Sep 07

Today’s News 7th September 2018

  • China Sought To Intercept British Warship, Claiming Expanded Territorial Waters

    In but the latest incident among a growing list that point to China’s expanding claims on the South China Sea, a British naval ship carrying Royal Marines had a confrontation with Chinese military vessels as it reportedly traveled through international waters.

    The incident took place near the Chinese-controlled Paracel Islands in South China Sea, and while the UK claims its ship stayed only in recognized international waters, China’s foreign ministry is disputing that claim, calling the British navy’s actions a “provocation”. 

    HMS Albion, via UK Defence Journal 

    Reuters reports of the disputed incident: 

    The HMS Albion, a 22,000 ton amphibious warship carrying a contingent of Royal Marines, exercised its “freedom of navigation” rights as it passed near the Paracel Islands, two sources, who were familiar with the matter but who asked not to be identified, told Reuters.

    The vessel was traveling to Ho Chi Minh City, where it safely docked after the encounter which according to a Reuters source involved China deploying “a frigate and two helicopters to challenge the British vessel, but both sides remained calm during the encounter.”

    The Paracel Islands are hotly disputed territory, and though occupied entirely by China are also claimed by Vietnam and Taiwan, the British vessel may have entered to within twelve nautical miles of the Paracels, which is the internationally recognized territorial boundary demarcating where sovereign waters extend.

    Britain may have been testing China’s resolve regarding its recent claims to the Paracels. 

    Two major flashpoint areas in the South China Sea: the Paracel and Sratly islands. 

    The incident took place on August 31, but has only now been revealed. China’s Foreign Ministry describes it as an act of aggression with no forewarning or permission to enter what it claims is its territorial waters. China’s foreign ministry described in a statement:

    The relevant actions by the British ship violated Chinese law and relevant international law, and infringed on China’s sovereignty. China strongly opposes this and has lodged stern representations with the British side to express strong dissatisfaction.

    “China strongly urges the British side to immediately stop such provocative actions, to avoid harming the broader picture of bilateral relations and regional peace and stability,” the statement continued. “China will continue to take all necessary measures to defend its sovereignty and security.”

    A spokesman for the Royal Navy negated the claim, and responded with: “HMS Albion exercised her rights for freedom of navigation in full compliance with international law and norms.”

    Current Britain-China relations have been described as “delicate” of late given London’s seeking a post-Brexit free trade deal from Beijing, which has suggested what’s being hailed as a potential future “golden era” in ties. 

    In previous years multiple reports have documented an extensive Chinese military build-up in the Parcel Islands, including the deployment of Russian-made surface-to-air missiles, which China’s Defense Ministry long ago confirmed, saying it’s lawful for China “to deploy defense facilities within its territory, and the facilities have existed for years.”

    The area is coveted for its potential oil and gas resources, and China’s heavy deployment and defense of the region has increased tensions among territorial claimants. 

    This latest incident follows a string of similar encounters throughout the summer involving various international vessels and aircraft, including a last August incident where a US Navy plane flying 16,500 feet over the South China Sea was unexpectedly contacted by the Chinese and warned to “Leave immediately and keep out to avoid any misunderstanding”.

    Beijing has laid down an extensive claim in what the rest of the world considers open international waters. China’s so called “nine-dash line” encircles as much as 90 percent of the contested waters in the South China Sea, and runs up to 2,000 kilometers from the Chinese mainland and within a few hundred kilometers of Malaysia, Vietnam, and the Philippines — all within this vaguely defined zone Beijing claims as within its “historical maritime rights”.

    The UN estimates that one-third of global shipping passes through the expansive area claimed by China — and crucially there’s thought to exist significant untapped oil and natural gas reserves in region. 

    Despite many Chinese warnings threatening the US, UK, and Australian vessels of late, which also involves aggressive encounters with the Philipines’ armed forcies, Washington and London have made it clear that they will maintain and increase an active presence in the region.

  • It's Africa's Choice: AFRICOM Or 'The New Silk Roads'

    Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Asia Times,

    When China calls, all Africa answers. And Beijing’s non-politicization of investments and non-interference in internal affairs is paying off big time…

    The dogs of war – cold, hot, trade, tariffs – bark while the Chinese caravan plies the New Silk Roads. Call it a leitmotif of the young 21st century.

    At the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) in Beijing, President Xi Jinping has just announced a hefty US$60 billion package to complement another US$60 billion pledged at the 2015 summit.

    That breaks down to $15 billion in grants and interest-free loans; $20 billion in credit lines; a $10 billion fund for development financing; $5 billion to finance imports from Africa; and waving the debt of the poorest African nations diplomatically linked to China.

    When China calls, all Africa answers.

    First, we had ministers from 53 African nations plus the African Union (AU) Commission approving the Beijing Declaration and the FOCAC Action Plan (2019-21).

    Then, after the $60 billion announcement, we had Beijing signing memorandums of understanding (MOUs) with nine African nations – including South Africa and Egypt – related to the New Silk Roads/Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Additionally, other 20 African nations are discussing further cooperation agreements.

