- Fake Saudi Who Swindled Millions From Investors Sentenced In Fraud Scheme
Miami fraudster Anthony Gignac, 48, who spent several decades impersonating a Saudi prince was sentenced last week to 18 years in prison for defrauding investors out of $8 million, reported the SCMP . The ruse reportedly fell apart when a victim saw him eating pork, which is prohibited in Islam.
Gignac went by the name of Prince Khalid al-Saud of Saudi Arabia, who is actually the 79-year-old governor of Mecca, chronicled his life of fraud on Instagram under the name @princedubai_07. About 450 posts show Gignac flaunting exotic watches, driving fancy cars, eating sumptuous meals, and taking luxury vacations.
The Miami Herald reported that US District Judge Cecilia Altonaga called him a “mastermind”. Prosecutors said it was at least the 11th time Gignac had been arrested for impersonating a Saudi prince.
“He was the so-called Saudi prince. He enveloped himself in the trappings of Saudi royalty. He had everyone believing he was a Saudi prince,” Altonaga said.
He resided on the exclusive Fisher Island in Florida, where his luxury penthouse was called “Sultan.” His bodyguards carried fake badges, and he even had fake diplomatic plates on some of his exotic cars. He went by “prince,” “sultan,” and “his royal highness” and demanded gifts from his business partners—’per royal protocol.’
But in actuality, Gignac was a Colombian orphan adopted by a Michigan family in the late 1970s. The Times said he lived a life of crime, arrested 11 times for “prince-related schemes.” Gignac pleaded guilty in March to wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, aggravated identity theft and impersonating a diplomat, court documents showed.
“Over the course of the last three decades, Anthony Gignac has portrayed himself as a Saudi Prince in order to manipulate, victimize, and scam countless investors from around the world,” Ariana Fajardo Orshan, the United States attorney for the Southern District of Florida, said in a statement. “As the leader of a sophisticated, multi-person, international fraud scheme, Gignac used his fake persona — Prince Khalid Bin al-Saud — to sell false hope.”
The conman had a checkered history: according to The Los Angeles Times, Gignac stole more than US$10,000 from a limousine company and the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in 1991. He pleaded no contest. The New York Times reported that in 2006, Gignac pleaded guilty to charging US$28,000 at Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus to the account of a Saudi royal. He also tried to withdraw nearly US$4 million from a Citibank account that did not exist.
Prosecutors say the scam started in California in 1987, once he had his name changed. He also schemed in Michigan and Florida and used his royal title to extract $8 million from investors for phony worldwide investments. The Los Angeles Times called him the “Prince of Fraud” in 1991 after he was arrested for not paying $10,000 in bills from a limousine company.
Gignac’s lawyer said he had lived a life of crime was the result of a troublesome childhood in Colombia.
“The entire blame of this entire operation is on me, and I accept that,” Gignac said at his sentencing, insisting, “I am not a monster.”
In Gignac’s latest scam, he and a now-dead business partner, Carl Williamson, created a fraudulent investment company, Marden Williamson International, in 2015. They told investors that Gignac was Saudi royalty and that he had access to exclusive deals. A Swiss victim invested US$5 million.
In 2017, he convinced Jeffrey Soffer, the owner of Miami Beach’s Fountainebleau hotel, that he wanted to invest hundreds of millions of dollars into his famed resort. Soffer gave him US$50,000 in gifts. Soffer caught on when he saw Gignac wolfing down bacon and other pork products at meals. He alerted authorities.
- How The Allies Guaranteed A 2nd World War
Authored by Serban V.C. Enache via Hereticus Economicus:
John Maynard Keynes, as a young adviser to the UK Treasury, successfully predicted another great conflict in Europe after what transpired at the so-called peace of Versailles. In preparation for the conference, Keynes argued that it would be better for Germany to owe no reparations, or a maximum of 2 million pound sterling at the most. He was in favor of a general forgiveness of war debts, including for Britain. Lastly, he wanted the US Government to begin a large credit program to quickly restore Europe to prosperity. But the Allies argued differently, and here is what they insisted on in Article 231 of the Versailles treaty on war debt (1919).
“The Allied and Associated Governments affirm and Germany accepts the responsibility of Germany and her allies for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies.”
Let’s compare the cold sentiments of Versailles to the peace of Westphalia from 1648, which put an end to the Thirty Years’ War.
Article I: “[…] And this Peace must be so honest and seriously guarded and nourished that each part furthers the advantage, honor, and benefit of the other… A faithful neighborhood should be renewed and flourish for peace and friendship, and flourish again.”
