Tag: finance

Authored by George Soros via Project Syndicate,

Europe is sleepwalking into oblivion, and the people of Europe need to wake up before it is too late. If they don’t, the European Union will go the way of the Soviet Union in 1991. Neither our leaders nor ordinary citizens seem to understand that we are experiencing a revolutionary moment, that the range of possibilities is very broad, and that the eventual outcome is thus highly uncertain.

Most of us assume that the future will more or less resemble the present, but this is not necessarily so. In a long and eventful life, I have witnessed many periods of what I call radical disequilibrium. We are living in such a period today.

The next inflection point will be the elections for the European Parliament in May 2019. Unfortunately, anti-European forces will enjoy a competitive advantage in the balloting. There are several reasons for this, including the outdated party system that prevails in most European countries, the practical impossibility of treaty change, and the lack of legal tools for disciplining member states that violate the principles on which the European Union was founded. The EU can impose the acquis communautaire (the body of European Union law) on applicant countries, but lacks sufficient capacity to enforce member states’ compliance.

The antiquated party system hampers those who want to preserve the values on which the EU was founded, but helps those who want to replace those values with something radically different. This is true in individual countries and even more so in trans-European alliances.

The party system of individual states reflects the divisions that mattered in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as the conflict between capital and labor. But the cleavage that matters most today is between pro- and anti-European forces.

The EU’s dominant country is Germany, and the dominant political alliance in Germany – between the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Bavaria-based Christian Social Union (CSU) – has become unsustainable. The alliance worked as long as there was no significant party in Bavaria to the right of the CSU. That changed with the rise of the extremist Alternative für Deutschland(AfD). In last September’s länder elections, the CSU’s result was its worst in over six decades, and the AfD entered the Bavarian Parliament for the first time.

The AfD’s rise removed the raison d’être of the CDU-CSU alliance. But that alliance cannot be broken up without triggering new elections that neither Germany nor Europe can afford. As it is, the current ruling coalition cannot be as robustly pro-European as it would be without the AfD threatening its right flank.

The situation is far from hopeless. The German Greens have emerged as the only consistently pro- European party in the country, and they continue rising in opinion polls, whereas the AfD seems to have reached its highpoint (except in the former East Germany). But now CDU/CSU voters are represented by a party whose commitment to European values is ambivalent.

In the United Kingdom, too, an antiquated party structure prevents the popular will from finding proper expression. Both Labour and the Conservatives are internally divided, but their leaders, Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May, respectively, are so determined to deliver Brexit that they have agreed to cooperate to attain it. The situation is so complicated that most Britons just want to get it over with, although it will be the defining event for the country for decades to come.

But the collusion between Corbyn and May has aroused opposition in both parties, which in the case of Labour is bordering on rebellion. The day after Corbyn and May met, May announced a program to aid impoverished pro-Brexit Labour constituencies in the north of England. Corbyn is now accused of betraying the pledge he made at Labour’s September 2018 party conference to back a second Brexit referendum if holding an election is not possible.

The public is also becoming aware of the dire consequences of Brexit. The chances that May’s deal will be rejected on February 14 are growing by the day. That could set in motion a groundswell of support for a referendum or, even better, for revoking Britain’s Article 50 notification.

Italy finds itself in a similar predicament. The EU made a fatal mistake in 2017 by strictly enforcing the Dublin Agreement, which unfairly burdens countries like Italy where migrants first enter the EU. This drove Italy’s predominantly pro-European and pro-immigration electorate into the arms of the anti-European League party and Five Star Movement in 2018. The previously dominant Democratic Party is in disarray. As a result, the significant portion of the electorate that remains pro-European has no party to vote for. There is, however, an attempt underway to organize a united pro-European list. A similar reordering of party systems is happening in France, Poland, Sweden, and probably elsewhere.

When it comes to trans-European alliances, the situation is even worse. National parties at least have some roots in the past, but the trans-European alliances are entirely dictated by party leaders’ self-interest. The European People’s Party (EPP) is the worst offender. The EPP is almost entirely devoid of principles, as demonstrated by its willingness to permit the continued membership of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz in order to preserve its majority and control the allocation of top jobs in the EU. Anti-European forces may look good in comparison: at least they have some principles, even if they are odious.

It is difficult to see how the pro-European parties can emerge victorious from the election in May unless they put Europe’s interests ahead of their own. One can still make a case for preserving the EU in order radically to reinvent it. But that would require a change of heart in the EU. The current leadership is reminiscent of the politburo when the Soviet Union collapsed – continuing to issue ukazes as if they were still relevant.

The first step to defending Europe from its enemies, both internal and external, is to recognize the magnitude of the threat they present.

The second is to awaken the sleeping pro-European majority and mobilize it to defend the values on which the EU was founded.

