- Mapping The 'Real' Europe – From 'Swedone' To 'Quitaly'
- Italy & The Euro Cannot Be Saved By Mass-Immigration
The ongoing euro crisis has never been and will never be solved. The native European populations are shrinking and this will have a consequence for the economy, production and public finance.
The demographic decline is the single most important economic phenomenon. We do not doubt that the annual visitors to the Global Economic Forum in Davos are fully aware of it: they know that the European and East Asian populations are decreasing and that 18 of the 20 top economies will never experience sustainable growth again. The economic press and mainstream analysts somehow do not get it and still believe that countries that will see their native population shrinking by 30% in the next thirty years can increase their GDP.
Italy is the next epicenter of the demographic crisis. The ongoing euro problems and the orchestrated mass migration into Italy are closely related. Italian population began to dwindle last year, a situation that has never happened in modern history. Without immigration, the Italian working-age population will drop by at least 30% before the middle of the century. If the productivity does not change and even if the Italians are able to balance their budget, the consequences are unsolvable.
The Italian GDP will be smaller and smaller in proportion to the fall in the number of the working-age population. Every working-age person in Italy is burdened with a sixty-thousand-euro debt and that amount will grow on average by nearly a thousand euros a year because more people are leaving the working force than entering. The debt ratio will be 200 percent by mid-century. We did not factor in the outflow of young people that are looking for employment in other European countries.
This scenario gives a good indication of the problem Italy faces. In the coming years it is expected that the productivity will go up, but the same holds good for the national debt which will increase by 15 percent since 2012. All Western economies have arrived at the point where productivity has to compensate for the decline in their populations. Italy is the world’s ninth economy and is on a trajectory that in the long run will end in an economic implosion comparable to the 1998 financial crisis in Argentina, number 21 on the world GDP list.
Financial speculators as George Soros, central bankers and part of the political establishment are fully aware of the long-term perspective of the country and the consequences for Europe. If Italy ditches the euro, the situation will be much worse than the 2008 financial crisis. Not only will the value of the euro collapse but investors, business people and the general public will begin to doubt the viability of the euro currency or fiat currency in general.
Politicians within the European Union try to throw the hot potato to the next generation because they know that they will not be able to contain the mayhem if push comes to shove. To deal with the consequence of the ultimate euro crisis is not within their competence.
Italy does not have its own Central Bank and the country cannot unilaterally suppress interest rates or buy its own debt. Creating money out of thin air as the Japanese do is impossible for the Italian political and monetary establishment.
Most politicians are not part of the wealthy elite, so they do not run a risk of winning or losing any assets. They serve their term (and the particular political purpose) and then they are rewarded with a position at one of the irrelevant international organisations. It is the financial and economic elites that will be crushed and lose their assets during such a crisis, so In order to turn the tide they are desperately trying to increase the working-age population in Europe by promoting and organising a relentless stream of immigrants into the old continent. The mass migration into Europe and the US and the financial state of affairs are not unrelated incidents and it is no surprise that such speculators as Soros are facilitating and promoting the re-population of Italy. Soros asserts that Europe should accept half a million refugees annually on top of the regular migration. Over years such an annual number of people will create a community of refugees with the size of the German population.
There is no reason to believe migration from Central Asia and Africa will compensate for the loss of native Europeans. Most of these immigrants come from areas where people have other work ethic than their European counterparts, they lack education and skills to be employable in the Western economies. Unemployment among sub-Sahara Africans in Western Europe is high while there is a high demand for low qualified uneducated East and Central Europeans. For now, some Africans in Italy will provide southern Italy with cheap slave labour in agriculture and the UN and European assistance budget will even bless the region with the influx of money for the charity industry. For the Italian society at large, the massive influx of immigrants from Africa will be a disaster. It will destroy social cohesion, increase government expenditure and fuel general discontent.
The Italians voted for a new policy that would stop fraudulent NGOs that are shipping another hundred thousand migrants this year to Italy. The two big winners of the last election wanted to send undocumented migrants back home and introduce a parallel currency.
The Italian President Sergio Mattarella blocked the creation of a new government to protect the investors outside Italy and give them the opportunity to proceed another year with the shipping of Africans into Italy. It will not change the long-term perspective and while the economic community still believes it is all about economics and competitiveness, we’d rather say “It is the demographics, stupid”.
- US Sanctions On Iran: The Unraveling Of Pax Americana
Authored by Christopher Wood via Grizzle.com,
Amid current news headlines about North Korea and related nuclear issues, it is important not to ignore the potential schism that could occur in the G7 world as a consequence of the practical fallout from Donald Trump’s decision on May 8 to exit the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.
WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO EUROPEAN INVESTMENTS IN IRAN?
One practical issue is what is going to happen to European investments in Iran. The most high profile example is French energy company Total’s investment in a giant Iran gasfield. Total said this month it would pull out of Iran and its development of the giant South Pars gasfield unless it is specifically protected from US penalties and related sanctions (see Financial Times article “Total threat to pull out of Iran dents EU hopes of saving accord”, May 17, 2018).
Obviously, some form of compromise may be negotiated. But if Washington takes a hard line, such as claiming US jurisdiction as regards dollar transfers between two sovereign countries as was the case in 2014 with the US$9 billion fine levied on French bank BNP, then a confrontation is seemingly inevitable and, as a result, a growing questioning of the US hegemony implied by the US dollar paper standard, a concern which has long been shared by both China and Russia.
