- Zuesse: America's News Media Foment Hate
Authored by Eric Zuesse via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
Mimiccing the movie 1984, in its two-minute section “Two Minutes of Hate,”…
…the US-installed Ukrainian regime on Russia’s doorstep, will soon be debating a bill to make hate of Russia obligatory to be inculcated into all Ukrainian children.
The Hill, on 9 November 2017, had the extraordinary courage to publish an opinion-piece that condemned the mainstream news-media’s charges that reports of widespread “neo-Nazi formations in Ukraine” are nothing but “Russian propaganda.” An editor who would accept a submission like that at such media as the Washington Post, New York Times, New Yorker, The Atlantic, or just about any other in America, would probably be fired or else re-assigned, so as to prevent a repeat.
It’s the way to achieve mass-indoctrination, which the Ministry of Truth specializes in. Thus, among the reader-comments to that bold article, the top-listed one under “sort by best” (in other words, the most popular) was the anti-Russian “Have you counted how many neo-Nazis are in the Russian army as well?”
But there is actually nothing at all in Russia which even begins to approach the outright nazi displays and rallies that are routine in today’s Ukraine, and some of which Ukrainian marches are publicly displaying symbols from Hitler’s regime — in fact, it’s all outright illegal in Russia, which had lost (by far) more of its citizens to Germany’s Nazis (13,950,000, or 12.7% of its population) than did any other country (except Belarus — another state within the Soviet Union — which lost 25.3% of its population). (The US, which might be where the obvious bigot who wrote that reader-comment resides, lost 419,400, or 0.32% of its population.) Metaphorically spitting like that, onto such millions of victims’ corpses, is to be expected from bigots, and from the fools who “up-vote” them. Furthermore, the US CIA provided protection and employment in Germany for top members of Hitler’s equivalent to the CIA, the Gehlen Organization. (America’s CIA continues flagrantly to violate the law and hide from Congress and the American people crucial details of its relationship with the Gehlen Organization.) By contrast, the Soviet Union was unremitting in killing Nazis whom it captured. Understandably, Hitler is admired far less in Russia than in today’s far-right United States, despite any lie such as “Have you counted how many neo-Nazis are in the Russian army as well?”
Stupid indoctrinated readers can’t change the facts about the post-coup Ukraine, which are documented not only in that excellent opinion-piece at The Hill, but by innumerable thousands of uploaded videos and other evidences of the nazism of the US-imposed Ukrainian regime. In fact, under US President Barack Obama, whose Administration imposed this nazi government upon Ukraine, the US Government was one of only 3 in the entire world who stood up publicly for nazism at the U.N. The other two nations were Ukraine itself (this vote having occurred after the coup) and Canada. Then, under the current US President Donald Trump, the US was again one of this time the only 2 nations in the entire world who stood up publicly for nazism at the U.N. The other country on that occasion was Ukraine itself. Thereby, Trump took upon himself, Obama’s nazi mantle. And, under Trump, there’s now supply of US weaponry directly to proudly and publicly nazi battalions in Ukraine. Even Obama wasn’t so bold as to do that. FDR would cry, but the Ministry of Truth has prohibited the public even to know about the reality.
Even UK’s supposedly anti-nazi BBC routinely states such baldfaced lies as “Ukraine is emphatically not run by fascists”, though clearly it is run by the worst type, racist fascists, ideological nazis, and they do typically nazi and outright horrendous things, which the Government that the US imposed refuses to punish anyone for having done. That’s because what was done is what the US Government itself had wanted them to do. It had put these people into power.
Here are yet further evidences, that the silence about this fact – silence by virtually all US and allied ‘news’ media, about Ukraine’s US-imposed nazism – is a scandalous proof of the utter corruptness of the US-and-allied ‘news’ media: “Nazism of Ukraine’s Western-Backed Government Is Hidden by Western ‘News’ Media”
The US regime foisted nazi rule on Ukraine, and backs the ethnic-cleansing program there to kill or else cause to flee from Ukraine into Russia the residents in Ukraine’s far-eastern Donbass region, in which over 90% of the people had voted for the democratically elected Ukrainian President that the US regime overthrew and replaced by fascists and nazis, in February 2014. Obama needed to get rid of those intensely anti-nazi voters, because otherwise the regime that he installed wouldn’t have lasted beyond the first post-coup election. That’s the purpose of ethnic cleansing – to get rid of unwanted voters. Western ‘news’ media portray it (when they do) simply as mass bigotry, but the installed political thugs have actually organized and armed it, in order to retain their power by getting rid of their political opponents’ voters. (Obama required it, in this case, because Ukraine has Europe’s longest border with Russia, and is thus ideal for posting US missiles).
