- 90% Of Palestinians Distrust Jared Kushner's Peace Plan
After White House Senior Advisor Jared Kushner unveiled his highly anticipated plan for peace in the Middle East during a two-day economic workshop in Bahrain, it was greeted with derision and exasperation by Arab leaders. The Palestinian leadership boycotted the event while a long list of commentators from Arab countries described the plan as “a colossal waste of time” and “dead on arrival”.
In fact, as Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes, new polling from the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research has found that nine in ten Palestinians do not trust the goals of the plan.
You will find more infographics at Statista
Instead of focusing on the deadlocked political situation, Kushner instead focused on economics, intending to invest $50 billion to fund 179 regional infrastructure projects over the coming decade. $27.6 billion would go to the West Bank and Gaza with the remainder going to Jordan, Egypt and Lebanon.
The primary goal of the plan is to allow the Palestinian territories to better access international markets while simultaneously improving key infrastructure such as electricity, water and telecommunications. That would see Palestinian GDP double over the next ten years, generate an estimated one million jobs and halve the poverty rate. The U.S. and Israel would not be responsible for the funding – the Bahrain workshop aimed to raise capital from across the Arab world. As the polling shows, however, an economic plan totally lacking a political dimension is certainly not being viewed as realistic by Palestinians.
- European Union: Toward A European Superstate
Authored by Soeren Kern via The Gatestone Institute,
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German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen, nominated to be the next President of the European Commission, has called for the creation of a European superstate. “My aim is the United States of Europe…” she said in an interview with Der Spiegel. She has also called for the creation of a European Army.
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Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel, nominated to be the next President of the European Council, has said that Eastern European countries opposed to burden-sharing on migration should lose some of their EU rights. He is also a strong proponent of the Iran nuclear deal.
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Spanish Foreign Minister Josep Borrell, nominated to replace Federica Mogherini as High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, is a well-known supporter of the mullahs in Iran. Borrell has also said that he hopes Britain will leave the EU because it is an impediment to the creation of a European superstate.
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International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde, nominated to be the next President of the European Central Bank, has supported U.S. President Donald J. Trump’s trade war with China. “President Trump has a point on intellectual property. It is correct that nobody should be stealing intellectual property to move ahead…. On these points clearly the game has to change, the rules have to be respected.”
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“The best cure for Europhilia is always to observe the EU’s big beasts at their unguarded worst… unencumbered by any attachment to democracy, accountability or even basic morality… [W]e witnessed rare footage of the secretive process that propels so many retreads and second-rate apparatchiks into positions of immense power in Brussels and Frankfurt, utterly disregarding public opinion…. Everything that is wrong with the EU was shamelessly on display.” — Allister Heath, The Telegraph.
German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen, nominated to be the next President of the European Commission, has called for the creation of a European superstate. “My aim is the United States of Europe…” she said in an interview with Der Spiegel. She has also called for the creation of a European Army. Pictured: Von der Leyen (left) is welcomed by outgoing European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker at the Commission’s headquarters on July 4, 2019 in Brussels, Belgium. (Photo by Thierry Monasse/Getty Images)
After weeks of frenzied backroom wrangling, European leaders on July 2 nominated four federalists to fill the top jobs of the European Union. The nominations — which must be approved by the European Parliament — send a clear signal that the pro-EU establishment has no intention of slowing its relentless march toward a European superstate, a “United States of Europe,” despite a surge of anti-EU sentiment across the continent.
Following are brief profiles of the nominees for the top four positions in the next European Commission, which begins on November 1, 2019 for a period of five years.
Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission
German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen, the daughter of a prominent EU official, has been nominated to replace Jean-Claude Juncker as the next president of the European Commission, the powerful bureaucratic arm of the European Union. Von der Leyen, of the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), was a compromise choice after the candidacy of Manfred Weber, a favorite of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, was rejected by critics, led by French President Emmanuel Macron.
Macron had favored the candidacy of European Commission Vice President Frans Timmermans, a Dutch Social Democrat. Timmermans, however, was rejected by the Visegrád Group — the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia — due to his frequent criticism of their stance against mass migration and judicial reforms.
Von der Leyen has called for the creation of a European superstate. “My aim is the United States of Europe — on the model of federal states such as Switzerland, Germany or the U.S.,” she said in an interview with Der Spiegel. She has also called for the creation of a European Army.
At the same time, however, von der Leyen has been roundly criticized at home and abroad for her performance as German defense minister. During her tenure, Germany’s military has deteriorated due to budget cuts and poor management, according to Parliamentary Armed Forces Commissioner Hans-Peter Bartels.
“The Bundeswehr’s condition is catastrophic,” wrote Rupert Scholz, who served as defense minister under Chancellor Helmut Kohl, days before von der Leyen was nominated to the EU’s top post. “The entire defense capability of the Federal Republic is suffering, which is totally irresponsible.”
Writing for the Munich-based newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, commentator Stefan Ulrich opined that von der Leyen is an “unsuitable” choice:
“Von der Leyen is unsuitable because after six years as defense minister the Bundeswehr is still in such a deplorable state. She should have resigned a long time ago. As President of the European Commission, she will be overwhelmed.”
In March 2016, von der Leyen was cleared of allegations of plagiarism in her doctoral thesis. In September 2015, the newsmagazine Der Spiegel reported that plagiarized material had been found on 27 pages of her 62-page dissertation. The president of the Hanover Medical School, Christopher Baum, said that although von der Leyen’s thesis did contain plagiarized material, the school decided against revoking her title because there had been no intent to deceive. “It’s about mistake, not misconduct,” he said.
Von der Leyen is currently being investigated by the Berlin Public Prosecutor’s Office for nepotism in connection with the allocation of contracts worth hundreds of millions of euros to outside consultants. One such firm is McKinsey & Company, where her son David works as an associate.
Former European Parliament President Martin Schulz tweeted: “Von der Leyen is our weakest minister. That’s apparently enough to become Commission president.”
A Deutschlandtrend survey published on July 4 found that 56% of Germans believe that von der Leyen is not a good choice to lead the European Commission; 33% said that she is a good choice.
The European Parliament will vote on her nomination in Strasbourg on July 16. If approved, she will take over from Jean-Claude Juncker on November 1.
