Month: July 2019

Authored by Finian Cunningham via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

In what was billed as her last major speech before quitting Downing Street, Britain’s outgoing Prime Minister Theresa May focused her concerns on Russian President Vladimir Putin, lashing out at his “cynical falsehoods” and admonishing her successor “to stand up to” the Russian leader.

Given her ignominious failure as premier over the Brexit fiasco, it seemed a strange choice of topic as she addressed the Chatham House think tank in London this past week. Her speech dealt with the wider theme of rising “populist politics” in the US and Europe. And she sought to portray Putin as an archetypal sinister figure fomenting populist threat to the “liberal” democratic order.

At one point, May claimed:

“No one comparing the quality of life or economic success of liberal democracies like the UK, France and Germany to the Russian Federation would conclude that our system is obsolete.”

This was supposed to be a riposte to an interview given by Putin to the Financial Times last month ahead of the G20 summit in Japan. During a lengthy interview on a wide range of issues, the Russian president was quoted as saying:

“The liberal idea has become obsolete. It has come into conflict with the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population.”

Putin was apparently explaining a fairly straightforward and, to many observers, valid assessment of international politics. Namely, that Western establishments and institutions, including the mainstream media, are experiencing a crisis in authority. That crisis has arisen over several years due to popular perception that the governance of the political class is not delivering on democratic demands of accountability and economic progress. That in turn has led people to seek alternatives from the established parties, a movement in the US and Europe which is denigrated by the establishment as “populist” or rabble rousing.

Putin was not advocating any particular politics or political figures. He was merely pointing out the valid observation that the so-called liberal establishment has become obsolete, or dysfunctional.

In her speech this week, May sought to lay on a sinister spin to Putin’s remarks as being somehow him egging on authoritarianism and anti-democratic politics.

Another example of distortion came from Donald Tusk, the European Council President, who also said of Putin’s interview:

“I strongly disagree with the main argument that liberalism is obsolete. Whoever claims that liberal democracy is obsolete, also claims that freedoms are obsolete, that the rule of law is obsolete and that human rights are obsolete… For us in Europe, these are and will remain essential and vibrant values. What I find really obsolete are: authoritarianism, personality cults, the rule of oligarchs.”

Tusk’s depiction of Putin being anti-democratic, anti-human rights and anti-law is a specious misdirection, or as May would say, “cynical falsehood”.

Political leaders like May and Tusk are living in denial. They seem to suffer from a charmed delusion that all is rosy with the state of Western democracy. That somehow Western states are the acme of benign “liberalism”.

By blaming evident deep-seated problems of poverty and apathy towards establishment politics on “sinister” targets of “populism” and “authoritarian strong men” is a form of escapism from reality.

In May’s case, she has added good reason to escape from reality. Her political career is ending in disaster and disgrace for having led Britain into a shambles over its Brexit departure from the European Union. Of course, she would like a distraction from her abysmal record, and she seemed to find one in her farewell speech by firing a dud diatribe at Putin.

But let’s re-examine her self-congratulatory claim more closely. “No one comparing the quality of life or economic success of liberal democracies like the UK, France and Germany to the Russian Federation would conclude that our system is obsolete.”

There are two parts to that.

First, May is giving the usual establishment spiel about presumed superiority of Western “liberal democracy” as opposed to politics and governance in Russia.

This week coming, May hands in her resignation as Conservative party prime minister to the unelected head of state, Queen Elizabeth. The British monarch and her heirs rule as official head of state by a presumed “divine order”. Some democracy that is!

May’s successor will either be Boris Johnson or Jeremy Hunt. The next prime minister of Britain will be elected solely by members of Britain’s Conservative party. As the Washington Post noted this week, the Tory party represents less than one per cent of the British population. So, the new leader of the United Kingdom is being decided not by a democratic national mandate, but by a tiny minority of party members whose demographic profile is typically rightwing, ardent nationalists, pro-militarist, white and elderly males. Moreover, the “selection” of new leader comes down to a choice between two politicians of highly dubious quality whose foreign policy tendency is to play sycophants to Washington. The way Johnson and Hunt have, for example, lent support to Trump’s reckless aggression towards Iran is a portent of further scraping and bowing to American warmongering typical of Britain’s “special relationship”.

In the second part of May’s presumed virtuous liberal democracy, she hails the “quality of economic success” of her nation as opposed to Russian society.

