May 08

Today’s News 8th May 2017

  • The One Thing We Can't Forget About North Korea (And Everywhere Else)

    Authored by James Holbrooks via TheAntiMedia.org,

    “It was easy enough to spot my cheerleader: She was the only person shouting in a crowd of quiet, curious, shy supporters. Her visage dug with deep wrinkles, but she was full of energy and smiles. When I saw her, I merged to the right and gave her a high-five. When I did, a group of women started to cheer me, (‘Bali! Bali!’), and a bunch of kids ran toward me to get their own high-fives. The ice was broken.”

    Nick Busca was a foreigner running a marathon, and up until that point, as he describes in an enlightening Quartz piece that ran Friday, the host country’s citizens had been standoffish. But as Busca would later explain, once the connection was made on the human level, everything else fell away.

    Considering this first-hand account — particularly within the context of the current mainstream news headlines — it may surprise readers to know that the host nation Busca is describing is North Korea.

    The marathoner opens his story with pain, explaining how his training had been inadequate for the Southeast Asia climate. Busca was in “all sorts of trouble,” he writes, when he heard his cheerleader’s words.

    “Bali! Bali!,” incidentally, means “Quicker! Quicker!”

    Busca explains that while he was still in physical agony, the simple human gestures were enough to bring his mind back into focus:

    “However, those few words of encouragement were able to distract me temporarily from the pain and bring me back to (sur)reality: I was running the North Korea Marathon.”

    This wasn’t the first time Nick Busca had run the Mangyongdae Prize International Marathon, which is held annually in the North Korean capital city of Pyongyang. He’s been running the 42-kilometer race for the past three years and says the positive feedback he got from locals this year is by no means atypical.

    “It wasn’t the first time I had bonded with fellow amateur athletes in North Korea,” he writes for Quartz. “In 2014, I found myself talking to an engineering student on a chairlift at the Masik Pass Ski Resort; on the flight there from Beijing, I also chatted with a few members of a women’s soccer team who were coming back from a tournament in Asia.”

    Continuing:

    “The day after this year’s marathon, with our legs begging for mercy, my tour group visited a soccer academy and played with six- and seven-year-old children. In all of these occasions, when the language barrier kept our cultures apart, sports functioned as a catalyst for social interaction.”

    Busca points out that the Olympic charter, which the marathoner notes is held up as “the pinnacle of how we value sports,” promotes a “peaceful society, the preservation of human dignity, and the celebration of friendship as its main values.”

    He also reminds readers that even among bitter enemies, sports can act as a vehicle to find common ground as negative, even violent tendencies among participants are being expressed in “a war with the bloodshed of real conflicts.”

    But perhaps the most deeply penetrating part of Busca’s narrative comes when he’s addressing the problems with the isolated country.

    Acknowledging the demonization of the Kim Jong-un regime in the press and admitting that sure, a lot of what’s being said may be true, the runner says it’s difficult to consider all the negativity when encountering the actual people of North Korea — and that if you do choose to condemn, then you should direct that condemnation toward those who actually deserve it.

    “It is hard to travel there without having these kinds of reports in my mind,” Busca writes of the Hermit Kingdom, “but through my journey, I learned that even when we legitimately condemn a regime, we must keep the top of its political pyramid separated from the bottom.”

    Then, in moments of almost stunning clarity — sad commentary on an age where reports of drone strikes killing civilians barely register a response from the public — Busca states what would be common sense in a sane world:

    “A country’s people may be subjugated to the decisions of their government, but they have their own lives and values — and deserve more than being held to the same ethical judgments we hold their leaders.”

    It must be noted here that the same logic should apply to the people of any and all nations.

    If you truly believe Bashar al-Assad is an evil dictator who gasses his own civilians, then hate him – but don’t let that hatred spill down to the women and children who are being blown apart by bomb-dropping robots in Syria.

    If you truly believe Saddam Hussein was a ruthless authoritarian who deserved to be ousted and eventually hanged, then run with that. But don’t for a second believe that the people in the streets of Baghdad had anything to do with the atrocities you associate with their country’s leader.

    Even in the United States, where Congress’ popularity stands somewhere between cockroaches and herpes — and the sitting president is the most unfavorable of all time — the public feels detached and in disagreement with the government on many issues.

    And if you choose to believe that North Korea is a nuclear threat to its surrounding neighbors, terrific. But try your best to not forget this one thing: The human beings living under Kim Jong-un’s rule play no part in the decision-making.

    I’ll close here with one of Busca’s lines that echoes the feeling he started the piece off with: pain.

    Because for many of us, the drone strikes do register. The innocent dead are felt. We didn’t know them, but we know they didn’t deserve to die. And so, their pain, and the pain of the loved ones left behind becomes ours. Or, as Nick Busca so truthfully states:

    “By the 30km mark, it doesn’t matter what country you’re from or what kind of life you live: You just want it to stop.”

  • War And Empire: The American Way Of Life

    Authored by Paul Atwood via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    A few months ago I received a message from a professor at the Khomeini Institute for Education and  Research in Tehran, Iran, informing me that my 2010 book “War and Empire: The American Way of Life” (London, Pluto Press) had been translated into Farsi. He requested that I write an Introduction for Iranian readers. What follows is that Introduction. Two years ago the Xinhua Peoples’ Press in Beijing, China also published a translation in Mandarin.

    In the aftermath of Saddam Hussein’s 1991 attempt to annex Kuwait the U.S. deliberately destroyed much of Iraq’s water and sewer infrastructure. The Pentagon even admitted on its website that these acts would lead to mass outbreaks of disease. These were certifiable war crimes under international law. After Saddam’s defeat the U.S. also imposed widespread sanctions on his regime that included preventing necessary medicines from reaching Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens perished as a result. In an infamous interview in 1996 Madeleine Albright, then the Secretary of State, was asked to justify the deaths of 500,000 children. She defended these atrocities by saying “I think this is a very hard choice but we think the price is worth it.” Twenty-one years have elapsed since Albright uttered her rationalization of this vicious barbarity and it has been virtually “disappeared” from the collective memory of Americans. But it is far from being the only one.

    Today much the same is being visited upon the children of Mosul, Syria and Yemen. Fifty thousand more marines are slated for deployment to Afghanistan and the new Defense Secretary’s bellicose rhetoric threatens Iran.

    When I undertook to write this book I could not imagine that it would ever be translated into Farsi or Mandarin Chinese. Over the course of my teaching career I had become increasingly concerned about the vacancy of knowledge about their nation’s past on the part of my students and by extension many millions of my fellow American citizens. This condition of ignorance is the effect of the incomplete and, too often, dishonest orthodoxy in required school texts and by the distortion of the real past by popular culture, Hollywood films and corporate controlled network television, especially the purported “news.” George Orwell was correct. “Who controls the present controls the past.” What the majority of Americans are conditioned to think they know about their past (and that of many other peoples) is myth, and too often, sheer illusion. Misdirection and manipulation about proclaimed threats from abroad since 1945 has led directly into wars and unjust armed interventions and coups in many other nations. The results are always tragic on a colossal scale.