QUESTIONING THE US’ ROLE AS THE “ECONOMIC POLICEMAN OF THE PLANET”
In this respect, the most interesting reaction to the Iran issue since Donald Trump made his announcement on May 8 was that of the French finance minister Bruno Le Maire when he said on May 9 that it was not acceptable for the US to be the “economic policeman of the planet”.
In this respect, France is the European country to watch since it has a history of being willing to stand up to Washington in the post-1945 world. That cannot really be said of Germany and certainly not of Britain.
POMPEO WARNS IRAN OF ESCALATING SANCTIONS
Staying on the subject of Iran, US Secretary of State and former CIA boss Mike Pompeo made an ultra-aggressive speech on Monday threatening Iran with escalating sanctions. In his first major foreign policy address as Secretary of State, Pompeo stated:
Sanctions are going back in full effect and new ones are coming… This sting of sanctions will be painful if the regime does not change its course… These will indeed end up being the strongest sanctions in history when we are complete.
The above rhetoric hardly suggests a willingness to compromise with the European position. The significance of all of the above is that Europe and the US remain on a collision course.
IRAN’S EXPORTS BOOMING SINCE SANCTIONS ENDED
The importance of Europe for Iran can be seen in the fact that Iran’s exports to Europe have surged almost ninefold since the end of sanctions in January 2016.
Thus, Iran’s exports to the EU have risen from US$1.3 billion in 2015 to US$11.4 billion in the 12 months to January, according to the IMF Direction of Trade Statistics (see following chart).
There is also of course the growing trade between Iran and China. Iran’s total trade with China rose by 18%YoY to US$27.5 billion in the 12 months to January (see following chart). All this makes Iran a good example of the increasingly multipolar world where American influence or interests appear to be fading.
IRAN ANNUALIZED EXPORTS TO EU
Source: IMF – Direction of Trade Statistics
IRAN ANNUALIZED TOTAL TRADE WITH CHINA
Source: IMF – Direction of Trade Statistics
IRAN’S CURRENCY TAKES A HIT
Meanwhile, Iran’s currency has been hit hard in recent months as a result of the uncertainty created by Trump’s previous repeated earlier threats to pull out of the nuclear deal and now subsequent follow-through decision.
The rial has depreciated in the black market by 33% against the US dollar year-to-date (see following chart). This followed a period of comparative stability where the currency traded in a 13% range for two years, helped by the optimism created by the nuclear deal as well as by very high real interest rates. Iranian treasury bill yields peaked at 27% in early 2017 and bottomed at 16% late last year. They are now back at 19% as a result of the market pressure created by the threat of renewed American sanctions.
IRANIAN RIAL/US$ (INVERTED SCALE)
Note: Based on black market rate after Iran unified its dual exchange rates on 9 April. Source: Ministry of Economic Affairs and Finance, Bonbast.com
SUBSTANTIAL FOREIGN INVESTMENT IN IRAN
With a classic bullish emerging market demographic profile, in terms of a population of 80 million, 60% of whom are under the age of 35, Iran has, naturally, attracted a lot of foreign direct investment in recent years, most particularly following the 2015 nuclear deal.
The biggest of late was the previously mentioned Total’s US$4.8 billion investment signed in July 2017. But Total says it has only invested under €40 million so far, according to the above mentioned FT article, which is precisely why the French company wants to know if it can get a specific waiver from the sanctions.
In terms of the aggregate data, Iran’s actual FDI inflows surged by 64%YoY to US$3.37 biilion in 2016, according to United Nations data. While an Iranian government report published last year disclosed that Iran has approved US$11.8 billion in FDI during the 12 months to December 2016, with Spain and Germany accounting for US$3.2 billion and US$2.9 billion of that total respectively.
IRAN FDI INFLOWS
Source: UNCTAD World Investment Report 2017
WILL WE SEE A RETREAT FROM PAX AMERICANA?
The point, therefore, remains that a confrontation between the US and the Eurozone on this issue is potentially a landmark development in the retreat from Pax Americana.
But for now it is probably the case that most of Europe, in the spirit of appeasement, will be content to fudge the issue in the hope that Donald Trump may not be re-elected to the US presidency for a second term and life will return to “normal”.
IRAN’S ECONOMY
Turning away from geopolitical issues, Iran’s economy and financial markets spring some positive surprises. The country has an open capital account, while there is no tax on capital gains or dividends. The Tehran Stock Exchange celebrated its 50th anniversary last year.
But if FDI has been coming into the country in recent years, foreign portfolio investment activity has been much more limited, with estimates of only US$100 million invested in aggregate. This is the consequence in terms of equities of both a lack of inclusion in benchmark MSCI indices and, of course, of sanctions.
NO FOREIGN BANKS IN IRAN
There is still no foreign bank in Iran and therefore a lack of familiar custodians acceptable to international portfolio investors. Indeed, despite the 2015 nuclear deal, it is still not possible to use foreign credit cards to pay for hotel bills or any other transaction.
Foreign credit rating agencies are also absent which may not surprise given the three biggest are owned by the Americans. This is a pity for the Iranian Government given that, with minimal foreign currency debt and total government debt to GDP of only 35% of GDP, it would make a lot of sense to do a landmark sovereign bond issue. Total external debt is now only US$10.8 billion or just 2.5% of GDP, according to the Central Bank of Iran (see following chart).