Charles Michel, President of the European Council
Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel, the son of a prominent EU official, has been nominated to succeed Poland’s Donald Tusk as President of the European Council. The European Council defines the EU’s overall political direction and priorities. The members of the European Council are the heads of state or government of the 28 EU member states, the European Council President and the President of the European Commission.
Michel became Belgium’s youngest prime minister in 2014 at the age of 38. In December 2018, he resigned after losing a no-confidence motion over his support for the UN Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. It proclaimed basic rights for migrants, but critics said it would blur the line between legal and illegal immigration. He now heads a caretaker government after an inconclusive general election in May 2019.
Michel has said that Eastern European countries opposed to burden-sharing on migration should lose some of their EU rights. “The European Union is not only an ATM when you need support,” he said. “Cooperation means solidarity and responsibility.”
Michel is a strong proponent of the Iran nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). He has criticized the Trump administration for withdrawing from the agreement: “No #IranDeal means more instability or war in the Middle East. I deeply regret the withdrawal by @realDonaldTrump from #JCPOA. EU & its international partners must remain committed and Iran must continue to fulfil its obligations.”
Michel has also condemned the Trump administration’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. “We know that tensions in Israel and Palestine are feeding a form of hatred and violence that is felt everywhere in the world. That’s why we have unequivocally condemned Donald Trump’s statement. It was oil on fire, we do not need it.”
Josep Borrell, EU Foreign Policy Chief
Spanish Foreign Minister Josep Borrell has been nominated to replace Federica Mogherini as High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. Like Mogherini, Borrell is a well-known supporter of the mullahs in Iran and is likely to clash with the United States and Israel over the nuclear deal with Tehran.
In a February 19 interview with Politico, Borrell, a Socialist, declared that Israel would have to live with the existential threat of an Iranian nuclear bomb:
“The Americans decided to kill [the Iran nuclear deal], unilaterally as they do things without any kind of previous consultation, without taking care of what interests the Europeans have. We are not children following what they say. We have our own prospects, interests and strategy and we will continue working with Iran. It would be very bad for us if it goes on to develop a nuclear weapon…. Iran wants to wipe out Israel; nothing new about that. You have to live with it.”
On February 11, Borrell marked the 40th anniversary of the Iranian revolution by praising the achievements made by women in the country since Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini swept to power in 1979. The rights and status of Iranian women have, in fact, been severely restricted since the Islamic Revolution. In a Twitter thread, Borrell also encouraged the Iranian regime to wait out American sanctions in case U.S. President Donald J. Trump is not reelected in 2020.
In May 2019, Spain withdrew a warship, the frigate Méndez Núñez, from the USS Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group, because of rising tensions between Washington and Tehran.
Also in May 2019, Borrell accused the United States of acting “like a western cowboy” after the Trump administration recognized the president of Venezuela’s National Assembly, Juan Guaidó, as interim president of the country. Borrell said that Spain “will continue to reject pressures that border on military interventions” to remove from power Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. The Spanish Socialist Party has a long history of promoting the Marxist revolutionaries led by Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chávez.
In November 2018, Borrell explained why the United States is more politically integrated than the European Union: “The United States has very little previous history. They were born to independence with practically no history; the only thing they had done was to kill four Indians.” He later apologized for the “excessively colloquial manner” in which he downplayed the “quasi annihilation” of Native Americans. Borrell made no mention of the destruction of the native populations of Central and South America at the hands of Spanish conquerors.
Borrell has said that “Europe needs a new leitmotiv” and that the fight against climate change “should be one of the great engines of Europe’s rebirth.”
Borrell has also stated that he hopes Britain will leave the EU because it is an impediment to the creation of a European superstate:
“I belong to the school which believes that with the UK in the EU we will never have a political union. Personally, because I do want a political union, I don’t care whether the United Kingdom leaves because I know that to date, it has been an obstacle to further integration.”
In April 2012, Borrell was forced to resign as president of the European University Institute (EUI) due to a conflict of interest after it emerged that he was simultaneously being paid €300,000 a year as a board member of the Spanish sustainable-energy company Abengoa.
In October 2016, Borrell was fined €30,000 ($34,000) by the National Securities Market Commission (CNMV) for insider trading after selling 10,000 shares in Abengoa in November 2015.
Christine Lagarde, President of the European Central Bank
Christine Lagarde, a former French finance minister the current managing director of the International Monetary Fund, has been nominated to succeed Mario Draghi as president of the European Central Bank (ECB). Lagarde’s nomination has received mixed reviews. As the head of the IMF, she brings strong credentials in leadership, management and communications. She is, however, a lawyer, not an economist, and she has no experience in monetary policy.
During an interview with the Daily Show, Lagarde said that President Donald Trump “has a point” in his trade war with China:
“President Trump has a point on intellectual property. It is correct that nobody should be stealing intellectual property to move ahead. He has a point on subsidies, you cannot just go about competing with others out there that are heavily subsidized. On these points clearly, the game has to change, the rules have to be respected.”
Financial reporter Bjarke Smith-Meyer noted that Lagarde’s nomination came as something of a surprise and “pushes the European Central Bank toward an area it’s tried to avoid in its 21-year history: politics.”
Paul Taylor, a columnist for Politico, added:
“Central banking is rocket science. If you don’t get it right, the consequences can be tragic.
“That’s why EU leaders are taking a huge gamble in their decision to entrust the leadership of the European Central Bank to Christine Lagarde, a political rock star with no economic training and no practical experience of monetary policy.
“At a time when the ECB is running low on options for jolting the economy, Lagarde may have the acumen and authority needed to persuade reluctant, conservative Germany and the Netherlands of the urgent need to provide more fiscal stimulus….
“But by nominating the former French minister to succeed Italy’s Mario Draghi — the bold president of the bank who rescued the European economy in 2012 with a promise to do ‘whatever it takes to preserve the euro’ — the EU’s leaders have effectively decided that they don’t need a central banker to run their central bank….
“The surprise choice of Lagarde, 64, was part of a Franco-German trade-off under which conservative German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen, 60, was nominated to head the European Commission, breaking a political deadlock in which all the original candidates fell by the wayside….