Article II: “On both sides, all should be forever forgotten and forgiven. What has from the beginning of the unrest, no matter how or where, from one side or the other, happened in terms of hostility, so that neither because of that, nor because of any other reason or pretext, should commit, or allow to happen, any hostility, unfriendliness, difficulty, or obstacle in respect to persons, the status, goods, or security himself, or through others, secretly or openly, directly or indirectly, under the pretense of the authority of the law, or by the way of violence within the Kingdom, or anywhere outside of it, and any earlier contradictory treaties should not stand against this. Instead, all and every, from here as well as from there, both before as well as during the war, committed insults, violent acts, hostilities, damages, and costs, without regard of the person or the issue, should be completely put aside, so that everything, whatever the one could demand from the other under his name, will be forgotten in eternity.”
Keynes described the Versailles conference as a clash of values and world views among the principal leaders, “the cynical traditions of European power politics [vs] the promise of a more enlightened order.” Keynes held Woodrow Wilson as the game maker.
“When President Wilson left Washington he enjoyed a prestige and a moral influence throughout the world unequalled in history. […] The enemy peoples trusted him to carry out the compact he had made with them; and the Allied peoples acknowledged him not as a victor only but almost as a prophet. In addition to this moral influence the realities of power were in his hands.”
In 1919, Keynes wrote The Economic Consequences of the Peace in which he criticized the Versailles treaty and its authors, while accurately predicting its grave socio-economic and political effects: high inflation, stagnation, and revanchism.
He had two main points: that the treaty made it economically impossible for Europe to revive itself, and that the Allies had betrayed the tenets of the Armistice, in which they pledged to the defeated side a degree of fairness with regard to territorial and economic impositions. He judged these violations as a stain on the honor of the Allies and a primary cause for a future conflict. His prediction, that another war would begin in the next twenty years, was surgically precise.
Keynes wrote:
“Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth.
[…] Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.
[…] Economic privation proceeds by easy stages, and so long as men suffer it patiently the outside world cares very little. Physical efficiency and resistance to disease slowly diminish, but life proceeds somehow, until the limit of human endurance is reached at last and counsels of despair and madness stir the sufferers from the lethargy which precedes the crisis. The man shakes himself, and the bonds of custom are loosed. The power of ideas is sovereign, and he listens to whatever instruction of hope, illusion, or revenge is carried to them in the air.
[…] But who can say how much is endurable, or in what direction men will seek at last to escape from their misfortunes?”
Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points [of the Armistice] had been widely disseminated in Germany prior to the end of the war, and were well known by the German public. Sadly, these promises turned out to be nothing but propaganda. The clear gap between this document and the final treaty of Versailles caused great anger in Germany and fueled ultra nationalist sentiments.
There’s a prevalent myth out there, which states that the nazis came to power in Germany due to hyperinflation. It can be easily debunked through the following observations…
Germany did experience hyperinflation in the early 1920s. By October 1922, the mark stood at 130 billion to the dollar. Marks had to be carried in wheelbarrows and life savings were wiped out. Yet the inflationary spiral was brought under control in November 1923 largely through the efforts of Hjalmar Schacht, currency commissioner and president of the Reichsbank and Finance Minister Hans Luther. For an in depth explanation of their policies, see this previous article.
With inflation in check by 1924, Germany entered a time of relative growth. Hitler, while active in German politics, was consigned to the political fringe. Beginning in late 1929, the German economy fell victim to the Great Depression. Industrial production, employment, and sales fell in the early ’30s , while Hitler’s support increased. Price inflation was nonexistent. Rather, by 1933, when Hitler became Chancellor, prices were going down as a result of collapsing demand. Price deflation is good when nominal economic growth is positive, not negative. Tight credit and tremendous unemployment left millions of people with very few marks to spend on anything.
What brought the nazis to power if not hyperinflation? Austerity! During the years of skyrocketing prices, the percentage of the nazis [NSDAP] ranged below 4 percent (see the 1928 elections). The Government imposed harsh austerity measures in the early 1930s [after the hyperinflation had been reined in]; this increased unemployment drastically and it also gave the nazis their first success (18.5 percent in September 1930). Two years later, the ever growing levels of unemployment and poverty drove Hitler to 37.2 percent in the 1932 elections. This graph speaks for itself.
In 5 years time (between ’33 and ’38), the Nazi Government rebuilt the army, built industries and infrastructure, eliminated unemployment, real wage growth was in the double digits – and all of this in a climate of price stability. As such, contrary to popular mythology, the hyperinflation years didn’t bring the nazis to power. What brought them to power was private debt deflation in combination with harsh fiscal austerity.
The end of WW1 wasn’t the end of ‘the war to end all wars.’ Sadly, it was the groundwork for a new one, far deadlier than the first.
