Month: February 2019

The UK is stockpiling “trauma packs” over concerns that border delays caused by a no-deal Brexit could endanger lives, according to The Guardian, which says the move highlights “the dependence of the UK on frictionless movement of goods across the border.” 

Made by Johnson & Johnson and flown in during terrorist attacks, the kits are typically not stocked by hospitals due to expiration dates on included medications. 

Further opining on the “dangers posed by Brexit,” the head of England’s National Health Service said: “What we are doing is reviewing the tens of thousands of individual medicines, medical devices and other products that the health service uses, making sure that the manufacturers of those products have got extra buffer stockpiles,” adding “We do obviously have a reliance on the way the transport infrastructure works in order to continue uninterrupted supply.”

It’s “in nobody’s interest” in western Europe to disrupt the flow of medical equipment, Stevens added. “Getting those transport logistics right is absolutely crucial for the continuous flow of medical supplies, that is a statement of the obvious.” 

At the time of the 2017 bombing of the Manchester arena, in which 23 people died, the high number of casualties of both adults and children required Johnson & Johnson to swiftly fly in 500 additional packs from Belgium containing plates, wires, cables, nails and screws for the stabilising of joints.

“This is routine and the rapid deployment of trauma packs to the UK by the European Distribution Centre meant patient safety was never compromised,” a spokesman for Johnson & Johnson said. –The Guardian

Johnson & Johnson admitted that while there are “factors outside our control,” the company had been “preparing for no deal for well over a year” based on the risks to medical supplies. 

“Our priority throughout has been to patients, consumers, healthcare providers and our employees,” said their spokesman, adding “We are doing everything we can to prepare for all potential Brexit scenarios – including increasing our level of stockholding, increasing warehouse capacity, reviewing and where necessary changing transport/distribution routes.” 

Liberal Democrat MEP Catherine Bearder says that the whole thing is “terrifying,” and that a no-deal Brexit should be formally ruled out. 

“Vital trauma packs can be sent to hospitals from the EU within hours. Customs checks will delay the packs getting to patients in emergency situations – it’s terrifying. The prime minister must take no deal off the table now,” she insisted. 

According to 2017 findings by the cross-party home affairs select committee of MPs, post-Brexit customs inspections could result in five-hour border delays – which may prove “critical in life and death situations where critically injured patients need care and treatment as soon as possible.”

“Accident and emergency trauma packs (which are full of equipment and medicines) are flown in from the EU to the UK within hours from the order being placed to the operating room (OR) in a hospital,” reads the committee’s report. 

“This short time frame is particularly necessary during unexpected large-scale emergencies, such as terrorist attacks, when a large number of people are suddenly seriously injured.” 

Of course, if a no-deal Brexit happens and it isn’t chaos at the borders, there’s going to be a lot of expired medication floating around.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2G6yHll Tyler Durden

Submitted by Ronan Manly, BullionStar.com

In early November 2018, it first came to light that the Bank of England in London was delaying and blocking the withdrawal of 14 tonnes of gold owned by the Venezuelan central bank, Banco Central de Venezuela (BCV). At the time, Reuters and The Times of London both reported that according to unnamed British ‘public officials’, the delays were being caused by the difficulty and cost of obtaining insurance for the gold shipment back to Venezuela, and also due to “standard measures to prevent money-laundering“.

As I explained in a BullionStar article on 15 November titled ‘Bank of England refuses to return 14 tonnes of gold to Venezuela’, the explanations given to Reuters and the Times for the withdrawal delays were completely bogus, and that the real reason for blocking the BCV gold withdrawal was undoubtedly US and UK joint government interventions to stall the withdrawal. As I wrote at the time:

“The reasons put forward by official sources in the Reuters and Times articles for why Venezuela can’t withdraw its gold from the Bank of England are clearly bogus. The more logical and likely explanation is that the US, through the White House, US Treasury and State Department have been liaising with the British Foreign office and HM Treasury to put pressure on the Bank of England to delay and push back on Venezuela’s gold withdrawal request.”

As it turns out, this was an entirely correct prediction, since by 25 January, Bloomberg confirmed in an ‘exclusive report’ (two and a half months later) that:

“The Bank of England’s decision to deny Maduro officials’ withdrawal request comes after top U.S. officials, including Secretary of StateMichael Pompeo and National Security Adviser John Bolton, lobbied their U.K. counterparts to help cut off the regime from its overseas assets, according to one of the people, who asked not to be identified.”

Why Bloomberg took so long to state the obvious is not clear, but from the outset, the entire interventionalist playbook of the Americans and British in this saga has been entirely predictable to anyone observing the situation. This intervention by the Bank of England on behalf of the US and UK shows a complete disregard for sovereign gold property rights, and the Bank of England has now literally ripped up a custody gold storage agreement that it had entered into with another of the world’s central banks.

Predicting the Coup – Look to the Gold

More interestingly, the Bank of England’s stalling tactics on the BCV gold withdrawal has also been useful in predicting the timing of the current Western powers’ move against Maduro and in signaling how long this foreign backed coup has been in the planning in Washington DC and elsewhere. Let’s look at a few facts and their timing.

From at least early September 2018, the Bank of England (BoE) began stalling on allowing a central bank gold custody customer (the BCV) to withdraw sovereign property (gold bars) that the BCV had entrusted to the Bank of England under a gold custody agreement.

Why early September 2018? Because, as the Reuters report dated 5 November stated, the BCV gold withdrawal request had “been held up for nearly two months”. This would put the original BCV withdrawal request to at least early September. And since the BCV’s gold withdrawal request was not actioned by the BoE at that time in early September, then this implies that the Bank of England already had its instructions to begin stalling the BCV during at least early September, which also implies that the British and US governments were already involved.

Arguably, concern in Bank of England, British Foreign Office and US State Department circles, and associated hatching of plans to stall and block BCV gold bar withdrawals, could have began as early as April 2018. This was the month in which the BCV paid Citibank $172 million to recover gold bars at the Bank of England that the BCV had put up as collateral in a gold swap operation with Citibank. According to a Reuters article last June about the termination of this BCV-Citi gold swap, “the policy [of the BCV] is to recover the gold“.

So when the swap was closed out last April, the Bank of England and associated intelligence actors (UK Treasury, Foreign Office, State Department, US Treasury etc) would all have known that the BCV again had title to some gold bars in the Bank of England’s vaults and wanted to “recover the gold”.  So its also possible that the BCV gold withdrawal request to the Bank of England was pending from at least May onwards.

Stalling while awaiting backup

It is now also apparent that the Bank of England was engaged in its stalling tactics while waiting for new US sanctions to come into affect as well as for the beginning of Maduro’s new presidential term on 10 January 2019, when the US and associated allies then upped the coup rhetoric.