IRAN EXTERNAL DEBT AS % OF GDP
Source: Central Bank of Iran, IMF
- Visualizing The Imperial Logic Of US Foreign Policy
David Sylvan and Stephen Majeski reveal the imperial logic behind US diplomatic and military interventions around the globe…
Source: Swiss Propaganda Research
Simple really!
- "I Am Numb" – John Whitehead Rages "Whose Country Is This Anyway?"
Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
“The first time it was reported that our friends were being butchered there was a cry of horror. Then a hundred were butchered. But when a thousand were butchered and there was no end to the butchery, a blanket of silence spread. When evil-doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out ‘stop!’ When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer.” ― Bertolt Brecht, Selected Poems
There are days I wake up, and I’m not sure what country I live in anymore.
There are days I wake up and want to go right back to sleep in the hopes that this surreal landscape of government-sanctioned injustice, corruption and brutality is just a really bad dream.
There are days I am so battered by the never-ending wave of bad news that I have little outrage left in me: I am numb.
And then I get hold of myself, shake myself out of the doldrums, and remind myself that it’s not yet time to give up: America needs our outrage and our alertness and our tenacity and our fierce determination to remain a free people in a land where justice matters.
This is still our country.
Don’t just sit there.
Do something.
When you hear that the U.S. government “lost” 1,475 migrant children within its care over a three-month period, in some cases handing them off to human traffickers, don’t just chalk it up to incompetent bureaucrats. The Trump Administration’s plan to separate immigrant children from their parents at the border should outrage anyone with a moral conscience, especially in light of the government’s latest revelation that it is unable to account for the whereabouts of 1500 of those children.
Mind you, this is not just a Trump problem. A recent report indicates that under President Obama’s watch, migrant children were allegedly beaten, threatened with sexual violence and repeatedly assaulted while under the care of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials. According to Newsweek, “Border authorities were accused of kicking a child in the ribs and forcing a 16-year-old girl to ‘spread her legs’ for an aggressive body search. Other children accused officers of punching a child in the head three times, running over a 17-year-old boy and denying medical care to a pregnant teen, who later had a stillbirth.”
ACT. It doesn’t matter what your politics are or where you stand on immigration issues. There are some lines that should never be crossed—some government actions that should never be tolerated or justified—no matter what the end goal might be, and this is one of them. Demand that Congress stop playing politics and endangering children’s lives.
When you read that Attorney General Jeff Sessions wants police to use stop and frisk tactics randomly against Americans without even the need for reasonable suspicion, don’t just shake your head disapprovingly.
ACT: Call the Justice Department (202-353-1555) and read them the Fourth Amendment: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
After you watch the video of how the Transportation Security Administration, unfailingly tone deaf to the spirit of the Fourth Amendment, subjected a 96-year-old World War II veteran in a wheelchair to a patdown that left no part of her body untouched, don’t just seethe in silence.
ACT: Contact your representative in Congress and file a complaint on the TSA’s egregious practices. When old women and little children are being groped by government agents, things have gone too far. In light of revelations that the TSA “has created a new secret watch list to monitor people who may be targeted as potential threats at airport checkpoints simply because they have swatted away security screeners’ hands or otherwise appeared unruly,” you can expect even more headache-inducing behavior in the near future.
When you find out that Amazon is selling police real time facial recognition software that can scan hundreds of thousands of faces, identify them, track them, and then report them to police, don’t just shrug helplessly.
ACT: Harness the power of your wallet to urge Amazon to favor freedom principles over profit motives. It’s only a matter of time before these programs are used widely here in the U.S. They are already being used and abused abroad. For instance, Amazon’s Rekognition software was used by broadcasters to identify attendees at the royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. Chinese police have used similar facial recognition tools to scan crowds at rock concerts, malls and gas stations in order to catch alleged lawbreakers. Just recently, Chinese police used the technology to capture a suspect who had been living under a pseudonym after he failed to pay for $17,000 worth of potatoes. Chinese schools are even employing the facial recognition cameras in classrooms to alert teachers to students who aren’t paying attention.
When you hear Sessions bragging about how much he loves civil asset forfeiture, which allows the government to seize Americans’ personal property—money, cars, homes and other valuables—without having to first prove that any criminal conduct has taken place, don’t just take his word for it.
ACT: Do your own research. You’ll soon discover that because of the corruption that surrounds this abusive program, countless innocent Americans have been robbed blind by government agents out to get rich at their expense. Billions of dollars have been taken without probable cause. Anthonia Nwaorie, a Texas nurse who had saved up $41,377 to start a medical clinic for women and children in Nigeria, had her life savings seized by Customs Agents who refused to return the money unless she agreed to pay their “expenses.” Six months later, even though Nwaorie was never charged with a crime, she’s still waiting to get her money back.
When you hear about armed Denver police pulling a gun on a school official and conducting a classroom-to-classroom search for a missing student at an area high school, don’t just thank your lucky stars your childhood was more idyllic. Likewise, when you hear that the lieutenant governor of Texas thinks the solution to school shootings is fewer school doors (entrances and exits), don’t just marvel at the short-sightedness of government officials.
ACT: Say “enough is enough” to government-sponsored violence. The systemic violence being perpetrated by agents of the government has done more collective harm to the American people and our liberties than any single act of terror or mass shooting. Violence has become the government’s calling card, starting at the top and trickling down, from the more than 80,000 SWAT team raids carried out every year on unsuspecting Americans by heavily armed, black-garbed commandos and the increasingly rapid militarization of local police forces across the country to the surveillance drones that are already crisscrossing American skies.