    Debt trap or integration?

    That does not exactly paint the picture of the BRI as a vicious debt trap enabling China to take over Africa’s top strategic assets. On the contrary, the BRI is seen as integrating with Africa’s own Agenda 2063, a “strategic framework for the socio-economic transformation of the continent over the next 50 years” tackling unemployment, inequality and poverty.

    Apart from letting the numbers speak for themselves, Xi deftly counter-punched the current, massive BRI demonization campaign:

    “Only the people of China and Africa have the right to comment on whether China-Africa cooperation is doing well … No one should deny the significant achievement of China-Africa cooperation based on their assumptions and speculation.”

    And once again Xi felt the need to stress the factor that does seduce, Africa-wide – Chinese non-politicization of investments, and Chinese non-interference in the internal affairs of African nations.

    This comes right after Xi’s speech celebrating the five years of BRI, on Aug. 27, when he stressed Beijing’s organizing foreign policy concept for the foreseeable future has nothing to do with a “China club.”

    What that reveals, in fact, is a Deng Xiaoping-style “crossing the river while feeling the stones” fine-tuning, bent on correcting mistakes in what is still the BRI’s planning stages, and including the approval of a mechanism of dispute resolution for myriad projects.

    African leaders seem to be on board. For South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, the FOCAC “refutes the view that a new colonialism is taking hold in Africa, as our detractors would have us believe.” AU chairman Paul Kagame, also the president of Rwanda, emphasized a stronger Africa was an opportunity for investment, “rather than a problem or a threat.”

    A ‘non-enduring contingency location’?

    According to the China Chamber of International Commerce, over 3,300 Chinese companies have invested Africa-wide in telecommunications, transportation, power generation, industrial parks, water supply, rental business for construction machinery, retail, schools, hotels and hospitals.

    China is, in fact, upgrading its investments in Africa beyond infrastructure, manufacturing, agriculture and energy and mineral imports. China is Africa’s top trading partner since 2009; trade expanded 14% in 2017, reaching $170 billion.

    In November, Shanghai will host the first China International Import Expo – jointly managed by the Ministry of Commerce and the Shanghai municipal government, a convenient stage for African nations to promote their proverbial “market potential.”

    Xi depicted as a new and ruthless Mao? China mired in abysmal corruption? China’s massive internal debt about to explode like a volcano from hell? None of this seems to stick Africa-wide. What does impress is that in three decades, a one-party system managed to multiply China’s GDP per capita by a factor of 17. From a Global South point of view, the lesson is “they must be doing something right.”

    The ultra-sensitive military front

    In parallel, there’s no evidence Africa will cease to be a key BRI node for investment; a market with an expanding middle class receptive to Chinese imports; and most of all, strategic reasons.

    And then there’s the ultra-sensitive military front.

    China’s first overseas military base was inaugurated on Aug. 1, 2017 – on the exact 90th anniversary of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The official Beijing spin is that Djibouti is a base for peacekeeping and humanitarian missions, and to fight pirates based on the Yemeni and Somali coastlines.

    But it goes way beyond that. Djibouti is a geostrategic dream; on the northwest Indian Ocean and at the southern path to the Red Sea, en route to the Suez Canal and with access to the Gulf of Aden, the Arabian Gulf and most of all the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait. This prime economic connectivity translates into transit control of 20% of all global exports and 10% of total annual oil exports.

    Not accidentally, Djibouti’s top capital source is China. Chinese companies fund nearly 40% of Djibouti’s top investment projects. That includes the $490 million Addis Ababa-Djibouti railway, whose strategic importance far exceeds elephants, zebras and antelopes“roaming freely alongside a railway.”

    Djibouti’s aim, as expressed by President Ismail Omar Guelleh – who visited Xi in Beijing last November – is to position itself as the number one connectivity/transshipment node for all of Africa.

    Now compare it with the Pentagon’s AFRICOM agenda – as in an array of Special Ops deploying nearly 100 secret missions across 20 African nations at any given time.

    As Nick Turse extensively documented in his must-read book Tomorrow’s Battlefield, there are at least 50 US military bases Africa-wide – ranging from what AFRICOM designates as “forward operating sites” to fuzzy “cooperative security locations” or “non-enduring contingency locations.” Not to mention 36 AFRICOM bases in 24 African nations that have not previously made it to official reports.

    What this spells out, once again, is further evidence of the ever-replicating Empire of Bases. And that brings us to Africa’s stark “contingency location” choice. In the ultra-high-stakes development game, who’re you gonna call? FOCAC and the New Silk Roads, or Ghostbusters AFRICOM?

  • In Eastern Europe And Russia, Reminders Of Communist Horrors Are Everywhere

    Submitted by William Anderson of Mises Institute

    As our commuter train stopped at the Riga suburb of Tornakalns, we saw a small railroad boxcar standing by itself on the side. To the passenger from the train, it was a small memorial; to a Latvian nearly 80 years ago, it was at worst a death sentence and at best, transportation to exile in a Siberian labor camp.