Specific sanctions appeared on 01 November, when the United States signed Executive Order 13850, an order which imposed sanctions on Venezuela’s gold industry and which bullies the global gold industry not to do business with Venezuela and its gold sector. To put the issue into the public domain and control the narrative in the run up to Washington’s intervention, Reuters and the Times were then feed various bogus stories a few days later by “public officials” and “British officials”, and the resulting stories published firstly by Reuters (story one) and then by the Times (story two).

On the election front, while Venezuela’s president Maduro was re-elected in elections that were held on 20 May 2018, his inauguration was only held on 10 January this year. As other countries jumped on the bandwagon condemning Maduro’s new term and endorsing the relatively unknown Venezuelan national assembly leader Juan Guaidó, if the Bank of England was able to stall until 10 January, then it’s stalling tactics would appear more palatable since by then reneging a sovereign gold custody contract could be buried amid the media scramble and merely be another footnote in the escalating conflict.

This, the Bank of England has managed to do to an extent. In early December, the BoE stalled in its meeting with BCV president Calixto Ortega Sánchez and Venezuelan finance minister Simón Zerpa Delgado when they flew over from Caracas to London for a meeting requesting BCV gold withdrawal. See BullionStar article from 18 December, titled “Venezuela’s gold in limbo amid tug-of-war at the Bank of England” for more details.

The BoE’s stalling also enabled the US-backed Venezuelan opposition to throw its own spanner in the works during December, when Venezuelan opposition politicians Julio Borges (former Venezuelan national assembly president and founder of the Justice First party) and Carlos Vecchio (co-founder of the Voluntad Popular party) petitioned the BoE’s governor Mark Carney to “refuse the handover of fourteen tonnes of gold“.

John Bolton: From the Swamp?

 

Doubling down on the Gold, doubling up the Stake

In the immediate aftermath of Maduro’s re-inauguration, a number of intriguing developments regarding the BCV’s gold at the Bank of England have also now come to light. These developments merit attention, and are briefly summarised below.

Firstly, the BCV significantly upped the ante in December 2018 by doubling down on its gold holdings at the Bank of England. It did this by closing out another gold swap, this time one that its had on the table with the now troubled Deutsche Bank. This is according to a Reuters reportout of Caracas dated 21 January. According to Reuters, the BCV’s gold holdings at the Bank of England:

“more than doubled in December to 31 tonnes, or around $1.3 billion, after Venezuela returned funds it had borrowed from Deutsche Bank through a financing arrangement that uses gold as collateral, known as a swap…

..Under the deal struck with Deutsche Bank in 2015, Venezuela put up 17 tonnes of gold in exchange for a loan.“

By upping the amount of gold at stake from 14 tonnes to 31 tonnes, the BCV piled on the pressure with the BoE. If 14 tonnes sounds like a lot of gold, then 31 tonnes sounds like a lot more.

Back in December, I did a calculation of how many Good Delivery gold bars equates to 14 tonnes and wrote that it “would be in the region of about 1125 gold bars” which was  27% of the original 4,089 gold bars that the BCV left stored at the Bank of England in late 2011. I said that:

“This is the gold now being frozen by the Bank of England, about 1125 gold bars. If this gold is in custody, it will be set-aside or allocated and the BCV will know the individual serial numbers of every bar.

…the BCV should at the very least publish for everybody to see, the weight list / serial number list of all of these gold bars so that they cannot be confiscated or used by the Bank of England or bullion banks for other purposes, such as being sold to other central bank customers or sold to gold-backed ETFs.”

If 1,125 Good Delivery gold bars equate to 14 tonnes, then about 2,491 Good Delivery gold bars equate to 31 tonnes. So the BCV is now looking to withdraw approximately 2,500 wholesale gold bars from the Bank of England vaults in London. That is not a small number, and should cause ‘consternation’ among the LBMA and Bank of England vault managers that the reputation of the London Gold Market has now been tainted by freezing the withdrawal of 2500 large gold bars belonging to another sovereign nation. Not to mention ‘consternation’ among the world’s other central banks (more then 70 central bank gold custody customers) which store their gold in the BoE vaults in London.

Guaido and Maduro

Late January news also saw official confirmation from Bloomberg that the trip to the Bank of England in December by the Venezuelan central bank president Ortega Venezuelan finance minister Zerpa Delgado had been a waste of time. Again confirming the stalling tactics of the G30 member (Mark Carney) led Bank of England. According to a January 25 article by Bloomberg:

“those talks were unsuccessful, and communications between the two sides have broken down since. Central bank officials in Caracas have been ordered to no longer try contacting the Bank of England. These central bankers have been told that Bank of England staffers will not respond to them, citing compliance reasons, said a Venezuelan official…”

On 27 January, Reuters revealed that Venezuela’s political opposition, not content with just a letter from Borges and Vecchio to Mark Carney in December which pleaded to “refuse the handover of fourteen tonnes of gold“, had gone one step further and roped in Venezuela’s presidential contender Juan Guaido to write additional letters both to British prime minister Theresa May and the BoE’s governor Carney, claiming that Venezuela’s Maduro aimed to sell the BCV gold. “I am writing to ask you to stop this illegitimate transaction” said the Guaido letters, according to Reuters.  Remarkably, Guaido’s letter to Thersea May was his first letter ever to a foreign head of government, and shows the desperation of the US-UK forces to block access to this 31 tonnes of gold. Who said gold was just a pet rock?

On 28 January, Britain’s Foreign Office also entered the meddling, when Foreign Office minister Alan Duncan, with a straight face, told the British parliament in a parliamentary debate that the fate of the 31 tonnes of gold:

“is a decision for the Bank of England, not for government……It is they who have to make a decision on this.”

Duncan conveniently forget to mention that “top U.S. officials, including Secretary of State Michael Pompeo lobbied his UK counterparts” (i.e. Duncan) to help cut off Venezuela’s overseas assets. Duncan’s comments can be read on Hansard here, and a Bloomberg summary is here. So the British government is fully involved in blocking the BCV gold withdrawal request from the Bank of England but pretends that its an independent decision from the Bank of England – which itself has been stalling on the withdrawal request for months now.

Troops guarding central bank of Hungary’s gold repatriated from London

Conclusion

In all of this saga, perhaps the most amusing aspect is how any central bank now thinks that the Bank of England and London Gold Market are free from political risk and that London is somehow still a secure and safe place for central banks to store gold bars and to trade gold bars.

Back on the 30 January 2012, when the last shipment of gold came back into Caracas on the instruction of former Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, the then BCV head Nelson Merentes noted that:

“gold stored in BCV [in Caracas] will reach 86% of the total while the rest, about 50 tonnes, will stay in the banks in which the Republic needs to maintain open accounts for international financial operations.”   