But instead of The West’s recognizing publicly that the ethnic-cleansing program exists, The West’s propaganda-vehicles (called ‘news’ media by Big Brother) accuse Russia of ‘aggression’ for arming Donbass’s residents and bringing in food and medicine so that these people can stay there instead of emigrating into Russia. Russia is doing what it can to help them, but turned down the residents’ pleas to become admitted as a new region into Russia. Russia had gotten hit badly enough with America’s sanctions which resulted from Russia’s taking on the burden of protecting and allowing to become Russians again (as had been the case until the Soviet dictator in 1954 transferred them to Ukraine) Crimeans.
So: this ugly mindless and misinformed hate, which America’s ‘news’ media foment by constant lies and distortions against Russia, is being fomented for a reason: conquest. Conquering Ukraine wasn’t enough — the US regime wants, ultimately, to conquer Russia; and, so, that’s what all of this hate build-up is actually about. It’s the prelude to an invasion. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be done, at all. Invasion of Russia, is the sole sensible ultimate reason.
The American people would not tolerate, even for just ten seconds, Russia overthrowing Canada’s Government – our next-door neighbor – in order to place missiles on our border, but people who say such things as “Have you counted how many neo-Nazis are in the Russian army as well?” are, in effect, approving of our country doing that to the Russian people.
Ukraine is Russia’s equivalent to our Canada. And, America’s media constantly feed this stupidity and hate, by Americans against Russia, and blindly ignore the hate that the US regime has already unleashed in Ukraine, against Ukraine’s next-door neighbor, in preparation for an invasion of Russia. Never has the US sunk so low, at least not in modern times, but the direction in which we are heading is toward even worse, even lower than now, even more like Hitler’s Germany. Candidate Trump had promised to be the non-Obama, but turns out, on the most important matter of all, to be instead the super-Obama. This is playing with fire — a global fire. And the US Government is doing it with the most-evil intent imaginable. And the media play right along with it, and they whip the hatred even higher than they already have done.
Things aren’t looking good. There are too many lies, for any intelligent person to be able to feel at all comfortable about where we’re headed.
The sound of those two minutes of hate is becoming unbearable, for anyone with the ears and brain to hear it. It’s now all around us.
- 'Rent-For-Sex': Landlords Exploit Thousands Of Broke Millenials
It is now time to sound the alarm bells on the economic prospects for the Millennial Generation in the Western world, but more importantly, in the United Kingdom. This generation of citizens aged 18 to 36, is the first in modern developed economies on course to have a lower standard of living than their parents.
Housing affordability and a decaying job environment are some of the most pressing issues affecting Millennials. The future is bleak for this avocado and toast generation, as Western world economies have likely plateaued regarding economic growth. Surging debt and rising government bond yields are producing an environment that could lead to more hardships for this lost generation.
Landlords in the United Kingdom have taken full advantage of broke Millennials by offering “adult arrangements” for a roof over their heads. Yes, you heard this correctly, Millennials are trading sex for a place to sleep — unearthed in a new documentary by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), which provides a chilling insight into just how bad the Millennial generation has it.
BBC reporter Ellie Flynn went undercover to expose the scale of the ‘Rent For Sex’ issue in the United Kingdom, in which landlords on Craigslist are advertising “free” accommodation in exchange for sexual acts.
Ellie portrayed herself as a broke, 24-year-old nursing student with very little alternatives. She confronted one man in a Newcastle cafe who defended his actions and told cameras: “I’m not doing anything wrong… it’s not just about sex, it’s about companionship.”
“BBC Three’s Ellie Undercover: Rent For Sex also met up with a landlord who had built a log cabin in his garden where tenants could sleep if the agreed to have sex in return for a ‘physical arrangement once a week,” the Daily Mail reported.
“The man offers to show Ellie around after saying: ‘That’s where you sleep, it’s a log cabin, alright,” the Daily Mail reported.
He later denied knowing the practice of asking for sex in exchange for housing is a serious offense in the United Kingdom, saying: “I don’t know, I can’t truthfully answer that .”
One landlord put Ellie in touch with a former tenant who told of “how he tried touching her while she was staying rent-free with him,” said the Daily Mail.
“I would just feel almost paralyzed every time he tried to touch me but he didn’t force himself on me,” said the unnamed woman.
The woman added: “The idea of consent gets mashed up because a woman thinks this is the exchange I have to give this man in order for me to have a roof over my head.”
In fact, the number of listings on Craigslist and social media websites offering rent for sex is exploding. Latest figures from the Housing Charity Shelter are absolutely mind-numbing, more than 250,000 women over the last five years have been asked for “adult arrangements” in exchange for housing.
UK Millennials lack a living wage, therefore, this generation sees nothing wrong in offering their bodies to landlords for a roof over their heads. Apparently, the smartest generation to ever step foot on planet earth is the first generation since the 1950s to fail to do better than their parents, as this chart shows:
The homeownership rate for UK Millennials is so low that these levels have not been seen since World War I:
According to the Office for National Statistics, millennials have largely been priced out of the real estate market as prices soar above 2008 levels.
