Police in the UK are apparently investigating people online who post tweets critical of the coronavirus lockdown.
Toby Young’s LockdownSceptics.org website was contacted by a reader who regularly dissents against the shutdown of the UK on social media.
“I was contacted by a reader who has been very critical of police over-reach on Twitter,” writes Young.
“He saw a Tweet from another sceptic complaining the police had checked his profile on LinkedIn and thought, “That can’t possibly be true. Surely, they’ve got more urgent maters to attend to?”
He then checked his own LinkedIn profile and found this.”
A screenshot shows that the individual’s LinkedIn profile was accessed nine times between April 28 and May 5, and that one of the visitors was someone working for Metropolitan Police in London.
Not content with using surveillance drones to publicly shame remote countryside dog walkers, the authorities are now also apparently keeping tabs on anti-lockdown social media posts.
Because it’s not like there’s much real crime to deal with in London, is it?
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“I promise you, one day you will say, first they came after conservatives, and I said nothing,” opined Dennis Prager at a Senate hearing in July, invoking the famous Holocaust poem by Martin Niemöller. In this case, they refers not to Nazis but to YouTube, which Prager contends is censoring his business. The right-leaning radio host runs Prager University, also known as PragerU, a nonprofit that publishes videos to YouTube, a Google subsidiary.
Prager sued the platform in 2019 after YouTube classified some of its videos in a way that hid them from the 1.5 percent of users who had opted into “restricted mode,” which screens out content with mature themes.
While it’s worth debating whether YouTube should handle political content identically to violent and sexually suggestive content, PragerU’s suit argued that YouTube has become so large that it should now be treated as a public utility and thus prohibited from engaging in viewpoint discrimination. In a ruling issued in February, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit fundamentally rejected that argument. “PragerU runs headfirst into two insurmountable barriers—the First Amendment and Supreme Court precedent,” wrote Circuit Judge M. Margaret McKeown, reminding the plaintiffs that the Constitution protects individuals only from government censorship.
PragerU found common ground on this issue with Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D–Hawaii), who sued Google for violating her First Amendment rights after it temporarily suspended her campaign advertising account following an especially compelling Democratic primary debate performance in June. (Google says the suspension was automatically triggered by its anti-fraud provision, which flags accounts with large changes in spending.)
Like PragerU, Gabbard argued that Google is a public utility and, as such, should be required to maintain neutrality. But as Judge Stephen Wilson of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California observed, the First Amendment has no bearing on decisions made by private businesses. “Google is not now, nor (to the Court’s knowledge) has it ever been, an arm of the United States government,” he wrote.
Gabbard and PragerU may very well be justified in railing against Google’s content moderation methods. But they seem not to have considered the deleterious effects they might have had on the open internet if they had prevailed in court. It’s possible that companies would start scrubbing more content in an effort to avoid lawsuits alleging preferential treatment for certain viewpoints. Conversely, they might also forfeit their right to moderate content at all, which both Prager and Gabbard might change their mind on once companies lose the ability to remove porn.
Forcing Google to behave like a public utility would not be likely to serve the interests of those demanding that designation, to say nothing of the rest of us.
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Alton, Illinois, Mayor Brant Walker ordered police to crack down on people violating the state’s shelter-at-home order. Less than 48 hours later, cops broke up a gathering at a local bar, a gathering that included Walker’s wife. The wife, and everyone else in the bar, was cited for reckless conduct, a misdemeanor punishable by up to 364 days in jail and/or a fine of $2,500.
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Alton, Illinois, Mayor Brant Walker ordered police to crack down on people violating the state’s shelter-at-home order. Less than 48 hours later, cops broke up a gathering at a local bar, a gathering that included Walker’s wife. The wife, and everyone else in the bar, was cited for reckless conduct, a misdemeanor punishable by up to 364 days in jail and/or a fine of $2,500.
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via IFTTT
Despite the unprecedented increase in the ECB’s asset purchase program, the spread of Southern Europe sovereign bonds versus German ones is rising.
The ECB balance sheet has soared to more than 42% of the eurozone’s GDP, compared to the Fed 27% vs U.S. GDP. However, at the same time, excess liquidity has ballooned to more than 2.1 trillion euros.