    None of this is accidental or new. Since the end of World War II the U.S. ruling elites have set forth an agenda claimed to foster what they call a “liberal world order” in which democracy and human rights for all are the declared goals. But little about real U.S. actions in the world supports these claims. Washington has overthrown elected governments and waged catastrophic war upon helpless civilians in many nations since 1945. The public is told that national security and “vital interests” are at stake and the corporate controlled media ensure that key realities are omitted, or distorted. It is no secret that today much of the human species is living in existential crisis-whether from war, economic exploitation or dire effects of climate change- and  the profound ignorance about how the past shapes the present is a major factor in our failure to fashion a more peaceful and beneficial future. This volume is simply an attempt to illuminate much of the hidden history of the United States in the hope that more citizens in the United States will realize that we cannot continue on this destructive path and must find a way to cooperate with other nations instead of seeking to dominate them or outcompete them in a self-defeating contest for diminishing resources. Many American officials pay lip service to international cooperation but they really mean collaboration with the overarching American agenda.

    The words of those who have formulated the grand strategy for American global dominance since the U.S. emerged as the most militarily dominant nation after WWII must be taken seriously but desires for global dominance were evident long before. Consider the oft-quoted language of George F. Kennan, the U.S. State Department’s architect of the Cold War with the Soviet Union immediately after World War II. In a top secret document circulated only to other key officials he took notice of the fact that the American population was (in 1948) only 6.3% of the world’s but that the U.S. effectively controlled about 50% of the world’s resources. The object of U.S. policy, he declared, should be to maintain that disparity and employ “straight power tactics” to enforce this global inequality, while avoiding all rhetoric about commitment to human rights, raising other peoples’ living standards, democratization and the like. Kennan’s vision, coupled with the U.S. creation of the World Bank and International Monetary fund, anticipated a globalized economy under firm control by American and allied European banks and industries, and backed by American firepower.

    Much closer in time to the present is the comprehensive plan for complete American dominance of the planet projected in brutally frank and exacting detail by former national security chief Zbigniev Brzezinsky in his book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geo-strategic Imperatives.

    Eurasia is the globe’s largest continent and is geopolitically axial. A power that dominates Asia would dominate two of the three most advanced and economically productive regions. A mere glance at the map also suggests that control over Eurasia would almost automatically entail Africa’s subordination…About 75 percent of the world’s people live in Eurasia and most of the world’s wealth is there as well…Eurasia accounts for about three-fourths of the world’s energy resources.

    Upon assuming the presidency of the U.S. in 2001 George W. Bush filled his administration with so called Neo-Conservatives, members of the Project for a New American Century, who, with their allies in the Pentagon, called for nothing less than “full spectrum dominance” of planet Earth. Exploiting the hysteria mounted in the U.S. after the events of September 11, 2001 Bush II then proceeded to call for all-out war against what he termed the “axis of evil.” General Wesley Clark, a 2004 Democratic Party candidate for president, later revealed that the Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld Administration had secret plans all along to overthrow the governments of Libya, Syria, Lebanon, Somalia and Sudan, and “finish off” Iran. All that was needed was a “new Pearl Harbor” and the events of September 11, 2001 provided that pretext, launching a state of permanent war primarily against the Muslim world.

    Citizens of the U.S., like myself, who have long studied these matters and have opposed our nation’s imperial policies know that what these men, and many others like them, have proposed is exactly what they accused Nazi Germany and Communist Russia of attempting. Of course, proponents of what the first Bush deemed the “New World Order” in 1991 allege that this American imperium will constitute a radical departure from past empires and will instead usher in and guarantee a new age of democracy and human rights for all humanity. They assert this even as their bombs and those of their allies shatter the lives literally of millions in the Islamic world.

    The U.S. began its history as a colony of the early British Empire and an outpost of nascent capitalism though this essential fact is de-emphasized in standard accounts in favor of the claim that the primary incentive for the colonial project was “freedom of religion.” The earliest British colonies in North America, Virginia and Massachusetts, were established as joint-stock companies, precursors of the modern corporation, to return profits to the mother country from resources of fish, game, furs, lumber and later, tobacco, cotton and the industries that followed. Acquisition of these valued assets required the conquest, displacement or extermination of the native populations already living here. The name, Massachusetts, for example, the state where I live, is all that remains of the people who once inhabited the area of what is now Boston. Later, the profits derived from forcible acquisition of the land, and the slave labor to cultivate it underwrote the industrial revolution and this catapulted the United States into position as the richest nation on earth and soon the militarily most powerful.

    Only a century after breaking away from British rule the United States itself leapt upon the stage of empire to compete with other Europeans for dominance in the world, taking the former Spanish colonies of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam by force, and annexing Hawaii. Brooks Adams, the descendant of two presidents, exulted that “this war is the first gun in the battle for ownership of the world.” In the Senate Albert Beveridge proclaimed that “The power that rules the Pacific rules the world.”

    U.S. entry into both World Wars and all subsequent armed interventions is almost always mystified and characterized as a defense of democracy and human rights. In no case was American national security remotely threatened if by that we mean the vulnerability to invasion and military defeat.

    Since the end of World War II the United States has waged numerous full scale wars and many smaller conflicts in the name of national security and claims of principle and high ideals. Americans are unremittingly habituated to believe  Madeleine Albright’s all-encompassing contention that the United States is “the indispensable nation.” The end result of our actions has been many millions dead, maimed, reduced to penury, and desolated with grief. Americans are encouraged to see ourselves as humanitarians yet the widespread denial of our collective responsibility for the raw misery for those on the receiving end of our military firepower is nothing less than indefensible.

    Until WWII the U.S. was perceived, if not exactly as a benevolent friend of Muslim peoples, at least it was not yet seen as one more imperial power set upon exploiting the greater Middle East. This positive estimation changed virtually the moment that war ended and the regional shift toward virulent anti-Americanism originated in Iran.

    During World War II Iran had been co-occupied by Soviet, British and American troops. The Allies violated Iran’s declared neutrality because they thought that the country’s ruler, Reza Shah, was too friendly with Nazi Germany and they wished to use Iranian territory to transship supplies from the Persian Gulf to the USSR. The British owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now British Petroleum) had virtually monopolized production and profits from the industry and the Allies also wanted to prevent the country’s oil reserves from potential access by Germany. The three nations had agreed to withdraw from Iran within six months after the war’s end. In March of 1946 Soviet troops had still not withdrawn and Washington claimed that this was evidence of Stalin’s desire to expand communism and threaten the entire region. The reality was that the Soviet Union had suffered immense damage from the war and needed energy supplies to rebuild. Russians wanted some guarantee from Iran that they could purchase a certain quota of Iranian oil for this purpose and sought to gain an oil concession in the Azerbaijani region of Iran, which bordered the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan. Washington and the Iranian government feared that the Soviets might act to annex the territory when Iranian Azerbaijanis declared a separate republic. President Truman later claimed that he threatened the USSR with American military intervention. The U.S. State Department advised the Iranian prime minister, Ahmad Qavam, to negotiate and when Iran accepted the oil concession the Red Army withdrew. However, the Iranian parliament, the Majlis, later disavowed the agreement.

