Interpreting President Putin’s Speech At The 2019 BRI Forum

Authored by Andrew Korbko via Oriental Review,

President Putin left nothing to doubt when he proudly proclaimed that Russia and the Eurasian Economic Union regional integration organization that it leads are strategically merging with China and its Belt & Road Initiative, with this process having unprecedentedly far-reaching strategic consequences for the supercontinent and 21st-century geopolitics as a whole.

This year’s Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) Forum is a monumental event bringing together several dozen heads of state and providing a platform for the international community to better understand this world-changing vision. President Putin gave an important speech during this event that can be summarized as his proud proclamation that Russia and the Eurasian Economic Union (EAU) regional integration organization that it leads are strategically merging with China and its BRI. There’s no doubt that this process will have unprecedentedly far-reaching strategic consequences for the supercontinent and 21st-century geopolitics as a whole, which is why his entire address deserves to be analyzed in full. What therefore follows is the transcript of his speech interspersed with brief interpretations of the text in order to help the reader appreciate just how significant of an event this was and what his words might mean for the future of Russian grand strategy:

Passage:

“President Xi Jinping, Ladies and gentlemen,

First of all, I would like to thank my good friend President of China Xi Jinping for inviting me to attend the second Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation. I would like to express my appreciation for the opportunity to be here in such a large representative group and to meet with each other, to discuss current issues of global development and principles of cooperation.

I have listened with great interest – as I am sure many other people in this hall have – about the principles and goals of China’s development, that is, how the People’s Republic of China, the world’s largest economy today in terms of purchasing power parity, is planning to develop and build relationships with its partners. This is of fundamental importance both for Russia and, I am sure, for many of our colleagues who have gathered here in Beijing today.”

Interpretation:

When China talks, the world listens.

Passage:

“It is obvious that the implementation of this ambitious project, Belt and Road, promoted by our Chinese colleagues, is aimed at strengthening the constructive cooperation of the Eurasian states. Its truly unifying goal is to ensure harmonious and sustainable economic development and economic growth throughout the Eurasian space.

Russia has emphasised on numerous occasions that PRC President’s Belt and Road initiative rimes with Russia’s idea to establish a Greater Eurasian Partnership, a project designed to ‘integrate integration frameworks’, and therefore to promote a closer alignment of various bilateral and multilateral integration processes that are currently underway in Eurasia.”

Interpretation:

China’s Silk Road vision of Eurasian integration is complementary to Russia’s Greater Eurasian Partnership, with the key concept being that both Great Powers are now ready to “integrate (their) integration frameworks”, which confirms what the Russian Ambassador to China said earlier this month and strongly implies Moscow’s unstated but de-facto participation in BRI’s flagship project of CPEC, too.

Passage:

“Russia is ready to undertake efforts for creating a transparent and enabling environment in order to promote cooperation across Eurasia.

It is important that we come up with effective ways of responding to the risks of a fragmented global political, economic and technological landscape and growing protectionism, with illegitimate unilateral restrictions imposed bypassing the UN Security Council or, even worse, trade wars as its most dangerous expressions.

It is our firm belief that only by working together can we counter urgent challenges such as decelerating economic growth, the deepening prosperity gap among nations as well as technological backwardness.”

Interpretation:

Only multilateral economic cooperation such as the sort proposed by China’s BRI and Russia’s EAU (to say nothing of these integration projects’ impending merger) can counteract the systemically destabilizing consequences of the US’ “trade war” and the “Trumpist” worldview that inspired it.

Passage:

“Let me repeat what I have said on numerous occasions: these negative trends feed terrorism, extremism and illegal migration flows, causing old regional conflicts to resurface and new ones to emerge.”

Interpretation:

Russian President Putin, Chinese President Xi, and Prime Minister Khan of the global pivot state of Pakistan are all on the same page regarding the fact that the source of many security threats can be traced back to economic problems, hence the interest that the new Multipolar Trilateral has in pursuing the integration of the EAU, BRI, and CPEC.

Passage:

“I strongly believe that Eurasia can become a role model in devising a meaningful and positive agenda for overcoming these and other urgent international problems. Peoples of various cultures, religions and traditions have inhabited the vast Eurasian space for millennia.

Of course, there were wars and conflicts throughout the continent’s history, but sooner or later they subsided, while common sense and the natural aspiration of the people to peace and communication always triumphed at the end of the day.”

Interpretation:

Despite its diversity, Eurasia won’t be the scene of a destabilizing so-called “Clash of Civilizations” that shadowy forces are actively trying to spark, but rather the platform for a Convergence of Civilizations that will stabilize the supercontinent following the integration of the aforementioned integration frameworks (EAU, BRI, CPEC).

Passage:

“Russia is interested in the closest cooperation with all Eurasian partners on the basis of unshakable principles of respect for the sovereignty, rights and legitimate interests of each state. It is on these principles that we are building the Eurasian Economic Union, with our partners – Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan. Soon, on May 29, the EAEU will have been in existence for five years. Over this period, a common market has been created, and conditions are being created to ensure the free movement of goods, services, capital and labour.

Common markets have been formed, as well as a common digital space.

In his remarks just now, President Xi Jinping spoke about linking his initiatives with similar ones and with other associations that are forming in our vast space. This absolutely fits into our plans. The EAEU states are actively working to strengthen industrial and technological cooperation, to build efficient transport and logistics chains. And we, too, together with our Chinese friends, with all our partners, will talk more during our meetings today and tomorrow, we will continue coordinating this work, work of a global nature.”