Over the same period of rising real estate prices, UK Millennials have dealt with stagnating wages:
Real estate price increases and low personal savings rate for U.K. Millennials have been mostly fueled by low-interest rates, set by the Bank of England (BoE). Some ten years ago, the BoE decided to juice the economy by suppressing UK lending rates to a zero lower bound with cheap money after the 2008 crisis:
“In our society, it seems acceptable for people to wield their power over the vulnerable in order to get what they want, no questions asked,” explains Ellen Moran of Acorn, a tenants union and anti-poverty group.
“That power is entrenched and such actions are ignored by law enforcers. Sometimes, though, this happens because people are alienated in their society to such an extent that they crave physical affection without knowing considerate ways to get it. Sometimes it is a mixture of those two things,” she added.
Unfortunately, the ‘Rent For Sex’ issue in the United Kingdom will only get worse as the economic prospects continue to deteriorate for the Millennial generation. There is no end in sight for this madness, and it will only be a matter of time before this trend washes up on the shores of the United States. It seems as failed Central Bank policy has given landlords one new perk to owning real estate: sex with millennials.
- Someone Is Trolling the Sh*t Out Of The Oscars In Hollywood
Authored by Carey Edler via TheAntiMedia.org,
Just days before the first Academy Awards ceremony since Hollywood was hit with allegations of rampant sexual harassment, assault, and pedophilia, a Los Angeles street artist made a bold statement just a few miles from the Dolby Theater where the Oscars will be held.
Sabo, a conservative-leaning artist who has previously tagged the city with art referencing former President Obama’s drones, purchased three billboards, echoing the sentiment of a Academy Award-nominated film, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, which tells the story of a mother who seeks accountability for her daughter’s rape and murder, which police in her small town have failed to solve.
In the film, the mother purchases three billboards that read:
“RAPED WHILE DYING”
“AND STILL NO ARRESTS?”
“HOW COME CHIEF WILLOUGHBY?”
In Sabo’s version, the billboards plastered in Hollywood read:
“AND THE OSCAR FOR BIGGEST PEDOPHILE GOES TO…”
“WE ALL KNEW AND STILL NO ARRESTS”
“NAME NAMES ON STAGE OR SHUT THE HELL UP!”
Kevin Spacey’s career went down in flames last year amid the fallout of widespread allegations of abuse by now-scorned producer Harvey Weinstein. Anthony Rapp accused the actor of making advances on him in 1986, when Rapp was only 14. Other accusations against Spacey followed, including some others that alleged Spacey attempted to take advantage of the victims when they were under the age of 18.
Further, Corey Feldman, who has long warned of predatory, pedophilic behavior in Hollywood, revealed several of his accused abusers last year, citing John Grissom, former talent manager Marty Weiss, and Alphy Hoffman, who was the son of a high-power producer and ran the trendy Soda Pop Club, where Feldman claims widespread harassment took place in the 1980s.
Feldman claimed there were six abusers total, saying one is an A-list actor who might kill him. He has previously said his fellow child star, Corey Haim, now deceased, received worse abuse than he did.
In a 2011 appearance on Nightline, Feldman said:
“[T]he No. 1 problem in Hollywood was and is and always will be pedophilia…that’s the biggest problem for children in this industry… It’s the big secret.”
Last year, Bryan Singer, a noted director, was accused of and sued over allegations he raped a 17-year-old boy in 2003. He has denied those claims.
Also last year, amid the systemic controversy, the creators of An Open Secret — a documentary about child abusers in the industry that failed to obtain distributors or wide release — posted the film online for free.
In light of the pedophilia allegations, along with general accusations of sexual harassment against women and other vulnerable people seeking success in the film industry, Sabo’s art seems timely.
Much like the title of the documentary, this abuse was reportedly widely known and swept under the rogue.
As Barbara Walters told Corey Feldman, rejecting his attempts to sound the alarm about pedophilia, “You’re damaging an entire industry.”
As it turns out, the industry’s unwillingness to acknowledge and address the problem has done arguably equal if not more damage than Feldman’s refusals to stay silent.
In another show of artistic commentary on the ongoing scandals, a statue of Harvey Weinstein wearing a bathrobe, holding an Oscar, and sitting on a “casting couch” has also appeared on the Hollywood Walk of Fame ahead of the ceremony.
- Jim Grant: "Bond Markets Worldwide Are Living In Their Own Hall Of Mirrors"
Welcome to economic ‘fantasy’ island.
Jim Grant, the world’s most famous interest rate observer, ventured on CNBC this week to expose and explain the utterly farcical world of financial markets (and in particular, risk assets) and how grotesquely distorted global bond markets have become.