The ECB has been implementing aggressive asset purchases as well as negative rates for years, and the reality is that the eurozone economy has remained weak and close to stagnation already in the fourth quarter of 2019.
The main problem of the eurozone is that most governments have abandoned all structural reforms and bet all the recovery on monetary policy. The excessive government spending, high tax wedge, and burdens to growth remain, while an increasing percentage of growth came from travel and leisure (around 22% of gross added value in 2019).
The transmission mechanism of monetary policy is not the problem. Banks are eager to lend and businesses and families have no problem accessing credit. The problem is that the eurozone leaders and the central bank managers believe that the challenges of the eurozone are demand problems when there was evidence that the output gap was very small if existent at all. If there was any evidence, it is that monetary policy in the eurozone did not work as an incentive for productive investment and growth, but as a perpetrator of massive imbalances from almost-bankrupt governments.
With the crisis of Covid-19, the eurozone finds itself caught between a rock and a hard place. Its fiscal and monetary policy will perpetuate overcapacity in the wrong sectors and excessive government spending, while its tax policy will likely drive innovation, technology and productive investments further away.
Now that the European Commission has allowed partial nationalizations of industries, the road to permanent stagnation has been paved. First, governments ignore the risks of the pandemic, then they close the economy by government decision, then they announce tighter controls on foreign investment and capital inflows… and present themselves as the solution.
The Eurozone seems to want to use the Covid-19 crisis to advance its interventionist agenda and its so-called “new green deal” strategy. The problem is that higher government intervention in the economy will likely lead to more malinvestment, higher unemployment and lower growth.
The ECB can disguise the risk for a while, but the reality of the mounting debt and tax burden ahead is probably going to end in a debt crisis that can put the entire European Union at risk as governments in the North countries receive the bill of the excess spending of some Southern members.
Monetizing risk will not eliminate it. The euro will lose importance as a global reserve currency and its utilization in cross-border transactions may fall further, leading to a currency crisis just as the debt burden soars.
Montenegro Advertises Itself As “Corona-Free” Vacation Destination
Popular European tourist vacations like Cinque Terre in Italy and the French Riviera in southeastern France are about to have some serious competition on their hands.
While the global travel and leisure industry takes a massive hit, some small countries are hoping to cash in on the wave of coronavirus hysteria that’s expected to curtail travel plans for months, if not years, to come.
Al Jazeera reports that Montenegro, a tiny Balkan state, has advertised itself as a holiday destination where the coronavirus pandemic will soon no longer pose a threat. The country’s premier has vowed to vanquish the virus, which hasn’t spread widely in the Balkans region, before the traditional summer holiday season begins on July 1.
“Montenegro is on its way to becoming a CoronaFree destination!” tweeted Prime Minister Dusko Markovic on Sunday.
#Montenegro is on its way to becoming a #CoronaFree destination!
Taking care of health, in the weeks to come we will prepare our country for tourist season, continuation of investments and new partnerships to mitigate negative effects of the crisis ASAP. #CoronaInfoCGpic.twitter.com/9r31JWLzJJ
The government in Podgorica recently indicated that it expects the holiday season to start on July 1.
To be sure, some resorts haven’t yet decided on whether they will reopen for the summer season. One exclusive resort in Portonovi is currently planning to reopen Oct. 1.
Still, that’s probably much earlier than other European destinations.
A few days after China had announced it was sending medical supplies to Italy, Chinese state media aired pictures of Italians on balconies and streets applauding the Chinese national anthem. “In Rome, with the Chinese anthem playing, some Italians chanted ‘Grazie, Cina!’ on their balconies, & their neighbors applauded along”, wrote Zhao Lijian, the spokesman for China’s foreign ministry who shamefully and wrongly suggested that the U.S. military had brought the Covid-19 to Wuhan.
China presented itself in the role of the savior, willing to rush to the bedside of the sick patient Italy.
Now a Financial Times investigation reveals that those videos were manipulated as part of Beijing’s coronavirus propaganda. Hashtags #ThanksChina and #GoChina&Italy were further generated by bots. A report by the Carnegie Endowment called Italy “a target destination for China’s propaganda”.
An article called, “Why the Covid-19 epidemic is so politicized” and posted on the Chinese embassy website in Paris, said, “Some Westerners are beginning to lose confidence in liberal democracy” and “some [Western countries] have become psychologically weak”.