    These actions undertaken by Washington constituted the first direct American intervention in the Middle East as well as the first skirmish of the post-WWII Cold War. Anti-Soviet rhetoric claimed that the Soviet Union was bent on “world conquest” and pointed to the occupation of Eastern Europe by the Red Army. Omitted was all mention of the fact that as Nazi Germany had marched through the nations of Eastern Europe it had subjected their governments and made them allies. Then many waged war themselves against the USSR. Thus, the Red Army was occupying those nations for the same reason the United States and Britain were occupying Germany, Austria and Italy. American elites had plans for the reconstruction of Europe that would reintegrate the entire region into a revived capitalist order under American authority and communist Russia’s occupation of Eastern Europe was seen to obstruct those goals. No consideration was given to the very real security concerns that the Soviets had, especially about their eastern borders from whence twice in the early 20th Century they had been invaded.

    In fact, Russian non-actions at the time, not only with respect to Iran, indicated exactly the opposite of what Washington wanted the world to believe. The Red Army could easily have re-entered Iranian territory after the Majlis reneged on the oil concession and there was nothing, short of the atomic bomb that could have dislodged them. But it did not. Within a few years Soviet troops also withdrew from Austria and Manchuria quite in contradiction to the American assertion that they were intent on global conquest. There was no evidence whatever of Soviet designs to expand beyond what it declared to be its security zone in Eastern Europe. The U.S. had committed itself to an adversarial relationship with its former ally, in the absence of which the Nazis would never have been defeated, and it had initiated its long-term intervention into the internal affairs of Iran and many other nations, which, of course, continue to this day.

    When the Shah was overthrown in 1979 few Americans had any sense of why this occurred, especially because most journalists supinely omitted any reportage of crimes committed by the “king of kings” against the Iranian people. The public had been conditioned to believe for decades that Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi was a benevolent sovereign, beloved by his people, a staunch ally of the United States, and a pillar of stability in the region. Most had no sense that the Shah was installed by the Central Intelligence Agency when it conspired with other Iranians to topple the elected government of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 because he had the temerity to insist that the oil resources of his nation were the birthright of the Iranian people rather than the property of western oil companies. The public had no understanding of how brutal the Shah’s dictatorship was in fact and no comprehension of the role Washington had played in enabling his feared secret police, the SAVAK, to terrorize all Iranians who objected to his policies. To the extent that the general public took any notice at all of Iran they accepted the claim that the Shah was America’s “policeman in the Gulf,” aiding the United States in its efforts to “contain” the threat of the Soviet Union.

    The real menace to the interests of American corporate elites emanated from the upsurge in nationalism among all peoples around the globe who had been victims of western colonialism. World War II effectively finished Europe’s empires and nations from Indonesia, Vietnam, India, to  Kenya, Congo, Guatemala, Cuba, Chile and many others were rising in the post-war period to obtain independence, and who, like Iran in the early 1950s, sought to nationalize their resources. From the perspective of the would-be American overlords this was their cardinal sin. Such appropriations of national reserves like Vietnam’s independence movement, Egypt’s nationalization of the Suez Canal, Mossadegh’s actions, or Qassim’s appropriations of oil in Iraq in 1956, if successfully carried out and allowed to stand, would have thwarted the grand strategy of the U.S. to exert American corporate control over such assets, markets and cheaper foreign labor and the immense profits that would acrue to American industrial and banking giants. Since communist ideology also promoted national independence for western colonies intense government and media propaganda convinced the American citizenry that resistance to the American agenda and global turmoil was all the work of the Soviet devil.

    Even before WWII ended key members of the ruling elite sought preventive measures against a return to depression and mass unemployment. Sixteen million veterans were returning to civilian life. Would they face renewed unemployment and soup kitchens as so many had in the Great Depression of the 1930s? The director of war production, who had formerly been chief executive officer of the General Electric Company, a giant in what President Dwight Eisenhower would later designate the “Military-Industrial Complex,” argued that the U.S. needed a “permanent war economy.” Many of the massive corporations that now dominate the American political economy either grew exponentially during WWII or got their start as a result of government contracts financed by new taxation and borrowing. Only such massive government intervention put citizens back to work or in the military regiments. Given the nature of capitalism few among elite decision makers in the postwar could imagine restructuring such production to meet purely domestic purposes primarily because there was less profit to be made. War or the manufactured threat of war is the lifeblood of the military corporations and their financiers.

    Thus the ally that had been indispensable in the defeat of Nazism overnight became the new menace to American national security, despite the fact that the USSR had suffered upwards of 30 million deaths and its principal cities lay in ruins. From that moment on the “Cold War” became the ideological organizing touchstone of American society. Even then many citizens resisted the new precepts. Henry Wallace, who had been vice president under Roosevelt, led the popular movement for cooperation between the two post-war giants but he was reviled by the high priests of political orthodoxy as a “fellow traveler” of the communists, as were any who dissented from the new agenda.

    Inside the inner sanctum of the new “National Security State” a top secret document, NSC-68, specified a comprehensive blueprint to militarize American society, called for a tripling of taxation to expand the military budget and achieve nuclear supremacy by creating the hydrogen bomb. Even so the populace resisted until in the words of Secretary of State Dean Acheson “Thank God Korea came along.” Though Acheson himself had declared that Korea was outside of America’s “defensive perimeter,” warhawks in Washington and on Wall Street declared that the civil war between Korean factions on the other side of the planet imperiled the “free world.” What actually was at risk was the new militarized superstate, and the tax guaranteed profits to the corporations embedded in the war economy. The war that followed left 3 million Koreans and 37,000 US soldiers dead, threatened China with nuclear destruction, leading the Chinese to deploy their own nukes in short order.

    To cite only some cases, from 1947 to the present the United States has intervened politically or violently in Iran, China, Ukraine, Italy, Greece, Egypt, Vietnam, Guatemala, Indonesia, Congo, Cuba, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Cambodia, Laos, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, and most recently has intruded brutally in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Syria. Though internal domestic opposition to American interventions and wars has always surfaced the majority of the public historically succumbs to the incessant propaganda projected by U.S. governments of either party and their corporate allies and the media that military action is necessary for reasons of national security or to protect favored allies.

    Recently “humanitarian intervention” has surfaced as justification for American deployments in Muslim countries. The doctrine’s principal exponent, former UN ambassador Samantha Power, was instrumental in toppling the Libyan regime of Muammar Qaddafi, with catastrophic results for innumerable civilians. Along with her boss Hillary Clinton, and National Security adviser Susan Rice, these “gentle” women also encouraged the Obama administration to support and arm the rebellion against the Assad regime in Syria leading to today’s incessantly violent chaos, uncountable deaths, the outflow of hundreds of thousands of refugees and the destabilization of numerous nations from Africa to Europe.