In an interview with William Buckley, the founder of the British Union of Fascists, Oswald Mosley, explained why Hitler got into power in Germany and why he didn’t in the UK.
“When I began, in the following six years, right until Roosevelt’s doubling of the price of gold and many other things of that sort, unemployment in Britain was halved. Those six years before Hitler came to power, unemployment in Germany was quadrupled. Now, all those things, and your analysis of the English character, simply depend on the economic situation. Neither fascism, communism, nor any new policy, whether decent, humane, or not, will succeed ever, unless you have a grave economic crisis. That’s the only thing which moves people at all.”
Liberals are so terrified of the profound psycho-political impact of economic crises [second only to war itself and similar in some ways], they dare not speak of such phenomena even when they are happening, nor admit that crises, even unmediated, have severe psychological consequences. The liberals practice this fetishistic disavowal. That’s why the status quo [the so-called center left and center right] is so dangerous to public order and peace itself. It’s a paradox, and paradoxes are nature’s way of telling us [observers] that we’re missing something, that something new waits to be discovered. By shunning alternate points of view and trying to silence them outright, the center misses the dialectic and loses the moral legitimacy in the eyes of increasingly larger sections of the population. I personally hold the creditors of the Versailles treaty, Britain, France, and the US, responsible for nurturing what was to become the most devastating conflict in human history.
- Chinese Warships Cause Surprise In Sydney Harbor
A Chinese frigate, auxiliary replenishment ship, and an amphibious vessel with 700 sailors docked in Sydney, Australia, for an unannounced visit on Monday amid rising anxieties about a rising China in the Indo-Pacific, according to Shanghai Morning Post.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison was on a diplomatic trip at the time, in the Solomon Islands, a critical region in the South Pacific that China is trying to win over.
“It may have been a surprise to others, but it certainly wasn’t a surprise to the government,” Morrison told reporters in Solomon’s capital Honiara. “We have known about that for some time.”
Morrison called the port call a “reciprocal visit because Australian naval vessels have visited China.“
“They were returning after a counter drug trafficking operation in the Middle East,” he added.
There was no announcement, and a relatively muted welcome, as three Chinese warships entered Sydney Harbour this morning. Officially, it’s a friendly visit, strengthening ties between our two navies. #7NEWS pic.twitter.com/w8gqwIj51G
— 7NEWS Brisbane (@7NewsBrisbane) June 3, 2019
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The visit caught many social media users and academics off guard, with some questioning the port call’s timing and why the government failed to give its citizens advance notice.
“The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy visit might have been intended as an act of diplomacy, but it’s turning into a public relations disaster for China,” said John Fitzgerald, a China scholar at Swinburne University in Melbourne.
With closer examination, the vessels appeared to be the Kunlun Shan, an amphibious landing ship; the Luoma Lake, a replenishment ship; and the Xuchang, a modern frigate that is outfitted with advanced missile systems.
Rory Medcalf, the head of Australian National University’s National Security College, tweeted that Beijing is making a serious statement by docking its warships in Sydney.
There was no big welcome as three Chinese warships entered Sydney Harbour today. It’s meant to be a friendly visit strengthening ties between our two navies, but recent tension in the South China Sea meant the arrival was short on fanfare. @alexhart7 #7NEWS pic.twitter.com/KQp12bPsET
— 7NEWS Melbourne (@7NewsMelbourne) June 3, 2019
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Medcalf said historical data shows Chinese military port calls usually involve one vessel, and Sydney isn’t a convenient stopover for vessels returning from the Gulf of Aden.
“Chinese naval visits to Australia have more typically been a lone frigate, not a task group with an amphibious assault ship and 700 personnel,” tweeted Medcalf.
“Sydney is hardly a convenient stopover on their way home from the Gulf of Aden. What’s the story here?” he tweeted again.
“This looks like a serious show of presence in the South Pacific,” he said in another tweet.
John Blaxland, a professor at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University, said: “The Australian Government’s Pacific reset follows a period of some disengagement by Australia and has been, in part at least, triggered by China’s renewed interest in the Pacific – notably the remaining microstates that continue to support Taiwan.”
The port call comes about a week after Australian Navy helicopter pilots were hit by lasers while exercising in the South China Sea.
Australia is determined to be a significant player in the Indo-Pacific region, has recently expanded foreign policy and defense strategy with a greater push to maritime defense and security.
But as shown earlier this week, Australia has to contend with a rising China and has to make a tough decision soon or later that if it wants to continue challenging China in the Indo-Pacific region, it might risk a shooting war down the road.