Antoine Bondaz, a researcher at France’s Foundation for Strategic Research, toldPolitico:
“China considers Europe the soft belly of the West. In their logic, there is the West, and in it the U.S. that will oppose China for structural and ideological reasons, and their European allies that need to be neutral in case of conflict between China and the U.S.”
According to Lt. Gen. (ret.) H.R. McMaster, President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, in his new book Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World, Chinese leaders “believe they have a narrow window of strategic opportunity to strengthen their rule and revise the international order in their favor”.
A leading French official, Pierre-Henri d’Argenson, wrote inLe Figaro that “Europe has now become the buffer zone for the confrontation between China and the United States”. Beijing chose Italy as its soft belly in Europe and is following its script.
In April 2019, the Italian government of Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte was the first G7 country to sign a Memorandum of Understanding on China’s “Belt and Road Initiative” during a state visit by President Xi Jinping. According to an analysis by The Economist, the Chinese Belt and Road plan could surpass the Marshall Plan, by which the US revived Europe’s war ravaged economies.
Italy has a government coalition led by the Five Star Movement, an extremely pro-Chinese party, whose founder Beppe Grillo has been spotted frequently at the Chinese embassy in Rome. As the European Council on Foreign Relations reported, “in Italy business and political lobbies for China have been on the rise”. The former PM Matteo Renzi has visited Beijing for conferences.
Five years ago, China National Chemical Corp bought Pirelli, a 143-year-old Italian company, and the world’s fifth-largest tire maker. A study published by KPMG before the Pirelli deal revealed Chinese acquisitions in Italy have totaled 10 billion euros in five years (in a total of 13 billion euros investments). A third of foreign purchases in Italy are Chinese. The goal is to turn Italy into “Europe’s top destination for highly coveted investment from China”.
Now, China is trying to dominate southern Europe’s infrastructure. China was already granted a license to run Greece’s largest seaport, Athens’ Piraeus harbor, which Beijing plans to turn into Europe’s biggest commercial harbor. Then China started to project its expansion in Italy’s ports, where four major ports are also in line for Chinese investments. Zeno D’Agostino, the president of Trieste’s northern port, says that “China is opening because it feels strong”.
Italy’s political appeasement of China was on display during the fatal early days of the coronavirus crisis.
On January 21, Italy’s culture and tourism minister hosted a Chinese delegation for a concert at the National Academy of Santa Cecilia to inaugurate the year of Italy-China Culture and Tourism. Michele Geraci, Italy’s former undersecretary for development, was not sure that was his place. “Are we sure we want to do this?”, Geraci said looking at his colleagues. “Should we be here today?”. A few days later, in many Italian cities, such as Florence and Prato, where there is a Chinese manufacturing stronghold, mayors and local communities promoted the initiative, “hug a Chinese” to fight xenophobia and racism.
In Rome, Italy’s President, Sergio Mattarella, visited a school that has a high percentage of Chinese students to counter “discrimination” and Nicola Zingaretti, the leader of the Democratic Party, met the Chinese ambassador in Rome. Meanwhile, Italian televisions organized live tastings of Chinese products. That was Italy’s fatal initial mistake: fighting racism instead of the virus, which only a few days later would devastate the country.
China has been able to brainwash Italian public opinion. In a poll published April 17, 50% of Italians consider China a “friend” (just 17% of Italians think as much of the United States). And in the race for the global power to which Italy should be allied China is ahead of the US, 36% to 30%.
Italy’s foreign minister, Luigi Di Maio, welcomed a plane-load of Chinese medical supplies on March 12. “We will remember those who were close to us in this difficult period”, Di Maio said. It is not necessary, China will remind them.
Walter Ricciardi, an advisor to the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Italian government, tweeted: “Thanks China!”.
We know now that while the Chinese regime misled the world about the contagiousness of Covid-19, it stockpiled medical supplies. As the editor of the German BILDwrote in a letter to Chinese president Xi:
“I suppose you consider it a great ‘friendship’ when you now generously send masks around the world. This isn’t friendship, I would call it imperialism hidden behind a smile – a Trojan Horse”.
Not a single Italian minister or official blamed China for the cover up of the epidemic or causing witnesses to “disappear“.
