- Your Complete Guide To The NYTimes' Support Of US-Backed Coups In Latin America
Authored by Adam Johnson via TruthDig.com,
Last week, The New York Times continued its long, predictable tradition of backing U.S. coups in Latin America by publishing an editorial praising Donald Trump’s attempt to overthrow Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. This will be the 10th such coup the paper has backed since the creation of the CIA over 70 years ago.
A survey of The New York Times archives shows the Times editorial board has supported 10 out of 12 American-backed coups in Latin America, with two editorials—those involving the 1983 Grenada invasion and the 2009 Honduras coup—ranging from ambiguous to reluctant opposition. The survey can be viewed here.
Covert involvement of the United States, by the CIA or other intelligence services, isn’t mentioned in any of the Times’ editorials on any of the coups. Absent an open, undeniable U.S. military invasion (as in the Dominican Republic, Panama and Grenada), things seem to happen in Latin American countries entirely on their own, with outside forces rarely, if ever, mentioned in the Times. Obviously, there are limits to what is “provable” in the immediate aftermath of such events (covert intervention is, by definition, covert), but the idea that the U.S. or other imperial actors could have stirred the pot, funded a junta or run weapons in any of the conflicts under the table is never entertained.
More often than not, what one is left with, reading Times editorials on these coups, are racist, paternalistic “cycle of violence” cliches. Sigh, it’s just the way of things Over There. When reading these quotes, keep in mind the CIA supplied and funded the groups that ultimately killed these leaders:
- Brazil 1964: “They have, throughout their history, suffered from a lack of first class rulers.”
- Chile 1973: “No Chilean party or faction can escape some responsibility for the disaster, but a heavy share must be assigned to the unfortunate Dr. Allende himself.”
- Argentina 1976: “It was typical of the cynicism with which many Argentines view their country’s politics that most people in Buenos Aires seemed more interested in a soccer telecast Tuesday night than in the ouster of President Isabel Martinez de Perlin by the armed forces. The script was familiar for this long‐anticipated coup.”
See, it didn’t matter! It’s worth pointing out the military junta put in power by the CIA-contrived coup killed 10,000 to 30,000 Argentines from 1976 to 1983.
There’s a familiar script: The CIA and its U.S. corporate partners come in, wage economic warfare, fund and arm the opposition, then the target of this operation is blamed. This, of course, isn’t to say there isn’t merit to some of the objections being raised by The New York Times—whether it be Chile in 1973 or Venezuela in 2019. But that’s not really the point. The reason the CIA and U.S. military and its corporate partisans historically target governments in Latin America is because those governments are hostile to U.S. capital and strategic interests, not because they are undemocratic. So while the points the Times makes about illiberalism may sometimes be true, they’re mostly a non sequitur when analyzing the reality of what’s unfolding.
Did Allende, as the Times alleged in 1973 when backing his violent overthrow, “persist in pushing a program of pervasive socialism” without a “popular mandate”? Did, as the Times alleged, Allende “pursue this goal by dubious means, including attempts to bypass both Congress and the courts”? Possibly. But Allende’s supposed authoritarianism isn’t why the CIA sought his ouster. It wasn’t his means of pursuing redistributive policies that offended the CIA and U.S. corporate partners; it was the redistributive policies themselves.
Hand-wringing over the anti-democratic nature of how Allende carried out his agenda without noting that it was the agenda itself—not the means by which it was carried out—that animated his opponents is butting into a conversation no one in power is really having. Why, historically, has The New York Times taken for granted the liberal pretexts for U.S. involvement, rather than analyzing whether there were possibly other, more cynical forces at work?
The answer is that rank ideology is baked into the premise. The idea that the U.S. is motivated by human rights and democracy is taken for granted by The New York Times editorial board and has been since its inception. This does all the heavy lifting without most people—even liberals vaguely skeptical of American motives in Latin America—noticing that a sleight of hand has taken place. “In recent decades,” a 2017 Timeseditorial scolding Russia asserted, “American presidents who took military action have been driven by the desire to promote freedom and democracy, sometimes with extraordinary results.” Oh, well, good then.
What should be a conversation about American military and its covert apparatus unduly meddling in other countries quickly becomes a referendum on the moral properties of those countries. Theoretically a good conversation to have (and one certainly ongoing among people and institutions in these countries), but absent a discussion of the merits of the initial axiom—that U.S. talking heads and the Washington national security apparatus have a birthright to determine which regimes are good and bad—it serves little practical purpose stateside beyond posturing. And often, as a practical matter, it works to cement the broader narrative justifying the meddling itself.
Do the U.S. and its allies have a moral or ethical right to determine the political future of Venezuela? This question is breezed past, and we move on to the question of how this self-evident authority is best exercised. This is the scope of debate in The New York Times—and among virtually all U.S. media outlets. To ante up in the poker game of Serious People Discussing Foreign Policy Seriously, one is obligated to register an Official Condemnation of the Official Bad Regime. This is so everyone knows you accept the core premises of U.S. regime change but oppose it on pragmatic or legalistic grounds. It’s a tedious, extortive exercise designed to shift the conversation away from the United States’ history of arbitrary and violent overthrows and into an exchange about how best to oppose the Official Bad Regime in question. U.S. liberals are to keep a real-time report card on these Official Bad Regimes, and if these regimes—due to an ill-defined rubric of un-democraticness and human rights—fall below a score of say, “60,” they become illegitimate and unworthy of defense as such.