When you read about how 28-year-old Andrew Finch of Kansas answered a 5 pm knock on his front door only to be shot in the head and killed ten seconds later by a police sniper because a SWAT team responded to a prank “swatting” phone call with full force, don’t just tsk-tsk over the senseless tragedies arising from militarized and police and overzealous SWAT teams. Not only did police refuse to identify the officer who pulled the trigger, but he was also never charged with Andrew’s death.
ACT: Demand accountability. If any hope for police reform is to be realized, especially as it relates to how SWAT teams are deployed locally and holding police accountable for their actions, it must begin at the community level, with local police departments and governing bodies, where citizens can still, with sufficient reinforcements, make their voices heard.
The rise of SWAT teams and militarization of American police—blowback effects of the military empire—have unfortunately become entrenched parts of American life. SWAT teams originated as specialized units dedicated to defusing extremely sensitive, dangerous situations. As the role of paramilitary forces has expanded, however, to include involvement in nondescript police work targeting nonviolent suspects, the mere presence of SWAT units has actually injected a level of danger and violence into police-citizen interactions that was not present as long as these interactions were handled by traditional civilian officers. Nationwide, SWAT teams have been employed to address an astonishingly trivial array of criminal activity or mere community nuisances: angry dogs, domestic disputes, improper paperwork filed by an orchid farmer, and misdemeanor marijuana possession, to give a brief sampling. In some instances, SWAT teams are even employed, in full armament, to perform routine patrols. All too often, botched SWAT team raids have resulted in one tragedy after another for American citizens with little consequences for law enforcement.
When you find out that police and other law enforcement agencies are accessing the DNA shared with genealogical websites and using it to identify possible suspects, don’t offer up your DNA without some assurance of privacy protections.
ACT: Protect your privacy. It’s not just yourself you have to worry about, either. It’s also anyone related to you who can be connected by DNA. These genetic fingerprints, as they’re called, do more than just single out a person. They also show who you’re related to and how. As the Associated Press reports, “DNA samples that can help solve robberies and murders could also, in theory, be used to track down our relatives, scan us for susceptibility to disease, or monitor our movements.”
By accessing your DNA, the government will soon know everything else about you that they don’t already know: your family chart, your ancestry, what you look like, your health history, your inclination to follow orders or chart your own course, etc. Capitalizing on this, police in California, Colorado, Virginia and Texas use DNA found at crime scenes to identify and target family members for possible clues to a suspect’s whereabouts. Who will protect your family from being singled out for “special treatment” simply because they’re related to you? As biomedical researcher Yaniv Erlichwarns, “If it’s not regulated and the police can do whatever they want … they can use your DNA to infer things about your health, your ancestry, whether your kids are your kids.”
In the face of DNA evidence that places us at the scene of a crime, behavior sensing technology that interprets our body temperature and facial tics as suspicious, and government surveillance devices that cross-check our biometrics, license plates and DNA against a growing database of unsolved crimes and potential criminals, we are no longer “innocent until proven guilty.”
Finally, when you hear someone talking about how two American citizens in Montana were detained by a Border Patrol agent because he overheard them speaking Spanish at a gas station, don’t just shake your head in disgust.
ACT: Remind yourself (and those around you) that despite the polarizing, racially-charged rhetoric being tossed about by President Trump, this is still a nation whose strength derives from the diversity of its people and from the immigrants who have been seeking shelter on our shores since the earliest days of our Republic. As President Ronald Reagan recognized in one of his last speeches before leaving office:
“We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people—our strength—from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation… Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier. This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost… Those who become American citizens love this country even more. And that’s why the Statue of Liberty lifts her lamp to welcome them to the golden door. It is bold men and women, yearning for freedom and opportunity, who leave their homelands and come to a new country to start their lives over. They believe in the American dream. And over and over, they make it come true for themselves, for their children, and for others. They give more than they receive. They labor and succeed. And often they are entrepreneurs. But their greatest contribution is more than economic, because they understand in a special way how glorious it is to be an American. They renew our pride and gratitude in the United States of America, the greatest, freest nation in the world—the last, best hope of man on Earth.”
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, if the freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution, are to mean anything anymore—if they are to stand for anything ever again—then “we the people” have to stand up for them.
We cannot allow ourselves to be divided and distracted and turned into warring factions.
We cannot sell out our birthright for empty promises of false security.
We cannot remain silent in the face of ugliness, pettiness, meanness, brutality, corruption and injustice.
We cannot allow politicians, corporations, profiteers and war hawks to whittle our freedoms away until they are little more than empty campaign slogans.
We must stand strong for freedom.
We must give voice to moral outrage.
We must do something—anything—everything in our power to make America free again.
As Reagan recognized, “If we lose this way of freedom, history will record with the great astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening.”
- Artist's Impression Of Maduro's Victory Tour
- Are Tesla's Self-Proclaimed 'World's Safest Cars' Actually Among The World’s Deadliest?