“For the first time in many years, Western countries united behind the request to China for clarifications on how Covid-19 was born and then spread”, Paolo Mieli wrote in a front-page editorial for Italy’s largest newspaper, Il Corriere della Sera. Mieli mentioned the United States, Australia, United Kingdom, France and Germany.
“Who is missing? Italy, the only country in the Western world to have welcomed half a million masks sent to us (for a fee) from China with a truly excessive blaze”.
The world-renowned Italian textile industry was one of the major victims of a globalization expansion led by Chinese dishonest economic dumping. China is now reducing Italy to a setting to help spread and implement its propaganda and will to power. As Italian analyst Francesco Galietti wrote, Italy is going to become “the target of a Chinese ‘charm offensive’, a combination of hard cash and ‘soft power’, money and influence”. He notes as an example the People’s Bank of China:
“It has steadily amassed stakes above 2 percent (the disclosure threshold in Italy) in a slew of Italy’s largest shareholder-owned companies, including FCA (the Fiat Chrysler group), Telecom Italia, and Generali Group, Italy’s largest insurer”.
China has also invested in strategic Italian energy entities such as Eni and Enel and Italian oil services group Saipem.
This economic penetration will also have immense security consequences. During the first days of the Covid-19 epidemic, Italy, which is being lured by the promise of a $3 billion Huawei investment in its telecommunications system, announced that it has no plans to stop Chinese telecom firms playing a role in the country’s future 5G network. It is a project that US Attorney General William P. Barr defined a “monumental danger“.
“The geopolitical effects of the pandemic could be significant,” said NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg.
“Some allies (are) more vulnerable for situations where critical infrastructure can be sold out” in a Chinese “buying spree”.
US Secretary of Defense Mark Esper has also warned that China will exploit the virus “to further their own interests and try to sow division in the Alliance and in Europe”.
Italy is most vulnerable to this Chinese offensive. It is one of the most indebted countries in the world and has an economic growth close to zero. It is also one of Europe’s most unstable and fragile governments and had one of Europe’s highest coronavirus death tolls — an experience that an Italian nurse compared to a “world war“.
Italy is now Europe’s sick man. Due to the Chinese coronavirus crisis, the country will see a collapse of its GDP (-9.5%) and the explosion of its public debt which is set to 160% of gross domestic product — the highest since World War II. Beijing knows this and claims that “Italy has many economic problems, Europe is in crisis and the Belt and Road Initiative is the only major global investment plan”.
“The possibility that Europe will become a museum or a cultural amusement park for the nouveau riche of globalization is not completely out of the question”, said the late historian Walter Laqueur.
Rome’s dramatic fall could mean Beijing’s equally dramatic rise. It is a huge warning for the West.
Watch: ‘Skynet’-Like Robot Dog Patrols Singapore’s Parks To Ensure Humans Are Social Distancing
If there’s one thing we try to keep a eye on, it’s the potential use of this global pandemic for governments to try and unleash new and “interesting” ways of surveillance.
Thus, our eyes and ears perked up when we learned that Singapore was now going to be using robot dogs to patrol public areas and make sure that citizens are keeping their distance from one another. Municipal authorities are using Spot, a four legged robot dog made by Boston Dynamics, to remind visitors to parks to keep a safe distance from one another.
The robo-doggo officially started patrol at Bishan-Ang Mo Kio Park on Friday as part of a two week trial, according to The Verge. Spot is fitted with cameras that are used to estimate the number of visitors in the park, but Singapore says it won’t collect personal data or use the video to identify individuals. Sure.
Spot also comes equipped with a remote control, built-in sensors and will be accompanied by a guide. If the trial is deemed a success, Spot (and likely others like him) could become mainstays in the country’s public parks. The robot “lowers the risk of exposure to the virus,” the National Parks Board said, using the virus to shoehorn its agenda forward. Signs like the one above warn park visitors not to disrupt robot at work.
China and the U.S. have similarly experimented with drones to remind people to social distance. “Please maintain a safe distance between you and other people,” one robot from Knightscope tells people.
Spot is also undergoing trials in hospitals to help with coronavirus treatments and delivery robots are helping shipping and logistics companies. As The Verge notes, patrolling the parks and reminding people to social distance “may only be the beginning” for these robots. The pandemic is being called a “new opportunity” for robotmakers to deploy their creations.