While obviously not in Latin America, it’s also worth noting that the Times cheerled the CIA-sponsored coup against Iran’s President, Mohammad Mossadegh, in 1953. Its editorial, written two days after his ouster, engaged in the Times’ patented combination of victim-blaming and “oh dear” bloviating:
- “The now-deposed Premier Mossadegh was flirting with Russia. He had won his phony plebiscite to dissolve the Majlis, or lower House of Parliament, with the aid of the Tudeh Communists.”
- “Mossadegh is out, a prisoner awaiting trial. It is a credit to the Shah, to whom he was so disloyal, and to Premier Zahedi, that this rabid, self-seeking nationalist would have been protected at a time when his life would not have been worth the wager of a plugged nickel.”
- “The Shah … deserves praise in this crisis. … He was always true to the parliamentary institutions of his country, he was a moderating influence in the wild fanaticism exhibited by the nationalists under Mossadegh, and he was socially progressive.”
Again, no mention of CIA involvement (which the agency now openly acknowledges), which the Times wouldn’t necessarily have had any way of knowing at the time. (This is part of the point of covert operations.) Mossadegh is summarily demonized, and it’s not until decades later the public learns of the extent of U.S. involvement. The Times even gets in an orientalist description of Iranians, implying why a strong Shah is necessary:
[The average Iranian] has nothing to lose. He is a man of infinite patience, of great charm and gentleness, but he is also—as we have been seeing—a volatile character, highly emotional, and violent when sufficiently aroused.
Needless to say, there are major difference between these cases: Mossadegh, Allende, Chavez and Maduro all lived in radically different times and championed different policies, with varying degrees of liberalism and corruption. But the one thing they all had in common is that the U.S. government, and a compliant U.S. media, decided they “needed to go” and did everything to achieve this end. The fundamental arrogance of this assumption, one would think, is what ought to be discussed in the U.S. media—as typified by the Times’ editorial board—but time and again, this assumption is either taken for granted or hand-waved away, and we all move on to how and when we can best overthrow the Bad Regime.
For those earnestly concerned about Maduro’s efforts to undermine the democratic institutions of Venezuela (he’s been accused of jailing opponents, stacking the courts and holding Potemkin elections), it’s worth pointing out that even when the liberal democratic properties of Venezuela were at their height in 2002 (they were internationally sanctioned and overseen by the Carter Center for years, and no serious observer considers Hugo Chavez’s rule illegitimate), the CIA still greenlit a military coup against Chavez, and the New York Times still profusely praised the act. As it wrote at the time:
With yesterday’s resignation of President Hugo Chávez, Venezuelan democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be dictator. Mr. Chávez, a ruinous demagogue, stepped down after the military intervened and handed power to a respected business leader, Pedro Carmona.
Chavez would soon be restored to power after millions took to the streets to protest his removal from office, but the question remains: If The New York Times was willing to ignore the undisputed will of the Venezuelan people in 2002, what makes anyone think the newspaper is earnestly concerned about it in 2019? Again, the thing that’s being objected to by the White House, the State Department and their U.S. imperial apparatchiks is the redistributive policies and opposition to the United States’ will, not the means by which they do so. Perhaps the Times and other U.S. media – living in the heart of, and presumably having influence over, this empire – could try centering this reality rather than, for the millionth time, adjudicating the moral properties of the countries subject to its violent, illegitimate whims.
- Robots Call Americans An Average Eight Times A Month
While Americans talk on the phone less often, robots seem to be more keen to do so…
Statista’s Katharina Buchholz notes that an analysis by spam protection app provider Hiya has found that 26.3 billion calls were placed by machines in the U.S. in 2018 – and that most robots were up to no good.
You will find more infographics at Statista
The company estimates that the number is an increase of 46 percent in robocalls over 2017. Considering that there were 274 million mobile phone plan subscribers in the U.S. in 2018, robots called every mobile phone user an average of eight times a month. Robots were used to scam people with fake vouchers or lottery wins. Other phone users were charged when calling back an overseas number.
The biggest segment of calls made by robots were just annoying spam (32.1 percent), according to Hiya. Cases of actual fraud amounted up to an estimated 25.5 percent of all robocalls made. Another 24.7 percent of calls were placed by telemarketer machines.
Texas was the state most heavily targeted by robocalls in 2018, in part due to the fact that a popular scam had machines call people and tell them they won a free trip or the like with Dallas-based company Southwest Airlines.
- Trump's Withdrawals From Afghanistan & Syria Are Hardly "A Gift To Putin"
Authored by Stephen Cohen via The Nation,
Manichaean Cold War myopia and ludicrous Russiagate allegations have produced one of the worst periods of American “geopolitical” thinking in recent decades. Consider President Trump’s recently announced withdrawals of US forces from Syria and Afghanistan. Instead of applauding these long-overdue steps, the bipartisan US political-media establishment has denounced them as “Trump’s gifts to Putin.”
But why would Russian President Putin want to be without the United States as an ally in the fight against terrorists in these two countries, which Moscow has long regarded as its geopolitical backyard?
In Syria, where, as Putin has repeatedly warned, thousands of jihadists with Russian passports have appeared and vowed, if they take Damascus, to return to Russia and wage the same war there?
And why even more in Afghanistan, where ever since the Soviet invasion in 1979, Moscow has worried that victorious Afghan terrorists and their foreign allies – by whatever name in whatever organized form – will flow through Central Asia into Russia, along with the indigenous Afghan war-funding crop, opium poppy? (Heroin addiction, fostered by cheap Afghan opium, is already reaching epidemic proportions in Russia.)