No-one, least of all Putin, is denying that reducing poverty is a social challenge for Russia. In a recent nationwide televised Q&A, the “elected” (please note) head of the Russian state called poverty reduction a priority for his government. However, Russia certainly doesn’t need advice from the United Kingdom or many other Western states on that issue.

A recent major study in Britain found that some 21 per cent of the population (14 million people) are living in poverty. Homelessness and aggravated crime figures are also off the charts due to collapsing public services over a decade of economic austerity as deliberate government policy. The inequality gap between super-rich and poverty among the mass of people has exploded to a chasm in Britain, as in the US and other Western states.

These are some of the urgent issues that Putin was referring to when he asserted the “liberal idea is obsolete”. Can anyone objectively surveying the bankrupt state of Western societies honestly dispute that?

Western states are fundamentally broken down because “liberalism” is an empty term which conceals rapacious corporate capitalism and the oligarchic rule of an elite political class. The advocates of “liberalism” like Britain’s May, Johnson, Hunt or Tusk are the ones who are anti-democracy, anti-human rights and anti-law. Their denial about the systemic cause of poverty and injustice within their own societies and their complicity in American imperialist warmongering in the Middle East or belligerence towards Russia and China is the true “quality” of their “democratic principles”.

If that’s not obsolete then what is? And that’s why May took a weird parting shot at Putin… in a desperate diversion from reality.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2YnSjtH Tyler Durden

A recent climate change study has found that London’s weather could feel more like Barcelona’s in 2050.

Even though that might sound like a dream for Londoners, Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes that the change could be accompanied by severe drought. The research focused on 520 major cities and it was published in journal Plos One. Its most concerning finding was that residents in around a fifth of all cities including Jakarta, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur will experience climate conditions that have never been seen in any major cities.

You will find more infographics at Statista

By 2050, it is forecast that Madrid will feel like Marrakech, Stockholm will feel like Budapest, Seattle will feel like San Francisco and New York will be like Virginia Beach.

In the UK, the temperature increase would see the country’s average temperature during its hottest month soar around six degrees to 27C.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2GCjfvV Tyler Durden

Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk,

The UK fell for a US trap when it seized an Iranian ship on July 4. Iran struck back last Friday.

Useful Idiots

Eurointelligence provides interesting commentary of tit-for-tat ship seizures first by the UK, then by Iran in response.

The extraordinary story behind the capture of the British-flagged oil tanker Stena Impero is a cautionary tale on many levels. It has the potential of turning into a major diplomatic calamity for both the UK and the EU.

Simon Tisdall tells the story in the Observer that this confrontation was masterminded by none other than John Bolton, Donald Trump’s national security adviser. Several weeks ago, US intelligence services tracked an Iranian oil vessel headed for the Mediterranean, bound for a refinery in Syria. The Grace 1 sailed under a Panama flag. As it was too big for the Suez Canal, it undertook the longer journey from Iran around Cape Horn and up the Atlantic towards Spain. Washington alerted the Spanish government 48 hours before the tanker was due to enter the Strait of Gibraltar, but without giving any details that the ship might be in breach of US sanctions. The Spanish Navy escorted the ship but took no action at the time. Spain later said it would have intervened if it had been given information that the ship was in breach of US sanctions. 

Bolton instead tipped off the British, who felt compelled to intercept the Grace I as it entered the Strait of Gibraltar on July 4, dispatching a force of 30 marines who stormed the ship. 

The US managed to accomplish three things at the same time: escalating the conflict with Iran; dividing the Europeans by pitching the UK against Spain, which distanced itself from the UK manoeuvre off Gibraltar; and turning the UK once again into the useful idiot of US diplomacy. Not bad for a few days’ work. But it is also a clear indication of the EU’s total lack of preparedness to deal with a hostile Trump administration. 

Unsurprisingly, the EU’s response is divided. Spain is furious about the UK’s unilateral action in international waters off the Spanish coast. The EU’s external-action service, soon to be headed by Josep Borrell, Spain’s foreign minister, is silent. Germany and France are backing the UK – at least diplomatically – for now. Russia, Japan and China are with Iran. They do not want to risk oil supplies.

Excellent News?!

Excellent news: UK has detained the supertanker Grace I laden with Iranian oil bound for Syria in violation of EU sanctions. America & our allies will continue to prevent regimes in Tehran & Damascus from profiting off this illicit trade.