Interpretation:

The Russian-led EAU is the core of Moscow’s supercontinental integration strategy, and it perfectly dovetails with China’s BRI.

Passage:

“We also continue pursuing the policy of harmonising our monetary and fiscal policies. At the same time, the Eurasian Economic Union strives for the widest possible cooperation with all interested countries and associations. I am primarily referring to the People’s Republic of China, the country we consider to be our key supporter, our natural partner in the integrated development of the continent.

The five EAEU member states have unanimously supported the idea of pairing the EAEU development and the Chinese Silk Road Economic Belt project. The agreements reached in this regard are being successfully implemented. In the coming months, the Agreement on Trade and Economic Cooperation between the EAEU and China will enter into force.”

Interpretation:

The EAU will continue harmonizing its economic strategy with China, Russia’s key supporter and natural partner in jointly integrating Eurasia, with more cooperation agreements to be forthcoming.

Passage:

“The Eurasian Union is committed to liberalising economic ties with its other partners as well, and has already signed a free trade agreement with Vietnam and a provisional agreement with Iran paving the way to the creation of a free trade area. The preparation of similar instruments with Singapore and Serbia is nearing completion, and talks are underway with Israel, Egypt and India.

We cooperate actively with the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

We undoubtedly stand for expanding business ties with the European Union, our long-standing and traditional partner, in a constructive and equitable manner. Even if there are currently some differences between us, they cannot and should not cast a shadow on our shared responsibility for the future of Europe and all of Eurasia.”

Interpretation:

Russia’s Greater Eurasian Partnership vision is truly all-encompassing and seeks to spread multipolarity into every corner of the supercontinent, even doing what most observers had hitherto thought to be politically impossible by connecting Iran and its hated “Israeli” foe togetherthrough the same multilateral trade framework of the EAU.

Passage:

“Let me emphasise that the Great Eurasian Partnership and Belt and Road concepts are both rooted in the principles and values that everyone understands: the natural aspiration of nations to live in peace and harmony, benefit from free access to the latest scientific achievements and innovative development, while preserving their culture and unique spiritual identity. In other words, we are united by our strategic, long-term interests.

I strongly believe that the comprehensive approach that underpins both concepts will help us further enhance economic cooperation within the continent, develop shared transport and energy infrastructure and promote digital technology. This way, integration will serve the interests of our peoples and all Eurasian nations to the fullest extent.”

Interpretation:

“Win-win” isn’t high-sounding rhetoric exclusive to the Chinese, but is a credible Eurasian-wide vision that can ultimately improve the living standards of the supercontinent’s many people if it’s successfully pursued by all nations in full coordination with one another.

Passage:

“Once again, I would like to thank our partners, our Chinese friends for this initiative. Thank you for your attention.”

Interpretation:

No one should ever forget that while the vision of “win-win” is completely inclusive, it wouldn’t be possible to seriously implement in practice had it not been for China’s BRI, therefore making the People’s Republic the core of this paradigm-changing 21st-century process that’s poised to irreversibly revolutionize global geopolitics.

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

The Problem With Nudging People to Happiness

On Freedom, by Cass R. Sunstein, Princeton University Press, 136 pages, $12.95

Just as a building has a structure that allows the people within it to pursue their own happiness without obstructing the movements of others, a free society has a structure defined by the natural rights of first possession, private property, freedom of contract, restitution, and self-defense. These rights—all of which can be loosely characterized as “property rights”—distinguish liberty from license. License is the freedom to do whatever you desire. Liberty is the freedom to do whatever you desire with what, according to these principles, is rightfully yours.

In the Hobbesian state of nature, liberty is conceived as the liberty do anything at all, including the freedom to use other people’s bodies. So government is needed to limit this liberty to avoid life being solitary, nasty, and short. By contrast, the Lockean state of nature “has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.” Government, then, exists not to limit liberty but to protect it better than each of us can do on our own.

When speaking of freedom in the abstract, it is essential to know to which freedom one refers. The title of Cass Sunstein’s small and provocative new book, On Freedom, is therefore ambiguous. Does he mean unrestricted freedom that must be shaped or limited by government? Or does he mean a liberty bounded by rights that government is tasked to secure?

Sunstein is a progressive liberal. He genuinely cares about individual freedom. But like all progressives, he thinks “we” can do better than merely protecting the rights of individuals and letting the spontaneous order of human actions develop from there. The best and the brightest should intervene to improve outcomes.

Sunstein’s distinctive contribution concerns the nature of that intervention. Most progressives, like Hobbes, believe that freedom must be constrained by force to “make the world a better place.” Indeed, many seem to believe that anything that is not prohibited by the state should be mandated. Sunstein, instead, has long favored “nudging” over jailing and fining. On Freedom is an accessible introduction to how he approaches social problems—and a constructive challenge for libertarians.

The book disclaims any effort to “explore the differences between ‘negative freedom’ and ‘positive freedom’;…make a final judgment about Mill’s Harm Principle; or investigate the claim that property rights, conferred by the state, can be essential to freedom, or an abridgment of freedom.” In short, Sunstein attempts to discuss “freedom” abstracted from the essential concepts that are necessary to govern its exercise. That’s a big problem, though it does not render the book without value.