Submitted by @ElonBachman
If there’s one thing that Elon Musk likes more than pseudoprofundity, it’s superlatives. Small wonder, then, that the company that brought us the Gigafactory, Superchargers, and Ludicrous Mode has had an easy time convincing its fan base that Tesla makes the “safest car on the road”:
Lurkers on Tesla forums can confirm that these safety superlatives are articles of faith among Tesla’s flock, and apparently this faith is shared by Wall Street: Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jonas recently predicted that Tesla’s Model 3 will be “an order of magnitude” safer than the average car. On May 18, Jonas went even further, claiming that after 7.2 billion miles, Teslas have only been “involved” in five U.S. fatalities.
Wait, what? Observant Twitter users were quick to dispute both Musk and Jonas. Following Jonas’ initial note, pseudonymous poster @ElonBachman crowd-sourced a list over a dozen US fatalities. Jonas was out shortly after with a new note admitting to 15 deaths globally. But the internet doesn’t sleep: as of today, @ElonBachman’s list has grown to include 40 Tesla fatalities globally, including 14 U.S. deaths of Tesla drivers and occupants and a Wile E. Coyote-esque smattering of deaths-by-cliff and deaths-by-swimming-pool. A link to that list, and the sources behind it, is included below the following table:
What do these numbers mean?
First: they mean that you should not rely on the sell-side for either accuracy or insight. Second: they mean that Musk’s “safest car” claim is bunk. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety lists numerous luxury cars in Tesla’s class that have zero recorded fatalities (link here: http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/driver-death-rates), which would seem to disqualify the Model S and Model X (we’ll come back to the Model 3 in a minute).
What of Musk’s “4x safer than average” claim? This is tricky because in road safety statistics, as in Princess Bride, there are different kinds of “death.” Luckily, another Musk tweet gives us clues as to how Tesla calculates its deaths:
The NHTSA “fatality” measure that Musk references includes motorcyclists, cyclists, and pedestrians, as well as drivers and occupants. If we exclude occupants of other cars from the table above, then there have been 28 Tesla fatalities globally—that Twitter knows of, anyway. Dividing 7.2 billion miles by 28 deaths gives 257 million miles per death, notably worse than Musk’s claim of 320 million. Perhaps you are inclined to cut Musk some slack; after all, this is still safer than the average car. But the average car is 11 years old, is small, is driven by a younger and less affluent demographic, and lacks the safety features that come on a $100,000 vehicle. Midsize luxury sedans and SUVs in Tesla’s class have death rates far lower than Tesla’s.
Which brings us to the Model 3, Tesla’s “mass market” car offering Kia-level styling starting at $50,000. Although no Model 3 deaths have yet been reported, multiple crashes have (including this one), and of course as of the end of Q1 2018 Tesla had only shipped around 10,000 of them (just somewhat fewer than the 200,000 or so that Musk originally predicted would be on the road by then).
If a recent Consumer Reports article is any indication (“The Tesla’s stopping distance of 152 feet from 60 mph was far worse than any contemporary car we’ve tested and about 7 feet longer than the stopping distance of a Ford F-150 full-sized pickup”), Morgan Stanley may have to update its Tesla fatality figures again soon.
- Guccifer 2.0's American Fingerprints Reveal An Operation Made In The USA
Authored by Elizabeth Lea Vos via Disobedient Media,
In his final report in a three-part series, Guccifer 2’s West Coast Fingerprint, the Forensicator discovers evidence that at least one operator behind the Guccifer 2.0 persona worked from the West Coast of the United States.
The Forensicator’s earlier findings stated that Guccifer 2.0’s NGP-VAN files were accessed locally on the East Coast, and in another analysis they suggested that a file published by Guccifer 2.0 was created in the Central time zone of the United States. Most recently, a former DNC official refuted the DNC’s initial allegations that Trump opposition files had been ex-filtrated from the DNC by Russian state-sponsored operatives.
So, if Guccifer 2.0’s role was negated by the statements of the DNC’s own former “official” in a 2017 report by the Associated Press, why do we now return our attention to the Guccifer 2.0 persona, as we reflect on the last section of new findings from the Forensicator?
The answer: Despite almost two years having passed since the appearance of the Guccifer 2.0 persona, legacy media is still trotting out the shambling corpse of Guccifer 2.0 to revive the legitimacy of the Russian hacking narrative. In other words, it is necessary to hammer the final nail into the coffin of the Guccifer 2.0 persona.
As previously noted, In his final report in a three-part series, the Forensicator discusses concrete evidence that at least one operator behind the Guccifer 2.0 persona worked from the West Coast of the United States. He writes:
“Finally, we look at one particular Word document that Guccifer 2 uploaded, which had “track changes” enabled. From the tracking metadata we deduce the timezone offset in effect when Guccifer 2 made that change — we reach a surprising conclusion: The document was likely saved by Guccifer 2 on the West Coast, US.”
The Forensicator spends the first part of his report evaluating indications that Guccifer 2.0 may have operated out of Russia. Ultimately, the Forensicator discards those tentative results. He emphatically notes:
“The PDT finding draws into question the premise that Guccifer 2 was operating out of Russia, or any other region that would have had GMT+3 timezone offsets in force. Essentially, the Pacific Timezone finding invalidates the GMT+3 timezone findings previously described.”
The Forensicator’s new West Coast finding is not the first evidence to indicate that operators behind the Guccifer 2.0 persona were based in the US. Nine months ago, Disobedient Media, reported on the Forensicator’s analysis, which showed (among other things) that Guccifer 2.0’s “ngpvan” archive was created on the East Coast. While that report received the vast majority of attention from the public and legacy media, Disobedient Media later reported on another analysis done by the Forensicator, which found that a file published by Guccifer 2.0 (on a different occasion) was probably created in the Central Timezone of the US.