    In 1991 the pretext of the communist menace disappeared with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. That brief window of peaceful cooperation closed rapidly and Russia was soon demonized again as the principal menace to “liberal order.” The Trump Administration won election in great part because it promised a more cooperative relationship with Russia, one of the only ray’s of light in that dismal campaign. But what is now termed the American “deep state” is fostering a renewed condition of militarized tension with that nation. Trump also promised millions that he would renew the American economy and bring back jobs for millions who feel betrayed and impoverished by the flight of investment capital overseas in search of cheaper labor and the robotization of such industries that remain. “America First” is Trump’s watchword. Yet he has turned management of the U.S. economy over to the very bankers who orchestrated the swindles that led to the near collapse of the world economy in 2008.

    As I write these words Trump has launched missiles at a Syrian airfield, employed the U.S.’s deadliest weapon short of nukes in Afghanistan, bombed Yemen, and sent troops to Somalia. His Secretary of Defense, former General James Mattis, affectionately called “mad dog” by his troops, threatens Iran, falsely accusing it of violations of the recently signed agreement on nuclear proliferation. Trump is recklessly threatening North Korea, potentially creating an extreme risk of a nuclear event that would certainly also engage China. He has called for an increase in military spending that by itself is almost larger than the entire military budget of any other country. Despite promises of prosperity for all the taxes to fund all this will fall on the shoulders of the broad American middle class and generations to come, not on the giant corporations that are all but tax exempt– as it appears Trump himself has been for decades. Rather than sanely reducing the risk of war as he promised his presidency looks increasingly worrying. As his foreign policies take shape they are indistinguishable from those of his Democratic Party opponents and the global dominance doctrines of Bush’s neo-conservatives. They are all fated to fail and unless derailed ensure yet more widespread war and suffering.

  • Iran Threatens To Destroy Saudi Arabia After Saudi Prince Warns Of "Moving Battle To Iran"

    An unexpected war of words erupted between two sworn Middle-Eastern rivals over the weekend, when Saudi Arabia and Iran threatened each other with military action, if not outright destruction.

    It started on Tuesday, when in “unusually blunt comments” delivered during a nationally-televised interview Saudi Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman – the man who is now effectively in charge of Saudi oil policy – ruled out any dialogue with Iran and pledged to protect his conservative kingdom from what he called “Tehran’s efforts to dominate the Muslim world.”

    “We know that we are a main goal for the Iranian regime,” he said. “We will not wait until the battle comes to Saudi Arabia but we will work to have the battle in Iran rather than in Saudi Arabia.”

    Iran, never one to leave a lingering belligerent comment by its Saudi nemesis unanswered, responded when its defense minister said on Sunday that Iran would hit back at most of Saudi Arabia with the exception of Islam’s holiest places if the kingdom does anything “ignorant” according to Reuters.

    “If the Saudis do anything ignorant, we will leave no area untouched except Mecca and Medina,” Defence Minister Hossein Dehghan was quoted by the semi-official Tasnim news agency as saying. Taking a jab at the Saudi war in Yemen, the iranian said that “they think they can do something because they have an air force,” referring to Saudi attacks on Iran-aligned Houthi forces in control of the capital Sanaa.

    Dehghan, speaking to Arabic-language Al-Manar TV, was commenting on remarks by Saudi Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who said on Tuesday any contest for influence between the Sunni Muslim kingdom and the revolutionary Shi’ite theocracy ought to take place “inside Iran, not in Saudi Arabia”.

    Was this just more “run off the mill” jawboning and theatrics, or a prelude to a more serious escalation between the two nations which periodically trade verbal barbs even if neither has been willing to test overt military action against its counerpart? The answer will be revealed in the upcoming OPEC negotiation on production cut extensions, and specifically whether the Saudis will grant Iran – which has been steadily gaining market share at Saudis’ expense during 2017 – another waiver from participation in the mandatory output cuts. Because when it comes to Saudi Arabia, while nationalistic verbal pyrotechnics are for popular consumption, when it comes to oil, and associated revenues – especially ahead of the critical Aramco IPO – nothing could be more serious.

  • Is This WalMart 'Free-For-All' A Taste Of Things To Come?

    by Stefan Stanford via AllNewsPipeline.com,

    In the new story over at Survival Dan called “During The Collapse: Where To Go And What Places To Avoid”, he reports that when IT hits the fan, America’s ‘population hubs’ will likely explode with violence, looting and the total breakdown of law and order as resources become next to impossible to get and the masses suddenly realize the government isn’t coming to save them.

    Whether that be via total collapse, WW3 coming home to roost upon US soil or a ‘grid event’ that leaves tens to hundreds of millions either without power or access to the money in their bank accounts, the video directly below from a WalMart in Mexico gives us a very small taste of what that world without law and order can quickly devolve into.

    Showing what happens when suddenly ‘lawless people’ realize that there aren’t enough security guards in a Wal Mart store to stop them, we witness the kind of all-out ‘free for all’ that we’ll likely see in a collapse event, though the smart people would be carrying out food, toilet paper and other necessities instead of flat screen TV’s. And in an all-out SHTF event, we’d expect that the people will likely be fighting with each other for the few remaining resources as they are now in Venezuela where children are literally starving to death.

    Following Alt Market’s Brandon Smith warning that ‘a full spectrum crisis is about to take place’ a Wal Mart in Mexico gives us a small glimpse of what might happen here once it all comes crashing down amid more signs that what we’re witnessing in Venezuela may be coming to America.

    As commenters on the live leak video clearly point out, we’ve already witnessed events in America similar to what happened in the video above with packs of roving gangs showing up in malls and convenience stores ‘en masse’, taking whatever they want and parading out as if laws don’t matter to them. Knowing such events are already taking place in 2017 America, how much worse might things get when SHTF? As Susan Duclos reported this morning on ANP, parts of America are already a boiling cauldron read to boil over. How many Americans are the frogs in the simmering water?

    In this December 2016 story on ANP called “Map Shows Us Where We Don’t Want To Be When It All Turns Ugly”, we reported that nearly 50% of Americans live in very small geographical locations. According to this story from the Daily Mail, half of the US population live within 146 counties while the other 157 million are scattered across the other 3,000+.

    The map seen directly below gives us a visual representation of what that looks like with the counties seen below in blue making up approx. 50% of the US population while the remaining 50% of Americans live across the rest of the country in counties seen in gray. When SHTF, does anyone want to be in the blue areas?

    As we also reported back in December, the map seen above showing the US counties with the biggest populations coincides quite eerily with the map of US counties won by Hillary Clinton during the last election seen below.