“The main reason why Lagarde got the nod, instead of the experienced French central bank chief François Villeroy de Galhau, appeared to be gender.
“For the first time, the sensitive choice of ECB chief was the adjustment variable in political horse-trading over other top EU jobs — even though the bank is meant to be strictly independent of politics.”
In December 2016, France’s Court of Justice of the Republic found Lagarde guilty of negligence for not seeking to block a fraudulent 2008 arbitration award to a politically connected tycoon when she was finance minister. The court ruled that Lagarde’s negligence in her management of a long-running arbitration case involving tycoon Bernard Tapie helped open the door for the fraudulent misappropriation of €403 million ($450 million) of public funds in a settlement given to Tapie in 2008 over the botched sale of sportswear giant Adidas in the 1990s.
Reflections on European “Democracy”
Writing for The Telegraph, columnist Allister Heath, in an essay titled, “The EU is a Sham Democracy,” noted:
“Thank you, Eurocrats, for being yourselves. The best cure for Europhilia is always to observe the EU’s big beasts at their unguarded worst, wheeling and dealing in their natural habitat, unencumbered by any attachment to democracy, accountability or even basic morality.
“The spectacle of the past few days made for compulsive watching: we witnessed rare footage of the secretive process that propels so many retreads and second-rate apparatchiks into positions of immense power in Brussels and Frankfurt, utterly disregarding public opinion.
“Peeking into Europe’s dystopia was certainly the right medicine for pre-Brexit Britain, guaranteed to convert erstwhile moderates into raging Brexiteers as they looked on, aghast, at the shocking disconnect between elites and people.
“Everything that is wrong with the EU was shamelessly on display: a Franco-German stitch-up; smaller countries being bulldozed, especially Eastern Europeans; a constitutional coup which sidelined the (useless) European Parliament; the fact that so many of the new generation of EU leaders have had brushes with the law that would have terminated their careers in the US or UK; their explicit commitment to a ‘United States of Europe’ and a ‘European army’ (about which we keep being lied to); and the singing of a national anthem we were promised wouldn’t exist when the European constitution was voted down….
“While the EU apes some of the rituals of democracy, they are a sinister sham, and will always be. The EU is a technocratic empire, and can be nothing else.”
Writing for the European media platform, Euractiv, Jorge Valero lamented:
“After five summit days and hundreds of hours of phone calls, meetings and backroom chats, the EU conclave agreed on its new leadership. But the ‘white smoke’ that emerged from the Council building preludes storm clouds for the nominees and the European demos.
“Few winners came out of the distribution of the top posts sealed on July 2, and the European democracy was hardly one of them.
“Ursula von der Leyen, Charles Michel, Josep Borrell, and Christine Lagarde have good reasons to pop the champagne and toast their unexpected elevation to Commission president, European Council chair, High Representative and ECB chief, respectively.
“But it was a high price to pay for the badly needed gender balance….
“The fresh leadership will stand in the shadow of old scandals, legal cases and malpractice. Lagarde was found guilty of negligence in the Bernard Tapie scandal. Borrell was sanctioned by the Spanish market authority for using insider information in the sale of some shares.
“The German parliament launched an investigation into von der Leyen for nepotism and irregularities in allocating expensive contracts. And Michel’s career would hardly be the same if his father hadn’t been a Belgian minister and EU Commissioner.”
The British Conservative MEP Daniel Hannon, in a tweet, summarized: “Can anyone look at the people who will be running the EU for the next five years and then try to claim that the high tide of federalism has passed?”
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- The Strange Case Of Chrystia Freeland And The Failure Of The "Super Elite"
Authored by Matthew Ehret via OrientalReview.org,
Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland has become a bit of a living parody of everything wrong with the detached technocratic neo-liberal order which has driven the world through 50 years of post-industrial decay. Now, two years into the Trump presidency, and five years into the growth of a new system shaped by the Russia-China alliance, the world has become a very different place from the one which Freeland and her controllers wish it to be.
Chrystia Freeland
Having been set up as a counterpart to the steely Hillary Clinton who was supposed to win the 2016 election, Freeland and her ilk have demonstrated their outdated thinking in everything they have set out to achieve since the 2014 coup in Ukraine. Certainly before that, everything seemed to be going smoothly enough for End of History disciples promoting a script that was supposed to culminate in a long-sought for “New World Order”.
The Script up until Now
Things were going especially well since the collapse of the Soviet system in the early 1990s. The collapse ushered in a unipolar world order with the European Union and NAFTA, followed soon thereafter by the World Trade Organization and the 1999 destruction of Glass-Steagall. The trans-Atlantic at last was converted into a cage of “post-sovereign nations” that no longer had actual control of their own powers of credit generation. Under NATO, even national militaries were subject to technocratic control. This cage was perfect for the governing elite “scientifically managing” from above while the little people bickered over their diminishing employment and standards of living from below.
Even though the former Soviet bloc nations were in tatters by 1992, their sovereign powers could only be undone by applying the liberalization process which took 30 years in the west in a short space of only a decade. This was done under the direction of such monetarist “reformers” such as Anatoly Chubais and Yegor Gaidar under Yeltsin. Similar privatization and liberalization reforms were applied viciously to Ukraine and other Warsaw pact countries during the same period. Those pirates that became the “nouveau riche” of the west were joined by such contemporary modern oligarchs such as Oleg Deripaska, Boris Berezovksy, Mikhail Fridman, Roman Abramovich in Russia, alongside Petro Poroshenko, Rinat Akhmetov, Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Viktor Pinchuk of Ukraine (to name a few). Not to forget their spiritual roots, many of these oligarchs soon purchased houses in the swank upmarket sections of London which has come to be known as “Moscow on Thames.”
By the end of the 1990s a new phase of this de-nationalization was unleashed with the unveiling of the Blair doctrine explicitly calling for a “post-Westphalia” world order which unleashed a wave of hellish regime change wars in the Arab World beginning with 9-11, and with a long term intention to target Libya, Syria, Iran, and Lebanon while expanding NATO’s hegemony against the potential re-emergence of Russia and China.