Otherwise, the dream of a united Europe could become the nightmare of the twenty-first century.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2N1Vi2V Tyler Durden

By all accounts, Brexit has been an unmitigated disaster for the UK, largely because the Tories can’t seem to surmount internal squabbling over the finer points (i.e. the dreaded Irish backstop) of the deal negotiated by Prime Minister Theresa May.

But while the functioning of Britain’s civil service has more or less ground to a halt as bureaucrats focus on “Operation Yellowhammer” – the contingency planning for how the UK will keep its sweeping bureaucracy functioning if the UK leaves the EU next month without a deal – Defense Secretary Gavin Williamson decided to announce during a Monday speech at the Royal United Services Institute that, in addition to launching a multi-billion-pound tour of the UK’s naval might intended to strike fear into the hearts of the Chinese leadership in Beijing, the Royal Navy will also begin investing in its plans to convert ferries into warships.

Defense Secretary Gavin Williamson

In accordance with its plans, the UK will soon acquire two ferries or cargo vessels and begin the process of converting them to warships. The plan is part of a program to build out more nimble multi-purpose military seacraft (that, we imagine, could also be used to ferry emergency supplies over from the Continent if Brexit truly goes awry). The ships will be among the first assets purchased from the Royal Navy’s multi-million-pound “transformation fund”.

Williamson also revealed that his department is planning on buying off-the-shelf drones that build new “swarm fleets” that would be capable of interacting with the UK’s f-35 stealth fighters.

Here’s more on the costs of the program courtesy of the Times of London:

Two new vessels will be bought or procured under lease-hire to form the new strike-ship concept, which is set to cost tens of millions of pounds and is due to enter service within the next few years. The MoD will scout for ferries and container ships to find a pair of suitable vessels to convert.

Meanwhile, the drones are set to cost £7 million and will be ready by the end of 2019.

One of the ships will be based in the Indo-Pacific, and the other in the Mediterranean…

In a wide-ranging speech at the Royal United Services Institute in Westminster, Mr Williamson said of the new ships: “These globally deployable, multirole vessels would be able to conduct a wide range of operations, from crisis support to war fighting.”

“They would support our future commando force, our world-renowned Royal Marines – they will be forward deployed at exceptionally high readiness and able to respond at a moment’s notice, and bringing the fight from the sea to land.”

He said the two ships should be based to the east of Suez in the Indo-Pacific and one to the west of Suez in the Mediterranean, Atlantic and Baltic.

…Because nothing will signal to China and Russia that the UK means business like a couple of ferries outfitted with cannons as the UK works to expand its international presence in the Pacific and elsewhere.

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

Authored by Alastair Crooke via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

An establishment pillar of the European ‘order’ – the Frankfurter Allgemeiner newspaper – explicitly touches the ‘live rail’, which is to say, it ran an op-ed last month titled ‘A Nazi EU?’, speculating on whether or not the present EU, dominated by Germany, should be understood as a lineal extension of German National Socialism.

This has not before been an issue at all touched upon in mainstream German discourse. That it appears at all signals something important: a recognition that the dissidence being experienced by the EU has its roots in something other than just populist grievance tantrums. It is the resurfacing of an ancient struggle for the ‘soul’ of the international political order.

The author, Jasper von Altenbockum, quotes the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) leader, Alexander Gauland, at its party conference, saying that the:

“Corrupt, inflated, undemocratic and latent totalitarian apparatus” of the EU should have no future. Gauland traced a popular line of reasoning: Because democratic legitimacy deficits can be observed in EU supranational institutions, [one must conclude that the EU] must be a coercive regime. The radical opponents of progressive integration [however] go one step further: They compare the EU … to the European ideology under National Socialism …

“Gauland also [advanced] a recently popular argument, which [allows] Brexit to gain a historical justification: [Speaking about European Unification], Gauland in Riesa said:

“This goal was pursued by the French under Napoleon and, unfortunately, in a way, by the National Socialists. And, as everybody knows, England opposed them.

“What [that means, is that Gauland takes us beyond the mere claim of the EU being] a ” latent totalitarian apparatus”. [Rather, it suggests that] the EU and German European politics are in continuity with the Nazi propaganda of the European Union. There can hardly be a worse reproach. It provides the AfD with the welcome side effect of being able to present itself as immune to Nazi ideology”.

Well, as might be expected, von Altenbockum sees little to connect the European project with earlier Nazi racial ideology, but nonetheless he does concede that it is not only Gauland and the AfD (“fast becoming the German Brexit party”) who see these national socialist connections, however “the continuity of the European project from the National Socialist era is also considered by historians”, especially since Germany has again been accused of hegemonic strivings in Europe. As early as 2002, Hitler biographer Thomas Sandkühler called for “not so much to emphasize the breaches in European politics, where there should be more talk of continuities”.