He began with an example…
“As an example of where the world is mispricing interest rates… look to Italy, which is having a big [potentially disruptive] election on Sunday…
…there is a speculative grade Italian security, Telecom Italia, the 5 1/4’s of 2022 are trading at 0.61 percent, that is a junk bond with a zero handle.”
This bond traded with almost a 6 handle just 5 years ago…
Thank you Mr Draghi.
But it doesn’t stop there, Grant warns…
“…and since interest rates are critical in the pricing of financial instruments, these distortions preceded the uplift in all asset values.. and the manifestation of this manipulation is in many ways responsible for what we are now seeing in the markets.”
These distortions and the chaotic aftermath of their withdrawal are exactly what current Fed Chair Powell warned of in 2013…
[W]hen it is time for us to sell, or even to stop buying, the response could be quite strong; there is every reason to expect a strong response. So there are a couple of ways to look at it. It is about $1.2 trillion in sales; you take 60 months, you get about $20 billion a month. That is a very doable thing, it sounds like, in a market where the norm by the middle of next year is $80 billion a month. Another way to look at it, though, is that it’s not so much the sale, the duration; it’s also unloading our short volatility position.
…
I think we are actually at a point of encouraging risk-taking, and that should give us pause. Investors really do understand now that we will be there to prevent serious losses. It is not that it is easy for them to make money but that they have every incentive to take more risk, and they are doing so. Meanwhile, we look like we are blowing a fixed-income duration bubble right across the credit spectrum that will result in big losses when rates come up down the road. You can almost say that that is our strategy.
Almost?
“And I think there is a pretty good chance that you could have quite a dynamic response in the market. “
While Powell is anxious, Grant reminds listeners that the ‘end of the bond bull market’ does not necessarily mean disruptive change…“it took ten years for the long-dated Treasury to move from its low in 1946 of 2.25% to 3.25% in 1956…” but, as Grant points out, it’s different now, “that was before risk parity and the leverage that is now in financial instruments surrounding the bond market.”
However, Grant warns that he “suspects the tempo of a bond bear market will indeed be faster now than it was in 1946-56.”
* * *
Once again Grant is correct in his diagnosis of the symptoms… and the prognosis – all of which reminds us of his rhetorical question – What will futurity make of the [so-called] Ph.D. standard [that runs our world]?
Likely it will be even more baffled than we are. Imagine trying to explain the present-day arrangements to your 20-something grandchild a couple of decades hence – after the crash of, say, 2019, that wiped out the youngster’s inheritance and provoked a central bank response so heavy-handed as to shatter the confidence even of Wall Street in the Federal reserve’s methods…
I expect you’ll wind up saying something like this:
“My generation gave former tenured economics professors discretionary authority to fabricate money and to fix interest rates.
We put the cart of asset prices before the horse of enterprise.
We entertained the fantasy that high asset prices made for prosperity, rather than the other way around.
We actually worked to foster inflation, which we called ‘price stability’ (this was on the eve of the hyperinflation of 2017).
We seem to have miscalculated.“
Source: Jim Grant’s November 2014 speech at the Cato Institute
- The Middle-East's Nuclear Technology Clock Starts Ticking
Authored James M Dorsey via ‘The Turbulent World of Mid-East Soccer’ blog,
The Middle East’s nuclear technology clock is ticking as nations pursue peaceful capabilities that potentially leave the door open to future military options.
Concern about a nuclear arms race is fuelled by uncertainty over the future of Iran’s 2015 nuclear agreement, a seeming US willingness to weaken its strict export safeguards in pursuit of economic advantage, and a willingness by suppliers such as Russia and China to ignore risks involved in weaker controls.
The Trump administration was mulling loosening controls to facilitate a possible deal with Saudi Arabia as Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu prepared, in an address this week to a powerful Israeli lobby group in Washington, to urge US President Donald J. Trump to scrap the Iranian nuclear deal unless the Islamic republic agrees to further military restrictions and makes additional political concessions.
Israel has an undeclared nuclear arsenal of its own and fears that the technological clock is working against its long-standing military advantage.
The US has signalled that it may be willing to accede to Saudi demands in a bid to ensure that US companies with Westinghouse in the lead have a stake in the kingdom’s plan to build by 2032 16 reactors that would have 17.6 gigawatts (GW) of nuclear capacity.
In putting forward demands for parity with Iran by getting the right to controlled enrichment of uranium and the reprocessing of spent fuel into plutonium, potential building blocks for nuclear weapons, Saudi Arabia was backing away from a 2009 memorandum of understanding with the United States in which it pledged to acquire nuclear fuel from international markets.
“The trouble with flexibility regarding these critical technologies is that it leaves the door open to production of nuclear explosives,” warned nuclear experts Victor Gilinsky and Henry Sokolski in an article Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
While Israeli opinion is divided on how the US should respond to Saudi demands, Messrs Trump and Netanyahu’s opposition to the Iranian nuclear accord has already produced results that would serve Saudi interests.