    Our train was taking us from an afternoon at Jurmala, the resort located by the Gulf of Riga, a place where leading Communist Party members from the old U.S.S.R. went to spend vacations, but today, just another place to enjoy the warm sunshine of the Latvian summer. The horrors of the Soviet invasion of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania in 1940 are long behind, surfacing only in the image of the boxcar and the Museum of the Occupation, now located in the former U.S. embassy in downtown Riga.

    (The USA built a new embassy near the Riga International Airport, a beige, boxy construction that contrasts with the lovely embassies on the famed Embassy Row in Riga, featuring some of the world’s most prominent Art Nouveau facades. When the new embassy was being constructed, locals thought it was a new prison, which, given the USA’s penchant for imprisoning people, probably was not far off the mark.)

    The three Baltic nations finally broke away from the U.S.S.R. in 1990 and 1991, but the Museum of the Occupation provides reminders of how the ancestors of people walking freely about the towns and cities of these countries suffered, and suffered greatly at the hands of those promoting the socialist ideology that even today won’t die. How thousands were summarily executed at the hands of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police. How thousands more were herded into those tiny boxcars and shipped to the hinterlands of Siberia, many to die brutal deaths in labor camps. All because they were people who worked in government or taught in schools and universities of the Baltic nations, or who owned businesses, or who were just inconvenient to Soviet authorities. All on the ultimate order of Josef Stalin, the Soviet dictator called “Uncle Joe” by American journalists and by presidents Franklin Roosevelt and, later, Harry Truman.

    American publications like the New York Times were so in love with the ideals of the Bolshevik Revolution (and still are, given the NYT’s series last year lamenting the fall of the Soviet Union and its Eastern Europe satellites) that they could not be bothered to tell the truth about what the communists did in the Baltics, just as they denied that Stalin had created a famine that killed more Ukranians than Jews that were killed in the Holocaust . Even now, as one looks at photos of the Baltic people being shot, arrested, buried in mass graves, and forced into labor camps, one is reminded that the Soviet Union did not provide a new way of living, as socialist apologists and American journalists have claimed, but rather just another way of dying – and dying violently.

    But that was then. Today, the Baltic nations are wealthier and freer than they were in the days of Soviet occupation. For that matter, Russia also is freer and wealthier than it was when the Hammer and Sickle flew over the Kremlin. After spending time in Riga and Tallinn, Estonia, along with Helsinki, Finland (we were there the day of the Trump-Putin summit), we drove into Russia.

    Our first stop was at the border, which passed without incident and certainly was not the ordeal we would face a week later when re-entering the United States. Soon after entering Russia, we came to Vyborg, which once belonged to Finland before being seized by the U.S.S.R. in the brief 1939-40 war between Finland and the Soviet Union.

    Although Russia has moved on from its days of communism, it is clear that Vyborg has been slower with the transition. The city reminded me of what I saw in East Germany in 1982, with its drab and hulking Soviet-era high-rise apartment buildings and general shabbiness. The famous castle that dominates the edge of town is in scaffolding and one wonders how long that has been the situation. At least the coffee we had at the small coffee shop near the castle was very good, something I doubt would have been the case in the days of Commieland.

    So, we drove onto St. Petersburg mostly on a two-lane road cut through the boreal forest of the northern latitudes. It was here that I witnessed something that amazed all of us – how vehicle drivers cooperated to turn two lanes into de facto four lanes of traffic.

    As faster drivers moved to pass slower vehicles, the slower vehicles would move onto the asphalt shoulder and even as our bus moved over the center line, the oncoming traffic would shift to the right, too. It all was spontaneously coordinated and everyone on the road was in on the scheme.

    Entering St. Petersburg was an experience in itself. With five million people spread over a number of islands, we saw new high-rises standing alongside the old Soviet-era apartment buildings. No one, however, comes to St. Petersburg to see the relics of the U.S.S.R. Instead, they come to see the czarist palaces and the stunning 18thand 19th century architecture that dominates the city. It may be the birthplace of the Bolshevik Revolution, but people come to pay homage to the way of life the Bolsheviks wanted to destroy and to Czar Nicholas II and his family, infamously and brutally murdered on Lenin’s orders in 1918.

    A century later, the bones of the last royal family of Russia lie safely in St. Peter and Paul Cathedral. Despite more than 70 years of communist rule, and despite all of the blood spilled to keep the likes of Lenin, Stalin, and the others in power, and despite the massive propaganda that ordinary people in the U.S.S.R. had to endure, St. Petersburg is the city of the czars, not the Bolsheviks.

    Parts of St. Petersburg are run down – as nearly the entire city was during the days of communism – but other parts of it absolutely are amazing to see. Likewise, I enjoyed interacting with the locals and especially the young people that made up most of the workforce of our hotel, from running the desks to cleaning our rooms. The legendary dour Soviet worker was replaced by a competent employee who patiently answered our questions and took care of whatever we needed.