What did this mean? Today, it is difficult to move beyond the racial ideology aspect. But, despite the appearance of the word ‘national’ in the name of the German National Socialist party, Hitler was no great advocate of nationalism. He was a harsh critic not only of the Protestant Westphalian triumph of 1648, but also of the institution of the national state in particular, which he saw as vastly inferior to the Germans’ historic imperial legacy. In place of the order of national states he set out to establish a Third Reich that expressly drew its inspiration from the ‘First Reich’—that is, from the German Holy Roman Empire with its universal aspirations and thousand-year reign. Hitler’s Germany was thus intended as an imperial state in every sense.

In short, in the centuries’ old politics of Europe, Western nations have been characterized by a struggle between two antithetical visions of world order: an order of free and independent nations each pursuing the political good in accordance with its own traditions and understanding, and an order of peoples united under a single regime of law, promulgated and maintained by a single supra-national authority.

In other words, Germany was on the side of the ancient tradition extending from Babylon to Imperial Rome, who saw it as their task, in the words of the Babylonian king Hamurabi, to “bring the four quarters of the world to obedience.” That obedience, after all, was what ensured salvation from war, disease, and starvation.

Von Altenbockum’s conclusion that the origins of the ideas underlying European integration are not so much those of Napoleon or Hitler, but derive from the Thirty Year’s War and Westphalia, which precisely precipitated the fall of that old (Roman) notion of a Christian Universal Empire of peace and prosperity, is more compelling. To the victors, victory – and the victors set the narrative, one which remains as today’s European political paradigm.

The ‘Liberal’ construction of the EU is premised on that famous liberal manifesto: John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government, published in 1689 that asserted that there is ultimately only one principle at the base of legitimate political order: namely, individual freedom.

Locke’s was very much a product of the Protestant construction. It opens with the assertion that all human individuals are born “perfectly free” and “perfectly equal,” and goes on to describe them as pursuing life, liberty, and property in a world of transactions based on consent.

From this premise, Locke built his model of political life and theory of government: And from Locke’s framework has descended to us today’s economic model – in Adam Smith’s transposition of John Locke’s and John Hume’s Protestant vision of individualism and property into an economic structuring.

But being Protestant, this vision also took from the Old Testament (rather than the New), sovereign ‘authority’ (like Yahweh) was jealous and intolerant and unitary sovereign. One authority, one law, one ‘gun’ was the organisational principal of the nation-state (rather than the overlaid call of an ‘empire’ of confused sovereignties and spiritual allegiances that had preceded it).

At some point, liberal political, economic theory and international law crushed the life out of other, competing accounts, becoming the virtually unquestioned framework for what an educated person needs to know about the political world.

So what? What is the point? Well, firstly, it is that the AfD leader, Alexander Gauland, is saying that the EU is neither liberal, nor free, nor an ‘order’ (or Empire), but is coercive in its (secularised, Judeo-Christian) desire to achieve human or social unity through reducing ‘all’ to a single model (the liberal, regulated, EU ‘order’).

The point here is not just that such an establishment German publication should be touching such a ‘hot button’ issue (the possible influence of German national-socialism as the scaffold, on which EU politics is structured); but more substantively, through the tacit admission that that the AfD leader has a point (i.e. he is advancing the ‘other’ grand vision for Europe’s political order). 

The author duly concedes this: “there are many politicians in the AfD who would like to return to traditional equilibrium thinking” (a concert of independent sovereign powers). But then – echoing the Establishment line – the author says simply that it is impossible: Too much has been invested in the EU project to permit it to be yielded-up.

The ‘retrospective’ after the Second World War, von Altenbockum says, led to the [EU project] “being given an immovable, institutional anchorage, which inevitably involves a renunciation of sovereignty”.

But it is here that Brexit takes meaning for Gauland: Not simply as British resentment at Germany’s domination of Europe, but because England consistently was ‘on the other side’, opposing these visions of a universalism imposed through a reduction to a single model of empire – “as everyone knows, England opposed them”, Gauland states.

Locke, it is true, sought to strengthen the nation-state paradigm and not undermine it. Nevertheless, in fashioning his theory he downplayed or entirely omitted essential aspects to human society. In the Second Treatise, Locke abstracts away the intellectual, spiritual or cultural inheritance that one receives through descent. The result is the depreciation of even the most basic bonds that had been thought to hold society together.

Similarly, the government that is brought into being by the social contract of the Second Treatise is eerily without borders or boundaries. Institutions such as the national state, community, family, and the church appear to have no reason for existing at all. Without intending it, the framework provided by Locke’s Treatise makes the Protestant ‘order’ exceedingly difficult to explain, much less justify. He may have intended otherwise, but what he did was to give birth to a ‘liberal’ construction of politics which underpins the opposite of the nation-state.

What does this mean? Brexit, les gillets jaunes, la Lega, the Afd, the Visegrad group – the future of Europe is in serious contention, despite the fact that University-educated political and intellectual elites in America and Europe are now mostly sequestered within the liberal frame.