Unlike a large segment of the US policy-media elite, Putin can think geopolitically in his nation’s clear national interests. For 17 years, he has sought a full anti-terrorist alliance with the United States—first with President George W. Bush after 9/11, then with President Barack Obama, always in vain. As a candidate and then as president, Trump has seemed to want to seize the opportunity, but has been thwarted by Russiagate zealots, primarily Democrats, though not only.
Now we are told that Trump did something “treacherous” by meeting privately with Putin without adequate witnesses or note-keeping. His Russiagate accusers know history as poorly as they understand American national security. President Richard Nixon, for example, once met with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev with only Brezhnev’s translator present.
We should hope instead that in their necessarily secret meetings—there are enemies of cooperation in high places on both sides—Trump and Putin discussed expansive US-Russian cooperation against organized international terrorists, who are in pursuit of radioactive materials to make their explosions more lethal, whether the threat be abundantly visible in Syria and Afghanistan or silently incubating again in Europe and in Russia—or in our own country.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has reset its cautionary doomsday clock ever closer to midnight. The growing dangers of a new nuclear arms race also require the kind of US-American cooperation that has been badly shredded by the New Cold War and by unproven Russiagate allegations. But international terrorism has already repeatedly struck midnight. Is that not late enough to let Trump and Putin do what they can for the sake of everyone’s security, as American presidents and Kremlin leaders have previously done—and were expected to do?
- Canadian Company Soars 90% After Winning "POT" Ticker Symbol Lottery
The ticker symbol “POT” was so sought after in Canada, the exchange actually had to have a lottery in order to determine which company was going to “win” the symbol.
And to the victor go the spoils – a small Vancouver based pot company called Weekend Unlimited Inc. was deemed to be the winner of the lottery and saw its shares soar as much as 90% in trading on Friday as a result. The company also trades under WKULF on the U.S. OTC Markets.
The company had been listed on the Canadian stock exchange since October 15, two days before the country legalized recreational marijuana. And since these days nobody seems to have an attention span longer than the actual ticker, the comany was previously trading under the ticker “YOLO”, an acronym for “you only live once”.
Alas, the stock’s performance had been downright ugly… up until Friday. YOLO was down by about 57% since its first day of trading, bringing its market cap to C$28.6 million. As for the ticker “POT”, it was previously owned by Potash Corporation. When it became available in Canada about a week ago, 40 companies reportedly applied for it.
TMX Group CEO Paul Chu said: “The POT lottery served to raise the profile of Canada’s leadership in legal recreational cannabis and we believe it will also serve to raise Weekend Unlimited’s profile.”
Meanwhile, the AdvisorShares Pure Cannabis ETF filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to take over the “YOLO” symbol that Weekend Unlimited has left behind.
- MMT: The Court Astrologer's Dream
It’s not Modern; it’s not Monetary; and it’s really not much of a Theory
If ever there was a prime example of a belief in the Fairy Gov-a-Mother being mixed with a bad case of warmed-over monetary crankdom, the suddenly, newly- fashionable doctrine which masquerades under the portentous-sounding name of ‘Modern Monetary Theory’ – ‘MMT’, for short – must surely qualify.
Built upon that age old deceit of Planners that they – and the offices of the state and its bureaucracy which they occupy – provide a more rational means of organising people’s lives than can the Good Common Folk ever attain themselves through the voluntary relations and market-dealings which they conduct, MMT seeks primarily to overcome the well-founded objection that even the most benign and far-sighted government should notspend wildly beyond whatever it levies by means of the many taxes, fees, licences, transaction charges, and miscellaneous other exactions it can persuade its long-suffering subjects to endure.
The way it does this is to marry a decidedly old school of monetary thinking called ‘chartalism’ – child of the court intellectuals of Imperial Prussia and stepfather to the Weimar hyperinflation – to that other hoary old canard that the public debt does not matter since some faceless ‘We’ are said to owe it to ‘Our’ equally anonymous ‘Selves’.
Starting – as does so much that is bad about mainstream economics – with a simplistic and crushingly aggregative set of tautological identities which emanate from, who else, but that evil genius, Keynes – the MMT crowd next perform a few rounds of high-school algebraic manipulation to make these conveniently-defined, but thoroughly abstract, entities line up to ‘prove’ that every penny of government deficit spending must perforce be matched by an equal and opposite penny of private sector saving.
Hey, Presto!, they cry, we have now demonstrated that even the most incontinent of regimes can neither immolate the nation in a damaging blaze of inflation nor allow anti-social ‘hoarders’ and parasitic ‘rentiers’ to suffocate it in a deflationary deep freeze of miserly abstinence.
From this assertion – and here is where the ‘chartalism’ bit comes in – as long as the state uses its full apparatus of legalized violence to ensure that ITS obligations are the only things that pass for money (so no silver, no gold, no rye-backed notes, cigarette coupons, cowrie shells, or bitcoins), it can always fund its Big Digs, its high-speed rail lines, its bridges-to-nowhere, and its nine-days’ wonder, Olympic stadia, as well as all the day-to-day vote-buying and special interest-coddling to which this most caries-ridden of Tooth Fairies routinely stoops.
You – the poor ‘saver’ who has given up your own choice of goods in order to make such miracles possible – might be forgiven for casting a jaundiced eye at such evidence of either expensive pyramid-building or plain, old-fashioned, exhaustive consumption of Other People’s Money and enquire politely just what of productive value is being created in order that your ‘savings’ at least preserve – and hopefully increase – their value.