Adding to all of this, UK based analyst and independent journalist Adam Carter presented his own analysis which also showed that the Guccifer 2.0 Twitter persona interacted on a schedule which was best explained by having been based within the United States.
The chart above shows a box which spans regular working hours. It indicates that unless Guccifer 2.0 worked the night shift, they were likely working out of the US. Though this last data point is circumstantial, it is corroborated by the previously discussed pieces of independently verifiable hard evidence described by the Forensicator.
When taking all of these separate pieces into account, one observes a convergence of evidence that multiple US-based operators were behind the Guccifer 2.0 persona and its publications. This is incredibly significant because it is based on multiple pieces of concrete data; it does not rely on “anonymous sources within the government,” nor contractors hired by the DNC. As a result, much of the prior legacy press coverage of Guccifer 2.0 as a Russia-based agent can be readily debunked.
Such tangible evidence stands in contrast to the claims made in a recently published Daily Beast article, which reads more like a gossip column than serious journalism. In the Daily Beast’s recital, the outlet cites an anonymous source who claims that a Moscow-based GRU agent was behind the Guccifer 2.0 operation, writing:
“Guccifer 2.0, the “lone hacker” who took credit for providing WikiLeaks with stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee, was in fact an officer of Russia’s military intelligence directorate (GRU), The Daily Beast has learned. It’s an attribution that resulted from a fleeting but critical slip-up in GRU tradecraft.
… But on one occasion, The Daily Beast has learned, Guccifer failed to activate the VPN client before logging on. As a result, he left a real, Moscow-based Internet Protocol address in the server logs of an American social media company, according to a source familiar with the government’s Guccifer investigation.
… Working off the IP address, U.S. investigators identified Guccifer 2.0 as a particular GRU officer working out of the agency’s headquarters on Grizodubovoy Street in Moscow.”
[The Daily Beast, March 22, 2018]
Clearly, the claim made in the Daily Beast’s report is in direct contradiction with the growing mound of evidence suggesting that Guccifer 2.0 operated out of the United States. A detailed technical breakdown of the evidence confirming a West-Coast “last saved” time and how this counters the claims of the Daily Beast can be found in the Forensicator’s work.
The Forensicator explained to Disobedient Media that their discovery process was initiated by the following Tweet by Matt Tait (@pwnallthings), a security blogger and journalist. Tait noticed a change revision entry in one of the Word documents published in Guccifer 2.0’s second batch of documents, (uploaded 3 days after Guccifer 2.0 first appeared on the scene).
The Forensicator corrects Tait, stating that the timestamp is in “wall time,” (local time) not UTC. The Forensicator explains that Tait’s mistake is understandable because the “Z” suffix usually implies “Zulu” (GMT) time, but that isn’t the case for “track changes” timestamps. The Forensicator writes that the document Tait refers to in his Tweet is named Hillary-for-America-fundraising-guidelines-from-agent-letter.docx; it has Word’s “track changes” feature enabled. Guccifer 2.0 made a trivial change to the document, using the pseudonym, “Ernesto Che,” portrayed below:
The Forensicator correlated that timestamp (“12:56:00 AM”) with the document’s “last saved” timestamp expressed in GMT, as shown below courtesy of the Forensicator’s study:
Based on the evidence discussed above, the Forensicator concludes that Guccifer 2.0 saved this file on a system that had a timezone offset of -7 hours (the difference between 0:56 AM and 7:56 AM GMT). Thus, the system where this document was last changed used Pacific Timezone settings.
The logical conclusion drawn from the preceding analysis is that Guccifer 2.0 was operating somewhere on the West Coast of the United States when they made their change to that document. This single finding throws into shambles any other conclusions that might indicate that Guccifer 2.0 was operating out of Russia. This latest finding also adds to the previously cited evidence that the persona was probably operated by multiple individuals located in the United States.
Taken all together, the factual basis of the Russian hacking story totally collapses. We are left instead with multiple traces of a US-based operation that created the appearance of evidence that Kremlin-allied hackers had breached the DNC network. Publicly available data suggests that Guccifer 2.0 is a US-based operation. To this, we add:
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The Forensicator’s recent findings that Guccifer 2.0 deliberately planted “Russian fingerprints” into his first document, as reported by Disobedient Media.
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A former DNC official’s statement that a document with so-called “Russian fingerprints” was not in fact taken from the DNC, as reported by Disobedient Media.
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The media’s role in propagating the connection between early Russian hacking allegations and the Guccifer 2.0 persona, as reported by Disobedient Media.
In the course of the last nine months this outlet has documented the work of the Forensicator, which has indicated that not only were Guccifer 2.0’s “ngp-van” files accessed locally on the East Coast of the US, but also that several files published by the Guccifer 2.0 persona were altered and saved within the United States. The “Russian fingerprints” left on Guccifer 2.0’s first document have been debunked, as has the claim that the file itself was extracted from the DNC network in the first place. On top of all this, a former DNC official withdrew the DNC’s initial allegations that supported the “Russian hack” claim in the first place.
One hopes that with all of this information in mind, the long-suffering Guccifer 2.0 saga can be laid to rest once and for all, at least for unbiased and critically thinking observers.