    For all of the talk in the USA that Russia is a dictatorship under the iron thumb of Vladimir Putin, Russia did not seem like a dictatorship. Our Russian tour guide often would take a swipe at Putin (including likening his face to a painting of dogs at the Hermitage) and life itself there seemed to have the kind of normalcy that could not have been possible when people were compelled to inform on one another.

    The St. Petersburg we visited was not the Leningrad that Logan Robinson described in his humorous 1982 book An American in Leningrad , which described life as a post-graduate student living among Russian students and developing friendships with local writers, artists, and musicians, people who often harassed, persecuted, and arrested by local authorities. That city was an armed camp full of soldiers and had been relegated to being a backwater by Joseph Stalin and his successors who made Moscow the Soviet “showplace,” leaving the city founded by Peter the Great to succumb to the northerly elements.

    The citizens of the Baltic countries were not the only ones suffering under communism. No other city in the U.S.S.R. underwent the horror of a 900-day siege by German armies during World War II. Disease and starvation were rampant, but Leningrad held out. In “rewarding” the city for its courage and fortitude, Stalin reinstituted the infamous Purges shortly after the war ended, killing party members, writers, intellectuals, artists, and anyone else Stalin might have deemed even an imaginary threat. On top of that, the first Five-Year Plan after the war had Leningrad being the last city to be rebuilt.

    Americans cannot fathom what it is like to have entire cities destroyed or badly-damaged by bombs and artillery and have ruthless armies fight each other over their territories. Nor can we imagine having governments carry out massive executions of people whose only “crime” was not being what the government leadership wanted them to be. We cannot imagine the starvation, the disease, and watching family and friends be shipped off to places like Siberia where they surely would die terrible deaths.

    Yet, as I sat in the Old Town section of Riga eating and drinking and listening to live music, I strained to imagine the place as a battle zone with death and destruction all around where now I sat. I imagined the stores that now are full of goods and restaurants with food and drink being empty or stocked with subpar merchandise in the aftermath of the war as the Soviets imposed their primitive communist system and oppressed the people in the name of “liberating” them for many decades until they finally left in the early 1990s.

    No, I cannot see people in our cities having experienced anything like what the people of the Baltics and St. Petersburg had to tolerate for decades. And, yet, there are people in high places in the USA, those at the New York Times and elsewhere in the media and in academe that believe that communism had brought in a superior civilization – if only those blinded by capitalism had the courage and foresight to see what these “intellectuals” were imagining they saw.

    I recently saw a photograph of American Antifa protesters holding up a communist flag with the hammer-and-sickle and images of Mao, Lenin, and Marx. Perhaps they and the editors of the New York Times want to see the USA embrace a system that others that have lived under it now reject, and reject vehemently. Given that Antifa increasingly is providing shock troops for the causes espoused by prominent members of the Democratic Party like Bernie Sanders, the new drive for communism might not be as fringe as one might hope, and if a century of bloodshed, murder, vast prison systems, and starvation won’t convince the advocates of communism among American millennials, then perhaps nothing will.

    Perhaps the ultimate irony will be that Americans of the future might have to travel to the former U.S.S.R. in order to see free people and see a relatively free economy. One hopes not, but the daily onslaught of socialism into our body politic says this no longer is an impossible scenario.

    Bill Anderson is a professor of economics at Frostburg State University in Frostburg, Maryland.

  • Johnstone: Are We Being Played?

    Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

    If any evidence existed to be found that Donald Trump had illegally colluded with the Russian government to rig the 2016 presidential election, that evidence would have been picked up by the sprawling surveillance networks of the US and its allies and leaked to the Washington Post before Obama left office.

    Russiagate is like a mirage. From a distance it looks like a solid, tangible thing, but when you actually move in to examine it critically you find nothing but gaping plot holes, insinuation, innuendo, conflicting narratives, bizarre mental contortions to avoid acknowledging contradictory information, a few arrests for corruption and process crimes, and a lot of hot air. The whole thing has been held together by nothing but the confident-sounding assertions of pundits and politicians and sheer, mindless repetition. And, as we approach the two year mark since this president’s election, we have not seen one iota of movement toward removing him from office. The whole thing’s a lie, and the smart movers and shakers behind it are aware that it is a lie.

    And yet they keep beating on it. Day after day after day after day it’s been Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia. Instead of attacking this president for his many, many real problems in a way that will do actual damage, they attack this fake blow-up doll standing next to him in a way that never goes anywhere and never will, like a pro wrestler theatrically stomping on the canvass next to his downed foe.

    What’s up with that?

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    As you doubtless already know by now, the New York Times has made the wildly controversial decision to publish an anonymous op-ed reportedly authored by “a senior official in the Trump administration.” The op-ed’s author claims to be part of a secret coalition of patriots who dislike Trump and are “working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.” These “worst inclinations” according to the author include trying to make peace with Moscow and Pyongyang, being rude to longtime US allies, saying mean things about the media, being “anti-trade”, and being “erratic”. The possibility of invoking the 25th Amendment is briefly mentioned but dismissed. The final paragraphs are spent gushing about John McCain for no apparent reason.