While the dog is only in charge of pandemic-related rules enforcement for now, we can envision that it won’t be too long before they are enforcing other kinds of rules – for our own safety and good, undoubtedly – as well.
As today’s world teeters on the brink of a financial collapse greater than anything the world experienced in either 1923 Weimar or the 1929 Great depression, a serious discussion has been initiated by leaders of Russia and China regarding the terms of the new system which must inevitably replace the currently dying neo-liberal order. Most recently, Vladimir Putin re-initiated his January 16, 2020 call for a new emergency economic conference to deal with the looming disaster based upon a live session with representatives of the five nuclear powers of the UN Security Council.
While Putin’s commitment for this new system is premised upon multi-polar principles of cooperation and respect of national sovereignty, the financial oligarchy and broader deep state structures infesting the western nations who have initiated this crisis over the course of decades of globalization have called for their own version of a new system.
This new system as we have seen promoted by the likes of the Bank of England and leading technocrats over the past year, is based upon an anti-Nation State, unipolar system which typically goes by the term “Green New Deal”. In other words, this is a system ruled by a technocratic elite managing the reduction of world population through the monetization of carbon reduction practices under a Global Government.
No matter how you look at it, a new system will be created out of the ashes of the currently dying world order. The question is only: Will it benefit the oligarchy or the people?
In order to inform the necessary decision making going into this emergency conference, it is useful to revisit the last such emergency conference that defined the terms of a world economic architecture in July 1944 so that similar mistakes that were then made by anti-imperialist forces are not made once more.
What Was the Bretton Woods?
As it was becoming apparent that the war would be soon drawing to a close, a major fight broke out during a two week conference in Bretton Woods New Hampshire where representative of 44 nations convened to establish the terms of the new post-war system. The question was: Would this new system be governed by those British Imperial principles similar to those that had dominated the world before the war began or would they be shaped by a community of sovereign nation states?
On the one side, figures allied to American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s vision for an anti-Imperial world order lined up behind FDR’s champion Harry Dexter White while those powerful forces committed to maintaining the structures of a bankers’ dictatorship (Britain was always primarily a banker’s empire) lined up behind the figure of John Maynard Keynes.
John Maynard Keynes was a leading Fabian Society controller and treasurer of the British Eugenics Association (which served as a model for Hitler’s Eugenics protocols before and during the war). During the Bretton Woods Conference, Keynes pushed hard for the new system to be premised upon a one world currency controlled entirely by the Bank of England known as the Bancor. He proposed a global bank called the Clearing Union to be controlled by the Bank of England which would use the Bancor (exchangeable with national currencies) and serve as unit of account to measure trade surpluses or deficits under the mathematical mandate of maintaining “equilibrium” of the system.
Harry Dexter White on the other hand fought relentlessly to keep the City of London out of the drivers’ seat of global finance and instead defended the institution of national sovereignty and sovereign currencies based on long term scientific and technological growth. Although White and FDR demanded that U.S. dollars become the reserve currency in the new world system of fixed exchange rates, it was not done to create a “new American Empire” as most modern analysts have assumed, but rather was designed to use America’s status as the strongest productive global power to ensure an anti-speculative stability among international currencies which entirely lacked stability in the wake of WWII.
Their fight for fixed exchange rates and principles of “parity pricing” were designed by FDR and White strictly around the need to abolish the forms of chaotic flux of the un-regulated markets which made speculation rampant under British Free Trade and destroyed the capacity to think and plan for the sort of long term development needed to modernize nation states. Theirs was not a drive for “mathematical equilibrium” but rather a drive to “end poverty” through REAL physical economic growth of colonies who would thereby win real economic independence.
As figures like Henry Wallace (FDR’s loyal Vice President and 1948 3rd party candidate), Representative William Wilkie (FDR’s republican lieutenant and New Dealer), and Dexter White all advocated repeatedly, the mechanisms of the World Bank, IMF, and United Nations were meant to become drivers of an internationalization of the New Deal which transformed America from a backwater cesspool in 1932 to becoming a modern advanced manufacturing powerhouse 12 years later. All of these Interntional New Dealers were loud advocates of US-Russia –China leadership in the post war world which is a forgotten fact of paramount importance.