European signatories to the agreement are pressuring Iran to engage in negotiations to limit its ballistic missile program and drop its support for groups like Lebanon’s Shiite Hezbollah and Houthi rebels in Iran. Iran has rejected any renegotiation but has kept the door open to discussions about a supplementary agreement. Saudi Arabia has suggested it may accept tight US controls if Iran agreed to a toughening of its agreement with the international community.
The Trump administration recently allowed high-tech US exports to Iran that could boost international oversight of the nuclear deal. Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan signed a waiver that allows a Maryland-based company to export broadband networks, satellite dishes and wireless equipment to Iran for stations that monitor nuclear explosions in real time.
Iranian resistance to a renegotiation is enhanced by the fact that Europe and even the Trump administration admit that Hezbollah despite having been designated a terrorist organization by the US is an undeniable political force in Lebanon. “We…have to recognize the reality that (Hezbollah) are also part of the political process in Lebanon,” Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said on the eve of a visit to Beirut.
A US willingness to go easy on demanding that Saudi Arabia adhere to tough safeguards enshrined in US export control laws, widely viewed as the gold standard, would open a Pandora’s box.
The United Arab Emirates, the Arab nation closest to inaugurating its first nuclear reactor, has already said that it would no longer be bound by the safeguards it agreed to a decade ago if others in the region were granted a more liberal regime. So would countries like Egypt and Jordan that are negotiating contracts with non-US companies for construction of nuclear reactors. A US backing away from its safeguards in the case of Saudi Arabia would potentially add a nuclear dimension to the already full-fledged arms in the Middle East.
The Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) cautioned last year in a report that the Iranian nuclear agreement had “not eliminated the kingdom’s desire for nuclear weapons capabilities and even nuclear weapons… There is little reason to doubt that Saudi Arabia will more actively seek nuclear weapons capabilities, motivated by its concerns about the ending of the (Iranian agreement’s) major nuclear limitations starting after year 10 of the deal or sooner if the deal fails.”
Rather than embarking on a covert program, the report predicted that Saudi Arabia would, for now, focus on building up its civilian nuclear infrastructure as well as a robust nuclear engineering and scientific workforce. This would allow the kingdom to take command of all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle at some point in the future. Saudi Arabia has in recent years significantly expanded graduate programs at its five nuclear research centres.
“The current situation suggests that Saudi Arabia now has both a high disincentive to pursue nuclear weapons in the short term and a high motivation to pursue them over the long term,” the report said.
Saudi officials have repeatedly insisted that the kingdom is developing nuclear capabilities for peaceful purposes such as medicine, electricity generation, and desalination of sea water. They said Saudi Arabia is committed to putting its future facilities under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
Vietnam constitutes a precedent for application of less stringent US safeguards. The US settled for a non-binding Vietnamese statement of intent in the preamble of its agreement that Vietnam had no intention to pursue fuel cycle capabilities.
Tailoring Saudi demands of parity with Iran could be addressed, according to former senior US non-proliferation official Robert Einhorn, by sequencing controls to match timelines in the Iranian nuclear agreement. This could involve:
— establishing a bilateral fuel cycle commission that, beginning in year 10, would jointly evaluate future Saudi reactor fuel requirements and consider alternative means of meeting those requirements, including indigenous enrichment;
— creating provisions for specific Saudi enrichment and reprocessing activities that would be allowed if approved on a case-by-case basis by mutual consent and would kick in in year 15;
— limiting the period after which Saudi Arabia, without invoking the agreement’s withdrawal provision, could end the accord and terminate its commitment to forgo fuel cycle capabilities if it believed the United States was exercising its consent rights in an unreasonably restrictive manner.
Saudi foreign minister Adel al-Jubeir recently raised the stakes by declaring that the kingdom was engaged in talks with ten nations about its nuclear program, including Russia and China, nations that impose less stringent safeguards but whose technology is viewed as inferior to that of the United States.
To strengthen its position, Saudi Arabia has added Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, an international law firm specialized in energy regulation, to its army of lobbyists and public relations firms in Washington, in a bid to ensure it gets a favourable agreement with the United States.
“Allowing Moscow to gain a nuclear foothold in Saudi Arabia would deal a serious blow to U.S. regional influence and prestige,” warned the Washington-based Arabia Foundation’s Ali Shihabi.
- Venezuelans Are Paying Black-Market Dealers A 100% Markup For Worthless Paper Bills
Since the wheels came off Venezuela’s economy back in 2013, the US financial press has displayed an at times unhealthy preoccupation with the fate of Latin America’s favorite “Socialist Paradise” – once the region’s wealthiest economy.
