- The New Grand Strategy Of The United States
Authored by Thierry Meysan via The Voltaire Network,
Many people think that the United States is very active, but does not succeed in much. For example, it is said that its wars in the Greater Middle East are a succession of failures. But for Thierry Meyssan, the USA has a coherent military, commercial and diplomatic strategy. According to its own objectives, it advances patiently, and is crowned with success.
It is commonly believed in the United States that the country has no Grand Strategy since the end of the Cold War.
A Grand Strategy is a vision of the world that one seeks to impose, and that all administrations must respect. So, even if you lose in one particular theatre of war, the fight continues in others, and finally ends in triumph. At the end of the Second World War, Washington chose to follow the directives set by ambassador George Keenan in his famous diplomatic telegramme. It proposed describing an alleged Soviet expansionism in order to justify containment of the USSR. Indeed, although the USA had lost the wars in Korea and Vietnam, it finished by prevailing.
It is very rare to be able to rethink a Grand Strategy, even if there were others during that period, in particular, with Charles De Gaulle in France.
Over the last eighteen years, Washington has been able to progressively set new objectives and new tactics with which to attain them.
1991-2001: a period of uncertainty
When the Soviet Union collapsed on 25 December 1991, Father Bush’s USA supposed that they no longer had any rivals. The victorious President by default demobilised 1 million soldiers and imagined a world of peace and prosperity. He liberalised the transfer of capitals so that the capitalists would be able to get richer and, he believed, thus enrich their fellow citizens.
However, capitalism is not a political project, but a means of making money. The major US businesses – not the federal state – therefore allied themselves with the Chinese Communist Party (the reason for Deng Xiaoping’s famous « journey to the South »). They delocalised their businesses with very low added value from the West to China, where the workers were uneducated, but their wages were on average 20 times lower. The long process of the de-industrialisation of the West had begun.
In order to manage its transnational affairs, the Grand Capital moved its assets to countries with low taxation rates, where it realised that it could avoid its social responsibilities. These countries, whose fiscal exemption and discretion are indispensable for international commerce, suddenly found themselves swept along on a gigantic wave of fiscal optimisation, even a massive fraud system, from which they benefited in silence. The reign of Finance over the economy was beginning.
Military Strategy
In 2001, Secretary for Defense and permanent member of the « Continuity of Government ») [1] Donald Rumsfeld, created the Office of Force Transformation, which he handed to Admiral Arthur Cebrowski. This man had already computerised the armies, and was now set to modify their mission.
Without the Soviet Union, the world had become unipolar, which is to say no longer governed by the Security Council, but by the United States alone. In order to maintain its dominant position, it was obliged to « lose some to gain more », in other words, to divide Humanity in two. On one side, the stable states, meaning the members of the G8 – Russia included – and their allies), and on the other side, the rest of the world, viewed as a simple reservoir of natural resources. Washington no longer considered access to these resources as vital for itself, but intended for them to become accessible to the stable states only by permission of the USA. From that point on, it would be necessary to destroy – preventively – all the state structures in these reservoirs of resources, so that no-one could either challenge the will of the top world power, or do without it [2].
Since then, this strategy has been implemented ceaselessly. It began in the Greater Middle East (Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Syria, Yemen). However, contrary to what had been announced by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, (Pivot to Asia), it was not continued into the Far East, due to the military development of China, but in the Caribbean Basin (Venezuela, Nicaragua).
Diplomatic Strategy
In 2012, President Barack Obama took up the leitmotiv of the Republican Party and made the exploitation of oil and gas by hydraulic fracturing a national priority. Within a few years, the United States multiplied its investments and became the world’s major producer of hydrocarbons, reversing the paradigms of international relations. In 2018, the ex-director of the oil equipment provider Sentry International, Mike Pompeo, became the director of the CIA , then Secretary of State. He created the Bureau of Energy Resources, which he handed to Francis Fannon. The BER is the equivalent of what the Office of Force Transformation had been for the Pentagon. He set up a policy which was entirely concentrated on taking control of the world market for hydrocarbons [3]. To do so, he imagined a new type of alliance, like those of the Free and Open Indo-Pacific region. It was no longer a case of creating military blocs like the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quads), but organising these alliances around objectives of economic growth, on the basis of guaranteed access to sources of energy.