Sunstein effectively challenges us to consider how individuals can be made better off, by their own lights, not by coercing them in ways that violate their rights but by structuring their environment in ways that lead them to make the choices that will end up pleasing them the most. His approach builds on the insight that most decisions are already structured by the ways that options are presented to us. From grocery store layouts with end-cap specials to websites featuring seductive links and advertisements, we are constantly and inevitably being nudged in a thousand different directions. We’re free to resist these nudges, but we usually do not. So, Sunstein proposes, we might as well think about how best to nudge people to make good choices.

One revealing example he offers is the “food pyramid” designed by the federal Department of Agriculture (USDA). The idea was to nudge people to exercise their freedom to make healthier dietary choices, with the assistance of (mandatory) nutritional information on all packaged foodstuffs. Here is the pyramid as it appears in the book:

U.S. Department of Agriculture

According to Sunstein, the problem with this pyramid is that it “is organized by five stripes. (Or is it seven?) What do they connote? At the bottom, you can see a lot of different foods. But it’s a mess. Some of the foods appear to fall into several categories. Are some grains or vegetables?” For Sunstein, the obvious problem is that people “are unlikely to change their behavior if they do not know what to do.” Thus, the government “consulted with a wide range of experts, with backgrounds in both nutrition and communication, to explore what kind of icon might be better.” In 2011, they came up with this:

U.S. Department of Agriculture

The plate “doesn’t require anyone to do anything,” Sunstein says. Instead, “it makes clear that if half your plate is fruits and vegetables, you’ll be doing well, and if the rest of your plate is divided between rice and meat (or some other protein), you’re likely to be having a healthy meal.” What could go wrong?

But Sunstein starts his story in the middle, with the “new” food pyramid that was introduced in 2005. He neglects the original, promulgated by the USDA in 1992:

U.S. Department of Agriculture

That pyramid recommended seven servings of good old carbs such as bread, pasta, and potatoes for every three servings of protein. It lumped fats, oils, and salts together with sugars. (The latter, we now know, is made by your body from all the bread and pasta you’re eating.) Unsurprisingly, because it was issued by a government agency, the content was heavily influenced by food industry groups. Many nutritionists now blame it for fattening Americans like cattle, leading to chronic obesity, diabetes, and possibly even an explosion of dementia. Oops.

Of course, the new high-protein, low-carb recommendations might be as wrong as the old low-fat, high-carb diets. But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the new diet is right. (I’m now 30 pounds lighter because of it.) If so, generations of Americans—and the whole food industry—were “nudged” astray for decades to the detriment of their health.

What, Sunstein would respond, is the alternative? If choices are to be made, should they not be made with the best information currently at hand?

One obvious option is not to let a bigfoot like the Department of Agriculture do the nudging. Another would be to have more respect for spontaneous order, which in this case was the traditional American diet of meats, cheeses, and a side of veggies. Instead, we were urged toward a diet of partially hydrogenated fats as an alternative to supposedly unhealthy butter—”trans” fats that later were banned entirely.

“Let the market decide” is not necessarily a recipe for correct answers. But a decentralized order of freedom within the boundaries of our legally protected rights allows a diversity of choices from which better results can emerge “as if by an invisible hand.” Knowledge can evolve instead of being stipulated by a Leviathan. Labeling is fine; consumers cannot identify for themselves what’s put into processed food. But food recommendations—nudging—by enlightened experts empaneled by the government has been as likely to be wrong as to be right.

When I was a research fellow at the University of Chicago Law School, my office was next to Sunstein’s, who was then in his first year of teaching. We became good friends. During one of our many conversations, I recall him asking what I would say if one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century turned out to be Jürgen Habermas and not Friedrich Hayek.

Since then, Sunstein has become a bigger fan of Hayek. In this book, he quotes the Austrian economist as saying that “the awareness of our irremediable ignorance of most of what is known to somebody [who is the chooser] is the chief basis of the argument for liberty.” And yet, Sunstein asks, “Might people’s freedom of choice fail to promote their own well-being” from the perspective of their own desires? “Every member of the human species knows that the answer is sometimes yes.” So he proposes nudging people to make the choices that will better achieve their own goals.

I would like to see him seriously confront the problem of knowing how to nudge people to get what they want. He might then consider whether government experts, panels, and boards will always have the interests of the people, rather than those of powerful interest groups, in mind. On Freedom is a stimulating read that should nudge libertarians to stop and think harder about nudging. But it could use a little more Hayek and a little less Big Mother.

from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2DDoo5f
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The Problem With Nudging People to Happiness

On Freedom, by Cass R. Sunstein, Princeton University Press, 136 pages, $12.95

Just as a building has a structure that allows the people within it to pursue their own happiness without obstructing the movements of others, a free society has a structure defined by the natural rights of first possession, private property, freedom of contract, restitution, and self-defense. These rights—all of which can be loosely characterized as “property rights”—distinguish liberty from license. License is the freedom to do whatever you desire. Liberty is the freedom to do whatever you desire with what, according to these principles, is rightfully yours.

In the Hobbesian state of nature, liberty is conceived as the liberty do anything at all, including the freedom to use other people’s bodies. So government is needed to limit this liberty to avoid life being solitary, nasty, and short. By contrast, the Lockean state of nature “has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.” Government, then, exists not to limit liberty but to protect it better than each of us can do on our own.