The Economic Meltdown Was Always the Intention
Let’s be clear: the whole point of the post-1971 world was directed with the intention of destroying the moral-political and economic foundations for western society. The belief in scientific progress and industrial growth was the cause of all true progress from the 15th century Golden Renaissance to the assassinations of the 1960s. The intended consequences of this post-1971 (zero growth) policy were:
1) The destruction of the productive forces of labor vis a vis outsourcing to “cheap labour markets” driven by shareholder profit.
2) The consolidation of wealth into an ever smaller array of private multi-billionaire owners under a logic of Darwinian survival of the fittest.
3) The creation of a vast speculative bubble supported by ever greater rates of unpayable debt and totally detached from the physically productive forces of reality.
Just like 1929, after years of speculation known as the roaring twenties, the “plug could be pulled” on the bubble in order to impose a bit of shock therapy onto a sleeping population who would beg for fascism as a solution if only it would put bread on their tables. Though this plan failed 80 years ago due to the American rejection of fascism under President Roosevelt, the belief that the formula could succeed in the 21st century was adhered to most closely as long as America was brought firmly under control of the City of London and their Wall Street lackies.
Although the fascist “solution” to their manufactured crisis was put down during WWII, this new attempt was premised upon the policy that a new system of Global Government managed by draconian regulation would be imposed under a “Green New Deal” framework whereby the instruments of banking regulation, state directed capital and centralized government (not evils unto themselves), would be directed only to green, low energy flux density forms of energy which inherently lower the population of the earth. This is very different from the protectionism, bank regulation, state credit and central authority exerted by America during the 1930s New Deal (or Eurasian New Silk Road policy today). The difference is that one system empowers sovereign nations, and increases the productive powers of labor and energy flux density of humanity while increasing quality of life, the other “Green” agenda has the opposite effect whereby monetary incentives are tied to decreasing the “carbon footprint” of the earth. The image of a drug addict getting paid heroine as an incentive to bleed himself to death is useful here.
With the slow collapse of first world economies after the assassination of nationalist leaders in the 1960s, the plan for depopulation and global government seemed to be unfolding without serious opposition.
The Role of Chrystia Freeland
Freeland’s bizarre role in this whole affair was to do what every good Rhodes Scholar is conditioned to do upon their completion of their indoctrination at Oxford: facilitate the tough transition of the “pre-collapse” world economy into a new operating system that was meant to be the “green post-collapse” world economy. It wasn’t going to be easy to tell a new “pirate class” of billionaires that they would have to accept losing much of their wealth (less population equals less money), and operate under a strict new global operating system of regulation necessary to contract the society. The Rhodes Scholarship program begun in 1902 to advance a re-organized British Empire and had worked alongside the Fabian Society for over a century producing more than 7000 scholars who have permeated across all fields of society (media, education, government, military and corporate).
In his 1877 will, Cecil Rhodes said this group should be “a society which should have its members in every part of the British Empire working with one object and one idea we should have its members placed at our universities and our schools and should watch the English youth passing through their hands just one perhaps in every thousand would have the mind and feelings for such an object, he should be tried in every way, he should be tested whether he is endurant, possessed of eloquence, disregardful of the petty details of life, and if found to be such, then elected and bound by oath to serve for the rest of his life in his Country. He should then be supported if without means by the Society and sent to that part of the Empire where it was felt he was needed.”
After leaving Oxford in 1993, Chrystia Freeland learned the ropes of “perception management” by working for the London Economist, Washington Post, Financial times and Globe and Mail and Reuters. After serving a stint as editor-at-large of Reuters, the time had come for her to play the role of Valery Jarrett to the “Barack Obama” of Canada then being prepped for Prime Ministership of Justin Trudeau.
She was perfect.
As an asset of the global propaganda system, Freeland had made high level contacts with those Ukrainian, Russian, and Western oligarchs mentioned above including Viktor Pinchuk and Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Larry Summers, George Soros and Al Gore, were just a few players in the west whom she considered her “close friends” and whom she was happy to bring into Canada during the period of re-organization of the Liberal Party (2011-2014) as it prepared to take power under the banner of the Canada 2020 think tank. What made Freeland even more special was that she was bred from a zealous family of Ukrainian nationalists under the patriarchy of her Nazi grandfather Michael Chomiak. This network was brought to Canada after WWII by Anglo-American intelligence and cultivated as a force with ties to pro-Nazi Ukrainian counterparts ever since.
Freeland’s admission into politics was managed by another Rhodes Scholar named Bob Rae who served as interim controller of the Liberal Party during several of the Harper years and was a major player in Canada 2020. Rae, who had been the NDP Premier of Ontario from 1990-1995 was happy to abdicate his seat to Freeland ensuring her entry into Trudeau’s inner circle and thus becoming his official handler.
Freeland Promotes the New Global Elite
Freeland has made it clear that she understands well that there is a fundamental difference in cultural identities of the “new rich” relative to the older oligarchic families which she serves. In the 2011 Rise of the New Global Elite, she describes it as follows:
“To grasp the difference between today’s plutocrats and the hereditary elite, who “grow rich in their sleep” one need merely glance at the events that now fill high-end social calendars.”
Freeland then breaks down the categories of “new plutocrats” into two subcategories: the good, technocratic friendly plutocrats who are ideologically compatible with the New World Order of depopulation, such as Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, George Soros, et al and the “bad” plutocrats who tend not to conform to the British Empire’s program of global governance and depopulation under the green agenda. In Freeland’s world “good oligarchs” are those who adhere to this agenda, while “bad oligarchs” are those who do not. Trump is a terrible Plutocrat, and – Viktor Yanukovych was a good plutocrat until he decided to not sacrifice Ukraine on the altar of the collapsing European Union and chose to throw Ukraine’s destiny into the Eurasian Economic Union in October 2013.
In the same paper, Freeland wrote:
“if the plutocrats’ opposition to increases in their taxes and tighter regulation of their economic activities is understandable, it is also a mistake. The real threat facing the super-elite, at home and abroad, isn’t modestly higher taxes, but rather the possibility that inchoate public rage could cohere into a more concrete populist agenda– that, for instance, middle-class Americans could conclude that the world economy isn’t working for them and decide that protectionism… is preferable to incremental measures.” Quoting billionaire Mohamed El-Erian, the CEO of Pimco she wrote: “one of the big surprises of 2010 is that the protectionist dog didn’t bark.”