This concept was integrated into the Rumsfeld/Cebrowski strategy. It was no longer a case of grabbing the hydrocarbons from the rest of the world (Washington has absolutely no need of them), but to determine who may have them to use for their own development, and who will be deprived of them. This is a total reversal of the doctrine of the rarefaction of oil, promoted by the Rockefellers and the Club of Rome since the 1960’s, then by Dick Cheney’s National Energy Policy Development Group. From then on, the United States decided that not only had oil not disappeared, but that despite the drastic increase in demand, Humanity had enough to last at least another century.
Using many different pretexts, Pompeo has blocked Iran’s access to the world market, then that of Venezuela, and finally, has maintained US troops in the East of Syria to prevent anyone from exploiting the oil fields that have been discovered there [4]. Simultaneously, he is increasing pressure on the European Union to give up on the Russian gas pipeline Nord Steam 2 and is also pressuring Turkey to give up Turkish Stream.
Commercial Strategy
In 2017, President Donald Trump attempted to repatriate some of the jobs which had been delocalised from the United States to Asia and the European Union. Basing himself on the advice of left-wing economist Peter Navarro [5], he put an end to the Trans-Pacific Partnership and renegotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement. At the same time, he set prohibitive Customs taxes on German cars and most Chinese products. He completed these with a fiscal reform which encouraged the repatriation of capital. This policy has already enabled the re-balancing of commerce and the relaunching of the job market.
* * *
The military, economic and diplomatic systems are now complete. Each chapter is articulated with the others. Everyone knows what they have to do.
The designers of the US Grand Strategy – Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his advisor, Admiral Arthur Cebrowski; President Donald Trump and his commercial advisor Peter Navarro; and finally Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his advisor Francis Fannon.
The main force of this new Grand Strategy resides in the fact that it has not been understood by the elites of the rest of the world. Washington therefore retains the effect of surprise, reinforced by the deliberately chaotic communications of Donald Trump. If we look at the facts instead of the Presidential tweets, we note the advance of the United States after the double period of uncertainty under Presidents Clinton and Obama.
- Hey Broke Millennials! NASA Will Give You $19k To Stay In Bed For 2 Months
NASA, European Space Agency (ESA), and German Aerospace Center (DLR) are requesting 24 volunteers to lie in bed for two months as part of a study into examining how the body changes in weightlessness. The three space agencies will compensate each volunteer $19,000.
“We are looking for test persons who take part in a bed rest study from September to December 2019 in Cologne and spend 60 days lying down. Based on the study results, scientists are developing countermeasures that reduce the negative effects of weightlessness on astronauts,” reads a translated DLR website for the project.
Dubbed Agbresa (Artificial Gravity Bed Rest Study), NASA, ESA, and DLR have asked the public for 12 men and 12 women who will spend 60 days in special beds angled downward by 6 degrees, feet elevated above heads, with one shoulder touching the mattress at all times. This position simulates astronauts in space.
According to ESA, one group of volunteers will be spun around in a short-arm human centrifuge to generate artificial gravity and force blood back in the extremities, while the other group won’t.
Agbresa is the first of its kind to be conducted in partnership between the multiple space agencies. The test will be conducted at DLR’s medical research facility called the envihab facility.
ESA explained that bedrest had been the best way for researchers to mimic some of the body’s changes that would occur in space. Humans have been created to live on Earth, and without the constant pull of gravity, the body’s muscles and bones deteriorate.
Astronauts on board the International Space Station exercise for several hours per day and maintain a healthy diet to mitigate microgravity’s effects on the body, but researchers who are conducting the study believe a dose of artificial gravity on deep space missions could be beneficial for astronauts.
So, if you’re a broke millennial and need a quick payout to cover half of your student loans, well, NASA’s bed rest study could be for you.