“It is vital to the United States, it is vital to China and it is vital to Russia that there be peaceful and friendly relations between China and Russia, China and America and Russia and America. China and Russia Complement and supplement each other on the continent of Asia and the two together complement and supplement America’s position in the Pacific.”
Contradicting the mythos that FDR was a Keynesian, FDR’s assistant Francis Perkins recorded the 1934 interaction between the two men when Roosevelt told her:
“I saw your friend Keynes. He left a whole rigmarole of figures. He must be a mathematician rather than a political economist.” In response Keynes, who was then trying to coopt the intellectual narrative of the New Deal stated he had “supposed the President was more literate, economically speaking.”
In his 1936 German edition of his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Keynes wrote:
“For I confess that much of the following book is illustrated and expounded mainly with reference to the conditions existing in the Anglo Saxon countries. Nevertheless, the theory of output as a whole, which is what the following book purports to provide, is much more easily adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state.”
While Keynes represented the “soft imperialism” for the “left” of Britain’s intelligentsia, Churchill represented the hard unapologetic imperialism of the Old, less sophisticated empire that preferred the heavy fisted use of brute force to subdue the savages. Both however were unapologetic racists and fascists (Churchill even wrote admiringly of Mussolini’s black shirts) and both represented the most vile practices of British Imperialism.
FDR’s Forgotten Anti-Colonial Vision Revited
FDR’s battle with Churchill on the matter of empire is better known than his differences with Keynes whom he only met on a few occasions. This well documented clash was best illustrated in his son/assistant Elliot Roosevelt’s book As He Saw It (1946) who quoted his father:
“I’ve tried to make it clear … that while we’re [Britain’s] allies and in it to victory by their side, they must never get the idea that we’re in it just to help them hang on to their archaic, medieval empire ideas … I hope they realize they’re not senior partner; that we are not going to sit by and watch their system stultify the growth of every country in Asia and half the countries in Europe to boot.”
FDR continued:
“The colonial system means war. Exploit the resources of an India, a Burma, a Java; take all the wealth out of these countries, but never put anything back into them, things like education, decent standards of living, minimum health requirements–all you’re doing is storing up the kind of trouble that leads to war. All you’re doing is negating the value of any kind of organizational structure for peace before it begins.”
Writing from Washington in a hysteria to Churchill, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden said that Roosevelt ”contemplates the dismantling of the British and Dutch empires.”
Unfortunately for the world, FDR died on April 12, 1945. A coup within the Democratic establishment, then replete with Fabians and Rhodes Scholars, had already ensured that Henry Wallace would lose the 1944 Vice Presidency in favor of Anglophile Wall Street Stooge Harry Truman. Truman was quick to reverse all of FDR’s intentions, cleansing American intelligence of all remaining patriots with the shutdown of the OSS and creation of the CIA, the launching of un-necessary nuclear bombs on Japan and establishment of the Anglo-American special relationship. Truman’s embrace of Churchill’s New World Order destroyed the positive relationship with Russia and China which FDR, White and Wallace sought and soon America had become Britain’s dumb giant.
The Post 1945 Takeover of the Modern Deep State
FDR warned his son before his death of his understanding of the British takeover of American foreign policy, but still could not reverse this agenda. His son recounted his father’s ominous insight:
“You know, any number of times the men in the State Department have tried to conceal messages to me, delay them, hold them up somehow, just because some of those career diplomats over there aren’t in accord with what they know I think. They should be working for Winston. As a matter of fact, a lot of the time, they are [working for Churchill]. Stop to think of ’em: any number of ’em are convinced that the way for America to conduct its foreign policy is to find out what the British are doing and then copy that!” I was told… six years ago, to clean out that State Department. It’s like the British Foreign Office….”
Before being fired from Truman’s cabinet for his advocacy of US-Russia friendship during the Cold War, Wallace stated:
“American fascism” which has come to be known in recent years as the Deep State. “Fascism in the postwar inevitably will push steadily for Anglo-Saxon imperialism and eventually for war with Russia. Already American fascists are talking and writing about this conflict and using it as an excuse for their internal hatreds and intolerances toward certain races, creeds and classes.”