Merentes was of course referring here to the Bank of England vaults, where the BCV left 4,089 Good Deliver bars in storage when it repatriated another 12,819 Good Delivery bars to Caracas. These 4,089 Good Delivery gold bars at the Bank of England’s vaults totaled approximately 50.8 tonnes. Fast forward exactly 7 years later and it’s laughable that the Venezuelan gold that was left in London for international financial operations has been blocked by the very custodian that was supposed to be minding that gold on behalf of another central bank.

In the same vein, all of the smug central bankers around Europe who countered calls for their nations’ to repatriate gold from London with the argument that it was being safely held in an international trading center, will now have to backtrack on their claims that the Bank of England vaults are free from political and confiscation risk.

To cite just a few, Germany’s Bundesbank has 432 tonnes of gold stored in London which it claims is stored there “to be able to exchange gold for foreign currencies at gold trading centres abroad within a short space of time.”

The Austrian central bank keeps about 84 tonnes of gold at the Bank of England in London and 56 tonnes in Zurich, which it justifies at these locations since “different storage locations helps the Austrian central bank reduce concentration risk, while still being able to use gold in the gold markets of London and Zurich should the need arise.”

The Bundesbank also claims that

“the part of the Bundesbank’s gold reserves which is to remain abroad could, in particular, be activated in an emergency. Therefore one part will remain… in London, the world’s largest trading centre for gold.

In the event of a crisis, the gold could be pledged as collateral or sold at the storage site abroad, without having to be transported. In this way, the Bundesbank could raise liquidity in a foreign reserve currency.”

The Central Bank of Hungary now looks to have been shrewd when it purchased 28.4 tonnes of gold at the Bank of England last October, and immediately repatriated all of this newly bought gold back to Budapest, and in an instant ring-fenced that gold from confiscation and political interference at the now compromised Bank of England. With many governments and nations of myriad political systems and styles holdings gold in the Bank of England vaults, some of these central banks must at least be wondering if its now time to get their gold out of London.

In a short space of time, the Bank of England reputation’s as an impartial and safe location for the storage and trading of gold looks to have been irreversibly damaged.

This article was originally published on the BullionStar.com website under the title “Bank of England tears up its Gold Custody contract with Venezuela’s central bank”.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2RYarIl Tyler Durden

First it was the Libor-rigging cartel, then the FX exchange-rate manipulation cartel, now, European regulators have moved on to prosecuting “anti-competitive” practices in euro-denominated sovereign bond markets.

One month after the European antitrust regulators charged Deutsche Bank, Credit Agricole and Credit Suisse of being a part of a ‘bond trading cartel’, regulators are bringing a separate case against eight unidentified European banks alleging that they conspired to rigging euro-denominated sovereign bond markets.

Reuters reported Thursday that the European Union’s antitrust authority has charged the banks with operating the cartel behind 2007 and 2012.

Just like in past cartel cases, traders at the accused banks allegedly used chat rooms to share “commercially sensitive information and coordinated trading strategies” that they presumably used to rig markets to benefit their own trading books – and shortchange their “counterparties”.

If they’re found guilty, the banks could face fines equal to up to 10% of their global turnover.

“The Commission has concerns that, at different periods between 2007 and 2012, the eight banks participated in a collusive scheme that aimed at distorting competition when acquiring and trading European government bonds,” the Commission said.

“Traders employed by the banks exchanged commercially sensitive information and coordinated on trading strategies. These contacts would have taken place mainly – but not exclusively – through online chatrooms.”

Regulators told Reuters that they wanted to make one thing clear: The allegations aren’t meant to imply that euro-denominated bond markets are subject to pervasive “anti-competitive” practices (though maybe they should talk to Mario Draghi about that).

But don’t worry: We’re sure the information traded in these chatrooms fell neatly within the bounds of “market color.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2GdNKsp Tyler Durden

Authored by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog,

It’s educational and even somewhat entertaining to observe the role of the western press in the ongoing erosion and demise of democracy in Europe. But while it’s entertaining, it also means their readers and viewers don’t get informed on what is actually happening. The media paints a picture that pleases the political world. And it it doesn’t please politicians to lift a veil here and there, too bad for the public.

The Shakespearian comedy that was performed this week in the UK House of Commons is a lovely case in point. Basically, MPs voted whether or not to allow PM Theresa May to change the Brexit deal she had told them about a hundred times couldn’t possibly be changed. Brexit has turned full-blown Groucho by now: “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.”

It was exactly two weeks ago last night that lawmakers voted by a historic 432 to 202 count to reject May’s Brexit deal. And now they voted to a) let her change it and b) go talk to the EU about changing it though Brussels has said as often as May herself that it cannot be changed. Remember: the UK is set to leave the EU 59 days from now, and counting.

It’s like in a game of chess that has long turned into a stalemate or threefold repetitionsituation: you stop playing. No such luck in British politics. The only way the parliament could find ‘unity’ (in a narrow vote) was to agree to ditch the Irish backstop that is an integral part of why the EU accepted May’s deal to begin with.

There are/are even serious voices saying Ireland should leave the EU along with the UK, to make it easier for the latter to do what the former absolutely doesn’t want. That’s also part of the kind of mindset in which this plays out. Brexit has turned into a complete delusion, in which bickering and blame-games have been more important than practical solutions, for all sides.

A hard Brexit is used as some ultimate deterrent, and 59 days before the big moment it may actually turn into the disaster some Project Fear or another has been talking about for over 2.5 years. If that time has been used the way it should have, adapting deals, agreements, contracts, laws, all might have been fine(r).

What the role of May’s opposition in all this consists of is ever more confusing. It certainly never was to profile itself or come up with original ideas. In the process, Jeremy Corbyn appears to have hurt his reputation as much, if not more, than May. Quite the achievement. And now May says Corbyn “has no plan for Brexit”, but she does: only, it was voted down in the largest defeat in modern parliamentary history.

And then all of a sudden, as everyone is busy doing something else, Britain finds itself in a huge crisis of democracy.

Over Two Thirds Of UK Public Don’t Feel Represented By Political Parties

More than two thirds of the British public feel they are not represented by the main political parties, according to a new report on the divisions caused by Brexit. Research by campaign group Hope Not Hate found that the disconnect had increased from 60% to 67% over the last six months as Theresa May negotiated the EU withdrawal agreement.

The poll of nearly 33,000 people and results from focus groups also revealed that many felt they were being left in the dark or were “overwhelmingly bored” by the process. It has also seen an increase in the proportion of the public feeling pessimistic about the future – with very few believing that Brexit will address the frustrations and inequalities that lay behind the vote to leave the EU in 2016.

More people also believe that Brexit is feeding prejudice and division and taking the UK “backwards”, up from 57% in July 2018 to 62% last month. Just 20% of people said they could trust the government to deliver a “good Brexit”. Almost as many Leavers (66%) as Remainers (75%) said they do not trust the government to deliver a Brexit that works for them.