Applications for the study are available online.
- Why There'll Be No US-Russia Reset Post-Mueller
Authored by Finian Cunningham via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
President Donald Trump and his White House team have been cleared of collusion with the Kremlin in the 2016 presidential election. That startling conclusion by Special Counsel Robert Mueller after nearly two years of investigation, might be viewed by some as giving Trump freedom to now get on with normalizing relations with Moscow. Don’t bet on it.
Mueller’s report, and US attorney general William Barr’s appraisal of it, only partially vindicate Trump’s long-held claims that the whole so-called “Russiagate” story is a “hoax”.
Yes, Mueller and Barr conclude that neither Trump nor his campaign team “conspired” with Russia to win the presidential race. But Democrat opponents are now dredging up the possibility that Trump “unwittingly” facilitated Kremlin cyber operations to damage his 2016 rival for the White House, Hillary Clinton.
In his summary of Mueller’s report, Barr unquestioningly accepts as fact the otherwise contentious claim that Russia interfered in the US election. Democrats and the anti-Trump US news media have not been deterred from pursuing their fantasy that the Kremlin allegedly meddled in US democracy. Trump has been cleared, but Russia has certainly not. It very much continues to have the smear of interference slapped all over its image.
At the heart of this narrative – bolstered by Mueller and Barr – is the false claim that Russian cyber agents hacked into the Democrat party computer system during 2016 and released emails compromising Clinton to the whistleblower website Wikileaks. That whole claim has been reliably debunked by former NSA technical expert William Binney and other former US intelligence officials who have shown indisputably that the information was not hacked from outside, but rather was released by an insider in the Democrat party, presumably based on indignation over the party’s corruption concerning the stitch-up against Clinton’s rival nomination for the presidential ticket, Bernie Sanders.
That is real scandal crying out to be investigated, as well as the Obama administration’s decision to unleash FBI illegal wiretapping and dirty tricks against Trump as being a “Russian stooge”. The Russian collusion charade was always a distraction from the really big serious crimes carried out by the Obama White House, the FBI and the Democrat party.
In any case, the notion that Russia interfered in the US elections – even without Trump’s collusion – has become an article of faith among the American political and media establishment.
That lie will continue to poison US-Russia relations and be used to justify more economic sanctions being imposed against Moscow. Trump may be cleared of being a “Kremlin stooge”. But he will find no political freedom to pursue a normalization in bilateral relations because of the predictable mantra about Russia interfering in American democracy.
But there is a deeper reason why there will be no reset in US-Russia relations. And it has nothing to do with whether Trump is in the White House. The problem is a strategic one, meaning it relates to underlying geopolitical confrontation between America’s desired global hegemony and Russia’s rightful aspiration to be an independent foreign power not beholden to Washington’s dictate.
Russia under the leadership of President Vladimir Putin has presented a somewhat shocking quandary for the US ruling class. It found that Russia was no longer in the servile business of rolling over to pander to Washington’s tyranny in international relations. Under Putin, Russia shook off the vassal status that it had unfortunately acquired under the feckless presidency of Boris Yeltsin (1991-99).
Putin’s landmark speech in Munich in 2007 was certainly a watershed moment in geopolitical relations whereby the Russian leader condemned US rampaging across the Middle East with criminal wars.
Then there was the failed attempt in 2008 by the US and NATO to over-run Georgia, failed because of a decisive military intervention by Russia in support of neighboring South Ossetia.
The return of the Cold War in US-Russia relations under former President GW Bush was due to the realization in Washington that Putin and Russia were no longer subordinates that could be pushed around for the gratification of American imperialism.
The Americans then tried another tack. Public relations and inveigling.
When Barack Obama took over the White House in 2009, there was the famous “reset policy” initiated by Washington towards Moscow. In March 2009, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton greeted Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov in Geneva with a jokey “reset button”, purportedly to demonstrate a willingness in Washington for a new beginning in bilateral relations.