- Surviving Tiananmen: The Price Of Dissent In China
Authored by Rowena He via The Nation,
Remembering the Tiananmen Movement is not just about repression… it’s about hope.
“Young lovers from China!” a smiling sales lady said as she approached Yu Dongyue and me in a mall on a rainy afternoon in February. It took me a moment to realize that Yu could be taken as an ordinary man with a girlfriend. Yu’s hat covered the scar that he received from brutal beatings. No one could have guessed that he was suffering from severe trauma and mental disorders after 16 years of incarceration marked by torture and solitary confinement as a political prisoner in China.
I had long featured Yu’s story in my courses on Tiananmen and China, but I’d met him for the first time that day in Indianapolis, where he and his sister settled after escaping China in 2009. In spring 1989, when millions of citizens filled the streets all over China demanding political reforms, Yu was a 21-year-old art editor for the Liuyang Daily, a newspaper in Hunan province. The city of Liuyang also happened to be the hometown of Hu Yaobang, the former secretary general of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), whose sudden death on April 15, 1989 triggered a nationwide campaign that would become known as the 1989 Tiananmen Movement.
Hu was a proponent of reform, and students saw his passing as an opportunity to renew their push for change. After students launched a hunger strike in Tiananmen Square, Yu Dongyue and two friends, Yu Zhijian and Lu Decheng, traveled to Beijing to join the protests. Boarding the train, the three men, who would become known in Chinese as the Three Gentlemen of Tiananmen, could not have known it would be a one-way trip.
On May 23, 1989, Yu and his two friends threw eggshells filled with paint at Mao’s portrait in Tiananmen Square. Instead of applauding their audacity, the students turned them over to the authorities.
The students wanted to keep their protests separate from those of the workers. There was never an attempt to form a grand alliance to overthrow the regime, as Beijing would later assert. The students also feared that if they didn’t hand over the three young men, the government would have an excuse to crack down on them.
Paints mars the portrait of Mao Zedong after Yu Dongyue, Yu Zhijian, and Lu Decheng threw paint-filled egg shells at in May, 1989. (AP Photo / Mark Avery)
Ten days later, Chinese soldiers equipped with tanks and AK-47s attacked, nonetheless. On June 4, some 200,000 People’s Liberation Army soldiers were deployed to participate in the lethal action. Hu’s successor as CCP general secretary, Zhao Ziyang, refused to order the assault and was purged. He lived under house arrest until his death in 2005. Thus, the Tiananmen Movement was bracketed by the death of one CCP secretary general and the expulsion of another. The fate of these two reform-minded CCP leaders foreshadowed China’s development ever since.
The Tiananmen Movement remains a taboo topic in China, banned from academic and popular realms. Even the actual number of the dead and wounded remains unknown. In the immediate aftermath, after mass arrests and purges throughout the country, the CCP constructed a narrative portraying the Tiananmen Movement as a Western conspiracy to weaken and divide China. Reporting to the National People’s Congress on June 30, 1989, Beijing Mayor Chen Xitong asserted that the movement was “planned, organized, and premeditated” by those who “unite with all hostile forces overseas and in foreign countries to launch a battle against us to the last.”
The official justification for the clampdown was that the students were “counterrevolutionaries” who threatened the country’s stability and prosperity. Yet, in 1989, they were hoping the regime would transform itself. They were not seeking regime change, just asking the CCP to live up to its ideals. Their actions were rooted in the Chinese tradition of Confucian dissent—helping the rulers to improve, but not seeking to overthrow them.
Yu’s experiences are a testimony to the non-revolutionary nature of the movement. During my visit, Yu repeated the phrase: “This was not done by the students or the people.” After Yu and his two friends defaced Mao’s portrait, the students at Tiananmen had inscribed that sentence on a banner in order to disavow their vandalism. The three young men had not tried to run away, and they wrongly assumed the students would be on their side.
In the end, the Three Gentlemen and the students faced the same charges of counterrevolution. That was the label CCP officials affixed to those who openly disagreed with them. Since the CCP claimed to represent the revolution, anyone criticizing them could be labeled counterrevolutionary. Today, China accuses its critics of “subverting the state,” but, at its core, it’s the same charge.Yu Dongyue was sentenced to 20 years, Lu Decheng to 16 years, and Yu Zhijian to life in prison. Lu escaped to Thailand in 2006, and was later granted asylum in Canada. In 2009, Yu Zhijian and his pregnant wife smuggled themselves out together with Yu Dongyue. They hoped that they could get medical treatment for Yu so that he would recover from his mental disability. Yu’s younger sister fled with her brother in order to take care of him. At great personal cost, she left behind her former husband and her child, neither of whom can leave China to be reunited with her.