When speaking of freedom in the abstract, it is essential to know to which freedom one refers. The title of Cass Sunstein’s small and provocative new book, On Freedom, is therefore ambiguous. Does he mean unrestricted freedom that must be shaped or limited by government? Or does he mean a liberty bounded by rights that government is tasked to secure?

Sunstein is a progressive liberal. He genuinely cares about individual freedom. But like all progressives, he thinks “we” can do better than merely protecting the rights of individuals and letting the spontaneous order of human actions develop from there. The best and the brightest should intervene to improve outcomes.

Sunstein’s distinctive contribution concerns the nature of that intervention. Most progressives, like Hobbes, believe that freedom must be constrained by force to “make the world a better place.” Indeed, many seem to believe that anything that is not prohibited by the state should be mandated. Sunstein, instead, has long favored “nudging” over jailing and fining. On Freedom is an accessible introduction to how he approaches social problems—and a constructive challenge for libertarians.

The book disclaims any effort to “explore the differences between ‘negative freedom’ and ‘positive freedom’;…make a final judgment about Mill’s Harm Principle; or investigate the claim that property rights, conferred by the state, can be essential to freedom, or an abridgment of freedom.” In short, Sunstein attempts to discuss “freedom” abstracted from the essential concepts that are necessary to govern its exercise. That’s a big problem, though it does not render the book without value.

Sunstein effectively challenges us to consider how individuals can be made better off, by their own lights, not by coercing them in ways that violate their rights but by structuring their environment in ways that lead them to make the choices that will end up pleasing them the most. His approach builds on the insight that most decisions are already structured by the ways that options are presented to us. From grocery store layouts with end-cap specials to websites featuring seductive links and advertisements, we are constantly and inevitably being nudged in a thousand different directions. We’re free to resist these nudges, but we usually do not. So, Sunstein proposes, we might as well think about how best to nudge people to make good choices.

One revealing example he offers is the “food pyramid” designed by the federal Department of Agriculture (USDA). The idea was to nudge people to exercise their freedom to make healthier dietary choices, with the assistance of (mandatory) nutritional information on all packaged foodstuffs. Here is the pyramid as it appears in the book:

U.S. Department of Agriculture

According to Sunstein, the problem with this pyramid is that it “is organized by five stripes. (Or is it seven?) What do they connote? At the bottom, you can see a lot of different foods. But it’s a mess. Some of the foods appear to fall into several categories. Are some grains or vegetables?” For Sunstein, the obvious problem is that people “are unlikely to change their behavior if they do not know what to do.” Thus, the government “consulted with a wide range of experts, with backgrounds in both nutrition and communication, to explore what kind of icon might be better.” In 2011, they came up with this:

U.S. Department of Agriculture

The plate “doesn’t require anyone to do anything,” Sunstein says. Instead, “it makes clear that if half your plate is fruits and vegetables, you’ll be doing well, and if the rest of your plate is divided between rice and meat (or some other protein), you’re likely to be having a healthy meal.” What could go wrong?

But Sunstein starts his story in the middle, with the “new” food pyramid that was introduced in 2005. He neglects the original, promulgated by the USDA in 1992:

U.S. Department of Agriculture

That pyramid recommended seven servings of good old carbs such as bread, pasta, and potatoes for every three servings of protein. It lumped fats, oils, and salts together with sugars. (The latter, we now know, is made by your body from all the bread and pasta you’re eating.) Unsurprisingly, because it was issued by a government agency, the content was heavily influenced by food industry groups. Many nutritionists now blame it for fattening Americans like cattle, leading to chronic obesity, diabetes, and possibly even an explosion of dementia. Oops.

Of course, the new high-protein, low-carb recommendations might be as wrong as the old low-fat, high-carb diets. But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the new diet is right. (I’m now 30 pounds lighter because of it.) If so, generations of Americans—and the whole food industry—were “nudged” astray for decades to the detriment of their health.

What, Sunstein would respond, is the alternative? If choices are to be made, should they not be made with the best information currently at hand?

One obvious option is not to let a bigfoot like the Department of Agriculture do the nudging. Another would be to have more respect for spontaneous order, which in this case was the traditional American diet of meats, cheeses, and a side of veggies. Instead, we were urged toward a diet of partially hydrogenated fats as an alternative to supposedly unhealthy butter—”trans” fats that later were banned entirely.

“Let the market decide” is not necessarily a recipe for correct answers. But a decentralized order of freedom within the boundaries of our legally protected rights allows a diversity of choices from which better results can emerge “as if by an invisible hand.” Knowledge can evolve instead of being stipulated by a Leviathan. Labeling is fine; consumers cannot identify for themselves what’s put into processed food. But food recommendations—nudging—by enlightened experts empaneled by the government has been as likely to be wrong as to be right.

When I was a research fellow at the University of Chicago Law School, my office was next to Sunstein’s, who was then in his first year of teaching. We became good friends. During one of our many conversations, I recall him asking what I would say if one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century turned out to be Jürgen Habermas and not Friedrich Hayek.

Since then, Sunstein has become a bigger fan of Hayek. In this book, he quotes the Austrian economist as saying that “the awareness of our irremediable ignorance of most of what is known to somebody [who is the chooser] is the chief basis of the argument for liberty.” And yet, Sunstein asks, “Might people’s freedom of choice fail to promote their own well-being” from the perspective of their own desires? “Every member of the human species knows that the answer is sometimes yes.” So he proposes nudging people to make the choices that will better achieve their own goals.