Ominously, Clinton’s State Department mislabelled the button with the Russian word for “overload” not “reset”. Her inane cackling to ingratiate herself with the skeptical Lavrov was also a giveaway of a phony reset.
Look how hollow such ostensible claims for “reset” by Washington have since manifested.
Admittedly, there was a significant gain in Obama’s negotiation of substantial nuclear arms reductions with the New START treaty in 2010.
However, it didn’t take long until Washington was back to its usual business of subversions and covert wars for regime change against foreign states that didn’t kowtow to its dictates. We saw this with ample evidence in the overthrow of Libya’s government in 2011, the attempted ouster in Syria beginning the same year, and the even more daring American intervention in Ukraine in early 2014 when it installed a rabidly anti-Russian regime through an illegal coup d’état.
We are also presently seeing this criminal American imperialism being conducted brazenly towards Venezuela, where Washington wants to overthrow a socialist president in order to get its corporate hands on the South American country’s vast oil wealth.
All the while, Russia has become ever more resolute its defiance of Washington’s global gangsterism. Moscow’s military defense of Syria from US-led regime change was certainly a pivotal moment in defining the limits of Moscow’s tolerance, as was Russia’s defense of Crimea.
For these reasons, Washington in its chagrin has moved to abandon the other major arms control treaty, the INF, which could allow it to install short and medium-range nuclear missiles in Europe, thus aggravating threats and tensions with Russia. The future of the much-vaunted New START treaty is also in doubt because of American vacillation. So much for Obama’s “reset”.
These are the structural, strategic factors in why Washington is set on a course of hostility towards Moscow. It has got very little to do with President Trump being in the White House or whether he has been cleared of “collusion” with Moscow.
The fundamental issue for Washington is that Russia is not a vassal for American imperialism. That’s why there will be no reset. There will only be reset when American imperialism is replaced by a law-abiding, genuinely democratic US government. Until then, expect more US hostility, confrontation and even war towards Russia.
- DoD Orders $250 Million Of Gas Masks – What Do They Know?
The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has awarded Avon Protection Systems Inc., Cadillac, Michigan, a $245,961,250 firm-fixed-price contract for production of M53A1 Chemical Biological Protective Mask systems, according to the DoD contract website.
The Army estimates M53A1 gas masks will start delivery in the second half of this financial year ending September. U.S. Army Contracting Command, Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, will oversee the purchase order.
Avon Protection Systems is a world leader and major supplier to the military, law enforcement, first responders, and industrial sectors globally.
The M53A1 was developed to counter multiple threats encountered on the modern battlefield. “It provides excellent protection against traditional chemical and biological warfare agents, select Toxic Industrial Materials (TIMs) and particulate matter including radioactive dust,” read the M53 brochure.
According to the company, the M53A1 protects soldiers from chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear attacks. Specifically, the mask protects against mustard, sarin, soman, and VX nerve agents.
The order comes one month after the U.S. government introduced science-based guidelines for how first responders decontaminate large numbers of Americans after a chemical-weapons attack.
The guidelines, published last month, are the first in the U.S. to be based on extensive research and testing.
“Terrorist threats and the use of chemical weapons in Syria have heightened awareness of the need for improved preparedness against chemical attacks,” said Gary Disbrow, deputy director of the US Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, which prepared the guidelines.
“First responders are supportive of the fact that it is evidence-based guidance, and not just, ‘We used this last time, and it seemed to work,’” he added.
With lightning speed, the Army and U.S. government have been actively preparing for a biological incident on the homeland. With threats harder to anticipate today, the act of preparation suggests some fears that an attack of some sort could be imminent.
- Paul Craig Roberts: The Democrats Are Self-Destructing
Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,
The Democrats cannot stop making fools of themselves. Thom Hartmann is an example. He writes for Common Dreams and has a progressive talk radio program. During the George W. Bush regime I was a frequent guest on his program. It was OK to tell the truth about the Bush regime’s deceits and illegal wars of aggression. But telling the truth about the Obama regime’s deceits and illegal wars of aggression left me unqualified for his program.