    I strongly encourage you to read the piece in its entirety, because for all the talk and drama it’s generating, it doesn’t actually make any sense. While you are reading it, I encourage you to keep the following question in mind: what could anyone possibly gain by authoring this and giving it to the New York Times?

    Seriously, what could be gained? The op-ed says essentially nothing, other than to tell readers to relax and trust in anonymous administration insiders who are working against the bad guys on behalf of the people (which is interestingly the exact same message of the right-wing 8chan conspiracy phenomenon QAnon, just with the white hats and black hats reversed). Why would any senior official risk everything to publish something so utterly pointless? Why risk getting fired (or risk losing all political currency in the party if NYTAnon is Mike Pence, as has been theorized) just to communicate something to the public that doesn’t change or accomplish anything? Why publicly announce your undercover conspiracy to undermine the president in a major news outlet at all?

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    What are the results of this viral op-ed everyone’s talking about? So far it’s a bunch of Democratic partisans making a lot of excited whooping noises, and Trump loyalists feeling completely vindicated in the belief that all of their conspiracy theories have been proven correct. Many rank-and-file Trump haters are feeling a little more relaxed and complacent knowing that there are a bunch of McCain-loving “adults in the room” taking care of everything, and many rank-and-file Trump supporters are more convinced than ever that Donald Trump is a brave populist hero leading a covert 4-D chess insurgency against the Deep State. In other words, everyone’s been herded into their respective partisan stables and trusting the narratives that they are being fed there.

    And, well, I just think that’s odd.

    Did you know that Donald Trump is in the WWE Hall of Fame? He was inducted in 2013, and he’s been enthusiastically involved in pro wrestling for many years, both as a fan and as a performer. He’s made more of a study on how to draw a crowd in to the theatrics of a choreographed fight scene than anyone this side of the McMahon family (a member of whom happens to be part of the Trump administration currently).

    You don’t have to get into any deep conspiratorial rabbit hole to consider the possibility that all this drama and conflict is staged from top to bottom. Commentators on all sides routinely crack jokes about how the mainstream media pretends to attack Trump but secretly loves him because he brings them amazing ratings. Anyone with their eyes even part way open already knows that America’s two mainstream parties feign intense hatred for one another while working together to pace their respective bases into accepting more and more neoliberal exploitation at home and more and more neoconservative bloodshed abroad. They spit and snarl and shake their fists at each other, then cuddle up and share candy when it’s time for a public gathering. Why should this administration be any different?

    I believe that a senior Trump administration official probably did write that anonymous op-ed. I do not believe that they were moved to write it out of compassion for the poor Americans who are feeling emotionally stressed about the president. I believe it was written and published for the same reason many other things are written and published in mainstream media: because we are all being played.

    The more I study US politics, the less useful I find it to think of it in political terms. The two-headed one party system exists to give Americans the illusion of choice while advancing the agendas of the plutocratic class which owns and operates both parties, yes, but even more importantly it’s a mechanism of narrative control. If you can separate the masses into two groups based on extremely broad ideological characteristics, you can then funnel streamlined “us vs them” narratives into each of the two stables, with the white hats and black hats reversed in each case. Now you’ve got Republicans cheering for the president and Democrats cheering for the CIA, for the FBI, and now for a platoon of covert John McCains alleged to be operating on the inside of Trump’s own administration. Everyone’s cheering for one aspect of the US power establishment or another.

    Whom does this dynamic serve? Not you.

    If you belonged to a ruling class, obviously your goal would be to ensure your subjects’ continued support for you. In a corporatist oligarchy, the rulers are secret and the subjects don’t know they’re ruled, and power is held in place with manipulation and with money. As such a ruler your goal would be to find a way to manipulate the masses into supporting your agendas, and, since people are different, you’d need to use different narratives to manipulate them. You’d have to divide them, tell them different stories, turn them against each other, play them off one another, suck them in to the tales you are spinning with the theater of enmity and heroism.

    As a result of the New York Times op-ed, if this administration engages in yet another of its many, many establishment capitulations (let’s say by attacking the Syrian government again), Trump’s supporters won’t see it as his fault; it will be blamed on the deep state insiders in his administration who have been working to thwart his agendas of peace and harmony. Meanwhile those who see Trump as a heel won’t experience any cognitive dissonance if any of the establishment agendas they support are carried out, because they can give the credit to the secret hero squad in the White House.

    Would a billionaire WWE Hall of Famer and United States President understand the theater of staged conflict for the advancement of plutocratic interests, and willingly participate in it? I’m going to say probably.

    *  *  *

    The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My articles are entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, checking out my podcast, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, or buying my book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.