Freeland ended her article with this message:
“The lesson of history is that, in the long run, super-elites have two ways to survive: by suppressing dissent or by sharing their wealth… Let us hope the plutocrats aren’t already too isolated to recognize this”.
But what does Freeland really think of the technocratic management under a plutocratic governance of society? In Plutocrats vs. Populists (Nov. 2013), Freeland lets her pro-plutocratic worldview out of the bag when she gushes:
“At its best, this form of plutocratic political power offers the tantalizing possibility of policy practiced at the highest professional level with none of the messiness and deal making and venality of traditional politics… a technocratic, data-based, objective search for solutions to our problems”
Since a technocratic managerial class committed to a common ideology must be solidified for this system to work, Freeland goes on to make the case to recruit young people to the imperial civil service:
“Smart, publicly minded technocrats go to work for plutocrats whose values they share. The technocrats get to focus full time on the policy issues they love, without the tedium of building, rallying– and serving– a permanent mass membership. They can be pretty well paid to boot.”
The End of a Delusion?
Now that Russia and China’s new operating system shaped by the Belt and Road Initiative has created a force of opposition to this British-run Deep State design, nothing which those would-be gods of Olympus have attempted to achieve has succeeded. Syria stands strong and the Arab nations are increasingly joining China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Venezuela has failed to fall the way so many regimes have done before 2014 and NAFTA has been seriously challenged by a nationalistic president in the USA who has also totally rejected the Malthusian agenda with the killing of COP21 and the Green New Deal. Trudeau’s usefulness has withered away quicker than you can say “SNC Lavalin” and now the decision appears to be seriously humored whether Freeland will take the reins of Canada after Trudeau is eliminated in order to “preserve the dying British Empire” and the dream of Cecil Rhodes. While the universe may be organized by a principle of reason, no one can say the same applies to the mind of an oligarchic.
- Hong Kong Leader Carrie Lam Says Extradition Bill Is "Dead" After Protests
In an unexpected, if not outright bizarre concession by Beijing to protesters, on Tuesday morning Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam gave her strongest pledge yet when she declared the highly unpopular extradition bill that sparked several mass protests was “dead”, changing from an earlier script that it “will die” in 2020, according to the SCMP.
Climb down. For #HongKong government – and, in turn, Beijing – at least for now. #China (News flashes below) pic.twitter.com/s1faRfpu4H
— Eunice Yoon (@onlyyoontv) July 9, 2019
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“I have almost immediately put a stop to the (bill) amendment exercise, but there are still lingering doubts about the government’s sincerity, or worries whether the government will restart the process in the legislative council, so I reiterate here: There is no such plan, the bill is dead.”
Addressing the month-long drama during a news conference, she reiterated that there is no plan to restart the legislation, describing the work to amend the bill as a “total failure.” Meanwhile, she said she would take full responsibility for what has happened in the city, according to a translation of her address.
However, just like Erdogan’s surprisingly muted reaction to the loss of Istanbul in the local election re-run two weeks ago was a Trojan horse to the leader’s true intentions, unveiled this past weekend with his sacking of the central bank chief, confirming that nothing has changed and the Turkish “executive president” is digging himself even deeper as the country’s unchecked, executive power, we would urge readers not to read too much into this soundbite: as the SCMP notes, whether the bill was effectively withdrawn – as demanded by protesters – remained unclear, as Lam did not say that she is officially withdrawing the bill, raising questions about to what extent the measure could be revived in the future. Additionally, Lam stood firm on not setting up a top-level probe into clashes between police and protesters. Meanwhile, an independent study will be looking into police behavior during the protests, she said, asking for some time to “improve the current situation.”
Lam noted those concerns in Cantonese remarks, via CNBC.
“What I’m saying today is nothing really different from what I said before. But maybe the citizens need to hear a definitive saying (from me),” Lam said, according to a translation of those comments. “So saying that the extradition bill is now in the coffin is the more definitive way of saying it, which means, the bill is dead. Hence, everyone doesn’t need to worry whether there will be any tactics that the discussion of the bill will resume in this Legislative Council term.”
Yet in a hint that a wave of “behind the scenes” retaliation was coming, Lam said the Independent Police Complaints Council would be launching an investigation, and that all parties involved in the demonstrations, including protesters, police, media and onlookers, could provide information.
Ever the Beijing-trained bureaucrat, the chief executive, speaking before meeting her advisers in the Executive Council, reiterated that the government did not call a protest on June 12, during which there were violent clashes between police and mostly young protesters, a “riot”. And even as she suggested that all those who had “rioted” may be facing penalties, Lam also said she was “willing to engage in an open dialogue with students without any preconditions”, sending a barrage of mixed messages.
Whether this is just a gambit to ease tension in the town where just yesterday a fresh round of protests shut down the main shopping area, or a genuine gesture, student leaders from eight universities balked, and turned down her request for a small-scale and closed-door meeting on Friday, and said they would only talk to Lam if she agreed to their two preconditions: meet them in a town hall-style open meeting and promise to exonerate protesters.
At the same time, protesters have been urging the government to respond to other demands: withdraw the bill completely, retract all references to the protest on June 12 as a riot; set up a commission of inquiry to examine police use of force; and launch democratic reforms. A demand for Lam to resign appears to have gradually faded away.
Lam admitted the public’s trust in the government was fragile, yet said she is “proud of the quality of the Hong Kong people” as demonstrated by the peaceful behavior of the vast majority of protesters. She, however, said “a very small minority of protesters have used the occasion to resort to violent acts and vandalism.”
“We are sad to see these violent acts because they undermine the rule of law in Hong Kong,” she said. “So I make a very sincere plea here, that in the future, if anyone in Hong Kong have any different views — especially those about the Hong Kong government’s policies — please continue to uphold the value of expressing it in a peaceful and orderly manner.”
As the SCMP adds, the weekly Exco meeting is the first at the Chief Executive’s Office since June 11. Last week’s meeting was held at Government House as the administrative headquarters were closed because of the protests. The previous two Exco meetings were cancelled.