Hartmann, like the rest of them, will never escape from Democratic partisanship. He asserts that Attorney General William Barr, who he calls “cover-up general” covered up Mueller’s Russiagate report. Hartmann seems to think that Mueller found all sorts of damning evidence against Trump, but we will never know because Barr, “without showing us even a single complete sentence from the Mueller report decided that there are no crimes here.” He accuses Barr of “burying Mueller’s report and cherry-picking fragments of sentences from it to justify Trump’s behavior.” He tells his readers that “Barr’s history of doing just this sort of thing to help Republican presidents in legal crises explains why Trump brought him back in to head the Justice Department.”
Hartmann ignorantly accuses Barr of withholding Mueller’s report. To the contrary, Barr’s summary of the report clearly states that federal laws, which he identifies, govern the release of information that can be made public. Once the DOJ has identified “material that by law cannot be made public,” the report will be released.
I know Democrats are disappointed not to have Trump’s head presented to them by Mueller on a silver platter. But surely not even Democrats are stupid enough to believe the Russiagate conspiracy tale. It was all cooked up by the military/security complex to prevent Trump from normalizing relations with Russia, thereby removing the enemy that justifies the $1,000 billion annual budget.
Before writing such nonsense as Hartmann has written, he should have read Barr’s summary of the report. Barr quotes Mueller directly from the report:
“The investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
Again from Mueller’s report:
“The evidence does not establish that the President was involved in an underlying crime related to Russian election interference.”
Other Democrats who cannot cope with their disappointment claim that although cleared of election theft collusion Trump was not cleared of obstruction of justice. This is nonsensical even for Democrats. As Trump committed no crime, what evidence did he obstruct? The evidence of his innocence? Just as murder requires a body, obstruction requires a crime to obstruct.
But facts are boring to Democrats. They were certain that all the lies that they and the media whores told would find their way into Mueller’s report. Mueller’s staff was Democrat to the core, and Mueller used every dirty trick in the book in his effort to get something on Trump. It simply couldn’t be done.
Democrats will never get over it, just as they never have got over Iran-Contra. Hartmann couldn’t write about the “Russiagate coverup” without dragging in Ronald Reagan and the “Iran-Contra coverup.”
What coverup is he talking about? The Reagan administration started an investigation that continued during the George H.W. Bush administration. It resulted in a dozen indictments and convictions of high level officials, not lowly grunts as in the Abu Ghraib torture case. Among the convicted were Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams, National Security Adviser Robert C. McFarlane, National Security Advisor John Poindexter, Chief of Covert Ops-CIA Clair George, Chief of the CIA’s Central American Task Force Alan D. Fiers, Air Force Major General Richard Secord, Lt. Col. Oliver North.
Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger was indicted but pardoned by President Bush prior to being tried. Poindexter’s conviction was overturned. North was granted immunity for testifying. With the exception of General Secord, the others convicted were later pardoned by President Bush.
Under precedents established by the George W. Bush and Obama regimes, an Iran-Contra investigation would not be possible today. In the 21st century US presidents have successfully asserted powers as commander-in-chief that are beyond the reach of Congress. For all practical purposes, the Boland Amendment is a dead letter law.
Iran-Contra was a scheme involving Israel to prevent what was perceived to be a communist takeover in Nicaragua and to obtain the release of US hostages held by Hezbollah. As a scandal its illegality pales in comparison to the Clinton regime’s bombing attack on Serbia, the George W. Bush regime’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Obama regime’s overthrow of Gaddafi and attempted overthrow of Assad by military force and Obama’s overthrow of democratically elected presidents in Honduras and Ukraine, and the Trump regime’s threats against Iran and current attempt to overthrow the democratic government in Venezuela.
Iran-Contra was three decades ago. No one under 50 would know anything about it. Yet we hear more about it from the liberal/progressive/left than we do about the massive abuses of power and war crimes of our own time.