Once you start down this route, you will soon realise that it is only in the narrowest of contexts that the MMT brigade can be said to have a point: namely, that if the Gummint does confiscate our wealth, we will necessarily consume less than we might have wished to and so – in some perverted sense of a very overworked word- we might just be said to have ‘saved’ that much.
Not only to elevate this Sheriff of Nottingham practice of legitimised banditry into a major policy plank, but to dress the perps up in Lincoln Green so they can pretend to be Robin Hood’s Merry Men does take quite some neck, as I’m sure you will agree!
Granted, the state robbers in the MMT vision of the future are craftily going to disguise their theft by issuing us with a requisition chit in the form of their fiat currency – and will thereby so deftly pick our pockets that it might take us some while to work out that we have indeed been had.
But this sleight of hand hardly mitigates the severity of the crime or lessens the ultimate degree of loss we will suffer. After all, even such a tender-hearted, small-government paragon as Mussolini famously declared that you could not increase a country’s wealth simply by issuing extra paper portraits of its rulers!
Into the Fires of Moloch
The crucial distinction the MMTers seem congenitally unable to make in the course of their half-finished reasoning is that while their precious accounting identity (that Deficits equals Savings) may, under certain very restricted circumstances, be said to hold true, the dynamics, the process – the PRAXEOLOGY, if you will – of what is at work is what matters most.
Thus, very different results follow in the case where a man voluntarily decides up front (ex ante, in economist-speak) to finance some other entity’s expenditures in exchange for a promise to pay later – as opposed to the one where he finds that, after the game has been played for a round or two (and so, ex post, in the Latinate jargon), he has been landed with what none other than the Beelzebub of Bloomsbury, Keynes himself, once referred to as, “the bad, or depreciating, half-crown”.
In the first case, though not guaranteed to win the pot from his competitors, he is at least playing his own hand fairly and squarely: in the second, he not only looks around the table and realises HE is the proverbial patsy, but that the House is four-flushing and the dealer has a sleeve stuffed with extra aces.
More fundamentally still, the simple fact is that the whole of economic science must be founded on a real-world concept of the scarcity and finiteness of means. This is a requirement which utterly escapes the MMT wizards who instead seem to think that their special insights allow them, along with Shakespeare’s blowhard Glendower, to ‘summon spirits’ – and boundless economic means along with them – ‘from the vasty deep’.
The idea that, regardless of the magnitude of government spending, you, I, and our next-door neighbour can happily provide its clamorous army of functionaries, contractors, and welfare recipients with as many real resources as they need is clearly a nonsense of the first order.
Ask anyone whose grandparents were unfortunate enough to have to ‘fund’ the latest Five-Year Plan by queueing for hours outside the state dispensary in the chill of a Russian winter, all in the hope of securing the last head of mouldy cabbage for their cheerless, meagre supper.
Moreover, what all this lofty aggregation – all this misleading compression of the actions and interactions of hundreds of millions of people into a single, mute character in an equation – also overlooks is the fact that the obligations (and, in extremis, the currency) issued by the state will not rest inertly with its initial choice of a ‘saver’, but will inevitably pass through many hands, altering relative prices, dictating business success or failure, and redistributing wealth in the most insidious and arbitrary of fashions as it does.
The largely unpredictable topographical changes which are brought about by this scouring of the economic landscape by the floodwaters of state spending and monetized credit creation are known to those of us with a slightly wider exposure to economic history as ‘Cantillon effects’ (yes, THAT Cantillon) after the first great analyst of the disorder which resulted from John Law’s frankly proto-chartalist, MMT-precursor Mississippi Scheme of three hundred years ago.
Such unforeseen consequences – all too many of them unrelievedly malign – are another class of drawbacks which seem to elude our bold MMTers when they start their hands waving and their lips moving in the promotion of their aery imaginings.
Beyond even the question of whether MMT does dictate that the books will balance, come what may, when Leviathan doles out more than It gathers in, there also lies the issue of whether the concentration of a greater part of our resources into the hands of the Beast is in any way an advisable aim.
Government, after all, is not some Olympian deification of dispassionate justice (even justice of the oxymoronic ‘social’ kind) but is a creature which suffers from all the faults we associate with an absence of real ownership (i.e., from its lack of ‘skin in the game’, as the current vogue has it).
It is also generally exempt from formal accounting and budgetary strictures or from much in the way of temporal limitation – never being subject to the relentless, if decidedly necessary, test of validity constituted for the private sector by the annual profit & loss account.
Moreover, it is an institution within which men and women, fallible like you and me, are free to pursue their own, often highly venal, agendas and to do so – unlike those of us in private society who are often so harshly criticised for committing the very same sins – by proxy and therefore in a manner highly insulated from the costs of practising their prejudices or of giving rein to their wilder, Utopian enthusiasms – a remoteness which can only encourage such gross violations of the public trust.
Civis Romanus sum
In essence, the MMTer dreams of being the Roman procurator of a newly-conquered province who wishes to use the implicit threat of the armed might at the command of his colleague, the imperial legate, to exact tribute (‘savings’, as our Modern likes to call them) from the pair’s new subjects, preferably in the form of the tokens stamped with the Emperor’s likeness which he has had issued to that end.
In order not to be hoodwinked by this act of numismatical misdirection, let us not lose sight of the fact that however inherently insubstantial are these metallic symbols of oppression, those forced to ‘render unto Caesar’ in this manner will have to surrender hard-won real goods and laboriously-performed services in order to attain them. Given that the cash may initially be hard to come by – and making the MMT analogy even more complete – our procurator may well overcome this technical hurdle, as well as keep his patrician hands clean, by contracting out the collection of such taxes to a breed of political fixers called the publicani.