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- Pepe Escobar: Iran Is Bracing For All-Out Economic War
Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Asia Times,
While the dogs of war bark, the Ancient – and New – Silk Road goes on forever and a civilization with a long and proud history gets on with life…
The minute you set foot in the streets of Mashhad, the air smelling of saffron, a fine breeze oozing from the mountains, it hits you; you’re in the heart of the Ancient Silk Road and the New Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
To the east, the Afghan border is only three hours away on an excellent highway. To the north, the Turkmenistan border is less than four hours away. To the northwest is the Caspian Sea. To the south is the Indian Ocean and the port of Chabahar, the entry point for the Indian version of the Silk Roads. The Tehran-Mashhad railway is being built by the Chinese.
A group of us – including American friends, whose visas were approved at the highest levels of the Iranian government – have gathered in Mashhad for the New Horizon Conference of independent thinkers. Right after a storm, I’m in a van on the way to the spectacular Imam Reza shrine with Alexander Dugin, which the usual suspects love to describe as “the world’s most dangerous philosopher,” or Putin’s Rasputin.
Debating and discussion time
We’re deep in debate not over geopolitics but … bossa nova. Exit Sun Tzu and Machiavelli, enter Tom Jobim and Joao Gilberto.
Persia traditionally has been a land of serious intellectual discussion. At the conference, after a lunch break, a few of us decide to start our own geopolitical debate, no cameras rolling, no microphones on. Dugin expands on what multipolarity could be; no universality; pluriversal; a realm of pluralistic anthropology; all poles sovereign. We discuss the pitfalls of Eurasian identity, Islamic identity, sub-poles, India, Europe and Africa.
A few minutes later Iranian scholar Blake Archer Williams – his nom de plume – is delving into “The sacred community of Shi’ite Islam and its covenantal dispensation.”
Karaj is a bustling three million-strong city one hour away from Tehran by freeway. Early one morning I enter a room in a hawza – an Islamic seminary. In my previous travels I have visited hawzas in Qom, but never a female-only school. This one harbors 2,275 active students from all over Alborz province up to PhD level. They study philosophy, psychology, economics and politics. After graduation, some will go abroad, to teach in Islamic and non-Islamic nations.
Our Q&A is exhilarating. Many of my interlocutors are already teachers, and most will become scholars. Their questions are sharp; some are extremely well informed. There’s so much eagerness to know detail after detail about life in the West.
High academic standards
The next day I visit the Islamic Azad University; more than four million alumni, 1.4 million current students, 29,000 faculty members, 472 campuses and research centers and 617 affiliated high schools. The Karaj campus is the second in importance in Iran.
This is an extraordinary experience. The hillside campus may not be a UCLA, but puts to shame many prestigious universities across Europe. Not to mention the annual tuition fees; only US$1,000 on average. Sanctions? What sanctions? Most of the equipment may yield from the 1980s, but they have everything they need. As attested by jovial master architect Ali Kazemi, who spent 16 years in Paris after graduating from Nanterre, the academic standards are very high.
Rector Mohammad Hasan Borhanifar – formerly at the University of Kyrgyzstan in Bishkek – opens all the doors at the campus. I’m shepherded by Mohammad Hashamdar, from the Faculty of Languages. I talk to the deans of all faculties and have a Q&A with students, mostly in international relations.
Even before the proclamation of the “strongest sanctions in history,” everyone wants details on the US Treasury’s new form of financial war, even more deadly than a hot war. In slightly more than two months, the purchase of US dollars, steel, coal and precious metals will be banned; there will be no more Iranian imports to the US and aviation and the car industry will be under sanctions.
Airbus may have to cancel multi-billion dollar orders from Iran. An IT professor tells me Iran can buy excellent Sukhoi passenger jets instead. No Peugeots? “We buy Hyundai.”
My interlocutors update me on investments by Total, Airbus, BASF, Siemens, Eni – its branch Saipem signed a $5 billion deal with the National Iranian Oil Company, NIOC, to develop oil and gas fields and ultimately supply energy to Europe. They confirm that if Total pulls out of the development of the 11th phase of the South Pars gas field, the Chinese CNPC will take over.
Almost 70% of Iran’s oil exports go to China and Asia, 20% go to Europe. Almost 90% of what the EU buys from Iran is oil, going mostly to Spain, France, Italy, Greece, Germany and the Netherlands. Iran remains THE Big Prize, as Dick Cheney well knew; an astonishing $45 trillion in oil and gas reserves.
A wide gene pool
I’m slightly alarmed when, talking to the Friday prayer imam – who is the actual representative of Ayatollah Khamenei in Karaj – he’s clueless about the New Silk Roads. Just as the Ancient Silk Road allowed Buddhism to fertilize Chinese culture, Iran, India and China are bound to cross-fertilize again; imagine a trans-Eurasia lab equipped with a wide gene pool and well-educated young armada searching for creative solutions.
The LA freeway hell pales in comparison with being stuck in a monster three-hour traffic jam from Tehran to Karaj, only 25 kilometers. I duly incorporate a Persian imprecation to my vocabulary; kharab beshe, which in polite translation means “going to nowhere.” I miss my requisite geopolitical dinner with Professor Marandi of the University of Tehran; we do it later on Whatsapp – like MBS and Jared Kushner.