The Three Gentlemen of Tiananmen might not have anticipated the severity of the punishment that they received, but they were not naive about the repression of dissent. Being idealistic in China means being selfish to your loved ones. You choose to fight for your cause, uphold your principles, and stand ready to pay the price—but often family members suffer consequences, too. Prohibiting the children of human-rights lawyers from going to school is a vivid recent example.
Three decades on, the mothers of Tiananmen victims still cannot openly mourn their children, and exiled student protesters are banned from returning home, even for a parent’s funeral. Many older supporters of the movement, liberal intellectuals in the 1980s, died in exile. One of the Three Gentlemen, Yu Zhijian, died in Indianapolis in 2017, at the age of 54.
News of Yu Zhijian’s death was accompanied by a photo of his wife kneeling in front of the cardboard box that held his body. Printed on the makeshift coffin were the words, “Handle with care.” On one Chinese website, a comment in English read: “Garbage dead,” another said simply, “Traitor’s ending.”
For the past 30 years, the CCP has promoted historical amnesia, fostered a narrow and xenophobic nationalism, impeded reflection on historical tragedies and injustice, and stoked a growing enthusiasm for international assertiveness. The recent detentions of young communists on college campuses in China is a reminder that it still doesn’t take much to become a target of the state machinery. Those student leftists were simply doing what the government had told them to do “as successors of the Communist cause.” They formed study groups on Maoism and Marxism, and supported workers’ rights in a state where independent unions are forbidden. But once again, the Communists in power are cracking down on the young communists siding with the powerless.
Since the Tiananmen massacre, activists, scholars, and regular citizens have launched a war against forgetting. Many Tiananmen veterans, both inside and outside China, including Liu Xiaobo, the late Nobel Peace Prize laureate who died a political prisoner in 2017, have devoted their lives to the unfinished cause of 1989. Commemoration activities are organized in major cities every year. Tens of thousands of people gather in Hong Kong’s Victoria Park annually to demand truth and justice for those who were violently silenced in 1989. The image of thousands of people holding candles has become as iconic as the Tank Man, reminding us that Tiananmen is not just about repression—it’s about hope. Tiananmen symbolizes the struggle for freedom and human rights. Because this longing for basic rights is universal, history will witness the Tiananmen spirit again and again.
- This New Robot Will Take Millions Of Warehouse Jobs
The automation wave is expected to dramatically reshape the US economy in the 2020s. This disruption will impact the labor force and cause tremendous job losses. By 2030, automation could eliminate 20% to 25% of current jobs — equivalent to 40 million displaced workers, hitting the bottom 90% of Americans the hardest.
A new report from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) shows how warehouse automation is starting to gain traction in Atlanta, the sixth largest warehousing space in the US.
The new, robot-powered warehouse in McDonough, Georgia, is currently undergoing pilot tests and will begin operations in June. Project Verte, a start-up trying to compete with Amazon, is responsible for automating the warehouse.
The Butler system, an advanced autonomous fleet of mobile robots, uses robotic goods-to-person technology for automated put-away, inventory storage, replenishment, and order picking.
AJC said the Bulter robots are like “giant Roombas” that move between 6,000 refrigerator-size shelving units lined up in rows 85 deep within the warehouse. An employee summons the robot with a handheld device, it then uses a jack to lift the shelving unit and transports it to the human picker, who then grabs items out of the bins, scans it and hands it off to the packaging department.
While there are no other fully automated warehouses in Georgia, the closest one is in Jacksonville, Florida, which uses similar Roomba-like robots.
In the next 10.5 years, automation is set to eliminate millions of jobs in the warehouse and logistics space, as well as increase the demand for small to medium-sized automated warehouses.
“I think there’s definitely going to be fewer workers in warehouses, but warehouses are also experiencing labor shortages,” said Nancey Green Leigh, a Georgia Tech professor who studies robots and works with a National Science Foundation grant.
According to AJC, Atlanta has 683 million square feet of warehouse space, making it the sixth-most largest in the country.
Once fully operational, the McDonough warehouse will be able to ship 200,000 items per day, aided by a fleet of robots and 400 human pickers, packers, supervisors and technicians.
Tye Brady, the chief technologist for Amazon, said rising demand for new technologies [automated warehouses] would lead to job losses.
Before the Butler system, human pickers could walk up to 12 miles a day shifting items around the warehouse, said Leigh.
The collision of automation on the labor force will lead to severe economic dislocation that could depress wages and lead to an even wider gap in wealth inequality that would have significant economic and social ramifications. Nevertheless, millions of Americans will lose their jobs.