These worthies will first advance the money to the state and look to collect both it and more from the populace later – in other words, their equivalent is to be found in those who today buy some of those profligate issues of public debt which our dear MMT types believe are a sign of our prosperity, rather than of our prostration before our overlords.
In his borrowed munificence, the procurator will next make these payment tokens as wages over to the occupying troops – the government employees of the day par excellence (“Thank you for your service, centurion”) – and have them spend the proceeds in the townships, or ‘vici’, newly sprouted beside the legionary camps for that express purpose. In so doing, the occupying force will effectively consume the material representation of the tax-payers’ sacrifice – their ‘savings’, remember – though not without enriching a good few middlemen and greasing numerous palms along the way.
That done, the procurator will then congratulate himself that he has conferred the benefits of a higher civilisation upon his unwilling hosts, the despised and previously ungoverned ‘Britunculi’, and retire to an evening of heady indulgence in the comfort of the bath house.
Adding to this veneer of useful public activity the fruits of fifteen hundred years of economic wrong turns and misdirected conceptualising, the MMTers would thus not only bestow a certain ‘Romanitas’ upon us plebs but, they insist, they will also ensure an unwavering maximum of Keynesian ‘aggregate demand’ – another bogie of wrongheadedness – and forever abolish want and poverty, in all their many forms, into the bargain by the simple trick of chewing through the Forgotten Man’s small surplus.
By now it should be plain that not only is there little MODERN about Modern Monetary Theory, but that its workings are more fiscal than monetary and that, as theories go, this one is not only far-fetched but fairly well-worn, to boot.
Indeed, as Nobel-winner Gunnar Myrdal once caustically remarked of Keynes’s conceit that his was an innovative way of thinking, MMT displays much of the typically ‘unnecessary originality of the English-speaking economist’.
As Henry Hazlitt even more bitingly put it of the same man’s over-lauded ‘General Theory’: it ‘contains much that is original and much that is true. Sadly, that which is true is not original and that which is original is not true’.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to persuade my bank manager that my overdraft is, in MMT terms, not a matter for his censure, but rather a gift to him on my part, the better to help his depositors ‘save’ for their future.
* * *
I hope you’ve found this of interest. If so, please visit www.cantillon-consulting.ch for more information, check out examples of my work on Speakerdeck or follow me on Twitter via @CantillonCH. You can also listen to a slightly shortened version of this as a podcast at: Soundcloud or via TuneIn at:- https://bit.ly/2CXfEpy
- Melbourne Housing Prices Plummet At Fastest Quarterly Pace Ever Recorded; Sydney Enters "New Territory"
Six weeks after we noted that Australian housing regulators were warned to prepare “contingency plans for a severe collapse in the housing market” that could lead to a “crisis situation,” CoreLogic reports that Melbourne housing prices have fallen at their fastest quarterly pace on record, according to Australia’s News.com.au.
CoreLogic figures released on Friday show national dwelling values declined another 1 per cent in January, bringing the cumulative decline to 6.1 per cent since the overall market peaked in October 2017. –News.com.au
Prices in Sydney and Melbourne fell 1.3% and 1.6% respectively in January, “bringing their rolling quarterly falls to 4.5 per cent and 4 per cent,” according to the report.
From their respective peaks in July and November 2017, Sydney housing prices are down 12.3% , while Melbourne has seen a drop of 8.7% – as values drop to levels last seen between late 2016 and early 2017.
“If you had asked me in September last year I probably would have been surprised to see Sydney and Melbourne values down more than 4 per cent over the rolling quarter,” said Tim Lawless, head of research at CoreLogic.
“We have seen the downturn accelerate over the last three months. At 4 per cent down in Melbourne that’s the fastest rate of decline we’ve ever seen of any rolling three-month period, and Sydney is virtually (the fastest outside) a really brief period in the ‘80s.”
The decline in Sydney is now the worst since CoreLogic began collecting records in 1980 – surpassing the previous record of 9.6 perdcent seen between 1989 and 1991. Melbourne experienced a drop of 10% over the same period.
“Sydney clearly is in new territory,” said Lawless. “I think we can firmly point towards tighter credit and lending conditions throwing a dampener over the market.”
That said, given the relatively robust economic conditions, Lawless considers the drop to in Sydney and Melbourne be a “consolidation,” while also forecasting total declines in the two cities of 18% – 20% (after prices rose nearly 80% and 60% respectively).
Unlike previous downturns, which typically coincide with a sharp rise in mortgage rates, this downturn is occurring against a backdrop of reasonably robust economic conditions, decent jobs growth and low rates.
“If anything it’s a consolation,” Mr Lawless said. “The RBA can bring rates down, there’s a potential that might happen, people have jobs and are able to pay down their mortgages. In that sense the downturn is manageable.”
He conceded that “we are seeing some wealth destruction”. CoreLogic now forecasts total declines in Sydney and Melbourne of 18-20 per cent, but notes that comes after prices rose nearly 80 per cent and 60 per cent respectively. –News.com.au
“Most homeowners would still have a great deal of equity in their properties,” said Lawless. “It’s really just those owners that have bought in the last couple of years that are facing the prospect of negative equity.”
More pain in the cards
While Lawless has characterized the drop as a consolidation, others foresee continued difficulty in the Australian housing market.
AMP Capital chief economist Dr. Shane Oliver predicted an average peak-to-trough price drop of 10-15%, while revising his forecast for Sydney and Melbourne down from a drop of 20% to 25%.