I would like to see him seriously confront the problem of knowing how to nudge people to get what they want. He might then consider whether government experts, panels, and boards will always have the interests of the people, rather than those of powerful interest groups, in mind. On Freedom is a stimulating read that should nudge libertarians to stop and think harder about nudging. But it could use a little more Hayek and a little less Big Mother.

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Washington Has Destroyed Western Liberty: The Era of Tyranny Has Begun

Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

A fish rots from the head. In the Western world rot is accelerating. The rot in Washington is swiftly spreading to state and local governments and abroad to the Empire’s vassal governments.

Washington’s attack on journalism represented by the illegal arrest of Julian Assange has now spread to France. The US government’s policy of sanctions against sovereign countries that do not follow Washington’s orders has spread to the state of New York, where the governor has threatened sanctions against financial institutions that do business with the National Rifle Association.

In France the vassal president Macron has ordered three journalists — who revealed that Macron’s government knowingly and intentionally sold arms to Saudi Arabia and the UAE to be used for the slaughter of women and children in Yemen — to report for police questioning. The report proves that Macron’s government deliberately lied when it said it was unaware that French weapons were to be used for attack rather than defense use in violation of the Arms Trade Treaty of 2014. The journalists are under investigation by the French gestapo for “compromising national defense secrets.”

In other words, when the French government lies, it is a violation of national defense secrets to report it.

The entire Western world is adopting Washington’s approach to Assange and criminalizing the practice of journalism, thus protecting governments’ criminality. If you reveal a government crime, as Wikileaks did, you will be prosecuted by the criminal government for doing so. It is like permitting a criminal to prosecute the police and prosecutor who want him arrested.

With the First Amendment already under attack and targeted for elimination by Identity Politics for permitting “hate speech,” with the 10th Amendment destroyed by the war criminal Abe Lincoln, and with habeas corpus and due process destroyed by the George W. Bush and Obama regimes, only the Second Amendment still stands, and it is under attack from New York governor Andrew Cuomo.

Cuomo revealed that his threat of sanctions against financial organizations has the purpose of putting “the NRA out of business. We’re forcing NRA into financial jeopardy. We won’t stop until we shut them down.” The tyrant Cuomo knows that the NRA cannot operate without a bank account and insurance coverage.

To be clear, Washington’s success in weaponizing government against the people has spread throughout the empire and down into the state governments of the United States.

When we add to this the mass spying on citizens made possible by the digital revolution, we have as the result the death of liberty.

To any longer speak of the “Western democracies” is to mouth a falsehood. There are exactly zero Western governments that can be held accountable by the people. There can be no accountable government without a free press. There is no economic freedom or freedom of association when businesses are punished for having business relationships with organizations that are targets of government oppression.

The “war on terror” was a disguise for an attack on the US Constitution, an attack that has succeeded. The worst act of treason in history is the US government’s destruction of the US Constitution.

The era of tyranny has begun. Elections cannot stop it.

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

What’s Missing in Washington v. Azar

The latest national injunction has landed. In Washington v. Azar, the court cites a few Ninth Circuit precedents about national injunctions (pp. 5-6). The court recognizes that circuit precedent allows national injunctions “if such broad relief is necessary to give prevailing parties the relief to which they are entitled.” At this point, one would expect the court to say why such relief is needed. Or one would expect the court to return to that question later in the opinion. But the court never does. Oddly, there is no analysis of the scope of the injunction.

Other parts of the court’s preliminary-injunction discussion, too, could be criticized. The court disclaims any conclusion that the plaintiffs “are more likely going to prevail,” yet still issues a preliminary injunction. When analyzing irreparable injury, the court should be using as the baseline a scenario in which the plaintiff prevails on the merits. And the court’s balancing of the equities doesn’t really include any balancing.

But the real surprise is the hole where the national injunction analysis is supposed to be. That is in contrast to some of the recent national injunction decisions that have shown a stronger sense of craft (e.g., the E.D. Pa. opinion discussed here).

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“We Need To Take Action Now:” LA Homeless Deaths Jump 76%

Kaiser Health News reports that a record number of homeless people died across Los Angeles County last year, on bus benches, parks, hillsides, railroad track, and sidewalks.

Deaths skyrocketed 76% in the last five years, far outpacing the growth in the city’s homeless population.

As of 2018, the city’s total homeless population was about 53,000, an increase of 39% since 2014. The study said a majority of the people weren’t living in government shelters but rather on city streets.

Government officials and so-called experts have limited understanding of what the primary cause for the rise in deaths, but they said the opioid crisis could be a significant reason.

An increase in deaths outlines that Los Angeles County, a region of more than 10 million inhabitants, is in the midst of a homelessness crisis. 

Based on that criteria, the Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner-Coroner reported 3,612 deaths of homeless people from 2014 to 2018.

A closer examination of the deaths revealed where the homeless were dying.

About 33% died in hospitals and more than two-thirds died outside, in places like alleyways, sidewalks, parking lots, tent cities, parks, railroad tracks, and on freeway on-ramps.

Male deaths were much higher than female deaths, the study noted. Even though African Americans make up fewer than 10% of the county’s population, they accounted for 25% of the homeless deaths.

Substance abuse played a primary role in at least 25% of the deaths over the last five years, according to the coroner’s data.