None of the options being considered by parliament have consensus support across the UK, according to the report, and 42% of people think that it would be sensible to delay leaving the EU by a few months so we can agree a better deal with the EU or hold a Final Say vote.

Perhaps that is the topic that should have been discussed yesterday in the House of Commons. But the MPS far preferred to regurgitate long discredited useless stalemate ‘moves’. That’s how much they all care for their own voters. They go from one election to the next, and why would they care about the time in between, what could possibly happen to them?

Well, for one thing, pitchforks could happen. Which methinks is a clean poetic link to another European country that finds itself in deep crisis and distress but refuses to recognize it. France.

The interwebs are full of video’s and photos of police brutality perpetrated during the by now 11 Saturdays the Yellow Vests have protested president Macron and their people’s overall situations. It didn’t start out with all that violence, and sure, part of it may have been in response to protests, but what’s gone on in the last few Saturdays is something else.

And the media once again are silent, or mostly. Macron gets more coverage for telling Venezuela’s Maduro to resign than for his own regime’s cruelty towards its own people. But the French people do watch those videos, social media trump traditional ones in these cases, so there’s something good about them after all.

And the Yellow Vests, though the people don’t like the violence, still very much have their sympathy. Seeing Macron’s police beating them up the way they have will only increase the resolve. People losing their eyes, their hands, hundreds if not thousands with less severe but still serious injuries, it’s all being added to Macron’s tally.

French Police Weapons Under Scrutiny After Gilets Jaunes Injuries

The French government is under growing pressure to review police use of explosive weapons against civilians after serious injuries were reported during gilets jaunes street demonstrations, including people alleged to have lost eyes and to have had their hands and feet mutilated.

France’s legal advisory body, the council of state, will on Wednesday examine an urgent request by the French Human Rights League and the CGT trade union to ban police from using a form of rubber-bullet launcher in which ball-shaped projectiles are shot out of specialised handheld launchers. France’s rights ombudsman has long warned they are dangerous and carry “disproportionate risk”.

Lawyers have also petitioned the government to ban so-called “sting-ball” grenades, which contain 25g of TNT high-explosive. France is the only European country where crowd-control police use such powerful grenades, which deliver an explosion of small rubber balls that creates a stinging effect as well as launching an additional load of teargas.

The grenades create a deafening effect that has been likened to the sound of an aircraft taking off. France’s centrist president, Emmanuel Macron, is facing renewed calls to ban such weapons after Jérôme Rodrigues, a high-profile member of the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) demonstrators was hit in the eye on Saturday in Paris. He is said by his lawyer to have been disabled for life.

Rights groups say Rodrigues’s case is the tip of the iceberg. Lawyers estimate that as many as 17 people have lost an eye because of the police’s use of such weapons since the start of the street demonstrations, while at least three have lost their hands and others have been left with their face or limbs mutilated. Injuries have happened at demonstrations in Paris and other cities, including Bordeaux and Nantes.

The whole thing is utterly insane, but the craziest thing may well be the European Court of Human Rights rejecting a temporary ban on flash-balls last month. Go ahead, Emmanuel, we won’t tell a soul! Flash-balls being an improved -and ‘home-grown’- form of rubber bullets, which in turn have been ‘improved’ upon.

French ‘Flash-Ball’ Row Over Riot-Gun Injuries

Appalling injuries caused by French police riot guns during the yellow-vest protests have triggered anger and calls for the weapon to be banned. The LBD launchers known by protesters as “flash-balls” have left 40 people severely wounded, reports say. France’s human rights chief has called for the weapon’s use to be halted, but the government insists it is deployed only under very strict conditions.

Since the “gilets-jaunes” protests began in November, 3,000 people have been injured or even maimed and thousands more arrested. The LBD40 is described as a non-lethal weapon which in fact replaced the old “flash-ball” in France. But the old name is still widely used. It shoots 40mm (1.6in) rubber or foam pellets at a speed of up to 100m per second and is not meant to break the skin. However, some of the accounts of people hit by flash-balls have been shocking.

Volunteer firefighter Olivier Béziade, 47, was shot in the temple by a riot gun during a protest on 12 January in Bordeaux. Video at the time caught him running from police and then collapsing in the street, his face covered in blood. He was taken to hospital, treated for a brain haemorrhage and left in an artificial coma, from which he emerged on Friday. He was one of five seriously wounded on that day alone.

Many of those wounded have been young. One teenager called Lilian Lepage was hit in the face in Strasbourg on Saturday and suffered a broken jaw. His mother said he had been shopping in the city centre when a policeman fired at him. Two schoolboys were badly wounded by flash-ball pellets in separate protests last month. Campaigners say a dozen people have lost an eye ..

A lawyer for some of the victims, Étienne Noël, said many had been maimed. He said police did not have sufficient training in use of the riot guns and many victims had been hit in the head. Earlier this week police made clear the riot gun would be used only where security forces faced violence or if they had no other means of defence. Only the torso and upper or lower limbs could be targeted.

Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez told the French Senate on Thursday that the use of force by police was always proportionate and under very strict and controlled conditions. “If the police hadn’t used these means of defence perhaps some of them would have been lynched,” he said. The European Court of Human Rights rejected a temporary ban on flash-balls last month, in a case brought by several people who said they had been hit by flash-balls.

There is also a grenade version of the flash-ball, named the sting-ball. Throw it into a crowd and everyone around gets hit by rubber balls at high speed.

But of course it’s not the weapons that cause the injuries and deaths, it’s the people deploying them. And the people deploying these people. The instructions to use excessive violence because the government feels threatened by its own citizens. And after that the pitchforks and guillotines, real or not. Yanis Varoufakis was right a few weeks ago, Macron is a spent force.

Only a blind fool would use these things against his own people. Or a dictator with absolute power, but Macron doesn’t have that.. By the way, when is Brussels going to condemn Macron for his use of violence?

And this is all before the European elections, and Merkel’s goodbye that will throw Germany into chaos, and and and. Europe, we never knew ya.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2UyaiYR Tyler Durden

Extreme weather, merciless cold in the Midwest United States, snow squalls bringing near-whiteout conditions to the Northeast, nine dead, schools and postal service in many states canceled, and airports closed — an “act of God” as they say, yet MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow still found a way to make it all about Putin. 

She breathlessly reported Wednesday evening that life-threatening cold weather in the US could be weaponized by Russia. Maddow invoked a recent intelligence assessment which speculated over Russia and China’s abilities to launch cyber-attacks on critical US infrastructure, including natural gas pipelines. Running with this “what if” scenario, she launched into her now well-known conspiracy theorizing and fear-mongering, saying “It is life-threatening! And it is like negative 50 degrees in the Dakotas right now.”