Had the bill passed, it would have allowed Hong Kong to transfer suspects to jurisdictions it lacks extradition agreements with, including mainland China. Critics feared it would remove the legal firewall between the city and the mainland, exposing suspects to opaque trials across the border.
Tuesday marks exactly a month since the first mass protest against the bill brought an estimated 1 million people onto the streets on June 9, followed by about 2 million the following weekend.
- The Lowest Paying Jobs Are In These States
A new report by Yahoo Finance, using Occupational Employment Statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), shows the lowest-paying jobs in all 50 states pay an annual wage between $18,000 and $26,000 per year.
Most of these low-paying jobs were in the restaurant industry. The report discovered the most common low-paying jobs were cooking, prepping, and serving food. On a geographical basis, the lowest paying jobs were situated in the Rust Belt, Deep South, and Midwest.
Ticket takers, ushers, and lobby attendants were the second-most common low-paying jobs across the country.
“Jobs are low-paying for one of two reasons,” David Neumark, professor of economics at the University of California, Irvine told Yahoo Finance. “There’s a lot of supply and not much demand. And they’re very low-skilled. I mean, how much skill does it take to collect movies at the movie theater, right?”
Yahoo Finance points out that workers in the restaurant industry from Alabama to Washington were paid poorly, but there were exceptional variations in wages for the same jobs. Food preparation and servers made an annual wage of $18,680 in Alabama, the same position in Washington paid $25,550.
The reason for the pay gap in both states is due to the cost of living. Alabama was ranked as the 11th cheapest state to live while Washington was 38th, according to the Cost of Living Index by the Missouri Department of Economic Development.
The lowest-paid job was in Louisiana, where gaming and sports book writers and runners made $17,820.
A little more than 60% of the workforce is paid at hourly rates, according to the BLS, and out of that, 1.3 million earned less than the federal minimum wage.
And with inflation moving higher, the average American worker can barely survive, nevertheless purchase a home. Meanwhile, most have insurmountable students loans and aboustely no savings to whether the upcoming recession.
- Poundstone: There's A 50% Chance Humans Die-Off Within 760 Years
Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,
The author of “The Doomsday Calculation” estimates that there is a 50 percent chance the human race will die off within the next 760 years. In the book, author William Poundstone applies the mathematical approach of Princeton University astrophysicist J. Richard Gott III to estimate when humans will officially die off.
According to The Daily Mail, this mathematical method is said to work to predict the likely length of existence of anything of an uncertain duration so long as it’s being encountered at a random point in time.
“Obviously, if you have any specific information affecting the life span of, say, the human race, or a class of stars, you can estimate its life span more realistically,” Gott told the New York Times in 1993.
“But this statistical method allows you to make at least a rough estimate of a life span without knowing anything more than how long something has existed,” he added.
It’s a little surprising humanity isn’t predicted to end sooner with the rate the elite globalists are manipulating everything.
In an article published byVox, Poundstone explained the Copernican method he used to arrive at his prediction. The Copernican principle came from Copernicus, the great Renaissance astronomer, who declared Earth was not the center of the universe.
“Demographers have estimated the total number of people who ever lived at about 100 billion. That means that about 100 billion people were born before me,” Poundstone said.
“Currently, about 130 million people are born each year. At that rate, it would take only about 760 years for another 100 billion more people to be born. That’s the basis of the claim that there’s a 50 percent chance that humans will become extinct within about 760 years. The flip side of the claim is there’s also a 50 percent chance we’ll survive past 760 years, possibly long past that.”
After graduating from Harvard with a physics degree, Gott used this method to predict the demolition of the Berlin Wall. He estimated that there was a 50 percent chance the wall would come down no later than 24 years from that day, but that it would stand for at least two and two-thirds years more. The demolition of the wall officially began on June 13, 1990, roughly 21 years later, reported The Daily Mail.
Poundstone wrote: “[Gott] reasoned that this prediction had a 50 percent chance of being right. You may feel that 50 percent is too wishy-washy and Gott just got lucky. No problem: The method can supply predictions with any degree of confidence you choose. To achieve 95 percent confidence, you’d make a diagram with the shaded region covering the middle 95 percent of the bar. The prediction range would be wider (from 1/39 to 39 times the past duration). Had Gott used this formulation, his prediction for the wall’s ceasing to exist would have been 0.21 to 312 years after his visit. This is less impressive, given the extremely wide range — but it would have been correct, too.”
Using his own method in 1993, Gott estimated the end of humanity with a 95% probability of accuracy. He wrote about it in a scientific journal called Nature. “Making only the assumption that you are a random intelligent observer, limits for the total longevity of our species of 0.2 million to 8 million years can be derived at the 95 [percent] confidence level,” Gott said, in the abstract for the article.
But here’s where things get really interesting: Bayes’ theorem can also be used to lay odds on the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence; on whether we live in a Matrix-like counterfeit of reality; on the “many worlds” interpretation of quantum theory being correct; and on the biggest question of all: how long will humanity survive? –The Doomsday Calculation, book description
- FBI, ICE Using Facial Recognition To Bulk-Scan DMV Photos In "Unprecedented Surveillance Infrastructure"
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) along with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been using state driver’s license databases to run photos of millions of Americans through facial-recognition systems without their knowledge or consent, according to the Washington Post.
Thousands of facial-recognition requests, internal documents and emails over the past five years, obtained through public-records requests by Georgetown Law researchers and provided to The Washington Post, reveal that federal investigators have turned state departments of motor vehicles databases into the bedrock of an unprecedented surveillance infrastructure.
Police have long had access to fingerprints, DNA and other “biometric data” taken from criminal suspects. But the DMV records contain the photos of a vast majority of a state’s residents, most of whom have never been charged with a crime. –Washington Post
Disturbingly, neither Congress nor state legislatures have authorized this type of system, and none of us agreed to it when we obtained licenses.
“They’ve just given access to that to the FBI,” said Rep. Jim Jordan, ranking GOP member of the House Oversight Committee. “No individual signed off on that when they renewed their driver’s license, got their driver’s licenses. They didn’t sign any waiver saying, ‘Oh, it’s okay to turn my information, my photo, over to the FBI.’ No elected officials voted for that to happen.”