The coroner’s exact cause of death “doesnt necessarily tell the whole story,” said Brian Elias, the county’s chief of coroner investigations, who was alarmed by the surge in homeless deaths.

Dr. Paul Gregerson, chief medical officer for JWCH Institute clinics in the Los Angeles area, provides medical assistance to the homeless, says that many of the disadvantage people died from heart disease, cancer, lung disease, diabetes, and infections.

There has also been a sharp increase in deaths of millennials who were homeless. For instance, the deaths associated with adults under 40 – more than doubled.

“We need to take action now,” said Rev. Andy Bales, CEO of the Union Rescue Mission shelter on the city’s infamous Skid Row. “Otherwise next year, it’s going to be more than 1,000.”

The report paints a grim picture of a public health crisis expanding like wildfire across Los Angeles.

As to why the report didn’t mention the root cause of homelessness on the West Coast is beyond our comprehension. One of the main drivers has been income inequality, derived from the financialization of the economy and excessive monetary policy over the last decade or more, has collapsed the middle class, leaving them on borderline poverty levels.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2UM5GOy Tyler Durden

What’s Missing in Washington v. Azar

The latest national injunction has landed. In Washington v. Azar, the court cites a few Ninth Circuit precedents about national injunctions (pp. 5-6). The court recognizes that circuit precedent allows national injunctions “if such broad relief is necessary to give prevailing parties the relief to which they are entitled.” At this point, one would expect the court to say why such relief is needed. Or one would expect the court to return to that question later in the opinion. But the court never does. Oddly, there is no analysis of the scope of the injunction.

Other parts of the court’s preliminary-injunction discussion, too, could be criticized. The court disclaims any conclusion that the plaintiffs “are more likely going to prevail,” yet still issues a preliminary injunction. When analyzing irreparable injury, the court should be using as the baseline a scenario in which the plaintiff prevails on the merits. And the court’s balancing of the equities doesn’t really include any balancing.

But the real surprise is the hole where the national injunction analysis is supposed to be. That is in contrast to some of the recent national injunction decisions that have shown a stronger sense of craft (e.g., the E.D. Pa. opinion discussed here).

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US-Led Bombing Campaign in Syria Left Raqqa “Most Destroyed City in Modern Times”: Study

Authored by Julia Conley via Common Dreams

An “unprecedented” new study released on Thursday revealed that the U.S.-led bombing campaign on Raqqa, Syria in 2017 — which one military commander at the time claimed was the “most precise air campaign in history” — killed an estimated 1,600 innocent civilians while leveling the city on a scale unparalleled in recent decades.

The research collated almost two years of investigations into the assault on Raqqa, the groups said in a statement, and “gives a brutally vivid account” of the enormous number of civilian lives lost as “a direct result” of thousands of coalition air strikes and tens of thousands of US artillery strikes in Raqqa from June to October 2017.

Raqqa, Syria. Image source: Amnesty International

The report—”Rhetoric vs. Reality: How the ‘Most Precise Air Campaign in History’ Left Raqqa the Most Destroyed City in Modern Times“—is detailed on the interactive website created by investigative news organization Airwars and the human rights group Amnesty International-USA which carried out what they call the “most comprehensive investigation into civilian deaths in a modern conflict.”

The findings confirm that the U.S.-led coalition has admitted to just a fraction of the civilian carnage it has caused in Syria, even as it has boasted of the care it’s taken in avoiding such casualties and the precision of the Raqqa offensive.

According to the report:

US, UK and French forces also launched thousands of air strikes into civilian neighborhoods, scores of which resulted in mass civilian casualties.

In one tragic incident, a Coalition air strike destroyed an entire five-story residential building near Maari school in the central Harat al-Badu neighborhood in the early evening of 25 September 2017. Four families were sheltering in the basement at the time. Almost all of them – at least 32 civilians, including 20 children – were killed. A week later, a further 27 civilians – including many relatives of those killed in the earlier strike – were also killed when an air strike destroyed a nearby building.

“I saw my son die, burnt in the rubble in front of me,” Ayet Mohammed Jasem, one of the few survivors of the later attack, told the investigators. “I’ve lost everyone who was dear to me. My four children, my husband, my mother, my sister, my whole family. Wasn’t the goal to free the civilians? They were supposed to save us, to save our children.”

At the time of 2017 assault on Raqqa it was U.S. Lieutenant General Stephen J. Townswend, commander of the coalition, who said, “I challenge anyone to find a more precise air campaign in the history of warfare…The Coalition’s goal is always for zero human casualties.”

But the researchers argue the evidence belies those claims and, as part of the report, both groups demanded accountability for what was done to the city and its people.

“The coalition needs to fully investigate what went wrong at Raqqa and learn from those lessons, to prevent inflicting such tremendous suffering on civilians caught in future military operations,” said Chris Woods, director of Airwars, in a statement.

Donatella Rovera, a crisis investigator for Amnesty, shared some of what she found in Raqqa in a video the group released along with the report.

“When I first came to Raqqa after the war, I knew that relentless American, British, and French bombardment killed civilians and destroyed much of the city,” Rovera said.

“What I came to discover was that little or no protection was afforded to the thousands of civilians who were trapped in the city,” she added. “Raqqa is the most destroyed city in modern times in terms of percentage. There is no part of Raqqa which has been left untouched.”