You’ll never guess who is seizing on life-threatening cold weather in the U.S. to fear-monger about… Russia! pic.twitter.com/deo2H4SBBQ

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) January 31, 2019

Maddow told her MSNBC audience:

We’re relying on their [Russia and China’s] good graces that they’re not [attacking us]. It is life-threatening. And it is like negative 50 degrees in the Dakotas right now. What would happen if Russia killed the power in Fargo?

Posing more questions that perhaps rival Condoleezza Rice’s infamous “mushroom cloud” statement when it was Iraq and not Russia as the media’s latest boogeyman, she continued:

What would happen if all the natural gas lines that service Sioux Falls just poofed on the coldest day in recent memory and it wasn’t in our power whether to turn them back on? What would you do if you lost heat indefinitely as the act of a foreign power?

…On the same day the temperature in your backyard matched the temperature in Antarctica… What would you and your family do? 

This was enough for journalist Glenn Greenwald to request that the network scrub the absurdly embarrassing segment from the internet altogether. “I’m not even joking. I have so much work to do and I can’t stop watching this,” he said. “MSNBC often removes its most embarrassing debacles from the internet. Someone please do that here so I can get to work.”

I’m not even joking. I have so much work to do and I can’t stop watching this. MSNBC often removes its most embarrassing debacles from the internet. Someone please do that here so I can get to work pic.twitter.com/sdNn20XBv4

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 31, 2019

He followed by posing a serious question for liberal media in 2019: “For anyone who prides themselves on being a rational, fact-based person who shuns fear-mongering and unhinged conspiracies, please answer honestly – I’m genuinely interested in your answer: do you feel any embarrassment at all while you watch this???“

Flashing extreme temperatures on the screen while Vladimir Putin is the commentary…

Sadly we expect the answer to by and large be “no” — but at least this will bring more future hours of news coverage unhinged-conspiracy-fearmongering-as-entertainment TV watching.

THE TERRORISTS – I mean: RUSSIA!!! – are coming to take away the heat from you and your American families during winter!!! What will you do?!?!?!? This is the brain poison liberals feed on every night: https://t.co/9XSIyVrlc0

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 31, 2019

Sergey Lavrov just hacked my boiler and unplugged my refrigerator.

— jeremy scahill (@jeremyscahill) January 31, 2019

However, as independent journalist Aaron Maté points out, this is also serious business given the way Maddow is manipulating a truly dangerous extreme weather situation. 

“I generally argue that Russiagate conspiracy and fear-mongering distracts us from serious issues,” Maté said. He concluded, “This is a good example of Russiagate peddlers like Maddow not ignoring, but using serious issues like life-threatening cold weather for conspiracy and fear-mongering.”

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2DMSl3g Tyler Durden

Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,

In the midst of the three ring circus known as the false Left/Right paradigm it is sometimes easy to forget that there is a motive behind the chaos; that there is an intended end-game. Part of that end-game, I believe, is the eventual erasure of individual liberties and the implementation of martial law in the US.   However, the establishment quest for government lockdown requires something very special in order to succeed – They need a considerable percentage of the population to support and defend it.

Governments rarely attempt outright martial law. The reason should be obvious; no military, no matter how advanced, has the capacity to suppress a unified citizenry. If the public is armed, the task becomes even more impossible. The laws of attrition alone would make the conflict bloody and costly.

Martial law is a mechanism that cannot be exploited in a vacuum. The-powers-that-be understand that it can only be used when a large percentage of the public is conned into supporting it. This is usually accomplished through the triggering of engineered crisis events, but there is also another method for getting the masses to back martial law, and that is to push both sides of the political spectrum to extreme zealotry until one side decides to use government as a weapon against the other.

Whether by disaster or political division, the public can be influenced to rationalize government dominance of every aspect of life.

The agenda to engineer crisis is evident. In past articles such as ‘The Federal Reserve Is A Suicide Bomber With A Deeper Agenda’, I have outlined the facts behind economic decline and how it is often utilized by central banks and their international banking partners to accumulate and centralize wealth while also manipulating society into accepting reduced living standards for generations to come. There is another more important motive, though. The banking elites also use the controlled demolition of the economy as a tool to create fear.

The Hegelian Dialectic of problem-reaction-solution is a powerful potion that mesmerizes the unaware population. Those who are dependent are easily frightened because they have no control over their own futures. They become reactive rather than proactive; they seek to be led rather than to lead. They will readily accept promises and solutions from anyone in apparent authority rather than maintaining their objectivity and reason. They become slaves to the social and political tides, always waiting for someone else to fix the problems around them.

This conundrum also transfers over to political conflict. In my article ‘Order Out Of Chaos: The Defeat Of The Left Comes With A Cost’, published just after the 2016 election, I explored the dangerous possibility that Trump supporters were being fooled into participating in the false Left/Right paradigm while believing that they had transcended it.

When we refer to the “false Left/Right paradigm” in the alternative media, we are referring to the fact that the political gatekeepers within government actually tend to share the same beliefs and agenda regardless of the “party” or ideology they claim to support. That is to say, Republican and Democratic leaders play their respective roles and their battles are scripted, not legitimate. The Trump campaign was a rather different animal, in that Trump was a candidate without a longstanding political record. He was a relative unknown compared to Clinton, and this made him enticing to conservatives and liberty activists that had all but abandoned participation in US elections.

It takes time to identify a political fake or controlled opposition. With Trump, we had no point of reference. Two years have changed this…

Trump’s campaign was built upon two very important positions:

First, Trump promised small government conservatives that he was going to “drain the swamp” in Washington of the kind of globalists and banking elites that Clinton was notorious for associating with. Trump’s background already had at least one red flag in this regard – his empire was bailed out by the Rothschild banking family in the 1990’s during his debt crisis and Taj Mahal casino failures. This alone was not enough to discount him, though. Many businessmen have at least some interactions with banking elites by necessity and the way the system is designed. Unfortunately Trump’s relationship with the bankers did not stop there.

Trump’s cabinet picks were a perfect opportunity for him to establish his independence from globalists, bankers and their think tank partners. This did not happen. Trump brought in Wilber Ross as Commerce Secretary, the same Rothschild agent who arranged his bailout in the 1990’s. He brought in people like Steve Mnuchin, formerly of Goldman Sachs, Larry Kudlow, formerly of the NY Fed, and John Bolton from the Council On Foreign Relations. Trump was adding to the swamp, not draining it.

Second, Trump also argued for economic transparency during his campaign, which for many of us was a breath of fresh air. Trump pointed out the fallacy of the stock market and the fact that the Fed had been supporting a fabricated rally for years using artificially low interest rates and stimulus. Trump argued against false economic stats like mainstream unemployment numbers, which ignore the 95 million jobless people in the US that are no longer counted by the BLS.

Yet, as soon as Trump entered office, all of this changed. Trump immediately started taking credit for the bull market rally in stocks as if it was his own rather than a product of Fed manipulation. He took credit for fraudulent jobs numbers too, despite the tens of millions of people still listed as “non-participatory”. Trump has tied his administration to the performance of a fake economy sitting atop a massive deflating bubble.