So it’s hardly surprising that Bloomberg, in an effort to unearth more gritty vignettes about the hardships endured by Venezuelans – particularly those who were once middle class who have now fallen into abject desperation in the streets of Caracas, or elsewhere – is publishing a series of first person essays called “Life in Caracas”.
And in its introductory installment, reporter Andrew Rosati points out one of the most dumbfounding ironies of hyperinflation: The need to pay insane mark-ups to obtain paper cash from grey-market dealers.
Rosati describes setting up a clandestine meeting with his “cash dealer” in language that could be used for a drug buy.
My most recent order arrived by motorcycle, a loaded, black trash bag tossed my way. “This is what’s available,” the courier said gruffly before zooming off. I nodded. There’s no begging in the bolivar business.
What he delivered was cash, 200,000 bolivars of it. I, in turn, wired 400,000 bolivars to his bank account. Why such a huge markup? Because in hyper-inflationary Venezuela, we’re all desperate for paper money, a ridiculously scarce commodity but a necessity, even for someone like me with plenty of credit cards. You need cash for gasoline, to use the metro or park your car in a garage, to buy fried fish on the beach or a cup of coffee on the street.
So this is the question that’s all over Caracas: “You got a guy?” I hear it, in dive bars and at posh dinner parties, and in line at the bank, which, invariably, is out of the desired product.
The guy, of course, is a cash dealer. My phone is filled with a half-dozen numbers. They’re cab drivers and restaurant owners and produce sellers, anyone with a bit of hustle. It’s a booming business. The 100 percent premium I paid that day isn’t unusual.
While conventional wisdom might lead one to believe that ordinary Venezuelans sought to settle transactions digitally, this couldn’t be further from the truth: While bitcoin, monero and other digital currencies have become crucial sources of badly needed foreign capital, most Venezuelan merchants prefer to accept cash for small goods. This is true for restaurants and most food vendors, also.
As Rosati explains, the difficulty of obtaining enough cash before the value of the bolivar further disintegrates isn’t just a headache – in the slums, it makes a desperate situation worse.
For me, it’s just another of the frustrations of living in an imploding economy. Low-denomination bills—anything below 100 bolivars ($0.0005 at the black-market rate)—are often used nowadays for such things as confetti at baseball games. And the government is so broke, it can’t afford to print bigger bills fast enough. It’s a curiosity, this whole mess, almost bordering on a Yogi-ism: Hyperinflation’s rendered paper money so worthless that it’s become incredibly valuable.
The paper chase is most intense in the slums, where many people have no other means of payment. Fixers are everywhere in these neighborhoods, eager to get their hands on all the cash swirling around.
One flipper, Orlando Villarroel, told me he positions himself at a bakery check-out. One by one, he pays for customers’ items with his credit card, giving them a markdown and collecting their banknotes until he’s chased out of the place.
Venezuela, which struggles with the world’s worst hyperinflation, saw annualized inflation accelerate to 4,651%. As Rosati points out, the struggle to obtain enough cash is becoming increasingly more difficult to win. And it’s unlikely the money raised by President Nicolas Maduro’s petro will do anything to soften the blow.
- Change Is Coming: China Is Accelerating Its Plan For A Military Base In Pakistan
Authored by Lawrence Sellin, op-ed via The Daily Caller,
On January 1, 2018, The Daily Caller published information – later confirmed in two separate reports, here and here – about a plan for a Chinese military base on the Jiwani peninsula in Pakistan, near Gwadar, a sea port critical to the success of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).
According to noted national security correspondent Bill Gertz:
“Plans for the base were advanced during a visit to Jiwani on Dec. 18 by a group of 16 Chinese People’s Liberation Army officers who met with about 10 Pakistani military officers.”
“The Chinese also asked the Pakistanis to undertake a major upgrade of Jiwani airport so the facility will be able to handle large Chinese military aircraft. Work on the airport improvements is expected to begin in July.”
Sources now say the plan has been accelerated. Upgrade of the Jiwani airport is already underway. In addition, procedures are being formulated for the relocation of the local population to make way for Chinese military and other support personnel. The sensitivity and importance of this issue to China and Pakistan cannot be overstated. After the disclosures and the expected denials from both Islamabad and Beijing, Pakistani officials, as early as January 5, 2018, launched a leak investigation and it was jointly decided to advance the schedule for the Jiwani base.
Strategically, China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is their roadmap to geopolitical dominance. It is soft power with an underlying hard power, military component, the so-called “String of Pearls” bases and facilities.
A Chinese military base on the Jiwani peninsula will complement the Chinese base in Djibouti, which became operational in 2017. Both are located at strategic choke points. The Djibouti base is near the entrance to the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, while the Jiwani base will be within easy reach of the Strait of Hormuz, a combination, not only capable of dominating vital sea lanes in the Arabian Sea, but boxing-in U.S bases in the Persian Gulf and outflanking the U.S. naval facility on Diego Garcia.