What daily life in 17 million-strong, congested to death Tehran reveals is the standard of living essentially of a mid-level emerging nation. Everyone has a car, and smartphones and wi-fi are ubiquitous. In parallel, everywhere we feel intimations of a Persian civilization boasting at least a millennium of fabulous history even before Islam was born. And when we talk to the secularized intellectual elite, it’s clear that for them, in comparison, Arabs are nothing but trouble.
Everywhere I go I’m back in the ’70s; the whole infrastructure seems decades old, but everything works. Except for timing; Iran might as well be the land of magical realism 2.0, where the unexpected happens when all hope has been forsaken.
A smart, young generation
In Mashhad, I’m the guest in a political talk show on Khorasan TV – in a studio immaculately preserved from the ’70s. Yes, this is the heart of the fabled Khorasan – “where the sun arrives from” – that transfixed Alexander The Great. I spend half an hour dissecting the JCPOA; my translator is an over-qualified import-export expert. Khorasan TV’s blockbuster is an American-style cop show essentially covering road accidents in real time; after all, the crime rate is negligible.
Real inflation is at 16% a year – so far. Foreign exchange inflation is much higher. Real youth unemployment is at a steep 30%, in a country of 80 million where the median age is 29 and 40% of the population is under 24. One of my translators in Karaj, Ali, is 24; he’s unemployed, learned English by watching DVDs and cannot afford to rent his own place.
Under the new rial devaluation, the median regional salary plunged to about US$250 per month. One cannot rent a 40 square meter apartment near Azad University for less than $200 per month.
I stop for a late night pizza in Mashhad. The bill reads a whopping 200,000 rials; that’s a little more than $3. The euro in the black market spikes to nearly 80,000 rials.
Social media
Telegram has been blocked – but still, everyone uses both Telegram and WhatsApp. Some VPNs work, some don’t. The block was not necessarily linked to the spread of anti-government rumors during the January street protests – which actually started in Mashhad.
Elaheh, who did her language master in France; Bojan, who has a PhD in economics from San Diego State; or Ayoub Farkhondeh, who works on terrorism studies at the Habilian research institute, are all amused by the “bizarre” coverage by Western media of all things Iran.
The analysis of well-educated people in both Mashhad and Tehran tends to qualify the protests as essentially IMF riots – which happen when the Washington Consensus forces governments to reduce subsidies. Real revolutions, in Iran, involve clerics, middle-class intellectuals and the bazaaris.
This time the focus was the grassroots; the working class in small provincial cities. Millions in Iran, after all, depend on government salaries and subsidies. In contrast, Team Rouhani is essentially neoliberal.
Of course, there’s government criticism – more towards the clerics than neoliberal Team Rouhani. Businessmen told me of untold ministerial-level corruption – but it’s virtually impossible to verify the numbers. The Pasdaran, as the IRGC is referred to, continue to control a great deal of the economy and to manage a welfare system and client system that distributes favors to millions of people, but also imposes rigid social control.
At the same time, not looking at Iran via a windowless cubicle in Washington but actually on the ground, it’s clear that NSC Adviser John Bolton’s plan to revive the Mujahedin-e Khalq, known as MEK, to attempt a color revolution will fail miserably. MEK is universally despised. The whole of Iranian society won’t blame either Khamenei or Rouhani for the incoming economic war.
Europe on the spot
Persian politeness, hospitality and graciousness always strike a visitor as deeply touching. All that combined with an obsession with the image that the West has of Iran. Iran does not seek “isolation”; it’s Washington politics that wants it isolated.
So no wonder Europe is on the spot. The EU will activate a 1996 lawwhich forbids European companies to comply with US sanctions, protecting them “against the effects of the extra-territorial application of legislation adopted by a third country.” Still, the question is ubiquitous; “The Europeans will side with us or the Americans?”
In parallel, Iranians don’t want to be like the West. And the best way to understand it is by visiting the Imam Reza shrine over and over again – I went early in the morning, after an afternoon storm, and at night.
Night activities at Imam Reza shrine in Mashhad. Photo: Asia Times/Pepe Escobar
The Imam Reza shrine, known as Astan Qods-e Razavi, is a marvel enveloped in golden and turquoise domes, lavish minarets and 12 courtyards spread over one million square meters. It hosts the largest Iranian NGO; a centuries-old administrative structure encompassing eight general directorates, more than 50 industrial, agricultural and service companies, over 15 cultural and research institutions and more than 12,000 students.
The 12th-century library at the shrine is one of the world’s oldest, along with Alexandria, the Vatican and Topkaki. Ayatollah Khomeini ordered its preservation. The public library holds four million books in more than 90 languages. There’s even a lab to “cure book diseases.” Mashhad runs a library in India plus a documentation center with more than 18 million items, including a 1,300-year-old document linked to Imam Ali.
Before leaving on a night flight to Doha, I visit the shrine one last time with two fine, steeped in history, Italian observers, ace journalist Giulietto Chiesa and writer Roberto Quaglia. It’s the first day of Ramadan. We’re speechless facing the crossover of aesthetic beauty, spiritual illumination and plain old fun.
Whole families gather, improvise a picnic, chat, take selfies, kids roam around playing. Instead of being glued to some dodgy version of Big Brother, like most across the West, they prefer to live life in a shrine. It is indeed an organic “third day,” like a government insider told me in Tehran.
Meanwhile, a Chinese train is snaking along from Mongolia to Tehran carrying sunflower seeds. While the dogs of war bark, the Ancient – and New – Silk Road goes on forever.
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