    The next map below from James Wesley Rawles’ Survival Blog shows US cities with approx. 100,000 population in yellow circles with the shaded areas surrounding them indicating the distances from those cities with each shaded increment representing approx 40 miles. Showing that most of the East coast and eastern half of the US are within 120 miles of big cities, it’s easy to understand why videographer The Prepared Mind selects some of the areas seen in the final video below as his ‘go to’ areas for when SHTF.

    As M.D. Creekmore over at the Survivalist Blog has previously brought to the attention of preppers, getting out of the cities may not be possible for some who are tied to their jobs when SHTF and many of the same areas mentioned in that videohave such low populations for a very good reason – a major lack of jobs in areas long ago hit by the globalists economy that has decimated much of America.

    According to Brandon Smith in this recent story over at Alt Market, “I continue to believe that a greater crisis is brewing that is economic and global in nature. With numerous financial bubbles artificially inflated over at least eight years of central bank stimulus, the question is not “if” but WHEN the system will enter the final stages of its ongoing collapse.“

    Smith’s warnings echo the warnings given by Doug Casey who recently stated “a civilization always collapses from within. World War 1, in 1914, signaled the start of the long collapse of Western Civilization. Of course, termites were already eating away at the foundations, with the writings of people like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Karl Marx. It’s been on an accelerating downward path ever since….”

  • Emmanuel Macron Elected Youngest Ever President Of France With 65% Of The Vote

    Update: As Emmanuel Macron arrived in the courtyard of Paris’s Louvre museum to deliver his victory speech to thousands of supporters, the European Union’s anthem “Ode to Joy” played in the background.

    “Tonight, France won,” he said to rapturous crowds, adding that “Europe and the world are watching us.” Macron said, cited by the Telegraph, that France is facing an “immense task” to rebuild European unity, fix the economy and ensure security against extremist threats.

    “Our task is huge and it will require the courage of truth” he repeated. Speaking to thousands of supporters from the Louvre Museum’s courtyard, Macron said that Europe and the world are “watching us” and “waiting for us to defend the spirit of the Enlightenment, threatened in so many places.”

    “We have the force, the will… we will not give into fear, into lies… to the love of decline and defeat”

    Macron said  “everyone said it was impossible. But they didn’t know France!” and promised to work to unify France after a bruising presidential campaign and serve the country “with love.”

    He also vowed to the French public: “I will protect you in the fact of threats” and said “I will respect what everyone thinks and believes, because I want the unity of our country. I will serve you with humility, strength and in line with our motto: liberty, equality, fraternity… I will serve you with love.”

    His wife Brigitte then came up on stage with him, and she kissed his hand and waved to the crowd.

    * * *

    Live Feed from France 24:

    After an extraordinary election campaign full of twists and turns, Emmanuel Macron won a dramatic victory over Marine Le Pen in the French presidential election, taking 65% of the vote, with Le Pen collecting just over a third according to estimates from four separate French pollsters. Macron, 39, will become the youngest president of France’s Fifth Republic.

    As BBG notes, the firms sampled real votes as they were being counted and weighted their results to reflect the composition of the French electorate. Their projections were all within 1 percentage point. Indeed, all early polls all show Macron with at least 65% of the vote:

    • Elabe: 65.9%
    • Ifop: 65.5%
    • Ipsos: 65.1%
    • Kantar: 65.0%

    Abstention in Sunday’s election was expected to hit 26%, the highest rate since 1969, reflecting a lack of enthusiasm among many voters for the choice on offer.

    Macron was grateful and generous in his victory speech:

    “Thank you from the bottom of my heart to all those who voted for me,” begins Mr Macron in his victory speech. 

     

    “I salute my adversary Ms Le Pen, I know why people chose to vote for an extreme party. I know the doubt, the fear they expressed.

     

    “And it is my responsibility to take on those concerns and guarantee our unity and responsibility for our country.

     

    “From tomorrow we will modernise politics, recognise pluralism, revitalise democracy. This will be my first mission, respecting everyone.”

    Althought there was one small glitch…

     

    Moments after the results were announced, Le Pen conceded to Macron in a phone call and vowed to become major force of opposition,

    “The French have elected a new president and opted for continuity,” Le Pen told supporters just outside Paris. “I wish him success in the face of great challenges,” she said.

    The AFP reports that it has spoken to Macron since the election results. France’s president-elect says “a new page has turned, that of hope and of restored confidence”. 

    The reactions to Macron’s win are coming in fast and hard: French President François Hollande, former Prime Minister Manuel Valls, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, British PM Theresa May are just some of the major political figures and leaders who have been congratulating modern France’s youngest president-elect over the past few minutes.

    • BELGIUM’S CHARLES MICHEL SAYS ‘BRAVO EMMANUEL MACRON’ON TWITTER
    • GERMANY’S SIGMAR GABRIEL CONGRATULATES EMMANUEL MACRON
    • MACRON WIN STRONG SIGN FOR UNIFIED EUROPE: GERMANY’S SEIBERT
    • MACRON WIN A ‘SIGN OF HOPE’ FOR EUROPE, MOSCOVICI TWEETS

    European leaders hailed Macron’s victory as a vote for European unity and a blow to political forces that had sought to build on last year’s Brexit vote to tear apart the European Union.   

    “Your victory is a victory for a strong united Europe and for German-French friendship,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s spokesman Steffen Seibert tweeted to Macron shortly after the election results were published.

    Donald Tusk, the former Polish prime minister who chairs summits of European leaders, tweeted: “Congratulations to French people for choosing Liberty, Equality and Fraternity over tyranny of fake news” – an apparent reference to misleading stories about Macron that were spread on social media in the run-up to the vote.

    In a tweet from her spokesperson, British Prime Minister Theresa May warmly congratulated Macron. “France is one of our closest allies and we look forward to working with the new President on a wide range of shared priorities,” she said.

    Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni tweeted: “Hurrah Macron President! There is hope for Europe!”

    Even President Trump endorsed Le Pen in the election, but just fired off this conciliatory tweet:

    Geert Wilders, who stood as a Right-wing populist in the Dutch elections but lost out to Mark Rutte, has offered his commiserations to Ms Le Pen. He went on to predict both of them would win in the next election.

    As Reuters adds, Europe’s political establishment limped into 2017 fearful that the Trump and Brexit votes, fueled by anger over immigration and rising economic inequality, could be replicated on the European continent in a mega-election year in which the Dutch and Germans were also voting. As a result, the election in France, the second largest economy in the euro zone after Germany, was always seen as the litmus test for European politics. Had Le Pen won, many European officials acknowledged, it may have been the beginning of the end of the EU, Europe’s 60-year-old experiment in closer integration which delivered peace and prosperity for decades before succumbing to a series of crises over the past decade.

    As the FT put it. Macron’s victory is a “phenomenal achievement” for the 39-year-old former Rothschild banker, who has never before held elected office and whose political movement En Marche! was set up barely a year ago. He becomes the youngest ever French president.