“A crash landing — say a national average price fall in excess of 20 per cent — remains unlikely in the absence of much higher interest rates or unemployment, but it’s a significant risk given the difficulty in gauging how severe the tightening in bank lending standards in the face of the royal commission will get and how investors will respond as their capital growth expectations collapse at a time when net rental yields are around 1-2 per cent.”
One analyst has even tipped falls of up to 30 per cent, based on the revelation from the banking royal commission that almost all mortgages written between 2012 and 2016 had used the controversial HEM benchmark to over-assess borrowing capacity.
Douglas Orr from Endeavour Equity Strategy said his scenario, in which the focus on responsible lending in the wake of the royal commission’s final report leads to billions of dollars in unaffordable loans gradually cycling out of the system, would make it the worst downturn since 1890. –News.com.au
At the end of January, the median home value in Sydney was $795,509, and $636,048 in Melbourne. Every capital city experienced declines aside from Canberra, which saw values gain 0.2%.
Leading the declines were the most expensive end of the market.
Meanwhile, Australia’s debt-to-income ratio has ballooned to shocking levels over the past three decades as Sydney is ranked as one of the most overvalued cities in the world.
According to the Daily Mail Australia last August, credit card bills, home mortgages, and personal loans now account for 189 percent of an average Australian household income, compared with just 60 percent in 1988, as Callus Thomas, Head of Research of Topdown Charts, demonstrates that record high household debt is a ticking time bomb.
For more on Australian debt dynamics, watch the video below from economists John Adams and Martin North:
- The Ruling Class & An Undeclared Civil War
Authored by Steve McCann via AmericanThinker.com,
Over the past 73 years, devoid of any meaningful national misfortune, the American social order has undergone a major transformation. Historically, societies tend to stratify themselves along economic or pre-ordained class lines. The United States has long prided itself on the belief that class distinctions were no longer a part of a unique American culture. However, the current social structure has evolved into a near impregnable three-tier categorization in which the ruling class, that sits astride the social order, has revealed, thanks to the election of Donald Trump, open and unabashed disdain for the two lower classes and the unleashing of a radicalized army of malcontents.
The citizens who provide the primary labor and resources for the economic engine of the country constitute the second tier.
The third is comprised of those who have been betrayed by a self-serving education system and are conditioned to be totally dependent upon a government dominated by the ruling class.
Class conflict just ain’t what it used to be. (“Contracturalisation” by Kandukuru Nagarjun)
Unlike any other period in the nation’s history, one stratum of society, the American elites of the past half-century, by their control of education, entertainment, the media and politics, have totally dominated and overwhelmingly and negatively influenced the culture and national character.
They are chiefly responsible for what it is today.
This American aristocracy is now entirely made up of those who have no recall or firsthand experience of the years of adversity prior to 1940. Their entire point of reference is never-ending affluence and the pursuit of pleasure within an overall framework of world peace. Yet this assemblage is dominated by a comparatively few committed ideologues and so-called intellectuals who are dedicated to permanently altering the economy and American culture. Nonetheless, they have been very successful in attracting many others by appealing to their vanity and avarice.
Thus entrance into this class is not entirely a factor of birth or wealth but rather that of developing a mindset of superiority similar to the evolution of cliques within a high school setting. This attitude is further reinforced and promoted in the incubator that is the college campus, wherein this mindset is further enhanced by the academic elites waxing eloquent about the failings of the United States and the ideal of a classless society — led, of course, by the pre-eminent class…themselves and their their naïve recruits.
Once having left the bubble that is the university environment, the majority of these same recruits, still influenced by their university experience and desirous of maintaining a standing within the circle, look to the anointed leaders in the mainstream media, the entertainment industry and politics to set the agenda and dialog. Further, by being an accepted member of this class it is far easier to be ushered by the gate-keepers onto the path of making a substantial living be it in government, academia, Wall Street, the media or a myriad of non-profit advocacy groups.
To achieve and retain these benefits, it becomes paramount to retain membership within the congregation and do their bidding rather than question what the pronouncements and policies of their titular leaders would do to the culture and well-being of the country at large. Thus, while proclaiming to be independent thinkers, no faction in American society is more acquiescent to groupthink and conformity.
The reality is that the majority of those in the ruling class are mind-numbed eternal adolescents hell-bent on pushing the boundaries of ethical and moral behavior and viewing all political and policy issues as a war between their side and their mortal enemies (those who oppose the transformation of the nation into a socialist oligarchy, the concomitant erosion of liberty as well as unrestrained personal behavior). While there are a few comparatively independent thinkers within the group that do question the over-reaching of a powerful central government, their opposition is muted and limited to a more gradualist approach as their concession to remain within the fold.
An all-powerful central government is vital to maintaining the elite’s power, income base and pre-eminent class status and must be protected at all cost. In order to retain their supremacy, the tactics of outright lies, innuendos, and character assassinations, as well as exploitation of national tragedies to impugn their adversaries, have been utilized by the foot soldiers in the mainstream media, the political establishment and the entertainment industry.
The eight years of the Obama administration rudely awakened a sleeping populace. Many of whom, also benefiting from the overwhelming economic growth and absence of national adversity over the past half-century, had consciously chosen to ignore what was happening to the culture and future well-being of the country. Thus, the election of Donald Trump was in essence the revenge of the lower classes for not only the overbearing and condescending attitude of the elites but their ongoing success in transforming American society and culture.
Faced with the exposure of their agenda and the real prospect of losing their status and influence, the disdain toward the lower classes, which had always bubbled beneath the surface, burst forth in a volcanic eruption of uncontrolled vitriol, anger and absurdity.