I would also note that during Trump’s campaign and in the two years since Trump has barely mentioned the word “Constitution”. This is rather odd to me. A liberty advocate should be defending constitutional protections regularly, driving home the need for the Bill of Rights to be secured and honored. Our very society depends upon the survival of such principles, after all.

It has become clear that Trump is not the “savior” that the liberty movement was hoping for, but many people will continue to applaud him all the same because of a specific factor: The increasingly deranged political left.

Consider the endless absurdity of Russiagate; a conspiracy theory with absolutely no evidence to back it. It never seems to die despite all logic and reason, but the motives behind this are not what conservatives usually assume. Russiagate is a drug, a drug for leftists. They love it, they need it, it dulls the pain of their loss in 2016 and it confirms their biases. They didn’t “fail” in 2016, and they aren’t the biggest losers of all time; the election was “stolen” from them by Trump and his Russian handlers. Therefore, they are now justified in any level of insanity they display in their activism and opposition. They believe they are righteous.

At the same time, conservatives are ever more bewildered by the cultism and zealotry of the left. Each new incident pokes at their ribs with a pointy knife. Trump is being “railroaded”, they think to themselves. The left must be planning a coup. They won’t let him build the border wall. They try to delay or obstruct his State Of The Union Address. They spew nonsensical drivel and froth at the mouth and scream and wail and act like overgrown toddlers. They are dangerous. Drastic measures might need to be taken…

And so we are confronted with a perilous choice; do we as conservatives becomes zealots ourselves in order to defeat the zealotry of leftists?

But this is a false choice. The left hand of the paradigm has reached full bore lunacy, but this is designed to push conservatives into our own brand of blindness. The goal? To get conservatives to champion actions that are completely contrary to our principles. The goal, I believe, is to condition us into cheering for greater government power and centralization in the name of stopping the leftist menace.

Three weeks from now the government shutdown fight is set to return. The mainstream media has been avidly reporting that the uncertainty is over, but this is a preposterous conclusion. What the nation faces now is even greater confusion as the shutdown fight prepares to return in February or a national emergency is declared, or both. My concern is that this is leading to conservative support for extreme measures.

Consider the current geopolitical environment in the western hemisphere today.  South America is on the verge of potential implosion, in no small part due to the failures of socialism, but also due to Trump’s globalist infested administration seeking destabilization of an already fragile region.  Increasing US sanctions on Venezuela, Trumps support for Madruro’s political opponent (John Guaido), and John Bolton’s notepad snafu would suggest there are military plans being made to take advantage of the chaos.

I have warned in the past that the ongoing breakdown in South America is suspiciously similar to the martial law scenario described in the US government’s secretive Rex 84 plan which was exposed during the Iran/Contra hearings.  To summarize, it suggests that a South American crisis would lead to mass migrations to the southern US border, and that this would be used as a rational for martial law measures in America.  I have to say, this sounds a lot like what is happening now.

If you think the border wall debate is a hot button issue this year, just wait until a collapse in Venezuela or an economic disaster in Brazil or Argentina results in millions of people seeking refuge illegally in the US.  Trump’s wall will be all that any conservatives talk about, while leftists will be blaming his administration for the very calamity that brought about the migrant hordes in the first place.  Both sides would be fully disillusioned with each other if they are not already.  Conservatives would certainly support a declaration of national emergency for the wall.

The cleverness of this ruse is that both sides would be partly right, but also mostly wrong.

What would a national emergency entail? Simply building a border wall? Building a border wall using the military? What about martial law on the border? Why stop there?  Why not have martial law throughout the entire country?  That would finally put an end to leftist interference, right?  Knowing what we now know about Trump’s associations with banking elites, how can we trust that it will end at the border?

It seems to me that the fight between left and right is being driven beyond the information wars and beyond activism into a realm that could include actual civil war. If the current trend continues, I see no other outcome.

But as always we must ask who benefits the most from this?

While the left has gone off the deep end into cartoonland and must be stopped, the real threat to America is the banking cabal which influences both sides of the paradigm.  The fact is, Trump works with them everyday in the White House. Economic crisis and geopolitical crisis are inevitable catalysts for greater centralization and totalitarianism, and the left is being used as a cattle prod to ensure that the political right is infuriated enough to jump on the bandwagon.

The only right answer, the only solution is to refuse to support martial law under any circumstances or under any president, and to fight against it should it ever arise.  Borders can and should be secured without giving government carte blanche to do whatever it pleases without restriction.  In fact, any problem can be better resolved without selling our souls to big government in exchange for temporary power over our political opponents.

I would remind liberty activists that by opening such a Pandora’s box, there is no going back. It is a power that would allow for infinite and irreversible corruption, a power that can only be used for evil and never for good.  Even if you truly believe Trump’s motives to be honorable, there are no guarantees that these measures will ever be rescinded once they are started, nor can we be sure that they will not be used by a future president with ill intent once Trump is gone. Some people might argue that my concerns are unwarranted; that it will never come to martial law. We shall see. The trend developing today is certainly not encouraging.

*  *  *

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via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2G2kUMf Tyler Durden

On Monday Russia’s Defense Ministry published video showing a dangerous aerial encounter between US and Russian aircraft that took place in the skies above the Baltic Sea. The incident involved a Sukhoi Su-27 fighter jet intercepting a US P-8A Poseidon reconnaissance aircraft after — as Russian statements claimed — the US Air Force spy plane was picked up on radar rapidly approaching approaching the Russian maritime border in the Baltic Sea.

But more video has surfaced late this week showing spectacular footage in what a appears to be a separate and previously unknown incident, also over the Baltic Sea. It was put online by a purported retired Russian pilot and appears to be a separate video taken from a Russian fighter jet on an unknown date. The new video shows a Russian Air Force Su-27 Flanker aggressively banking into a U.S. Air Force F-15.

#BREAKING: A #Russian Air Force pilot has released this video showing how a #RuAF Su-27P (from 72nd Guards AvB) dangerously banked in front of a #USAF‘s F-15C of 493rd Fighter Squadron while it was patrolling over #Baltic Sea as a part of #NATO Baltic Air-policing mission. pic.twitter.com/zVU5dN4rpe

— Babak Taghvaee (@BabakTaghvaee) January 31, 2019

In recent years, there’s been a significant uptick in such dangerous incidents between Russian and US Air Force jets over the Baltic and Black Seas, and it follows reports last week about a tense standoff between Russian bombers and Canadian military aircraft in the Canadian Air Identification Zone.

It’s another reminder of just how quickly a major crisis could flare up in an instant based on such intercepts.

Prior video released Jan. 28 of Russian fighters shadowing the US P-8A Poseidon reconnaissance aircraft over the Baltic.