    As for, Le Pen, she fell short of the 45% that she was projected to win at one point earlier in the year. But her score of 34.9% is almost twice the 18% won by her father Jean-Marie Le Pen in 2002, and points to a depth of disaffection and anger towards France’s political elite that could nourish the far-right for years to come, especially if President Macron fails to deliver on his promises.

    • LE PEN CONCEDES DEFEAT OVER MACRON IN FRENCH PRESIDENTIAL VOTE
    • LE PEN SAYS SHE THANKS THE 11M FRENCH VOTERS WHO SUPPORTED HER
    • LE PEN SAYS TRADITIONAL PARTIES HAVE FAILED TO REPRESENT FRENCH
    • LE PEN CALLS FOR ‘ALL PATRIOTS’ TO JOIN HER FOR COMING VOTE

    Macron, a former government adviser and economy minister in the Hollande administration, will now turn his attention to elections for the National Assembly on June 11 and 18. He needs to build a stable majority from a party that as yet has no MPs. On Friday, he said he already had in mind his nominee for prime minister, a choice that could help him build alliances with MPs from other parties.

    Shortly after the results were announced, BuzzFeed reported that LePen’s Front National is going to re-brand, and change its name after the election result. Le Pen said that “The National Front … must deeply renew itself in order to rise to the historic opportunity and meet the French people’s expectations. I will propose to start this deep transformation of our movement in order to make a new political force.”

    Meanwhile, the Leave EU campaign, which presumably preferred a Le Pen victory over Macron, has just tweeted the following picture and message:

    * * *

    MARKET REACTION

    Macron’s victory is in line with expectations, which according to several banks carries a “sell the news” risk, especially in EURUSD.

    In a note released earlier on Sunday, Barclays’ Giovanni Paci writes that “a Macron victory, in line with current polls, in the second round of the French Presidential election, carries risk of a “buy the rumor, sell the fact” downside move in EURUSD, given the current long EUR pre-positioning.” On the other hand, “this outcome would also likely bring temporary relief and a further reduction in volatility.” Because a VIX of 10 is high?

    Some further details below:

    Macron victory in line with polls carries risk of a “buy the rumor, sell the fact” downside move in EURUSD, given the current long EUR pre-positioning. The EUR political-risk premium was reduced significantly by the “benign” first round outcome, which supported a c.2% EUR NEER appreciation. EURUSD should depreciate mildly over the remainder of this year, as monetary policy divergence and some residual political-risk premia weigh on the common currency.

     

    With market attention to the ‘Politics of Rage’ likely to fade after the French election, and no other clear themes visible, we see risk of a significant decline in market volatility. Implied volatility is low across asset classes (Figure 1) and, for most major currencies, realized and implied volatility measures are well below their yearly averages (Figure 2). Although we do not believe the Politics of Rage has yet crested, the outcome of the Dutch elections and the expected victory of Emmanuel Macron in France, are likely to assuage market fear of radical political change, at least for the near term, as no other clear risk events are visible. Risk-taking began to deteriorate earlier this year as ambiguity brought about by the ‘Politics of Rage’ dampened strategic risk taking. However, the resolution of near-term risks, with no other clear themes or major risk events to trade tactically, is likely to take activity and volatility further down.

     

     

    … the election of Mr. Macron as president, combined with a potential hung parliament would leave in place long-held concern about reform, but remove acute risks that provided shorter-term trading opportunities. As long as short-term events bring about temporary relief and long-term risks, volatility is likely to remain depressed, but prone to sudden bursts.

    * * *

    Deutsche Bank’s director of FX strategy, Sebastien Galy, has chimed in with a similar tak saying that while EUR/USD will likely gap higher, looking to clean out the stop losses,  before eventually consolidating lower. He adds that equity flows are likely to increase into the euro zone,‎ but that will take time as much is already priced in.

    * * *

    Expect more sellside commentary as analysts react to the initial results.

    Here is another live feed, this time from the Telegraph:

  • April Was Cruel… To The US Treasury

    Submitted by Nicholas Colas of Convergex

    April Was Cruel… To the US Tre

    Our monthly review of tax data from the US Treasury’s Daily Statement shows three important points.  First, overall employment and wage trends in the US are still on a solid footing.  Individual tax/withholding payments from salaried/hourly workers rose 4.5% year over year in April and are up 3.7% on a three month rolling average basis.  Second, April tax season was a bit of a bust for Treasury, with receipts down 5.7% from last year and at the lowest levels in 5 years. We attribute that to the delayed realization of capital gains in 2016, with asset owners deferring sales ahead of anticipated tax changes this year. That also explains a bit of the slow US equity trading volume and low volatility of 2017 – those asset owners still don’t know what the new tax code may bring and may be continuing to defer sales.  Lastly, “Gig economy” tax receipts (not withheld, but paid directly by the worker) show this post-Financial Crisis labor market phenomenon is on the wane, down 5.5% in Q1 2017 after a 4.8% decline in Q4 2016.

    April is to the US Treasury what Christmas is to retailers: the busiest and most profitable time of the year.  In 2016, for example, the Treasury’s Internal Revenue Service took in $193 billion in payments from individuals as a result of the usual April deadline for filing personal taxes.  By comparison the IRS took in only $15 billion in the month before and $12 billion the month after from taxpayers sending their remittances to the US government.

    Last month, however, was not so good to the US Treasury. “Individual Income and Employment Taxes, Not Withheld” (the Treasury line item for receipts outside the customary withholding process) were down 5.7% year over year to $182 billion. Moreover, this is the lowest April haul since 2012. The April tax receipts of 2013 to 2016 ran between $193 billion (2014) to $219 billion (2015). This year’s receipt totals are far from those.

    That should seem strange to you.  After all, virtually all asset prices have risen in the past 5 years.  Stocks, bonds, real estate… Everything is higher.  And when individuals sell those assets, they need to pay the capital gains tax as part of their annual April true-up with the US Government.

    My explanation: asset owners are deferring sales while they wait for the details of Washington’s new tax plans. Why sell an asset (unless you have to) if you think the tax code might change in your favor?  Better to wait – especially if asset prices are in an uptrend – and see what develops.

    I have been writing a lot about US equity market volatility this week, and it strikes me that this phenomenon might have a role in creating the current low-vol environment.  Since the details of the President’s proposals to change the tax code are still not public, asset owners may be continuing to defer sales in the hopes of better tax treatment down the road.  It is a sort of “Sellers’ strike”, where individuals with capital gains in equities are waiting for a new (and hopefully more capital-friendly) tax code before selling stock.

    On the plus side of things, the same report we use for the tax receipt analysis (Treasury’s Daily Statement, https://www.fms.treas.gov/dts/index.html) shows that the US labor market is still humming along.  Looking at “Withheld Income and Employment Taxes” – the amounts deducted from employee paychecks every cycle – we see that April receipts were up 4.5% from last year and +3.7% on a three month rolling average.