The denizens of the ruling class unleashed their out of control foot soldiers on the citizenry, employing the tactics and weapons previously aimed at their political enemies. Today vast swaths of the American populace, whether they voted for Trump or not, are indiscriminately accused of being racists, misogynists, white supremacists, ignoramuses, religious zealots, xenophobes and malcontents.
Intimidation and threats of violence are no longer condemned so long as it is directed at those identified as a threat to the hegemony of the elites. Various social media platforms are being hijacked and weaponized by the mindless and radicalized brain-dead army of elite wannabes, the ruling class chooses not to restrain, in order to terrorize and permanently cower those in the second tier of society — the citizens who provide the primary labor and resources for the economic engine of the country.
There is at present an undeclared and non-violent civil war being waged in this country. The underlying factor of any civil war is an elite ruling class desperate to maintain power at odds with a majority of a population seeking change. Also prevalent in most civil upheavals is the unleashing, by those determined to retain power, of the radicalized and ultimately uncontrollable dogs of war who more often than not devour their sponsors. Both elements are currently in play.
While the ruling class publicly obsesses over Donald Trump and denigrates the vast majority of the population, they have planted the seeds, by their actions, for a takeover of the country by a radical element that will turn on them as they are presently doing within the Democratic Party.
The American people must understand that the current ruling class will not willingly exit the stage or take on their mercenary army. Donald Trump, while perhaps accomplishing a significant degree of change, cannot induce their demise. This threat can only be marginalized through the determined utilization of political process which will encompass a number of political cycles and the long-term willingness to not be intimidated or cowed into submission. The future of the nation as founded is at stake.
- Erik Prince Denies Knowledge Of Blackwater-Type Training Base In China
A Hong Kong-Based training company launched by Blackwater founder Erik Prince is reportedly building a training center in the controversial Western Chinese region of Xinjiang according to Reuters, citing a company statement from Prince’s Frontier Services Group (FSG).
While the exact details of the $600,000 (4 million yuan) project weren’t disclosed, a state media report said that the facility will be able to train 8,000 people a year.
Despite being the founder, Executive Director and Deputy Chairman of FSG, Prince says he had “no knowledge or involvement” in the preliminary memorandum for the base, according to Reuters.
A Hong Kong-based spokesman for FSG told Reuters on Friday that the statement was “published in error by a staff member in Beijing” and had been taken off FSG’s website.
The removed statement had said that FSG signed a deal with the Kashgar Caohu industrial park in Tumxuk city in southern Xinjiang to build a training center.
…
“Any potential investment of this nature would require the knowledge and input of each FSG Board member and a formal Board resolution,” the spokesman said in an email. –Reuters
Xinjiang is a strategically important component of China’s sprawling Belt and Road trade infrastructure. It has also drawn sharp criticism for China’s mass incarceration of up to one million dissidents, mostly of the Muslim ethnic Uighur minority. Beijing has insisted that these “re-education camps” are peaceful, and instill compliance and Chinese values. Ex-detainees say the facilities are little more than prisons.
Uighur Muslims in China have experienced a huge security crackdown (AFP Photo/Greg Baker) In October, AFP reported how one local government prefecture’s purchases had little to do with education and included 2,768 police batons, 550 electric cattle prods, 1,367 pairs of handcuffs, and 2,792 cans of pepper spray. –AFP via Yahoo!
Prince, a former Navy SEAL and brother of US Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, has come under fire for FSG’s contracts in the Xinjiang region due to the severe security crackdowns and mass incarcerations by Chinese authorities. FSG manages “the largest private security training school in China” for Beijing’s International Security Defense College, which trains police and military experience on handling detainees, hostage situations and terrorist attacks.
As of May, 2018 FSG had trained over 5,000 Chinese military personnel, 500 SWAT specialists, 200 plainclothes police officers, 200 railway police officers, and 300 overseas military police officers according to the Washington Post, citing school’s promotional material.
“He cloaks himself in the American flag when he’s seeking a U.S. contract, but he is the hood ornament of the new era of the military industrial complex and a set of mercenaries who work for countries, oligarchs and random billionaires,” said former military contractor Sean McFate, who wrote a book about private armies, “The Modern Mercenary.”
“The Pentagon and national security establishment view Erik as a pariah,” he added.
Only weeks ago Prince told Fox Business that private military contractors could replace the U.S. troops that are currently withdrawing from Syria. This followed a similar proposal Prince reportedly made through White House channels in 2017 to privatize the fight against the Taliban in Afghanistan — which some contractor industry analysts have suggested Trump was “sympathetic”. Prince has touted the plan as fixing failed US policy in the Middle East: “The United States doesn’t have a long-term strategic obligation to stay in Syria. But, I also think it’s not a good idea to abandon our allies,” he told Fox at the time.
Thus while Prince is now essentially operating under the approval and authority of Beijing, he’s floating the idea that his own mercenaries could replace US troops abroad. This also as China plans its own launch of a Blackwater-style agency for offshore security — something which no doubt Price is being consulted on.
In a statement last year to the Post, FSG wrote: “Erik Prince is a proud American who would never seek to undermine the national interest. FSG is an international company with operations in China and is listed in Hong Kong. It aims to support infrastructure projects internationally to serve its clients’ needs in the interest of shareholders and does not support a political agenda.”