  • America Is The Most Attractive Country For The World's Workers

    Given that politicians on the left continue to out-outrage one another by proclaiming that “America was never great,” it may be worth asking the rest of the world why they see the United States as the best place to work in the world?

    However, as Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes, around the world, the desire to move between countries for work reasons is becoming less desirable.

    The Boston Consulting Group conducted a major survey of 366,000 people across 197 countries about labor trends and work preferences.  57 percent of those polled said they would move abroad for work, a decline on 2014’s 64 percent when the question was last asked.

    The developing world had the highest desire for a relocation abroad with 90 percent of India’s repondents and 70 percent of people in Brazil saying they would be willing to move to another country for the right job.

    In 2014, the U.S. was named the most popular work destination worldwide and it remains in top-position this year. 34 percent of the survey’s respondents said they would be willing to move to the U.S. for work reasons.

    Infographic: The Most Attractive Countries For The World's Workers | Statista

    You will find more infographics at Statista

    In Europe, the UK was the most popular destination for foreign workers in 2014 but due to Brexit, it has now slipped down the ranking to fifth place overall. The UK has been replaced by Germany which comes second in the ranking with 26 percent of foreign workers considering it their most attractive potential destination.

    Given its meteoric economic rise, China is conspicuous by its absence from the list and the only Asian entry is Japan in tenth place.

  • Nikki Haley: "US Will Not Remain A Passive Observer As Nicaragua Becomes Another Venezuela Or Syria"

    The US Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley warned the UN Security Council on Wednesday that Nicaragua is heading down the path that led to conflict in Syria and an economic collapse in Venezuela.

    “With each passing day, Nicaragua travels further down a familiar path,” Haley told a meeting of the UN Security Council on the deteriorating environment in the Central American country. “It is a path that Syria has taken. It is a path that Venezuela has taken.”

    The warning took place during the first Security Council meeting called by Ambassador Haley, the current council president, to address what the UN says Nicaragua’s government has participated in violent acts of repression toward students and opposition groups that have led to over 300 deaths since mid-April.

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    Haley said the Security Council could not remain a “passive observer” as Nicaragua descended into chaos “because we know where this path leads.”

    She said Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega and Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro “are cut from the same corrupt cloth … And they are both dictators who live in fear of their own people.”

    “The Syrian exodus has produced millions of refugees, sowing instability throughout the Middle East and Europe,” Haley said. “The Venezuelan exodus has become the largest displacement of people in the history of Latin America. A Nicaraguan exodus would overwhelm its neighbors and create a surge of migrants and asylum-seekers in Central America.”

    Costa Rican Ambassador Rodrigo Carazo told the council that his government received 400 asylum applications from Nicaraguan citizens in the first quarter, that was before the crisis started. Last month, Ambassador Carazo said that number inflated to over 4,000. Year to date, the Costa Rican government has received nearly 13,000 asylum applications from Nicaraguans, he added.

    “The deepening of the political, social and economic crisis, the repression, and the failure to respect fundamental freedoms and human rights shown by the authorities has the potential of an unbridled worsening of the crisis,” Carazo warned. “And this can have a direct impact on the stability and the future of development in Central America.”

    According to Voice of America (VOA), human rights groups have reported abuses by law enforcement and military groups, including temporary detentions, torture, sexual violence, harassment, and intimidation. Nicaraguan civil society leader Felix Maradiaga told council members, “Nicaragua has become a huge prison which seems to be without any controls…every day, we see a climate of terror and indiscriminate persecution.”

    Maradiaga warned the political crisis was at risk of developing into a collapse. “Today, there is a time bomb in Nicaragua,” he said. “Crimes against humanity are creating an atmosphere conducive to internal conflict that can only grow in size.”

    A special report published last week by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights documented the four months of social unrest in the country.

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    The human rights office called on the government to stop the arrest of protesters and disarm the masked groups that have been responsible for many killings. Then, late last week, the government expelled the human rights group from the country.

    The Organization of American States (OAS) has also condemned the violence and urged protestors and government to particpate in a peaceful dialogue. The OAS has called for 2021 elections to be brought foward as soon as possible to usher in a new government.

    “When tensions like this are so high, and violence takes place in such a way in a society that leaves more than 300 people dead, you need to give the power back to the people to decide,” OAS Chief of Staff Gonzalo Koncke told reporters.

    Nicaraguan Foreign Minister Denis Moncada spoke at the Security Council Wednesday, explaining to officials his country is “a model” in the fight against terrorism, organized crime and drug trafficking in the region, and has a booming economy.

    Moncada criticized the US for its past interventions in Nicaragua in the 1980s and urged Washington to “cease any type of aggression or intervention,” which leaves us with thought that the Trump administration could soon be nation-building in Central America.

    Meanwhile, the official Twitter feed of the Russian Mission to the UN “urges Washington to abandon the colonial-style attempts to influence the situation in Nicaragua such as the NICAAct, visa and other restrictions against Nicaraguan officials, and the abolition of the “temporary protection status” for migrants from this country.”