During their investigation, the groups also listened to the stories of survivors like nine year old Fatima Hussein Ahmad who lost her mother, Aziza, and three siblings in artillery strikes on their neighborhood, as well sustaining injuries that required the amputation of her right leg. “I was thrown over there by the explosion,” she told Amnesty during an interview from a burnt out home near where the attack took place. Almost two years later, she still cannot walk and uses a wheelchair donated by an NGO to get around. She told the researchers her only wish is to go back to school.

The interactive website contains a whole section of stories from the ground, including one of 32 people, 20 children among them, who were killed in an air strike near a school and another where civilians were targeted as they crossed a river with no way to escape.

The U.S. has claimed to have unleashed 30,000 rounds of artillery on the city during the offensive, while the U.K. and France helped to carry out thousands of air strikes. The U.S. strikes represent the equivalent of one strike every six minutes for four months.

“Many of the air bombardments were inaccurate and tens of thousands of artillery strikes were indiscriminate, so it is no surprise they killed and injured many hundreds of civilians,” said Rovera.

“Coalition forces razed Raqqa, but they cannot erase the truth,” she added. “Amnesty International and Airwars call upon the Coalition forces to end their denial about the shocking scale of civilian deaths and destruction caused by their offensive.” 

Civilians — who for four years had been essentially held captive in Raqqa by ISIS as the armed group set up checkpoints restricting movement, planted land mines in exit routes, and used residents as human shields — suffered fresh brutality from the U.S. and its allies as they claimed to be “liberating” the city.

The two groups interviewed about 400 survivors and surveyed 200 attack sites throughout the city, examining the ruins of residential buildings and neighborhoods.

Analyzing social media posts, satellite images, and other material, Amnesty and Airwars have identified the shellings that destroyed about 11,000 buildings and the names of more than 1,000 victims.

But even with access to the groups’ meticulous research, which they have shared with the coalition, military leaders have admitted to only 159 civilian deaths during the Raqqa campaign — 10 percent of the number determined by Airwars and Amnesty —despite the fact that the coalition does not carry out its own investigations.

The report comes ahead of an expected report from the Trump administration regarding civilian casualties that resulted from the coalition’s strikes.

“We hope to finally see an honest assessment of the devastating impact that U.S. lethal strikes have had on the civilians in Raqqa,” said Daphne Eviatar, director of Amnesty’s Security with Human Rights program. “The public deserves to know how many civilian casualties our government is responsible for, and the survivors deserve acknowledgement, reparations, where appropriate, and meaningful assistance to rebuild their lives.”

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2J0q0t6 Tyler Durden

Orwell Goes Retail: Stores Now Track Where You Shop… And Sleep

In news that shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, retailers are now tracking not only where are you shop, but also where you sleep, according to a new Bloomberg article.

For instance, Hill Country Galleria in Bee Cave, Texas used information and location data from customers’ phones to determine that a lot of shoppers own pets. Using this data, it went on to install water fountains, babysitting stations and photo op stations for customers and their pets. As a result, the time customers spent in the mall grew by 40%.

One shopping Center in Chicago found it was drawing customers from Asian neighborhoods, so it filled one of its vacancies with a high-end Asian specialty grocery. And even Dunkin’ Donuts is getting in on the trend. It employed phone data to make sure that the 278 new stores it was opening wouldn’t steal customers from existing locations.

These few clues that retail owners are getting from customers’ phones are one of the last chances brick-and-mortar shops have at trying to salvage their industry. They’re buying this mobile phone data hand over fist in order to help determine where people shop, eat and see movies. They’re also looking to see where customers go before and after going to the mall. It helps them look at personal details and paint a picture of the demographic that shops with them. It also helps them advertise.

But aside from transforming the industry, this is raising privacy concerns. The idea of being tracked – surprise – makes some people uneasy (how that is not “all” is beyond comprehension). All the companies interviewed for the article said that they don’t use any information that can identify individuals, but due to lax regulation, they’re really on the honor system to keep their word. So, we’re absolutely positive they’re doing the right thing…

This new type of analysis is called location analytics and the worldwide industry is expected to grow to $15 billion by 2023 from $8.35 billion in 2017. More than half of the retailers surveyed last year said that they use these firms to collect the data.

lan McKeon, chief executive officer of Alexander Babbage, which packages and sells location data said: “Historically, we’ve only been able to look at theoretical behaviors of people. Now we can look at where we’re actually drawing from, and we discovered that the trade areas look nothing like we used to think they did.”

Smartphone apps gather data throughout the day, dropping pins on locations and collecting timestamps and device IDs. Aggregators buy this data and sell it to analytics companies that clean it up for retail to use. Packages for retailers run as low as $15,000. Aggregator UberMedia says it looks at 800 million active devices per month and has 14 trillion total location observations deriving from four and a half years of historical data. To help get details including the age, income and education of people, firms connect the phone’s location at night – i.e. when you’re home and in bed – with US census data.

“We don’t have any information about who owns the device, so the way that we contextualize the information is we look at where the phone sleeps at night,” McKeon continued.

And it isn’t just your location that is being tracked. Psychographic data, including a person‘s behavior and spending habits – as well as their social media chatter – is also being tracked.

Spatial.ai is a startup that studies online conversations and collects location data for 72 categories, helping businesses determine whether specific personality types correlate with sales. For instance, for “hipsters” these products often include antiques, vinyl records and coffee.