- The Deep State And The Deep Media
Via Monty Pelerin’s World blog,
To fully understand the Deep State one need focus on matters both inside and outside of government. The Deep State corrupts everything it touches. Today that includes much of the country.
The Deep State corrupted the media.
The first task of any State is to control the information (propaganda) fed to its citizens. Totalitarian states eliminate any free exchange of opinions. The Soviet Union had a state-run newspaper known as Pravda. It was a monopoly in that no other sources legally provided news. The new Russia pretends it has press freedom, but it controls the media. So does China. Severe penalties, including murder, are used to obtain conformity.
In the US, we say we have freedom and a “free press.” But do we?
The answer regarding freedom is increasingly negative, at least when compared with our history. The issue regarding a “free press” is a bit more complicated. America’s press, while not owned by the State, is under similar restrictions as the press in more totalitarian states. These restrictions are not officially codified in law but are understood by the media. They result from the fact that the US government has the power to bankrupt any person or corporation it chooses to target.
The unlimited resources of the Deep State make it impossible for individuals or corporations to defend themselves. If they come after you, you will lose. Your limited resources or the resources of even the largest corporation are no match for the unlimited resources of the Deep State. Admission of guilt (even when not guilty) and plea deals (often admitting guilt), are generally the least costly alternative to settling any argument with the State. Often it is necessary to survive such assaults.
With this kind of power and the willingness to use it, the Deep State need not own corporations.
The recognition that the Deep State can “kill” any corporation it chooses explains why the “free press” (or literally any other person or company) is not truly free. There is no corporation or individual that does not break the law every day in some manner. These violations are not intentional nor are they even known by the actor. There are too many laws that none of us don’t violate several of them, unknowingly, every day.
This type of society is not socialism in the normal sense. Actually, it is more like fascism where private ownership is allowed but behavior is so subject to government rules and regulations that it is government that actually drives behavior.
While we think of the media as independent companies operated in local markets, they are hardly that. Most media giants control local markets. US media (as most large corporations) is “owned” by the State because of the State’s arbitrary and immense regulatory and punative powers. To understand how easy it is to influence/control media, this information sent by a reader is useful:
This is what you call a “stacked deck.” Info like this can be a great benefit to the general public and help more and more people to wake up to who their real enemies are
IF YOU HAD A HUNCH THE NEWS SYSTEM WAS SOMEWHAT RIGGED AND YOU COULDN’T PUT YOUR FINGER ON IT, THIS MIGHT HELP YOU SOLVE THE PUZZLE.
ABC News executive producer Ian Cameron is married to Susan Rice, Obama’s former National Security Adviser.
CBS President David Rhodes is the brother of Ben Rhodes, Obama’s Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications.
ABC News correspondent Claire Shipman is married to former Obama Whitehouse Press Secretary Jay Carney.
ABC News and Univision reporter Matthew Jaffe is married to Katie Hogan, Obama’s former Deputy Press Secretary .
ABC President Ben Sherwood is the brother of Obama’s former Special Adviser Elizabeth Sherwood.
CNN President Virginia Moseley is married to former Hillary Clinton’s Deputy Secretary Tom Nides.
This is “Huge” and is only a ‘partial’ list since the same holds true for NBC/MSNBC and most media outlets.
Trump has been right all along. Fake News is generated by these incestuous relationships .h/t to Roscoe
Obviously the relationships are more numerous and deeper than those listed above. Compounding the executive conflicts is the crossover between politics and journalism. George Stephanopoulos, John Brennan, Jason Chaffetz, James Clapper and others slide easily from the Deep State into the Deep Media. The reverse is also common. This incestuousness is not limited to the media.
- Trade War Backfires On US Hegemony: China May Shift Production To Russia
President Trump’s efforts to force China to ‘fair’ trade (along with sanctions and/or tariff threats against many other nations in the world) appears more likely to destabilize the unipolar US hegemon than support it.
Many multipolar-supporting nations are hording gold, seeking alternative payment systems, and creating bilateral trade agreements between themselves in an effort to skirt US threats (or merely to defend their own sovereignty in the long-run).
While we have seen China pushing the petro-yuan (rather anti-climactically for now) and Europe pushing INSTEX to enable trade with Iran (still unused for now), RT reports the latest shift away from the US ‘system’ and towards multi-polar collaboration is coming from China, where small and medium-sized enterprises, under pressure from Washington’s trade war, are studying the possibility of moving production to Russia.
According to the secretary general of the China Overseas Development Association (CODA), He Zhenwei, “many Chinese export-oriented small and medium-sized enterprises are now facing difficulties.”