- No More 'Netflix And Chill'? Record Number Of Americans Not Having Sex
A new study published by the Washington Post has found that record numbers of Americans are not having sex, based on data compiled by the General Social Survey, which has collected and maintained opinion and experience data on US residents since the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago began the survey in 1972.
But the most shocking aspect to the study is the evidence revealing a rampant lack of gen-Z and millennial sex. Or perhaps this might not be so surprising, given the rise of online gaming as a near obsession among younger demographics, phenomena like Netflix binge watching, and fewer young men entering the work force.
From the 2008 film, “Step Brothers” The analysis found that 23% of American adults reported having no sex in the past year, or almost 1 in 4, according to the report.
In decades prior to the 2000’s the percentage of those reporting no sex was generally at a steady level, represented for example in 1989 at 19%.
To put things in perspective, in 2008 that figure dipped to about 9%, which means over merely the past decade the number of those regularly not getting any swelled by nearly triple.
And perhaps surprisingly, it’s younger adults who are driving the trend in sexlessness up, according to the Washington Post:
The portion of Americans 18 to 29 reporting no sex in the past year more than doubled between 2008 and 2018.
Within the 18 to 29 age range in 2018 reporting no sex, about 28% of that group were men, compared to only 18% of women.
So essentially more twenty-something men are now not doing the deed than ever before, whether through willful refrain, or likely more realistically they’re getting rejected more often.
As The Hill summarized, there are multiple factors for the decline in sex trend among the younger demographic:
There are a number of reasons experts attribute to the decline in sexual activity, including technology, more people marrying or finding partners later in life and an increase in young men living at home.
The new analysis comes after data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) earlier this year showed a decline in sexual activity among high schoolers.
Other likely explanations related to the steep decline in gen-Z and millennial sex include a greater willingness of young people to spend the majority of their waking hours plugged-in, either gaming or on social media or Netflix binge watching — though ironically this no longer translates to “Netflix and chill” apparently.
From the WaPo study:
Young men also are more likely to be living with their parents than young women: In 2014, for instance, 35 percent of men age 18 to 34 were living in their parents’ home, compared with 29 percent of women in that age group. At the risk of stating the obvious, “when you’re living at home it’s probably harder to bring sexual partners into your bedroom,” Twenge said.
One final factor that may be affecting Americans’ sexual habits at all ages is technology. “There are a lot more things to do at 10 o’clock at night now than there were 20 years ago,” Twenge said. “Streaming video, social media, console games, everything else.”
Underscoring this point, the share of people who are having relations once a week or more is on a downward trajectory: from 51 percent in 1996 to 39 percent today.
So the number of people not getting laid is clearly at a record high, and the study further revealed that “the number reporting sex weekly or more” is on the decline.
Stunning chart: the share of men under 30 who aren’t having sex has nearly tripled in the past decade https://t.co/0aazxCijYP pic.twitter.com/HVVmffy7Jc
— Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) March 29, 2019
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Another bit of commentary on the WaPo study perhaps put it best: “This doesn’t just impact the young men, but it’s possible a lot of these dudes are fondling their phones and computer rather than… other bodies.”
- California Dream Has Become An Over-Crowded Nightmare
Authored by Joe Schaeffer via Liberty Nation,
The state’s leftist immigration policies choke the livable life out of urban centers.
The quality of life in the former paradise known as the state of California continues to decline precipitously. Overcrowding, strained resources, homelessness, and accompanying social welfare hazards seriously hamper the Golden State’s major urban population centers. Instead of acknowledging that some form of course correction to developments over the past 30-odd years is necessary, however, California’s Democrat politicians are steadfastly beating the drum for and attempting to accommodate massive legal and illegal immigration into their congested domains.
Sardine Cities
“The California ranch-house lifestyle — founded on sunshine and ample backyard space for a pool — has become increasingly unaffordable for middle-class families in urban areas where most jobs exist. Living space has tightened and become impossibly pricey for too many,” the Los Angeles Times reports in what reads very much like an elegy for a lost land.