    Withheld tax receipts are a function of the number of people employed and wage levels, so a positive comparison shows underlying strength in the labor market.  Yes, there is a mix issue here.  The top 10% of wage earners may be taking most of the wage gains and therefore paying those to Treasury in their regular withholding.  Even still, the annual increases in withholding to Treasury have been remarkably stable (see attached charts in the PDF link above) at +4-10% since 2013, mirroring the growth in overall US employment.

    Even as the overall US labor market has improved over the last year, one group seems to be left behind: those individuals who work in the “Gig economy”.  These workers pay Social Security/Medicare taxes just like those “Employed” by companies, but their remittances to Treasury tell a different story from the withholding data we described in the prior point.

    For the first quarter of 2017, tax payments by self-employed/contract workers to Treasury were down 5.5%.  In Q4 2016, they were down 4.8%. Compare that to the growth in withholding/tax payments for payroll workers, and you see the problem.  One group is seeing growth in total wages (people employed times wages earned); the other is not.

    Now, it could be that as the US economy has strengthened in the last year those previously in the “Gig” workforce have transitioned to traditional employment.  A few points here:

    • The Bureau of Labor Statistics has not done a study on “Gig economy” workers since 2005, so they are not much help in understanding the possible migration of workers between formal and “Gig” employment. Their work at that time showed “Contingent workers” represented 2-4% of the US labor force.  In addition, about 7% were “independent contractors”.  The BLS plans to update their findings with a study to take place this month.  Read the BLS piece here: https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2016/article/what-is-the-gig-economy.h…
    • If workers are transitioning from “Gig” to traditional employment, they may still do occasional outside work as a means to augment their income and preserve their options; this trend should be visible in the BLS data. In fact, the number of Americans who report holding multiple jobs has started to rise in the last year. As of March 2017, 5.3% of the US workforce has more than one job, up from 5.0% a year ago. That is the highest reading since before the Financial Crisis.
    • Interest in typical “Gig Economy” jobs seems to be on the wane. Looking at the data from Google Trends, US searches for “Gig jobs”, “Uber driver”, “Delivery driver”, “Freelance work”, and “Online job” are all either flat or slightly down over the past year.
    • The one area of incremental interest: searches for “Work from home” were up 50% in 2016 from 2015.
    • McKinsey did an excellent study, published in October 2016, about the Gig economy in the US and Europe if that is a topic of interest for you: http://www.mckinsey.com/global-themes/employment-and-growth/independent-work-choice-necessity-and-the-gig-economy.

    In summary, the tax data we’ve reviewed sheds some useful light on a few critical capital markets questions.  First, the US labor market is still strong. It is proving strong enough, in fact, to pull “Gig” workers back into the salaried labor force. Second, lower April tax payments highlight the possibility that asset owners are reluctant to sell appreciated assets such as stocks until they know the details of any revision to the tax code.  This will likely continue until either equities become more volatile or changes in the tax code are clearly on their way to becoming law.

    While the tax data we’ve reviewed here is not typically part of the econometric toolbox used to analyze the US economy, it does provide an independent take on key issues. Who says there’s nothing good about taxes?

  • "Sell The News"

    After initial kneejerks higher in the euro and equity futures, it appears Macron’s victory is now a “sell the news” event as EURUSD has dropped 60 pips from post-election highs…

     

    S&P Futures are fading…

     

    And gold has bounced back to Friday’s highs…

  • Doug Casey On The Plague Of Cultural Marxists

    Authored by Nick Giambruno via InternationalMan.com,

    Nick Giambruno: What exactly are Cultural Marxists, and how are they, and political correctness, contributing to the decline of Western Civilization?

    Doug Casey: Economic Marxism was intellectually debunked decades ago. With the collapse of the USSR, and radical changes in China, the man in the street became aware that the “intellectuals” were fools. And that is reinforced by the ongoing disasters in Cuba, North Korea, and Venezuela. So, since they recognize that there’s nothing to steal if they implement Marxian economic policies, most “intellectuals” no longer talk about them.

    Cultural Marxism, however, is just as destructive. It divides people not into economic classes, but cultural classes. You’re no longer an individual—you’re part of a gender, or a race, or some other group. Undoubtedly one being discriminated against by white males who—not just coincidentally—are largely responsible for Western Civilization.

    I despise the wave of “politically correct” thought that’s washed over the world like a tidal wave of raw sewage. I remember when I first heard the term used. I believe it was on Saturday Night Live in the early 80’s. At the time I thought it was a joke…

    A word Cultural Marxists use a lot lately is diversity. “We’ve got to have diversity.” No, we don’t have to have diversity. There’s zero logical or moral reason why every room should have a quota of blacks, Hispanics, LGBT’s, women, or whatever. It’s extremely stupid to have people qualify for something based upon accidental characteristics. It encourages them to view themselves not as individuals, but members of a group. So it actually foments class warfare.

    I occasionally like to go to a men’s club. It’s odd that men are never invited to ladies’ functions – and I don’t care. Everyone should associate with whomever they like. People who use the State to impose their opinions on others, or approve of it, are essentially criminal personalities. I avoid them at all costs.

    In fact, birds of a feather usually flock together. This is perfectly natural. You don’t need diversity; it’s not a necessarily positive value, it’s a neutral preference. If you want it in your club, fine. But freedom of association is far, far more important.

    I form my friendships based upon neither diversity nor a lack of diversity, although there’s a natural, genetically based tendency to associate with people like yourself. I form my friendships based upon the character and the beliefs that a person has. The attributes that create diversity are stupid accidentals. The fact that diversity is emphasized draws attention to incidentals like race, sex, and gender, and diverts it from important things like character and beliefs. Diversity has become destructive. Cultural Marxists love “diversity” because, in fact, they actually hate people. And themselves. They want to cause conflicts that work to destroy Western Civilization—which they also hate.

    Nick Giambruno: How does the migrant crisis in Europe relate to all of this?

    Doug Casey: First, let me say that I’m all for immigration and completely open borders to enable opportunity seekers from anyplace to move anyplace else. With two big, critically important, caveats: 1) there can be no welfare or free government services, so everyone has to pay his own way, and no freeloaders are attracted 2) all property is privately owned, to minimize the possibility of squatter camps full of beggars.

    In the absence of welfare benefits, immigrants are usually the best of people because you get mobile, aggressive, and opportunity-seeking people that want to leave a dead old culture for a vibrant new one. The millions of immigrants who came to the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries had zero in the way of state support.

    But what is going on in Europe today is entirely different. The migrants coming to Europe aren’t being attracted by opportunity in the new land so much as the welfare benefits and the soft life. When they arrive, they expect free food, shelter, clothing, and entertainment—totally unlike past immigrants. For the most part they are unskilled and poorly educated. And 99% of them will stay that way, because it takes generations to change cultural attitudes. Few of them will ever become self-supporting.