“The US has already raised its duties on Chinese goods from 10 percent to 25 percent, which is tantamount to closing its doors. In case American consumers agree to pay more out of their pockets, these companies will be able to raise prices on products by 25 percent, which is hardly probable,” he said.
In such harsh conditions, Chinese companies are now struggling to maintain their existence.
“They should think about moving production to Russia,” He said, adding that “Chinese goods produced in Russia could be further sold in the United States and even in Europe.”
As a reminder, trade between Russia and China saw historic growth last year of around 25 percent to US$108 billion, beating all forecasts. According to Russian President Vladimir Putin, China is and will continue to be Russia’s number one foreign trade partner. He recently said that the two countries are enjoying their best trade and economic ties ever… not something that Makes America Great Again, for sure.
- For Tech Giants, A Cautionary Tale From 19th Century Railroads On The Limits Of Competition
Authored by Richard White via ConsortiumNews.com,
The tech monopoly giants have a lot to learn from the railroad monopolies of the 19th Century during the First Gilded Age…
Late 19th-century Americans loved railroads, which seemed to eradicate time and space, moving goods and people more cheaply and more conveniently than ever before. And they feared railroads because in most of the country it was impossible to do business without them.
Businesses, and the republic itself, seemed to be at the mercy of the monopoly power of railroad corporations. American farmers, businessmen and consumers thought of competition as a way to ensure fairness in the marketplace. But with no real competitors over many routes, railroads could charge different rates to different customers. This power to decide economic winners and losers threatened not only individual businesses but also the conditions that sustained the republic.
An 1882 political cartoon portrays the railroad industry as a monopolistic octopus, with its tentacles controlling many businesses. (G. Frederick Keller)
That may sound familiar. As a historian of that first Gilded Age, I see parallels between the power of the railroads and today’s internet giants like Verizon and Comcast. The current regulators – the Federal Communications Commission’s Republican majority – and many of its critics both embrace a solution that 19th-century Americans tried and dismissed: market competition.
Monopolies as Natural and Efficient
In the 1880s, the most sophisticated railroad managers and some economists argued that railroads were “natural monopolies,” the inevitable consequence of an industry that required huge investments in rights of way over land, constructing railways, and building train engines and rail cars.
Competition was expensive and wasteful. In 1886 the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway and the Missouri Pacific Railroad both built railroad tracks heading west from the Great Bend of the Arkansas River in Kansas to Greeley County on the western border, roughly 200 miles away.
The tracks ran parallel to each other, about two miles apart. Charles Francis Adams, president of the Union Pacific Railroad, called this redundancy the “maddest specimen of railroad construction of which” he had ever heard. And then his own railroad built new tracks into western Kansas, too.
After ruinous bouts of competition like this, rival railroad companies would agree to cooperate, pooling the business in certain areas and setting common rates. These agreements effectively established monopolies, even if more than one company was involved.
Monopolies as Unfairly Subsidized
Anti-monopolists who opposed the railroads’ power argued that monopolies originated not as a result of efficient investment strategies, but rather from special privileges afforded by the government. Railroads had the ability to condemn land to build their routes. They got subsidies of land, loans, bonds and other financial aid from federal, state and local governments. Their political contributions and favors secured them supporters in legislatures, Congress and the courts.
As stronger railroads bought up weaker companies and divided up markets with the remaining competitors, the dangers of monopoly became more and more apparent. Railroad companies made decisions on innovation based on the effects on their bottom line, not societal values.
For instance, the death toll was enormous: In 1893, 1,567 trainmen died and 18,877 were injured on the rails. Congress enacted the first national railroad safety legislation that year because the companies had insisted it was too expensive to put automatic braking systems and couplers on freight trains.
But a monopoly’s great economic and societal danger was its ability to decide who succeeded in business and who failed. For example, in 1883 the Northern Pacific Railway raised the rates it charged O.A. Dodge’s Idaho lumber company. The new rates left Dodge unable to compete with the rival Montana Improvement Company, reputedly owned by Northern Pacific executives and investors. Dodge knew the game was up. All he could do was ask if they wanted to buy his company.
For anti-monopolists, Dodge’s dilemma went to the heart of the issue. Monopolies were intrinsically wrong because they unfairly influenced businesses’ likelihood of success or failure. In an 1886 report on the railroad industry, the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Interstate Commerce agreed, stating clearly that the “great desideratum is to secure equality.”
Turning to Regulators for Help
To achieve equality, anti-monopolists wanted more government regulation and enforcement. By the late 1880s, some railroad executives were starting to agree. Their efforts at cooperation had failed because railroads treated each other no better than they did their customers. As Charles Francis Adams put it, his own industry’s “method of doing business is founded upon lying, cheating, and stealing: all bad things.”