Shopping landlord Brixmor Property Group Inc. worked with the start up to identify a lot of talk about “girls night out” in the neighborhood of one of its shopping centers in Newtown, Pennsylvania. As a result, Brixmor opened a “female friendly organic concept” restaurant in the area. Brixmor CEO Jim Taylor said: “You get a much better sense of the commuting patterns of the community that utilizes your center, and it’s oftentimes quite revelatory.”

But privacy concerns remain. As the market is more competitive, providers have started to cut corners. Laura Schewel, CEO of StreetLight Data Inc. said her friend lost a potential client to a competitor because it refused to sell individual raw data, versus aggregated data, on groups of people.

Taylor concluded: “We don’t want to use technology in a way that erodes trust. As a shopping-center owner, you want to bring in vibrant uses that generate lots of sales, lots of traffic and allow you to grow rents over time.”

And yet one wonders just how much “trust” shoppers would have if the stores were honest and forthcoming, and disclosed all the different ways they strip their clients of their last shred of privacy.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2ZGXG4T Tyler Durden

The Great Financial Crisis Ten Years On: China’s Past Role & Current Risks

In this week’s episode of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with China expert Anne Stevenson-Yang about the imminent dangers facing global financial markets in the event of a break in the renminbi-dollar peg.

In the years leading up to the Great Financial Crisis, it was generally understood that the Chinese were artificially depressing the value of the RMB vis-à-vis the USD, in order maintain an abnormally large current account surplus that would be recycled into western financial markets in the form of government securities, equities, real estate, etc. By recycling so much of the proceeds from trade back into foreign markets, the CCP managed to maintain a lower exchange rate than it otherwise would be, were it to convert those dollars back into renminbi.

In other words, China was suppressing the value of its currency. Bob Wittbrot calls this recycling process the “Boomerang Greenback.” This dynamic worked extraordinary well until the world went into recession around the time of the great financial crisis, which marked a peak in China’s current account. The CCP also met the crisis by expanding bank lending, easing credit, and fueling investment even further. In addition, by maintaining interest rates and the cost of capital well-below the rate of inflation during China’s multi-decade boom, the CCP has managed to keep households’ share of the economy at low enough levels to induce an overall high-savings rate for the country (by having less disposable income than would otherwise be expected for an economy this size, the average Chinese citizen spends less on consumption than he or she otherwise would, absent financial repression). This has been an additional shot in the arm for investment.

At some point post-2008 (judging from their foreign exchange reserves, this appears to have started somewhere around the start of 2014) China went from artificially suppressing the value of its currency to artificially supporting it. Unlike a country like Thailand, however, whose currency peg famously broke under the speculative attacks of foreign investors during the 1997-98’ Asian Financial Crisis, the Chinese have managed to avoid such a scenario on account of maintaining a closed capital account (exercising tight capital controls). Coupling that with a current account surplus, the CCP has been able to obtain the hard currency it has needed in the last 5 years or so in order to buy the various inputs required to run their economy and keep the cycle going.

The problem is that China generated a tremendous amount of money and credit since the GFC, in particular, and therefore risks a major devaluation in the value of the RMB should the country no longer be able to get the foreign exchange reserves it needs through a sustainable current account surplus. They are, at the moment, running a negative current account, a negative fiscal balance (of roughly 9% of GDP), their foreign exchange reserves are declining for the first time ever, while the country’s external debt has doubled in the last five years, increasing by an average of $70 billion per quarter since the beginning of 2017. More than half of this debt is short-term, which means it needs to be constantly rolled over. Up until the Fed paused it’s tightening cycle, the rising interest rates coupled with new tariffs on Chinese goods were creating a pincer-like effect on China’s economy and on its ability to maintain its peg, forcing it to fund more of its dollar needs through borrowing at ever higher interest rates.

China cannot maintain a credible peg between the RMB and the USD when its money supply is growing, by some calculations at more than 10x that of the United States over the last 10 years. This is a fundamental problem of accounting. If China were completely self-sufficient – if it had access to sufficient energy, food, base metals, etc. within its own borders – then its inability to obtain dollars would not be an issue. The problem is that it is desperately short these commodities as inputs for its manufacturing and domestic consumption. The recent drop in the price of oil helped them out a bit, but it has been rising again, just as China’s oil imports are surging. The country recently surpassed the United States as the world’s largest crude importer. For a nation with dwindling foreign exchange reserves, this is not a good trend. And, it isn’t even clear what the real FOREX numbers are in China. Official foreign exchange reserve put that number at $3.2 Trillion, but US treasury tick data shows that China owns a little bit less than $1.2 trillion in US Treasuries, which according to some people, suggests that their overall FOREX position is closer to $2 Trillion.

Meanwhile, the U.S. trade deficit fell to $49.4 billion in February, the lowest level since June 2018, and well below what economists had expected. A 20.2% drop in imports from China was the main driver behind the nearly 3.4% improvement in the trade deficit in February, data from the Commerce Department showed. The trade deficit has narrowed for two straight months now.

There seems to be a growing sense of awareness among many in China that all is not well with the country’s capital account. We have seen numbers suggesting that illicit capital has been flowing out of China (whether we are talking about precious stones, Bitcoins, or other means available to the wealthier citizens of China) in noticeably higher amounts since the mini-devaluation in August 2015. This is consistent with what we often see in countries ahead of a devaluation, default, or some other financial disturbance. Do China’s wealthy know something we don’t?

Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2GQR9gV Tyler Durden