    What we’re talking about here is the migration of millions of people of different language, different race, different religion, different culture, different mode of living. If you're an alien and you're 1 out of 10,000, or 1,000, or 100, you're a curiosity, an interesting outsider. But an influx of millions of migrants is only going to destroy the old culture, and guarantee antagonism—especially when the locals have to pay for it. In many ways, what’s happening now isn’t just comparable to what happened 2,000 years ago with the migration of barbarians into the Roman Empire. It’s potentially much more serious.

    Nick Giambruno: What’s the welfare state’s role in all this?

    Doug Casey: The State now pays for food, housing, schooling, and even cell phones for the “disadvantaged.” The next step will likely be some type of guaranteed income. All these things only serve to relieve the “disadvantaged” of personal responsibility for their own lives, which acts to cement them to the bottom of society—while slowly bankrupting the country as a whole.

    The welfare state must be abolished, pulled out by its roots, and debunked intellectually and psychologically. If you want to help a deserving individual on your own, great. But to make it part of the State is idiotic—except, of course, for politicians that need votes.

    Nick Giambruno: I recently read an article by arch-neocon Charles Krauthammer. He claimed that the failure of the US to more forcefully interfere in Syria is an indication of the West’s decline. What’s your take?

    Doug Casey: I despise Krauthammer, and his ilk. But, that said, I believe he dislikes me much more than I do him. He’s one of those creatures who thrive within the swamp circled by the Washington Beltway. His prescriptions are almost universally wrong-headed. Which is to be expected from a neocon, a fan of both the warfare state and the welfare state.

    I’ve debated Charles on three separate occasions. He has a high IQ, but his ideas are quite stupid—if we define stupidity as an unwitting tendency to self-destruction. I recently discovered that he is also a leading bioethicist—which I didn’t know when I did an essay on that pernicious group of busybodies.

    Nick Giambruno: Webster’s defines bioethics as “a discipline dealing with the ethical implications of biological research and applications especially in medicine.” What’s so pernicious about that?

    Doug Casey: Bioethics is a phony science, recently concocted by people working for pharmaceutical companies, governments, and medical institutions looking for excuses to justify what they have already decided to do.

    A bioethicist is someone who's supposed to determine the right and wrong of these things. I consider them self-appointed censors pandering to dimwits apparently incapable of thinking out psychological/ethical/economic dilemmas on their own.

    That’s dangerous enough, but these are not just fools sowing confusion, they are mostly of a particular mindset—that is to say, they are a bunch of collectivists and statists—who pretend to be objective. Worse, they espouse policies with wide-reaching implications, almost universally wrong-headed and disastrous, which are a reeking part of the rotting fabric of what was once American society.

    But what really gets me about these bioethicists is that they are not technical experts contributing to debates among scientists—they're just a bunch of busybodies who want to tell everyone else what to do, based on their own opinions of morality and notions of political correctness. This is especially dangerous, because people make decisions and act based on their ideas of what is right and wrong—on moral grounds. By setting themselves up as the great determiners of what is ethically correct, these supposed experts become a sort of new secular priesthood to guide us all. They're worse than run-of-the-mill busybodies, however; they want to play the role of Gríma Wormtongue in counseling rulers. They are generally sociopaths who want us to accept their statist, collectivist ethics, and thereby exert control over the direction of society, taking it down paths they deem best.

    These so-called ethical experts insinuate themselves into the bureaucratic machinery of the State, into the flow of intellectual and academic debate, into the course material taught at universities, and they exert influence.

    It’s especially dangerous because when people read about a consensus of Ph.D.s agreeing that X or Y is ethical, they may be seduced into letting these others do their ethical thinking for them, instead of holding on to the vital responsibility of thinking through ethical matters for themselves.

    From the beginning of the Dark Ages up until the early 1500s, the Church of Rome was the arbiter of morality in the West; that was highly problematical, because it substituted the judgment of some priest for that of each individual. It's one reason that the medieval era was so backward.

    Individual responsibility to understand ethics and act accordingly is a cornerstone of Western Civilization, going all the way back to the Greeks. It's what the play Antigone is all about. This is one reason that Islamic countries are basket cases—they’re at the same stage of philosophical evolution as the West was in the medieval era.

    Anyway, the decline of religion in the West over the last century—a trend I applaud for many reasons, but won’t go into now—has left something of a moral vacuum. It’s been partially filled by secular religions like Marxism, but Marxism has been debunked everywhere but on college campuses… so the bioethicists are the latest fad trying to fill the space.

    Individual responsibility, rather than diffuse responsibility among classes of people, is a major reason for the individual accomplishments and innovations that led the West to global eminence. Bioethicists are trying to set themselves up as a new priesthood. If they succeed, it would reverse an essential element of Western thought. Bioethicists are irksome because they’re a visible cutting edge of the knife destroying the foundations of Western Civilization, and yet they are given unearned respect and material prosperity.

    Nick Giambruno: Can President Trump, or anyone, for that matter, reverse the decline of Western Civilization?

    Doug Casey: Once an empire starts falling apart, trying to stop it is like trying to stop a tree from falling once its roots have rotted. It can’t be done, and it’s best not to be around when it happens.

    The Cultural Marxists and other enemies of Western Civilization are in total control of the education system, so the next several generations of young people are corrupted. They control the media, so they control the prevailing intellectual climate. They control the NGOs, and the “think tanks” that infest DC and other major capitals. They control the Deep State.

    So, no, Trump can’t reverse it. Among other reasons because he himself doesn’t have a philosophical or ethical core. He’s just a businessman; his object is just to make things more efficient. Like Mussolini, to make the trains run on time, as it were. He’s a good influence in that he hates the Cultural Marxists, and they hate him. But it’s not like he can offer a positive alternative for people to believe in.

    Nick Giambruno: What’s the bottom line here?

    Doug Casey: I always like to try to turn a lemon into lemonade. But it’s impossible if someone drops a 500-pound bomb on your kitchen, and follows it up with a poison gas attack. That said, I like to do what I can. Not because I expect success, but because it’s the right thing to do. And that is as important, from a personal viewpoint, as anything in the world.

    Nick Giambruno: Thanks, Doug, until next time.

    Doug Casey: Thanks, Nick.

    *  *  *

    There’s major turmoil ahead for Western Civilization… and it could be catastrophic for global currency and stock markets. We expect the fallout to be far worse than 2008. Most investors can’t handle that sort of chaos. But Doug Casey and his team know how to turn it into huge profits. They’re sharing need-to-know information about the coming global economic meltdown in this time-sensitive video. Click here to watch it.

  • Which Jobs Have The Most Suicides?

    According to an ONS analysis commissioned by Public Health England, suicides are less common among women than men with the rate also varying considerably by occupation.

    Infographic: Which jobs have the most suicides? | Statista

    You will find more statistics at Statista

    Between 2011 and 2015, workers employed in skilled construction and building trades were found to have had the most suicides, followed by elementary administation and service occupations.

Digest powered by RSS Digest