— John Bolton (@AmbJohnBolton) July 4, 2019

Dangerous Trap

The Guardian comments How Trump’s Arch-Hawk Lured Britain Into a Dangerous Trap to Punish Iran

Bolton’s delighted reaction suggested the seizure was a surprise. But accumulating evidence suggests the opposite is true, and that Bolton’s national security team was directly involved in manufacturing the Gibraltar incident. The suspicion is that Conservative politicians, distracted by picking a new prime minister, jockeying for power, and preoccupied with Brexit, stumbled into an American trap.

In short, it seems, Britain was set up. As a result, Britain has been plunged into the middle of an international crisis it is ill-prepared to deal with.

Much of this angst could have been avoided. Britain opposed Trump’s decision to quit the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, the trigger for today’s crisis. It has watched with alarm as the Trump-Bolton policy of “maximum pressure”, involving punitive sanctions and an oil embargo, has radicalised the most moderate Iranians.

Yet even as Britain backed EU attempts to rescue the nuclear deal, Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt, foreign secretary, tried to have it both ways – to keep Trump sweet.

Eye for an Eye

The Financial Times comments on the ‘Eye for Eye’ Ideology Behind Iran’s Seizure of UK Tanker.

“Eye for eye and hand for hand is our Islamic ideology. An American eye or a European hand are not more valuable than an Iranian eye or hand,” said Mohammad-Sadegh Javadi-Hesar, a reformist politician.

Lovely.

Nothing But War Will Do

Bolton wants war. Nothing less will do.

To get it, he is willing to radicalize the Iranian moderates and trap allies into doing his immoral bidding.

I am sick of this administration’s war policy and treatment of allies.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2YmFNuu Tyler Durden

Police in the city of Santa Catarina, Brazil recently raided a secret factory that was used to create bootleg replicas of luxury vehicles, according to CNN. 

Santa Catarina Civil Police’s investigative unit seized eight nearly assembled replicas of Lamborghinis and Ferraris during last Monday’s raid, according to a police press release.

The replicas were being sold for between $48,000 and $66,000 – a small fraction of the list price for an original. The starting price for a Ferrari, for instance, is generally around $215,000. In addition to seizing the replica vehicles, tools, molds, fibers and frames used to manufacture the cars were also seized.

The shop was owned by a father and son duo who now both face criminal charges for falsifying commercial property. They are being called “the largest manufacturers of bootleg luxury vehicles in Brazil”.

Ferrari and Lamborghini representatives had contacted the Santa Catarina civil police, which prompted the investigation to begin with.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/30PyY22 Tyler Durden

Authored by Jacob Hornberger via The Futures of Freedom Foundation,

Ruler Of The World

Recently released secret documents from Chinese company Huawei provide insights into how the U.S. Empire rules the world. According to the Washington Post, the documents reveal that Huawei secretly helped North Korea “build and maintain the country’s commercial wireless network.”

What’s wrong with that? you ask.

It violates U.S. sanctions against North Korea!

What do U.S. sanctions have to do with commercial relations between a Chinese company and North Korea?

Well, as the ruler of the world – or, in common parlance, as the world’s sole remaining empire – the U.S. Empire’s rules and regulations apply to everyone in the world. If anyone anywhere in the world is caught violating them, he will be summoned to the United States to face criminal and civil prosecution.

What about President Trump’s lovefest with North Korean communist dictator Kim Jong-Un?

Irrelevant! Just because the president of the United States has fallen in love with North Korea’s communist dictator and salutes his communist generals, that still does not relieve foreigners from complying with the Empire’s edicts prohibiting commercial ties with North Korea without the official permission of U.S. officials.

That’s how the Empire works – its rulers are free to fall in love with anyone they want but that still doesn’t relieve foreign governments and foreign companies of their duty to comply with and obey the rules and regulations of the U.S. Empire.

Anyway, everyone is supposed to know that North Korea is a communist regime and that communism is bad. That’s in fact why the Empire has maintained a harsh economic embargo against the Cuban people for more than 50 years. Since the Cuban people have refused to oust their communist regime with a coup or a violent revolution, the U.S. Empire has continued to target them with impoverishment and death through economic sanctions, the same thing they are doing to the North Korean people and, well, for that matter, the Iranian people.

Like Huawei’s helping North Korea to build and maintain a wireless commercial network, woe to the foreigner who does business with communist Cuba in violation of the U.S. embargo. He will be prosecuted, fined, and imprisoned for daring to violate the rules and regulations of the Empire.

