Now to discuss the shocking contents of the Flynn interview:

    It will be interesting to see years from now which “narrative” concerning Obama’s legacy in the Syrian conflict future historians choose to emphasize. 

    …Obama the president who “stayed out” and “on the sidelines” in Syria? …Or Obama the president whose decisions fueled the rise of the most brutal terrorist organization the world has ever seen?

    * * *

    Below is the relevant excerpt covering Syria from the 26-minute Intercept interview with Obama deputy national-security adviser Ben Rhodes [bold emphasis ours].

    The audio is available here — Mehdi Hasan begins questioning Rhodes about Syria and ISIS at the 19-minute mark.

    Mehdi Hasan: My guest today was at President Obama’s side every step of the way over the course of those two terms in office. Ben Rhodes joined the Obama election campaign in 2007 as a foreign-policy speechwriter, when he was just 29, and rose to become a deputy national-security adviser at the White House, who was so intellectually and ideologically close to his boss that he was often described as having a mind-meld with Obama.

    Ben, who currently works at the Obama Foundation, has written a new book, “The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House.” And earlier this week I interviewed him about Obama’s rather contentious foreign policy record…

    …

    MH: But Ben, here’s what I don’t get, if you’re saying this about Afghanistan and prolonged conflict, all of which I don’t disagree with what you’re saying. How do you, then, explain Syria? Because you’ve been criticized a lot. I’ve been listening to your interviews on the book tour; you talk about in the book about how you were criticized for not doing enough on Syria. I remember being an event in D.C. a couple years ago where Syrian opposition members were berating you for not doing enough at an event, and you often were the public face who came out and defended Obama. I want to come to the other direction and say: Did you intervene too much in Syria? Because the CIA spent hundreds of millions of dollars funding and arming anti-Assad rebels, a lot of those arms, as you know, ended up in the hands of jihadist groups, some even in the hands of ISIS. Your critics would say you exacerbated that proxy war in Syria; you prolonged the conflict in Syria; you ended up bolstering jihadists.

    Ben Rhodes: Well, what I try to do in the book is, you know, essentially raise — all the second guessing on Syria tends to be not what you expressed, Mehdi, but the notion that we should’ve taken military action.

    MH: Yes.

    BR: What I do in the book is I try to look back at 2011 and 2012, was there a diplomatic window that we missed or that we, in some ways, escalated its closure by pivoting to the call for Assad to go — which obviously I believe should happen, I believe Assad has been a terrible leader for Syria and has brutalized his people — but, you know, was there a diplomatic initiative that could have been taken to try to avert or at least minimize the extent of the civil war. Because, you know, what ended up happening essentially there is, you know, we were probably too optimistic that, you know, after Mubarak went and Ben Ali and eventually Saleh and Gaddafi, that you would have a situation where Assad would go. And, you know, not factoring in enough the assistance he was going to get from Russia and Iran, combined with his own nihilism, and how that could lead him to survive. So I do look back at that potentially missed diplomatic opportunity.

    On the support of the opposition, you know, I don’t know that I would give us that much agency. There are a lot of people putting arms into Syria, funding all sorts of —

    MH: Oh, come on, but you were coordinating a lot of their arms. You know, the U.S. was heavily involved in that war with the Saudis and the Qataris and the Turks.

    BR: Well, I was going to say: Turkey, Qatar, Saudi.

    MH: You were in there as well.

    BR: Yeah, but, the fact of the matter is that once it kind of devolved into kind of a sectarian-based civil war with different sides fighting for their perceived survival, I think we, the ability to bring that type of situation to close, and part of what I wrestled with in the book is the limits of our ability to pull a lever and make killing like that stop once it’s underway.

    So that’s why I still look to that initial opening window. I also describe, there was a slight absurdity in the fact that we were debating options to provide military support to the opposition at the same time that we were deciding to designate al-Nusra, a big chunk of that opposition, as a terrorist organization. So there was kind of a schizophrenia that’s inherent in a lot of U.S. foreign policy that came to a head in Syria.

    MH: That’s a very good word, especially to describe Syria policy…

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