    It seems that Central America is about to become a hot… again.

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  • Trump Does 180 Shift On Syria: Regime Change Back On The Table

    Will the war in Syria never end? Will the international proxy war and stand-off between Russia, the United States, Iran, and Israel simply continue to drift on, fueling Syria’s fires for yet more years to come?  It appears so according to an exclusive Washington Post report which says that President Trump has expressed a desire for complete 180 policy shift on Syria. 

    Only months ago the president expressed a desire “to get out” and pull the over 2,000 publicly acknowledged American military personnel from the country; but now, the new report finds, Trump has approved “an indefinite military and diplomatic effort in Syria”.

    The radical departure from Trump’s prior outspokenness against militarily pursuing Syrian regime change, both on the campaign trail and during his first year in the White House, reportedly involves “a new strategy for an indefinitely extended military, diplomatic and economic effort there, according to senior State Department officials”.

    This even though one of the Pentagon’s main justifications for being on Syrian soil in the first place — the destruction of ISIS — has already essentially happened as the terror group now holds no significant territory and has been driven completely underground. 

    But most worrisome about the Post report is that sources said to be close to White House policy planning on Syria suggest that Trump has made a commitment to pursuing regime change as a final goal.

    Crucially, the report describes that “the administration has redefined its goals to include the exit of all Iranian military and proxy forces from Syria, and establishment of a stable, nonthreatening government acceptable to all Syrians and the international community.”

    Of course, there’s the glaringly obvious issue of the fact that the most powerful top competing “alternatives” to the current government in Damascus include groups like Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, which currently holds Idlib and is under direct allegiance to al-Qaeda chief Ayman al Zawahiri (as recently confirmed in the US State Department’s own words).

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    The shift stems from the White House’s re-prioritizing the long held US desire for the complete removal of Iranian forces from Syria. There’s reportedly increased frustration that Russia is not actually interested in seeing Iran withdraw, despite prior pledges as part of US-Russia largely back channel diplomacy on Syria. 

    However, the Post report quotes a top Pompeo-appointed official, James Jeffrey, who is currently “representative for Syria engagement” at the State Department, to say that U.S. policy is not that “Assad must go” but that immense pressure will be brought to bear, and in terms of future US troop exit, “we are not in a hurry”.

    “The new policy is we’re no longer pulling out by the end of the year,” Jeffrey said while noting the mission would largely shirt ensuring Iranian departure. He also indicated to that Trump is likely “on board” on signing off on “a more active approach” should there be direct confrontation with either Iran or Russia. 

    It goes without saying that such a significant policy shift makes the possibilities of just such a confrontation — or perhaps “provocation” — over Idlib all the more dangerous considering it now appears Trump may now be looking for an excuse to act, which would provide the usual convenient distraction from problems at home. 

  • Everybody Gets A 'AAA': Why S&P Is Adopting "Custom Credit Ratings" For Chinese Debt

    S&P is reportedly working on developing a custom credit rating scale for China, but some investors are worried that it could do more harm than good. Unlike S&P’s custom ratings scale for emerging markets like Argentina, Israel and Taiwan, the coming Chinese rating scale will not include the recalibrated “mapping specifications” that indicate how the ratings relate to the rest of S&P’s global ratings.

    Instead, the ratings will reportedly stand alone, meaning that when an A+ is issued in China, it is to be thought of as an A+ rating issued anywhere else globally.

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    S&P is reportedly working on setting up an independent business in China where it will compete not only with the local ratings firms, but also Moody’s and Fitch, who are also applying for licenses to open up shop in China. And since American companies typically lack the guanxi necessary to thrive in the Chinese market, S&P is aiming to tailor its bond rating system to all types of issuers, including governments and corporations, in a way that will “fit the local situation” (and presumably placate the Communist Party).

    “We believe that considering the size, dimensions and extent of diversification of China’s domestic capital market, there needs to be a set of special rating standards and rating methodology that fit the local situation,” S&P said in a document translated by the Wall Street Journal. 

    Unsurprisingly, debt investors aren’t buying it.

    That’s because ratings in China won’t necessarily correspond to global ratings, and it appears there will be no widely available way to convert these ratings to global rating grades.

    Prashant Singh, an emerging-markets debt manager at Neuberger Berman told the WSJ: “If the ratings show little credit differentiation and do not reflect true credit risks, then investors will not give much credence to them.”

    As WSJ points out, only two American non-financial corporations have the AAA, S&P’s highest rating: Microsoft and Johnson & Johnson. Meanwhile, the US government gets only a double A+ rating from S&P. That a US ratings firm would hand out AAA ratings to barely solvent Chinese industrial firms is a bitter irony, indeed.

    “It is almost like being in a classroom where everyone is getting a (top grade), but in reality, not everyone is that good,” a sovereign analyst with BNY Mellon Investment Management told the WSJ.