The Aviationist aerial analysis site narrows down the possible timeline for when the new video of the US-Russian jets incident may have occurred: 

A clip that shows a Russian Air Force Su-27 Flanker aggressively banking into a U.S. Air Force F-15C Eagle has appeared online. It’s not clear where and when the footage was taken but, provided it is genuine (it seems so), it was probably filmed in the Baltic region, when the U.S. Air Force F-15C) were supporting NATO BAP (Baltic Air Policing) mission.

Last time U.S. Air Force supported BAP was during the 45th BAP rotation between August and December 2017.

American defense officials have been increasingly vocal in condemning what they’ve consistently described as “aggressive maneuvers” carried out by Russian jets against US aircraft.

The Aviationist notes further multiple major instances over the past few years where this was the case:

 As happened on Jan. 29, 2018, when a U.S. EP-3 Aries aircraft flying in international airspace was intercepted by a Russian Su-27 over the Black Sea; on Apr. 29, 2016, when a Russian Su-27 Flanker barrel rolled over the top of a U.S. Air Force RC-135 aircraft operating in the Baltic Sea; on Apr. 14, 2016, when another Su-27 carried out the same dangerous maneuver on another US Rivet Joint over the Baltic; on Jan. 25, 2016 when a Russian Su-27 Flanker made an aggressive turn that disturbed the controllability of the RC-135; or on Apr. 7, 2015, when a Flanker flew within 20 feet of an RC-135U over the Baltic Sea.

There’s been no official government confirmation by either side concerning the events shown in the new video that surfaced Thursday. 

The Russian Defense Ministry described this week’s prior incident as follows: “A quick reaction alert Su-27 fighter jet from the Air Defense Force was scrambled to intercept the target in the air. The Russian fighter’s crew approached the air object at a safe distance and identified it as a P-8A Poseidon reconnaissance plane of the US Air Force,” the ministry noted.

However, the new video of the Russian fighter banking into the US F-15 reveals an incident that was anything but “safe” — so it’ll be interesting to hear a detailed account if any official details are released over the incident. 

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2Gd5p3v Tyler Durden

Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

In domestic policy, a time-honored strategy for ramming through ill-considered legislation is to insist that it is better to do something than to just stand around doing nothing. Are “too few” people earning advanced degrees? Then we are told we must increase subsidies for college tuition. Will that solve the problem? Who knows? What’s important is that we did something.

This sort of thing is politically valuable, of course, because the new program and the new spending can be seen and measured.

The true costs of the program, however, are not seen. We can, for example, easily ignore the fact that subsidies tend to increase tuition levels, which in turn increase student-loan debt levels. Students then put off purchasing homes and starting families until later, in order to pay off debts. These realities impose costs on students. But they aren’t easily seen or measured.

Thus, the benefits of the program are showcased, while the costs remain hidden.

In the realm of foreign policy, and especially with humanitarian interventions, this problem is even worse, partly because the stakes are higher. The methods employed here, by now, are quite familiar. Advocates for humanitarian intervention repeatedly showcase real or assumed human rights abuses in a foreign country. It is then assumed that it will be a simple matter for the United States military to intervene to solve the problem — probably in a short amount of time. The costs of intervention, both financial and non-financial are assumed to be minor, at most. Thus, we are to conclude that it is better to do something than nothing. Those who insist on opposing humanitarian interventions are then portrayed as being motivated by a lack of empathy, or perhaps by outright hostility and cynicism.

The Rise of the Humanitarian Interventionism as a Favored Policy

For more than twenty years this narrative and method has grown in popularity and influence, as humanitarian interventions have become a more and more acceptable option for the United States in addressing global human rights issues.

Almost never are the true costs and uncertainties of these interventions addressed in detail in mass-media commentary and news coverage. The focus is on highlighting the benefits and necessity of intervention while ignoring the unintended consequences of these actions.

Moreover, ignoring these costs has become more urgent for advocates of intervention as ostensibly humanitarian intervention has become a larger cornerstone of US foreign policy. While these interventions began sporadically, Stephen Wertheim notes in the Journal of Genocide Research how after 1991,

humanitarian intervention become a central and insistent preoccupation in US discourse, routinely posited as a raison d’eˆtre of US global leadership. Only then was humanitarian intervention mainly imagined not as an emergency response to extraordinary episodes but rather as a permanent programme requiring special doctrines, which US and British leaders issued.1

Much of this growth in acceptance for humanitarian interventions centered around the world’s non-response to the Rwandan Genocide in 1994. This, coupled with ethnic-cleansing campaigns in the former Yugoslavia, led to numerous calls for more active international attention to potential humanitarian interventions worldwide.

As Wertheim notes, however, a problem with the debate has long been an assumption that human rights violations can be addressed with relative ease by large, wealthy states like the United States:

A dramatic shift began around 1998. It brought a new belligerence, confident that US troops would have ended Rwanda’s genocide easily and should stop any other. This view permeated the US foreign-policy establishment in 1999 and 2000, appearing in both government doctrines and popular commentary, among neoconservatives and humanitarian interventionists alike…

But were things really as simple as advocates assumed?

For Wertheim, the answer is “no,” continuing:

[H]umanitarian interventionists often assumed military challenges away, failing to think concretely how intervention might unfold…[But] a war to stop the Rwandan genocide would have been nothing like as simple as interventionists later claimed…Interventionists truly committed to achieving humanitarian results must appreciate the difficulties of forging peace after war — and register the potential harms of postconflict occupation in the calculus of whether to intervene in the first place … On the whole, humanitarian interventionists tended to understate difficulties of halting ethnic conflict, ignore challenges of postconflict reconstruction, discount constraints imposed by public opinion, and override multilateral procedures.

In real life, though, these costs and constraints are numerous. For example, there is always a “losing” side when interventions occur. Once the intervening force leaves, will the losing side engage in reprisals? If the intervention required bombing campaigns, who will pay for reconstruction of infrastructure? And, how long will an occupation force be necessary? What if counterinsurgency becomes necessary? How many locals will the interventionists be willing to kill in counterinsurgency battles in order to implement a “humanitarian” solution?

Nor are these questions matters of mere logistics and administrative resolved. Political constraints imposed on states by voting populations are very real. For example, the US invasion of Somalia at first appeared to be an easy sell to American voters. After 18 US soldiers were killed in the Battle of Magadishu, however, President Bill Clinton quickly removed the troops. It’s easy to win public support when interventions are short, and produce no casualties. But things don’t always go that way.

Indeed, such care is often taken to avoid casualties among occupying troops (in cases primarily justified on humanitarian grounds) that this causes other tactical problems. In the Kosovo intervention, for example, planes flew at an unusually high 15,000 feet to minimize danger to themselves. But this increased danger to civilians and severely limited the credibility of claims that the NATO coalition was engaging in “precision bombing.”