In fact, woe to the American citizen who travels to Cuba and spends money there without the official permission of his rulers. He too will be viciously prosecuted, fined, and imprisoned by the Empire.

Notice the operative words: “without the official permission of his rulers.” You see, apparently trading with the Cuban Reds is not bad per se because U.S. officials do grant official permission to some Americans – the privileged ones – to travel to Cuba and spend money there. That’s how the Empire works – if you approach it, show respect, bend the knee, and plead for permission to trade with others, they might (or might not) let you. What’s important is that you ask permission. That’s how “freedom” works under an Empire.

Of course, there is a big exception when it comes to trading with the communists. That exception is North Vietnam or, excuse me, Vietnam, a country that is headed by a communist regime that killed more than 58,000 American men who were sacrificed by the U.S. Empire in a violent war against communism. Apparently Vietnam’s communism is not so bad anymore because U.S. Empire officials have granted Americans official permission to trade with the Vietnamese Reds. 

In his Fourth of July, 1821, address to Congress, entitled “In Search of Monsters to Destroy,” U.S. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams accurately predicted what would happen if the U.S. government were ever to abandon its founding principle of non-interventionism in favor of a worldwide interventionist empire:

The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. The frontlet upon her brows would no longer beam with the ineffable splendor of freedom and independence; but in its stead would soon be substituted an imperial diadem, flashing in false and tarnished lustre the murky radiance of dominion and power. She might become the dictatress of the world.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Gpk6jg Tyler Durden

Several years ago, when ZIRP and NIRP was (again) raging, investors jumped at the chance to buy $1.2 billion in bonds whose proceeds wound up with a cluster of airlines linked to Etihad Airlines. As Bloomberg details, the deal was unusual in several ways: Goldman had teamed up with two relatively obscure brokerages and controversial German financier Lars Windhorst was helping structure the deal behind the scenes.

Ultimately, the deal wound up going bust and a group of creditors has now hired a private eye firm to dig out the details into how the deal came together, including the roles played by Windhorst, Goldman and others.

The deal and its ensuing investigation are bad PR for Goldman Sachs and highlight the company’s “willingness to raise large pools of capital in unorthodox or risky deals.” It also pairs the company with Windhorst, who has been under scrutiny in recent weeks especially over his role in the blow up of the ill-named H20 fund.

Roger King, an analyst at research firm CreditSights said:

“There were a lot of strange characteristics. It was a bizarrely complicated deal. A hairy deal no matter who brought it.”

One of the main questions about the deal was why did Goldman Sachs step in after another notoriously law-breaking bank, HSBC, dropped out. The financing likely wouldn’t have taken place without the help of a global bank.

Now, creditors including investment managers BlueBay Asset Management and Gramercy Funds Management have enlisted private investigators to help them push for maximum recoveries from the busted bonds. While it is not unheard of for bondholders to hire intelligence companies for due diligence purposes, it’s relatively rare that they will employ them in these types of scenarios.

Etihad had an issue in 2015. It had bought stakes in several smaller airlines but some of them, like Air Berlin, kept bleeding cash. Windhorst, who was once the airlline’s largest shareholder, was looking to help fix these issues. He proposed that a special purpose vehicle close to Etihad could sell bonds and then turn around to slice up the proceeds to many of the smaller carriers. Those companies would then pay back the special purpose vehicle.

Anoa, a small brokerage that was contracted to work out the details by Windhorst, was an affiliated company of his investment arm. Anoa has since gone bust and its former CEO is now the CEO of Windhorst’s private investment vehicle. Anoa helped design the transaction but it lacked fundraising firepower. HSBC was initially recruited to lead the deal, but the bank suddenly and inexplicably dropped out before the sale. It was reportedly the participation of Anoa that caused HSBC’s skepticism. Others wondered whether or not the smaller brokerage would be able to commit to carrying out the complex transaction.

That’s when Goldman Sachs stepped in.

The deal needed to be cleared many times over at Goldman because of its complexity and because of the involvement of a sovereign entity, Abu Dhabi. Windhorst’s involvement was also an issue.

The SPV issued its first set of junk rated bonds in the amount of $700 million in September 2015. In April 2016, Senior Etihad executives and a Goldman Sachs banker were given an industry award for the structuring of the plan. Two months after that, the financing team raised another $500 million, bringing the total to $1.2 billion. 93.5% of the proceeds went to the airline group.