    If S&P follows in the footsteps of local Chinese rating agencies, they could wind up posting AAA ratings for companies that are clearly distressed, like HNA Group Co., which reportedly has a triple-A rating from Shanghai Brilliance Credit Rating & Investors Service Co despite the fact that the company is selling assets to meet its debt obligations and that it paid nearly 9% to borrow money last year over a term of one year.

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    Everybody knows that in this business, money talks and bullshit walks. Ergo, there’s only one way that S&P will be able to persuade bond issuers to pay for their ratings – and that’s to tell the Chinese firms what they want to hear to stay “competitive” with the domestic ratings agencies. The economic environment in China, where some asset managers and many institutions are restricted from buying lower rated bonds, naturally tends to help inflate the entire ratings industry.

    Out of the 300 Chinese companies that have issued debt outside the mainland, S&P hasn’t offered any of them a higher than A+ rating – that’s five notches below AAA. China’s sovereign rating is also a A+. But perhaps once S&P opens its domestic subsidiary, it will have reason to reevaluate.

    But without mapping specifications like those that S&P has implemented in other emerging markets, there is no way for foreign investors to interpret credit ratings in the world’s most opaque major economy.

    Just like they did during the run-up to the financial crisis in the US, S&P appears to be hurting, not helping, the situation in China.

  • Australia's Big Banks Raise Mortgage Rates, Sparking Housing Market Fears

    For decades, the housing market in Australia – which has not seen a recession in 27 years – appeared immune to any external or internal shocks, as prices kept rising gingerly year after year. That all changed in the past year, when according to Core Logic, home prices across Australia’s 5 top cities peaked in October of 2017 and have since declined by 3.5% on average.

    That decline is now set to accelerate because overnight, two of Australia’s biggest banks, Commonwealth Bank of Australia and Australia and New Zealand Banking Group, announced within minutes of each other that they are raising mortgage rates citing higher funding costs, cutting chances of an official rate hike and risking a political backlash.

    The rate increases followed one week after Australia’s second largest bank, Westpac, became the first of the so-called “Big Four” to raise rates. That prompted fierce criticism from Prime Minister Scott Morrison. The former Treasurer demanded the bank explain itself and suggested unhappy borrowers should shop around.

    “They have to justify, in this environment when people are really feeling it, why they believe they need to clip that ticket a little harder when people in Australia and their customers I think are doing it tough,” he told reporters.

    Fourth-ranked National Australia Bank Ltd is the only one of the majors not to deliver an out-of-cycle rate rise.

    CommBank will increase all variable home loan rates by 15 basis points from October 4, while ANZ will hit all borrowers with a 16 basis point increase from September 27. The change means a customer with a $400,000 loan from CommBank will pay an extra $37 a month, or $447 a year. An ANZ customer with the same loan will pay an extra $40 a month, or $476 a year.

    “We have made this decision after careful consideration,” CommBank group executive retail banking services Angus Sullivan said in a statement.

    “We are very conscious of the impact that increasing interest rates will have on our customers, however it is important that we price our home loan products in a way that reflects underlying costs.”

    The move comes two days after the Reserve Bank again left the official cash rate on hold at its record low of 1.5%, extending the country’s longest ever period without an official rate move to more than two years. Despite the low-rate environment locally, banks have faced rising costs in overseas wholesale markets, forcing many of the smaller lenders to gradually raise rates over the past 12 months.

    The hikes also reverse moves from just a month ago when some banks cut rates as a downturn in the country’s red-hot housing market heightened competition to write new loans. More notably, the rate increases come even as the Reserve Bank of Australia has held its official cash rate at a record low of 1.50% since 2016 while signaling a steady path for some time.

    News of the rate increases pressured the Australian dollar, which dropped near a two year low on concern that higher mortgage rates at three of the big-four banks will sap consumer spending. Short-end bonds gained on similar concern, while the local ASX/S&P index added to morning losses, down 1.1% by the close, as investors digested the prospect that rising rates would hurt home prices further, stifling spending.

    According to Michael McCarthy, Chief strategist at CMC Markets and Stockbroking, the news was both goods in that “It’s a small negative for housing prices but part of a much larger trend towards the normalisation of interest rates”… and bad “that of course is likely to continue to keep pressure on housing prices.”

    The four banks combined control about 80% of the country’s deposit and home loan market, Reuters reported. The banks have come under intense scrutiny, wiping tens of billions of dollars from their market capitalisations, from a public inquiry which has aired continuous allegations of misconduct within the sector.

    As a result, with the central bank seemingly unable to make up its mind and raise rates, the banks decided to take matters into their own hands, and according to a UBS note, “today’s announcements demonstrate the oligopolistic nature of the Australian banks and their ability to pass on additional funding costs and more to their customers.”

    “Given the additional focus from both sides of politics (on the banking sector) there is a risk the government or opposition may look to raise the bank levy,” UBS added.

    A spokeswoman for NAB, the only lender not to lift rates on Thursday, said in an email the bank continually assessed interest rates and tried to “achieve the right balance for our customers and our shareholders, and to ensure we remain competitive”.

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