Prince defended himself last year, noting that FSG was focusing on protecting Chinese enterprises in Africa and Asia, not Beijing’s diplomatic policies. However, he has said that his business in China “is not a patriotic endeavor.” Instead, Prince seeks “to build a great business and make some money doing it.“
- Advanced Social Decay: What's Going On Behind Closed Doors In America
Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,
It is difficult for me to write this article, and I will warn you in advance that some of the things in this piece are going to make you cringe. Today, there are an increasing number of signs that the very fabric of our society is rotting away all around us. We witnessed a very clear example of this last week when Kyrsten Sinema paraded around on the floor of the U.S. Senate looking like a hooker, but far more telling is what is going on behind closed doors all across America. The stories that I am about to share with you barely made a blip on the news, but they should have, because they are all indications of how far our nation has fallen.
Let’s start in Colorado. A 27-year-old man named Christopher Wayne Cleary was just arrested on terrorism charges after he threatened to shoot “as many girls as I see”…
Authorities said Christopher Wayne Cleary, of Denver, posted on his Facebook page that “Theres nothing more dangerous than man ready to die.”
“All I wanted was a girlfriend, not 1000 not a bunch of hoes not money none of that,” he wrote, according to a probable-cause statement cited by authorities. “All I wanted was to be loved, yet no one cares about me I’m 27 years old and I’ve never had a girlfriend before and I’m still a virgin, this is why I’m planning on shooting up a public place soon and being the next mass shooter cause I’m ready to die and all the girls the turned me down is going to make it right by killing as many girls as I see.”
Thankfully authorities were able to arrest him before he was able to carry out his threats, but the sad truth is that there are thousands upon thousands more young men out there just like him.
These young men feel like failures if they can’t get young women to sleep with them, and this message is reinforced by popular culture over and over again.
But that isn’t what “being a man” is all about.
Unfortunately, the only values that many of our young men have are the values that they have been fed by Hollywood, and Christopher Wayne Cleary was so frustrated with his inability to live up to the Hollywood ideal that he was ready to go on a mass shooting spree.
Next, let me share a story with you about a young mother in Florida. When police recently arrived at the home of Angelica Crites, she didn’t respond. So they entered the home and when she still didn’t respond they had to pry her bedroom door open.
But she still didn’t wake up when they did that. In fact, it took authorities several minutes to finally wake her up.
And when they looked around the house, what they discovered was like something out of a horror movie…
There was an “overwhelming odor of ammonia and feces,” and large spider webs were along the ceilings and door frames. Food and dirt was all over the floor in the living room and dining room. A mop bucket filled with dirty water and food pieces was in the dining room, the report said.
The dining room had a large amount of trash in the corner and underneath a table to make food. The refrigerator was unsanitary with food, dirt and stains all over the inside and outside. Numerous insects were flying around the house.
The condition of her children was even worse. They were filthy dirty and their teeth “were black and gray” from a lack of care.
On top of everything else, animal feces had literally been smeared throughout the house…
The floor leading to the bathroom had animal feces smeared on it. Mold and animal feces was in the corner of the hall by the bathroom door.
Crites and her children shared a bedroom, where there was a large pile of clothes in the corner, dirt on the floor and several red cups on a shelf containing an unknown black liquid and cigarette butts, the report said.
In her bathroom, there were several piles of animal feces on the floor and in the bathtub, and some smeared on the floor, the report said.
It is easy to criticize anyone that lives like that, but the truth is that what we are doing to ourselves as a nation is even worse.
We need to be praying for children all across America, because so many of them are living in absolutely horrific situations and they have no way to escape.
For example, consider what recently happened to one precious child in Indiana…
Back on January 14th, a young child was taken to Union Hospital.
That’s according to court documents.
Police, DCS, and emergency room staff say the child had a split tongue, several bruises, and other injuries.
That child was later transported to Riley Hospital in Indianapolis.
While there, hospital staff determined an object, most likely scissors, were used to split the child’s tongue.
How evil do you have to be to do something like that?
But this is who we have become as a nation. And things like this happen so frequently that this story barely made a blip on the national news.
Almost everyone can put up a pretty decent facade in public, but it is the things that happen behind closed doors that define who we truly are. And what one man in Arizona recently did is almost too sickening for words…
A nurse has been arrested in the sexual assault of an incapacitated woman who gave birth at a Phoenix nursing facility, Arizona police said Wednesday.
Nathan Sutherland, 36, was a licensed practical nurse at Hacienda Skilled Nursing Facility, where the woman gave birth.
The female patient had been in a vegetative state facility for at least 14 years after a near-drowning incident.
Some of you may be thinking that “this is just one guy”, but the truth is that there are more than 850,000 registered sex offenders in the United States today.
And that is just the people that have been caught. Imagine how many more there are that have not been caught.
So no, this is not just “an isolated incident”. We are a nation that is literally teeming with sexual predators.
Lastly, I want to share with you the story of Logan and Daley South. They both wear fangs and they both drink blood, and they opened up about their relationship with their “girlfriend” Ilona on a recent episode of Extreme Love…
‘I don’t like the way blood tastes. I find it inconvenient to have to do regularly,’ Daley admits. ‘I’m someone that needs it, but I’m not a big fan of it. For Logan, it can be very sexual for him.’
Although Logan and Daley both wear fangs, they don’t need to bite into Ilona’s neck and gorge on her blood like a scene in a horror movie to feel satisfied.
In the clip, Daley uses the same tool that diabetics use to prick their fingers to draw Ilona’s blood before she and Logan begin hungrily sucking on her fingers.
If you took Americans from 200 years ago and showed them this, how do you think that they would react?
Needless to say, they would think that we have completely lost our minds.
And the sad truth is that we have definitely lost our way as a nation. Our lack of values is producing absolutely horrific results, and it is getting worse with each passing day.
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