There is concern that the Chinese will transform its 99-year lease of the Sri Lankan port of Hambantota into another naval base, the exact “debt-trap” method the Chinese used in Djibouti and after its acquisition of a 40-year lease of the Pakistani port of Gwadar. There are also continuing Chinese diplomatic efforts to gain access to the Maldives.
All of the above represent elements of China’s “String of Pearls” bases to secure military dominance of the maritime component of BRI.
In addition to explicit economic and military moves, China is planning a fiber optic network to control the flow of information and is mapping the northern Indian Ocean seabed, potentially for a SOSUS-like system to monitor maritime traffic and control a fleet of subsurface drones.
While the United States is tinkering with counterinsurgency policy and nation building in Afghanistan, there are seismic strategic changes taking place in South Asia and the Indian Ocean region.
It is senseless to continue an unsuccessful, costly and exhaustive approach in Afghanistan, which not only places our forces at an equivalent tactical level to the Taliban, but allows Pakistan to regulate the operational tempo and the supply of our troops.
Instead, the U.S. should be moving toward a policy that shifts the burden of Afghanistan stability to the regional players who have thwarted our efforts there and adopt a strategy that exploits our technological advantages to counter growing Chinese sophistication and ambition through augmented U.S. naval and air power projection and the selective use of covert, special operations and cyber warfare operations.
The foremost regional problem is to have a workable plan to secure Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, which is growing more dangerous because of its expanding tactical nuclear weapons program.
The United States is not without strategic options to disrupt Chinese hegemony. The linchpin of BRI is CPEC. Pakistan’s main vulnerability remains ethnic separatism, which was largely the reason Pakistan adopted a program of Islamization in the late 1970s. Pakistan is the Yugoslavia of South Asia with the Pakistani province of Punjab as the equivalent of Serbia, when that country pursued an expansionist policy in the 1990s.
For example, BRI cannot succeed without CPEC and CPEC cannot succeed without a subservient Balochistan, a province with a festering insurgency that was once independent and secular before it was forcibly incorporated into Pakistan. Balochistan is also where Pakistan maintains a significant Taliban infrastructure and provides safe haven to its Quetta Shura leaders.
There clearly needs to be a sense of urgency applied to this challenge because current U.S. policy in Afghanistan is about to be overtaken by events.
An American withdrawal from Afghanistan will only be a humiliating defeat if the United States is forced into strategic retreat because we do not have a plan in place to address the changing regional conditions.
- A Tiny Island Nation You've Never Heard Of Has Become A Global Battleground
Authored by Darius Shahtahmasebi via TheAntiMedia.org,
Last week, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates announced a grant of $160 million for “development projects” in the Maldives, a country located in the Indian ocean that is currently battling an economic and political crisis.
“As part of the support of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the Saudi Fund for Development and the Abu Dhabi Fund for Development has pledged $160 million in support of the Maldives and its brotherly people for the development projects including the airport development and fisheries sector of the Maldives,” a statement on the Maldives presidency website said on February 18.
Foreign debt is viewed with great enthusiasm by the current governments in the Asia-Pacific region, but not so much by the rest of the population. Former Maldivian President Mohamed Nasheed recently warned that its monumental debt to China has put the country at risk of a “land grab.”
“We can’t pay the $1.5-2 billion debt to China,” Nasheed told the Nikkei Asian Review in an interview.
If the Maldives falls behind on its payments, China will “ask for equity” from the owners of various islands and infrastructure operators, and Beijing will then “get free hold of that land,” he also reportedly said.
Just days ago, the current President, Abdulla Yameen, extended the state of emergency that was implemented in early February. Fortunately for China, the focus has quickly shifted from China’s influence in the country to the Gulf’s growing involvement, particularly Saudi Arabia’s.
“It is unfortunate that certain countries are assisting the deep state,” Mohamed Aslam, Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP) legislator and member of the House Economic Committee, told Al Jazeera. He also said:
“The Maldives, at present, is in a state of flux politically and socially. It is also under siege by an organised and systematic strategy developed and implemented by radical Islamists with the intention of infiltration and subsequent total control of key departments of the state.”
In 2015, the Maldives approved a law to allow foreigners who invest more than $1 billion to own land in perpetuity. While this may not seem like that big of a deal, having a five-minute conversation with anyone in the Asia-Pacific region will immediately tell you otherwise because land is everything to local inhabitants of the Asia-Pacific. As the New York Times articulated last year:
“But Mr. Ahmed [a local resident] and others here are bracing for a life change they fear could be catastrophic, after the Maldivian president’s announcement in January that leaders of Saudi Arabia were planning a $10 billion investment in the group of islands where Mr. Ahmed lives, known as Faafu Atoll.