“It was wonderful when our population was only 12 million in the 1950s and 22 million in the 1970s. But now we’re at 40 million and headed to 50 million by 2050,” The Times reports.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s solution: stack bodies up to the sky. The Democrat, a staunch advocate for illegal aliens, is turning a blind eye to the negative effects of encouraging foreigners to pour into his state and instead trying to handle the swell of lower income residents by building what The Times states will be “densely populated, multistory living [areas] near transportation centers.”
This “solution,” of course, will do nothing to alleviate the negative impact overcrowding has on communities. The World Health Organization reportsincreased urbanization can be devastating to human health:
“Health challenges particularly evident in cities relate to water, environment, violence and injury, noncommunicable diseases (cardiovascular diseases, cancers, diabetes and chronic respiratory diseases), unhealthy diets and physical inactivity, harmful use of alcohol as well as the risks associated with disease outbreaks.”
Urban sprawl has been reported to be a contributing factor to the rise of killer wildfires in California. It also has a deleterious effect on the state’s educational system. Victor Skinner of EAGnews.org, the website of the Education Action Group Foundation, details how Los Angeles teachers inexplicably advocate for illegal aliens even as they threaten to go on strike over the state’s strained educational resources. Skinner cites a report from The Education Trust – West that states some 250,000 illegal alien children between the ages of 3 and 17 are enrolled in California public schools, with the highest percentage in Los Angeles County. The trust states 750,000 K-12 students in California are the children of illegal aliens.
Yet immigration continues unabated. The Orange County Register reported in December 2017 that 85,339 foreigners had moved into the four-county region of Southern California area “in the past year.” The paper notes that the region has four of the five most heavily populated counties in all of California.
The website NewGeography.com in 2016 broke down U.S. Census data on the soaring population growth evident in California’s urban centers. The state was home to 12 of the 106 U.S. metropolitan areas with a population over 500,000 as of 2015, New Geography reported.
Exit Plans
A 2019 survey by Edelman Intelligence shows how unhappy Californians are with the new reality of their day-to-day lives. A majority of state residents surveyed, 53%, want to move away due to the high cost of living. A whopping 76% of residents of the heavily populated Bay Area who were surveyed say they are seeking to leave. Additionally, 62% of those queried say homelessness is a serious problem in the state, and the same percentage feel California’s best days are over.
The unspoken myth of unchecked Third World immigration is that it allows impoverished peoples from broken nations the opportunity to claim their share of the American dream. In California, that dream is dying, with prosperity, health, and upward mobility no longer part and parcel of the individual human experience. It has long been clear that turning Los Angeles into Mexico City is harming the well being of the native-born Americans residing on our West Coast. Becoming Increasingly evident as well is that the state does nothing beneficial for the foreigners flocking into California’s choked, strained, and stressed urban areas.
- Boston Dynamics' New Warehouse Robot Threatens Millions Of Jobs
The economy of the 2020s will be more volatile, and recessions could be more extreme. The collision of automation in the workforce will trigger economic disruptions far more significant than what seen in agriculture to industry (1900 to 1940) when nearly 40% of the workforce was displaced.
In the next ten years, automation may eliminate 20% to 25% of current jobs, or about 40 million, crushing the bottom 90% of Americans the hardest.
Boston Dynamics is at the forefront of developing new automation technologies.
The Waltham, Mass.-based company has released a new video of its warehouse robot, a “mobile manipulation robot designed for logistics. Handle autonomously performs mixed SKU pallet building and depalletizing after initialization and localizing against the pallets.”
Dubbed Handle, the robot uses an on-board vision system with a large suction cup arm to track boxes and then move them to a pallet. The video below shows several robots in a warehouse moving boxes to a pallet and conveyor belt, a task that would typically be completed by humans.
“When Handle places a boxes onto a pallet, it uses force control to nestle each box up against its neighbors,” Boston Dynamics said. “The boxes used in the video weigh about 5 Kg (12 lbs), but the robot is designed to handle boxes up to 15 Kg (30 lbs). This version of Handle works with pallets that are 1.2 m deep and 1.7 m tall (48 inches deep and 68 inches tall).”