“Law enforcement’s access of state databases,” and in particular those of the DMV, is “often done in the shadows with no consent,” added House Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah E. Cummings (D-MD).
And as has been reported for some time, law enforcement has been relying on facial recognition technology as a routine investigative tool for years – and it’s going to get worse.
Since 2011, the FBI has logged more than 390,000 facial-recognition searches of federal and local databases, including state DMV databases, the Government Accountability Office said last month, and the records show that federal investigators have forged daily working relationships with DMV officials. In Utah, FBI and ICE agents logged more than 1,000 facial-recognition searches between 2015 and 2017, the records show. Names and other details are hidden, though dozens of the searches are marked as having returned a “possible match.” –Washington Post
Also disturbing is the fact that law enforcement often uses facial recognition to investigate low-level crime, with searches “often executed with nothing more formal than an email from a federal agent to a local contact,” according to the Post.
“It’s really a surveillance-first, ask-permission-later system,” says Project on Government Oversight watchdog lawyer Jake Laperruque. “People think this is something coming way off in the future, but these [facial-recognition] searches are happening very frequently today. The FBI alone does 4,000 searches every month, and a lot of them go through state DMVs.”
Targeting illegals with licenses?
The Post also brings up the fact that undocumented residents who obtain driver’s licenses in states which allow this may be subject to immigration enforcement due to the facial recognition technology.
Though Utah, Vermont and Washington allow undocumented immigrants to obtain full driver’s licenses or more-limited permits known as driving privilege cards, ICE agents have run facial-recognition searches on those DMV databases.
More than a dozen states, including New York, as well as the District of Columbia, allow undocumented immigrants to drive legally with full licenses or driving privilege cards, as long as they submit proof of in-state residency and pass the states’ driving-proficiency tests.
Lawmakers in Florida, Texas and other states have introduced bills this year that would extend driving privileges to undocumented immigrants. Some of those states already allow the FBI to scan driver’s license photos, while others, such as Florida and New York, are negotiating with the FBI over access, according to the GAO. –Washington Post
“The state has told [undocumented immigrants], has encouraged them, to submit that information. To me, it’s an insane breach of trust to then turn around and allow ICE access to that,” according to Georgetown Law Center on Privacy and Technology senior associate Clare Garvie, who led the research.
The FBI’s facial-recognition search has access to local, state and federal databases containing more than 641 million face photos, a GAO director said last month. But the agency provides little information about when the searches are used, who is targeted and how often searches return false matches. –Washington Post
When asked about the surveillance, the FBI told the Post to refer to last month’s congressional testimony from Deputy Assistant Director Kimberly Del Grecco, who said that facial recognition was necessary “to preserve our nation’s freedoms, ensure our liberties are protected, and preserve our security.”
Racist technology?
Civil rights advocates have decried the use of facial recognition technology due to the fact that it is far less accurate when trying to identify people of color. According to the report, “The software’s precision is highly dependent on a number of factors, including the lighting of a subject’s face and the quality of the image, and research has shown that the technology performs less accurately on people with darker skin.”
Whatever the objection, we’re now at the point where our ability to drive a car or enjoy the out-of-doors is subject to constant electronic surveillance of varying accuracy.
- Matrix-Like Reality Goes Mainstream: NBC Asks "Are We Living In A Simulated Universe"
Authored by Dan Folk via NBCNews.com,
What if everything around us – the people, the stars overhead, the ground beneath our feet, even our bodies and minds – were an elaborate illusion?
What if our world were simply a hyper-realistic simulation, with all of us merely characters in some kind of sophisticated video game?
This, of course, is a familiar concept from science fiction books and films, including the 1999 blockbuster movie “The Matrix.” But some physicists and philosophers say it’s possible that we really do live in a simulation — even if that means casting aside what we know (or think we know) about the universe and our place in it.
“If we are living in a simulation, then the cosmos that we are observing is just a tiny piece of the totality of physical existence,” Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom said in a 2003 paper that jump-started the conversation about what has come to be known as the simulation hypothesis.
“While the world we see is in some sense ‘real,’ it is not located at the fundamental level of reality.”
Simulating worlds and beings
Rizwan Virk, founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s PlayLabs program and author of “The Simulation Hypothesis,” is among those who take the simulation hypothesis seriously. He recalls playing a virtual reality game so realistic that he forgot that he was in an empty room with a headset on. That led him to wonder: Are we sure we aren’t embedded within a world created by beings more technologically savvy than ourselves?
That question makes sense to Rich Terrile, a computer scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Detailed as they are, today’s best simulations don’t involve artificial minds, but Terrile thinks the ability to model sentient beings could soon be within our grasp. “We are within a generation of being those gods who create those universes,” he says.
Not everyone is convinced. During a 2016 debate at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, Harvard University physicist Lisa Randall said the odds that the simulation hypothesis is correct are “effectively zero.” For starters, there’s no evidence that our world isn’t the array of stars and galaxies that it appears to be. And she wonders why advanced beings would bother to simulate Homo sapiens. “Why simulate us? I mean, there are so many things to be simulating,” she said. “I don’t know why this higher species would want to bother with us.”
Echoes of Genesis
Yet, there’s a familiar ring to the idea that there’s a simulator, or creator, who does care about us. Similarly, the idea of a superior being forging a simulated universe parallels the notion of a deity creating the world — for example, as described in the Book of Genesis.
Some thinkers, including Terrile, welcome the analogy to religion. If the simulation hypothesis is correct, he says, then “there’s a creator, an architect — someone who designed the world.” It’s an ancient idea recast in terms of “mathematics and science rather than just faith.”
(click image for link to poll and updated distribution)
But for other scholars, including University of Maryland physicist Sylvester James Gates, the similarity between the simulation hypothesis and religious belief should be taken as a warning that we’re off track. Science, as he said in a recent radio interview, has taken us “away from this idea that we are puppets” controlled by an unseen entity. The simulation hypothesis, he said, “starts to look like a religion,” with a programmer substituting for god.
Who, or what, is the godlike entity that may have created a simulated universe? One possibility, supporters of the simulation hypothesis say, is that it’s a race of advanced beings — space aliens. Even more mind-bending is the possibility is that it’s our own descendants — “our future selves,” as Terrile puts it. That is, humans living hundreds or thousands of years in the future might develop the ability to simulate not only a world like ours but the bodies and minds of the beings within it.