In his 1946 Soviet Asia Mission, Wallace said “Before the blood of our boys is scarcely dry on the field of battle, these enemies of peace try to lay the foundation for World War III. These people must not succeed in their foul enterprise. We must offset their poison by following the policies of Roosevelt in cultivating the friendship of Russia in peace as well as in war.”
Indeed this is exactly what occurred. Dexter White’s three year run as head of the International Monetary Fund was clouded by his constant attacks as being a Soviet stooge which haunted him until the day he died in 1948 after a grueling inquisition session at the House of Un-American Activities. White had previously been supporting the election of his friend Wallace for the presidency alongside fellow patriots Paul Robeson and Albert Einstein.
Today the world has captured a second chance to revive the FDR’s dream of an anti-colonial world. In the 21st century, this great dream has taken the form of the New Silk Road, led by Russia and China (and joined by a growing chorus of nations yearning to exit the invisible cage of colonialism).
If western nations wish to survive the oncoming collapse, then they would do well to heed Putin’s call for a New International system, join the BRI, and reject the Keynesian technocrats advocating a false “New Bretton Woods” and “Green New Deal”.
Saudi Arabia Running Out Of Money: Riyadh To Slash Spending By $27 Billion, Suspend Cost Of Living Allowance
Last weekend we quoted Finance Minister Mohammed Al-Jadaan, who warned that the world’s biggest oil exporter hasn’t witnessed “a crisis of this severity” in decades, adding that government spending will have to be cut “very deeply”, something we touched on previously.
We didn’t have long to wait, because early on Monday, the Saudi government – which appears to be running out of money fast – ordered government spending cuts including suspending the cost of living allowance amid broad austerity measures for about $26.6 billion and a tripling of the value-added tax as part of measures aimed to shore up state finances, which have been battered by low oil prices and the coronavirus.
“Cost of living allowance will be suspended as of June first, and the value added tax will be increased to 15% from 5% as of July first,” said the Saudi finance minister according to the state news agency, suggesting Saudi Arabia is on the verge of a full-blown fiscal crisis.
Saudi Finance minister Mohammed Al-Jadaan
Other measures includes canceling or delaying some operational and capital expenditures for a number of government agencies and reducing the credits planned for a number of state initiatives, including the Vision 2030 project, just as we predicted.
“The covid-19 challenges have led to a decline in government revenues, and pressure on public finances to levels that are difficult to deal with later without harming the kingdom’s macroeconomics and public finances in the medium and long term,” Al-Jadaan said. “Therefore more spending cuts must be achieved, and measures to support the stability of non-oil revenues.”
Already under a strict curfew to contain the spread of the coronavirus pandemic, the world’s largest oil exporter has been affected by the oil price rout and global crude production cuts to help balance the market. The price of Brent crude crashed by more than 50% in March, contributing to a record $27 billion monthly drop in the Saudi central bank’s net foreign assets.
Adding insult to injury, last week we warned that the Kingdom may soon be dealing with a funding crisis as well: the collapse in crude prices and the government’s drop in foreign reserves, which plunged by a record $27BN in March…
… is putting more pressure on the Saudi riyal. For now, however, prices for 12-month dollar-riyal forward contracts are well short of their all-time high reached in 2016.
Commenting on the drop in reserves, Al Jazeera said that when the kingdom last stared down the crash in crude in 2014, it wielded reserves that peaked at over $735 billion. The stockpile was down by over a third just three years later, channeled almost entirely toward deficit spending.
And now, Saudi Arabia is blowing through its reserves at the fastest pace in at least two decades, even as the government is barely using the holdings to cover fiscal needs. Following its debut in international bond markets in 2016, borrowing covered most of the budget deficit in the first quarter.
As a result, with its buffers already fragile and the economy hammered by the coronavirus, Saudi Arabia is looking to scale back spending and rely more on debt.
There was some good news: recently Goldman Sachs has predicted that the central bank’s reserves, down more than 100 billion riyals ($27 billion) in March alone, will stabilize soon. “Despite a further anticipated decline in oil revenues in the second quarter, we expect the rate of reserve burn to slow,” Farouk Soussa, a Goldman Sachs economist, said in a report.
Alas, judging by the Saudi action, Riyadh is clearly far more concerned that the pain will straight well beyond the second quarter