But the strategy nonetheless worked. The fact that the US and NATO were able to win capitulation from the Serbian government in the Kosovo intervention — even without risking a domestic political backlash — furtherstrengthened calls for more openness to humanitarian interventions.

Second Thoughts Among Advocates for Interventionism

A decade after Rwanda, though, even many advocates for at least some use of humanitarian intervention were beginning to have second thoughts.

In his 2006 book At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention, David Rieff, an influential journalist who had enthusiastically supported humanitarian interventions in the 1990s, had become more cautious. For Rieff, humanitarian interventions had become so common, and so often invoked to justify a wide variety of foreign-policy goals, that:

I have changed my mind in the sense that I did not imagine Bosnia, or, had it happened, Rwanda, would become a template for the messianic dream of remaking the world in either the image of American democracy or of the legal utopias of international human rights law.

In the wake of Afghanistan and the Iraq War, Rieff was more aware of the real costs of “fixing” foreign regimes that behaved in undesirable ways. Rieff also noted that many interventionists on the left continued to deny this reality.

For example, in her book A Problem from Hell, US Ambassador to the UN (under President Obama) Samatha Power laments that none of the Saddam-era persecutors of the Kurds “had been punished.” But Rieff responds:

But how was the punishment to be meted out? At times, human rights activists behave as if one can have Nuremberg-style justice without a Nuremberg-style military occupation of the countries where the war criminals live. … These human rights regimes will be imposed by force of arms or they will not be imposed at all.

Worryingly, the future of humanitarian intervention looks more like Iraq than it does like NATO’s Kosovo mission.

This isn’t to say Rieff opposes all humanitarian interventions. He still explicitly thinks Western states should intervene in cases like the Rwandan Genocide. But, as Rieff states, his position is

…the polar opposite of [neoconservative Robert] Kagan. I believe we should lean away from war, lean as far as possible without actually falling over into pacifism. Of course there are just wars … [b]ut I would insist that there are not many just wars, and that the endless wars of altruism posited by so many human rights activists … or the endless wars of liberation (as they see it) proposed by American neoconservatives — Iraq was supposed to be only the first such step — can only lead to disaster.

The realities of Iraq remain a problem for humanitarian interventionists. While the war was initially justified only partly as a humanitarian effort of liberation, it is now justified almost wholly on the grounds of humanitarianism. Only the most obtuse policymakers and pundits still insist (wrongly) that Saddam Hussein’s regime was any threat to the United States, or was involved in the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Today, Iraq is justified almost entirely as a humanitarian war of liberation. The invasion of Afghanistan followed a similar pattern. Americans were told the invasion would liberate women from Islamist oppression just as much as invasion would bring terrorists to heel.

The costs of occupation, however, have been immense in terms of Iraqi (and Afghani) life and health, and US casualties (at least relative to other humanitarian efforts).

In his 2005 book The Dark Sides of Virtue, historian David Kennedy explores the real record of humanitarian interventions, and the habit of overstating its benefits, noting:

As with humanitarian activism … it is easy to overstate the humanist potential of international policy making. Many of the difficulties  encountered with human rights activism arise equally in humanitarian policy-making campaigns. Policymakers can also overlook the dark sides of their work and treat initiatives which take a familiar humanitarian form as likely to have a humanitarian effect. It is always tempting to think some global humanitarian effort has got to be better than none. Like activists, policymakers can mistake their good intentions for humanitarian results or enchant their tools — using a humanitarian vocabulary can itself seem like a humanitarian strategy. … It is all too easy to forget that saying “I’m from the United Nations and I’ve come to help you,” may not sound promising at all.

In other words, don’t confuse the visible government programs with the actual costs and benefits.

One answer, Kennedy concludes, is to stop assuming rosy, best-case scenario outcomes, to acknowledge the many unknown and unpredictable variables, and to

develop a new posture or character for international humanitarianism — informed by the vertiginous experience of disenchantment, of seeing that one is responsible and yet does not already know.

Nine Issues for Policymakers to Contemplate

In light of seventeen years of non-stop war since 9/11 — with most of it conducted in the name of national liberation and humanitarian intervention — policymakers would benefit from far more rigor when it comes to evaluating the true costs of intervention.

In his review essay “The Limits of Intervention — Humanitarian or Otherwise,” J. Peter Pham of the Atlantic Council presents a list of problems that policymakers need to address when advocating for foreign intervention:

1. Since most violence is perpetrated more quickly than commonly realized, an intervention will almost inevitably come too late for many, if not most, victims.

2. Intervention addresses symptoms rather than underlying causes.

3. Interventions will have significant, possibly unintended, effects on the value to particular individuals of positional and distributional goods.

4. Intervention opens the political space to new, often unexpected, actors. Outside intervention, by displacing the old political order, allows new forces to emerge.

5. Intervention may foster warlordism.

6. Intervention is the starting point for a complex political process whose eventual end point cannot be predicted.

7. Economic progress will be difficult if the intervention distorts pre-existing incentive structures.

8. Intervention can exacerbate, rather than reduce, the humanitarian crisis.

9. Interventions may have significant impact on trust, social capital, and the character of society, but it is difficult to produce positive effects directly.

We might also add to Pham’s list the problems that interventions pose in terms of of further crippling international respect for national sovereignty and its potential for further enhancing the power of hegemons at the expense of smaller states.

Within the target country, though,the problems remain ones in which entire economic and political systems are thrown into disarray. This can lead to human rights abuses of their own as formerly out-of-power groups assert their newfound power. All the while, economic recovery may elude the newly “liberated” population for many years. An end result may be no net overall advantage for the population as a whole.

Any debate over suggested new interventions, whether among voters or alleged policy experts, must present convincing information and arguments suggesting all these issues can be addressed with the resources and time that advocates claim is necessary. The burden of proof is on the advocates for intervention, and if they cannot bring sufficient rigor to the debate to account for all these issues, intervention ought to be emphatically disregarded.

Moreover, evaluating success, even after the fact, will remain an impossible task. Even when interventions appear to be a success, we are left with what is essentially a major economic calculation problem. Foreign policy tends to be examined in broad aggregates, with description of entire national populations — or certain factions —  as if all members of these groups shared roughly similar goals and outcomes as intervention progresses. This, is, of course, no more true in foreign policy than in domestic policy where it is impossible for governments to plan, regulate, and measure outcomes for individual persons or households. In the end, we’re left dealing with little more than an immense top-down effort of nationwide central planning. Evaluating outcomes outside enormous aggregated averages will be impossible. Consequently, the true costs to individuals are likely to remain hidden forever.

As it is now, however, those who are currently advocating for new interventions in Syria and Venezuela appear to have little interest in confronting the real costs of intervention. They see the political advantages of saying they “did something,” even if those things will turn out to be disastrous.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2MJzxEN Tyler Durden