“Just as you can simulate anything else, you can simulate brains,” Bostrom says. True, we don’t yet have the technology to pull it off, but he says there’s no conceptual barrier to it.
And once we create brain simulations “sufficiently detailed and accurate,” he says, “it is possible that those simulations would generate conscious experiences.”
The search for evidence
Will we ever learn whether the simulation hypothesis is correct? Bostrum says there’s a remote chance that one day we might encounter a telltale glitch in the simulation. “You could certainly imagine a scenario where a window pops up in front of you, saying, ‘You are in a simulation; click here for more information,’” he says. “That would be a knock-down proof.”
More realistically, physicists have proposed experiments that could yield evidence that our world is simulated. For example, some have wondered if the world is inherently “smooth,” or if, at the smallest scales, it might be made up of discrete “chunks” a bit like the pixels in a digital image. If we determine that the world is “pixelated” in this way, it could be evidence that it was created artificially. A team of American and German physicists have argued that careful measurements of cosmic rays could provide an answer.
What if we did confirm that we were living in a simulation? How would people react upon learning that our world and thoughts and emotions are nothing more than a programmer’s zeroes and ones? Some imagine such knowledge would disrupt our lives by upending our sense of purpose and squashing our initiative. Harvard astronomer Abraham Loeb says the knowledge could even trigger social unrest.
Knowing that our thoughts and deeds aren’t our own could “relieve us from being accountable for our actions,” he says. “There is nothing more damaging to our social order than this notion.”
Others imagine evidence in support of the simulation hypothesis could engender a new fear — that the creators might grow tired of the simulation and switch it off. But not Bostrum. “You could similarly ask, ‘shouldn’t we be in perpetual fear of dying?’ You could have a heart attack or a stroke at any given point in time, or the roof might fall down,” he says.
Whatever we might think of the simulation hypothesis, Bostrom thinks the mere act of pondering it provides a welcome dose of humility. He cites Hamlet’s cautionary remark to a friend in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
And Botrum insists that he takes the simulation hypothesis seriously.
“For me, it’s not just an intellectual game,” he says. “It’s an attempt to orient myself in the world, as best I can understand it.”
- China (Officially) Buys Gold For 7th Straight Month As Treasury Holdings Tumble
China continued its renewed (public) gold-buying spree in May adding another 10 tons of the precious metal to its reserve – the seventh month of buying in a row.
“It’s a diversification away from the U.S. dollar, particularly given the trade tensions and the potential technology cold war that’s evolving,” said Bart Melek, global head of commodity strategy at TD Securities.
“We have to remember that gold is nobody’s liability.”
While this figure is hotly contested as being an underestimate of Chinese State’s actual gold holdings, its the only figure available, and whatever the real number, its notable that the Chinese government has revived the trend of announcing physical gold purchases each and every month.
“Given the U.S.-China tensions, it is little surprise that China is attempting to diversify away its holdings of the dollar and Treasuries,” Howie Lee, an economist at Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp. in Singapore, said in an email, adding that it’s likely to continue adding in the coming months as its reserve holdings still lag countries such as the U.S. and Germany.
“Aside from its attempt to diversify its holdings of dollars, owning more gold reserves is also an important strategy in China’s rise as a superpower,” Lee said.
The People’s Bank of China raised reserves to 61.94 million ounces in June from 61.61 million a month earlier, according to data on its website on Monday. In tonnage terms, last month’s inflow was 10.3 tons, following the addition of almost 74 tons in the six months through May.
In fact, thanks in larger part to the surge in gold prices in the last month, the value of China’s gold reserves rose by the most in at least 4 years…
Pointedly this occurred as the trade war erupted and China ‘allowed’ the yuan to devalue against the dollar…
As Bloomberg previously reported, the rise in reserves reflects the government’s “determined diversification” away from dollar assets, Argonaut Securities (Asia) Ltd. analyst Helen Lau said, adding that retail demand has also picked up. At this rate of accumulation, China could buy 150 tons in 2019, according to Lau.
One wonders if Alasdair Macleod is on to something when he notes that if the yuan is to replace the dollar for China’s trade, officials will have to back it with gold…
It is hard to see how the US can match a sound-money plan from China. Furthermore, the US Government’s finances are already in very poor shape and a return to sound money would require a reduction in government spending that all observers can agree is politically impossible. This is not a problem the Chinese government faces, and the purpose of a gold-linked jumbo bond is not so much to raise funds; rather it is to seal a price relationship between the yuan and gold.
Whether China implements the plan suggested herein or not, one thing is for sure: the next credit crisis will happen, and it will have a major impact on all nations operating with fiat money systems. The interest rate question, because of the mountains of debt owed by governments and consumers, will have to be addressed, with nearly all Western economies irretrievably ensnared in a debt trap. The hurdles faced in moving to a sound monetary policy appear to be simply too daunting to be addressed.
Ultimately, a return to sound money is a solution that will do less damage than fiat currencies losing their purchasing power at an accelerating pace. Think Venezuela, and how sound money would solve her problems. But that path is blocked by a sink-hole that threatens to swallow up whole governments. Trying to buy time by throwing yet more money at an economy suffering a credit crisis will only destroy the currency. The tactic worked during the Lehman crisis, but it was a close-run thing. It is unlikely to work again.
Because China’s economy has had its debt expansion of the last ten years mostly aimed at production, if she fails to act soon she faces an old-fashioned slump with industries going bust and unemployment rocketing. China offers very limited welfare, and without Maoist-style suppression, faces the prospect of not only the state’s plans going awry, but discontent and rebellion developing among the masses.
For China, a gold-exchange yuan standard is now the only way out. She will also need to firmly deny what Western universities have been teaching her brightest students. But if she acts early and decisively, China will be the one left standing when the dust settles, and the rest of us in our fiat-financed welfare states will left chewing the dirt of our unsound currencies.
Is China’s “signal” an explicit warning of the end to the dollar era that has existed since August 1971, when gold as the ultimate money was driven out of the monetary system.
Now that’s a trend that is nobody’s friend.
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