Warehouse workers probably won’t have to worry about Handle taking their jobs anytime soon. That also means the more than 600,000 Amazon employees, mostly fulfillment center jobs, are safe for now but could be in jeopardy in the next 3 to 5 years.
The next phase of automation has begun, and it will accelerate in the years ahead. Forty million Americans are at risk of losing their jobs to automation by 2030.
- Who In Their Right Mind Would Lend Money To Chicago?
Authored by John Rubino via DollarCollapse.com,
When you see that Italy’s debt is rising, the logical question is, who the hell is dumping good money after bad into such an obviously failed state? The answer is that by lending money to Italy (or Greece, Portugal, Spain, or France) you’re really lending money to Germany, since the latter will have to bail those other countries out shortly.
Keep that in mind as you read this, from yesterday’s Wall Street Journal:
Cash-Strapped Illinois, Chicago Seek Billions From Investors
Illinois and its biggest city kick off hundreds of millions of dollars in borrowings this week, a test of investors’ willingness to lend to stressed governments prone to spending more money than they bring in.
The state launched borrowings with about a $440 million bond deal on Tuesday, followed by a sale topping $700 million by Chicago. Analysts expect what could be billions more especially from the state, as it puts together funds to do everything from paying retirees’ pensions to launching capital projects.
Before buying bonds from the nation’s lowest-rated state and its biggest city, investors have to assess their continuing mismatches between expenses and revenues along with pension burdens, which are slated to eat up a growing share of both budgets in coming years. Municipalities nationwide are grappling with how to pay bondholders while also meeting the rising costs of retirement benefits, but few are as financially strained as the nation’s third-largest city and the state.
Illinois leaders have floated borrowing at least $4.5 billion more through next year, according to its financials. Rather than using most funds to build bridges or improve infrastructure, the Prairie State plans to use many of its bonds to pay off outstanding debts or put money toward pension benefits that have already been earned. For example, a proposed $1.5 billion borrowing tentatively scheduled for June would help pay for a pile of unpaid bills the state still owes. Lawmakers failed to pass a budget for two years under the former governor, worsening this backlog.
Rahm Emanuel’s last bond deal as Chicago’s mayor will be used to pay off previous short-term borrowing alongside projects including sidewalk improvements and traffic signal installation. He considered selling $10 billion of debt to fund pensions, but it will be up to his successor—elected this April—to decide whether to move forward.
Illinois’s rating sits just above junk level. Chicago holds a speculative grade from Moody’s Corp. and investment-grade scores from S&P Global Inc. and other firms. Chicago didn’t hire Moody’s for its latest bond deal.
Despite their precarious finances, the city and state’s leaders have turned to the bond market at what some analysts say is an opportune time. Investors have poured money into municipal bonds in recent weeks, vying for a relatively limited supply of debt, analysts say, and lifting prices while pushing down the yields of even some existing Illinois and Chicago bonds.
That background helps ensure demand for the new bonds, analysts said, in the latest example of how investors’ voracious appetite for debt can help governments find willing lenders despite fiscal stress.
Here’s the key passage that ties Illinois/Chicago back to Italy:
“Despite their precarious finances, the city and state’s leaders have turned to the bond market at what some analysts say is an opportune time. Investors have poured money into municipal bonds in recent weeks, vying for a relatively limited supply of debt, analysts say, and lifting prices while pushing down the yields of even some existing Illinois and Chicago bonds.”
Why would such obviously crappy paper be such an easy sell? Because investors are looking ahead to the next Great Reflation, in which the Fed and other major central banks are forced to unleash a tidal wave of new credit to bail out the bad debts incurred in the previous round of monetary experimentation.
If the express goal is to keep bad debts from blowing up the global financial system, then by definition Illinois/Chicago will be bailed out, since they personify the concept of “bad debt”. So today’s junk munis are tomorrow’s Fed balance sheet assets. Which is another way of saying they’re taxpayers’ responsibility, not Chicago’s.
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