The consensus was that the railroads needed the federal government to enforce the rules, bringing greater efficiency and ultimately lower rates. But Congress ran into a problem: If an even, competitive playing field depended on regulation, the marketplace wasn’t truly open or free.
The solution was no clearer then than it is now. The technologies of railroads inherently gave large operators advantages of efficiency and profitability. Large customers also got benefits: John D. Rockefeller of Standard Oil, for example, could guarantee large shipments and provide his own tank cars – so he got special rates and rebates. Newcomers and small enterprises were left out.
Some reformers suggested accepting monopolies, so long as their rates were carefully regulated. But the calculations were complex: Charges by the mile ignored the fact that most costs came not from transport but rather from loading, unloading and transferring freight. And even the best bookkeepers had a hard time unraveling railway accounts.
Managing Power
The simplest solution, advanced by the Populist party and others, was the most difficult politically:nationalize the railroad routes. Turning them into a publicly owned network, like today’s interstate highway system, would give the government the responsibility to create clear, fair rules for private companies wishing to use them. But profitable railroads opposed it tooth and nail, and skeptical reformers did not want the government to buy derelict and unprofitable railroads.
The current controversy about the monopolistic power of internet service providers echoes those concerns from the first Gilded Age. As anti-monopolists did in the 19th century, advocates of an open internet argue that regulation will advance competition by creating a level playing field for all comers, big and small, resulting in more innovation and better products. (There was even a radical, if short-lived, proposal to nationalize high-speed wireless service.)
However, no proposed regulations for an open internet address the existing power of either the service providers or the “Big Five” internet giants: Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft. Like Standard Oil, they have the power to wring enormous advantages from the internet service providers, to the detriment of smaller competitors.
The most important element of the debate – both then and now – is not the particular regulations that are or are not enacted. What’s crucial is the wider concerns about the effects on society. The Gilded Age’s anti-monopolists had political and moral concerns, not economic ones. They believed, as many in the U.S. still do, that a democracy’s economy should be judged not only – nor even primarily – by its financial output. Rather, success is how well it sustains the ideals, values and engaged citizenship on which free societies depend.
When monopoly threatens something as fundamental as the free circulation of information and the equal access of citizens to technologies central to their daily life, the issues are no longer economic.
- China Issues Guidelines For Ranking 1.3 Billion Social Credit Scores
China’s top economic adviser has issued guidelines over how to introduce incentives that can boost a person’s social credit score, according to ECNS.
Issued by the National Development and Reform Commission, the new guidelines include 15 preferential policies to evaluate if a person should be considered a ‘role model’ in terms of creditworthiness.
Outstanding individuals in the system can freely acquire personal credit reports a number of times in a year, and freely search information in the national credit information online platform, according to the regulation.
They will also enjoy fast-tracked services when applying for administrative approval, qualification reviews, credit cards or personal loans, patents or copyright registration, and quick refunds from financial institutions or platform companies. –ECNS
The guidelines also state that role models will have priority access to public elderly care services as well as preferential treatment when applying for civil service positions.
Cities are encouraged to reward outstanding individuals with benefits in education, housing, employment, medicare and and administrative approvals.
“Keeping trust is glorious and breaking trust is disgraceful,” is the guiding ideology of Beijing’s attempt to crack down on rampant corruption, financial scams, corporate scandals and petty crimes.
In the eastern city of Hangzhou, “pro-social” activity includes donating blood and volunteer work, while violating traffic laws lowers an individual’s credit score. In Zhoushan, an island near Shanghai, no-nos include smoking or driving while using a mobile phone, vandalism, walking a dog without a leash and playing loud music in public. Too much time playing video games and circulating fake news can also count against individuals. According to U.S. magazine Foreign Policy, residents of the northeastern city of Rongcheng adapted the system to include penalties for online defamation and spreading religion illegally. –Washington Post
“Untrustworthy conduct” by both business and individuals includes failure to repay loans, illegal fund collection, false and misleading advertising, swindling customers, and – for individuals, acts such as taking reserved seats on trains or causing trouble in hospitals.
According to a February report by SCMP, around 17.46 million people who are “discredited” were prevented from buying plane tickets, while 5.47 million were disallowed from purchasing tickets to China’s high-speed train system.
Legal experts have expressed concern that the accelerated use of the creditworthiness system trample on what little privacy rights they have in China.
“Many people cannot pay their debt because they are too poor but will be subject to this kind of surveillance and this kind of public shaming,” said one attorney quoted by SCMP, who added “It violates the rights of human beings.”
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