“Most alarming to the residents were reports that the government was breaking with a longstanding policy of leasing the islands that are home to some of the world’s premier resorts and selling the atoll outright to the Saudis. The inhabitants fear they might be moved off the islands.”
However, despite the potential loss of land ownership, Saudi funding for any country comes with some more disturbing strings attached. As Fareed Zakaria has explained:
“In Southeast Asia, almost all observers whom I have spoken with believe that there is another crucial cause [behind the ‘cancer’ of Islamic extremism] – exported money and ideology from the Middle East, chiefly Saudi Arabia. A Singaporean official told me, ‘Travel around Asia and you will see so many new mosques and madrassas built in the last 30 years that have had funding from the Gulf. They are modern, clean, air-conditioned, well-equipped – and Wahhabi [Saudi Arabia’s puritanical version of Islam].’ Recently, it was reported that Saudi Arabia plans to contribute almost $1 billion to build 560 mosques in Bangladesh. The Saudi government has denied this, but sources in Bangladesh tell me there’s some truth to the report.”
As The Week also explained in 2015, Saudi Arabia has spent billions of dollars “investing heavily in building mosques, madrasas, schools, and Sunni cultural centers across the Muslim world. Indian intelligence says that in India alone, from 2011 to 2013, some 25,000 Saudi clerics arrived bearing more than $250 million to build mosques and universities and hold seminars.”
According to the New York Times, Saudi Arabia has “for decades spread its conservative strand of Islam in the Maldives by sending religious leaders, building mosques and giving scholarships to students to attend universities.”
It should therefore come as no surprise to anyone that the South China Morning Post reported that Indian intelligence sources are claiming hundreds of Maldivians have joined ISIS in Syria. ISIS essentially holds the world ransom with Saudi Arabia’s strict strain of Islam, a mere coincidence one can be sure.
India, for its part, also has a deep interest in claiming the Maldives for itself, though it was noticeably left out when President Yameen sent envoys to Saudi Arabia, China, and Pakistan to request help in its current political crisis.
China sees the Maldives as a key part of its One Belt, One Road initiative, and Beijing does not necessarily view Saudi Arabia’s desire to inject itself in the region as a bad thing. In fact, the South China Morning Post lamented that Saudi Arabia is doing so in its bid to assert itself as a more viable partner in China’s rapidly expanding economic projects as opposed to its major arch-rival, Iran, with which China also has a cooperative relationship.
- One Company Now Owns Over 7% Of The Entire S&P500
By now it has become common knowledge that in the ongoing war of attrition between expensive – but very much underperforming under central planning – active investing and cheap and efficient passive, ETFs, the latter are winning and the former will likely concede majority control of market AUM in just over a year.
Furthermore, as BofA notes, US trading volume (as of late summer 2016) was 24% exchange traded funds (ETFs) and 76% single stocks versus 20% ETFs and 80% single stocks three years ago. By now ETFs are likely responsible for 30% of trading volume or much more.
However, it is far less known that as “active” loses market share, “passive” has become a giant force in the overall market, and as of 2016, the percentage of S&P 500 market cap held by Vanguard alone has doubled since 2010. At this rate, ETF-giant Vanguard alone will own 10% of the entire market by the end of the decade.
Unfortunately, this unprecedented dominance by investment vehicles that merely reflect flows and not fundamentals, means that the market is becoming increasingly fragile, inefficient and broken, something which can be seen in the excess volatility (measured by both standard deviation & price declines) of stocks with a larger proportion of shares held by passive investors.
Yet while in the US ETFs are yet to dominate the market, resulting in even greater systemic fragility and irrationality, this is already the case in Japan, which like with QE and NIRP, has been the guinea pig for countless monetary and market experiments.
Just like in the US, there is a tangible reason why the flows into Japan passive investing have been massive: active managers suffered outperformance rates 12ppt lower between 2014-2016, a period in which passive inflows were accelerating vs. over the prior decade (34% of funds outperforming the TOPIX between 2014-2016 vs. 46% outperforming between 2002-2013).
As a result, in Japan passive funds are now two-thirds of total….
… with the flow differential between active and passive absolutely staggering.
It is unclear how much of this has been the result of BOJ intervention, but what we do know is that over the past 5 years the Japanese central bank has been purchasing massive amounts of equity ETFs in its attempt to control the stock market, and at last check the BOJ owned 75% of total Japanese ETFs.
If Japan is indeed the harbinger of what is coming, then over the next 3-5 years, the Fed will become the biggest investor in the ETF market as the US central bank does everything in its power to avoid a terminal stock market collapse after the next depression.
Meanwhile, the trend in the US is clear: investors increasingly are giving up on single stocks, and thus fundamentals, and embracing the collective hive mind of ETFs…
… resulting in “less stock selection, more sector selection”, and an ominous increase in “long-term market inefficiencies” according to Bank of America…
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