However, right after that last deal, things began to go south. Smaller airlines in the partnership like Air Berlin, Alitalia and Jet Airways fell victim to their financial woes and the bonds created. At the same time, Etihad decided it was no longer going to support the affiliate airlines and instead embarked on a management overhaul.

The bond offering documents didn’t explicitly guarantee support from Etihad, but there was always an “implicit understanding” that they would be there for support if needed. And now, the investor group in the bonds is left holding the bag with no choice left but to hire law firms and private investigators to try and maximize their recoveries.

Goldman’s dealings with Windhorst were formerly the topic of a lawsuit by a former executive, Chris Rollins. Seth Redniss, a lawyer for Rollins said: “Whether in public or private, the evidence shows that top execs allowed these very large, risky deals to happen.”

In other words, the buck – as in the case of 1MDB – stopped with none other than Lloyd Blankfein… who conveniently retired last year just as the heat was starting to build.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2YmdAE4 Tyler Durden

Authored by Chloe Anagnos via The American Institute for Economic Research,

As the granddaughter of a survivor of communism and socialism, I find it almost unfathomable that the political ideology my family left a continent for is creeping into my neighborhood.

I was alerted to an event on Facebook called “Summer Socialism 101 classes,” which will be hosted at the Indianapolis Central Library this August. The group will offer the following classes: “Why we need a revolutionary party, Introduction to Marxism, and Contradictions of Capitalism.”

You can imagine my disbelief and frustration when I saw this event shared on Facebook by people urging others to learn more about a political ideology that killed at least 100 million men, women, and children — more than all the deaths of all the major wars of the 20th century – combined.

Published by Harvard University Press, The Black Book of Communism documents the victims of each Marxist socialist regime in, but not necessarily limited to, 

• China under Mao Zedong

• North Korea under Kim Il-Sung, Kim Jong-il, and Kim Jong-un

• Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh

• Cuba under Fidel Castro

• Cambodia under Pol Pot

• Ethiopia under Mengistu Haile

• Venezuela under Nicolás Maduro

Greece is no exception.

After World War II, a civil war broke out in Greece between the Greek government (backed by the U.S. and the UK) and the military branch of the Communist Party of Greece (supported by then-socialist states Yugoslavia, Albania, and Bulgaria).

During the war (1946-49), Greeks either publicly supported or joined the Communists or were thrown in jail. My Yiayia’s (grandmother’s) oldest brother and both of her parents didn’t join the Communists, so they quickly became political prisoners. 

(My great grandparents – the Antonakes family.) 

As best as my Yiayia can recall, they were held as political prisoners for more than three years.

When the war broke out, my Yiayia was the youngest of the family — just eight years old. While her parents were in prison, she and her siblings were raised by family and neighbors. Although this conflict started after World War II, the internal political struggles began during the German occupation of Greece in the early 1940s.

She remembers Nazis occupying her village, one of them shooting a neighbor’s goat in the head in front of her and others while saying something to the effect of “If you don’t fall in line, this is what will happen to you.”

My great uncle lost part of a finger and some of his scalp during the occupation of another village. That is the only injury I’m aware of  — or at least the only one anyone is willing to talk about. Miraculously, not only did the family survive World War II and the civil war, but the three were released from prison. 

In total, 80,000 Greeks were killed and another 700,000 were left homeless. Soon, parts of my family left for better opportunities. Some went to Canada and others eventually got to the United States. Some stayed in Greece and are still there today.

My immediate family and I are only in Indiana because our first relative who came here from Ellis Island wanted to get to Chicago but didn’t have enough money to get there. Instead, he made a life in Elkhart, Indiana — 108 miles short. From there, four generations have worked to achieve the American dream, which wouldn’t be possible without the free market.

Senior AIER fellow Michael Munger says it best:

“The problem for Marxists is simple: every flaw in markets is worse under socialism. At the micro level, every flaw in consumers is worse, and in fact much worse, in voters. Unless you are willing to advocate monarchism, or actual communist dictatorship, markets and democracy are the only two mechanisms we have for organizing society.”

For those in my home state flirting with Marxist ideals, I suggest you read Munger’s forthcoming book from AIER, Is Capitalism Sustainable? along with the other brilliant publications we offer.

After all, capitalism is what truly lifts the masses out of poverty and into freedom. 

Just look at my family.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Y60Pt7 Tyler Durden