Yet an article such as this piece from the Frankfurter Allgemeiner newspaper – and its discussion of the purported link between European integration and national socialism – Wolfgang Münchau remarks, represents “an explosive connection” hitherto confined only to fringe discussion in Germany. It underlines that the Euro-élite are beginning to recognize the potential combustibility of this conflict. They can see that real issues – ancient struggles about the very nature of politics, society, culture and how human potential is to be developed – are at issue. 

And to understand this gives the framework to understand European foreign policy: How, even after the disaster of Libya, European leaders can, for example, ignore the long history of interventions in Venezuela, to support a new intervention. Or, wish to withhold reconstruction finance and assistance from Syria. It recalls the Babylonian king’s desire to “bring the four quarters of the world to obedience”. That obedience, after all, being in their own best interest.

Is it going too far for Gauland to have described the EU as ‘latent totalitarian’? Well, Yanis Varoufakis gives us the flavour of it: from his first visit to Brussels and Berlin as Greece’s freshly elected finance minister:

“When Schäuble welcomed me with his “it is my mandate against yours” doctrine, he was honouring a long EU tradition of neglecting democratic mandates in the name of respecting them. Like all dangerous hypotheses, it is founded on an obvious truth: the voters of one country cannot give their representative a mandate to impose upon other governments conditions that the latter have no mandate, from their own electorate, to accept. But, while this is a truism, its incessant repetition by Brussels functionaries and political powerbrokers, such as Angela Merkel and Schäuble himself, is intended to convert it surreptitiously into a very different notion: no voters in any country can empower their government to oppose Brussels.”

Varoufakis adds, they never listen:

“My team and I worked hard to put forward proposals based on serious econometric work and sound economic analysis. Once these had been tested on some of the highest authorities in their fields, from Wall Street and the City to top-notch academics, I would take them to Greece’s creditors in Brussels, Berlin and Frankfurt. Then I would sit back and observe a symphony of blank stares. It was as if I had not spoken: As if there was no document in front of them. It would be evident from their body language that they denied the very existence of the pieces of paper I had placed before them. Their responses, when they came, would be perfectly independent of anything I had said. I might as well have been singing the Swedish national anthem. It would have made no difference.”

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2Su1lDq Tyler Durden

Food prices in Turkey have been soaring since the lira’s sharp, violent depreciation last summer. The rise in prices is not only a result of the currency’s depreciation which made the Turkish lira one of the worst performing currencies in the world, but is also a result of price gouging that has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, feeding on itself, over the last 6 months.

According to Bloomberg, the price of eggplants, cucumbers and tomatoes in Turkey has jumped 81%, 53% and 39% monthly, respectively. Overall, food inflation in Turkey is at 31% annualized. 

These soaring prices haven’t gone unnoticed by the Erdogan regime, and instead of focusing on the underlying economic deterioration, the Turkish government has instead started targeting vendors who raise prices, labeling price gougers “traitors” and “terrorists”. 

But this rhetoric isn’t working, so Erdogan is backing up threats with fines: and so, the Turkish government has started cracking down and issuing fines after raiding wholesale food markets in five provinces on February 6, uncovering exorbitant price increases of up to 800%.

To avoid price manipulation, the administration is seeking to eliminate (not literally, yet) middlemen by purchasing vegetables directly from farmers and selling them at lower prices in major cities. Government run vendor tents are up and running at numerous locations as of Monday and sales will soon be expanded to include cleaning products.

Meanwhile, in addition to the depreciation of the Lira, flash floods in Antalya have also contributed to food shortages, pushing prices even higher. Despite this, Treasury and Finance Minister Berat Albayrak dismissed the idea that weather is in any way to blame.

“The inflation reduction campaign is perceived to distort relative prices and to be unsustainable,” a recent Bank of America report read.

One potential wild card: municipal elections in Turkey are just two months away and the fight against inflation will be the hallmark issue, as surging food costs have disproportionately hit poorer sections of the 82 million people that live in Turkey – many of whom have traditionally been supporters of the President’s party. In taking the fight to local areas and warehouses, President Erdogan is trying to make a statement that he is going to fight inflation with the same vigor that the country has used to defend itself militarily in the past. In fact, this being Erdogan, it is probably not a surprise that the Turkish president compared food producers and retailers to terrorists.

Erdogan said Sunday: “The government will finish off those terrorizing wholesale food markets in no time, the way it finished off those terrorists in caves.”

“Our inspections will continue across Turkey at full steam to give no respite to opportunists,” Trade Minister Ruhsar Pekcan said.

Of course, since none of the government’s actions will have any tangible impact, it is only a matter of time before social discontent hits a plateau, and what until recently has been the most stable middle-eastern regime suddenly finds itself scrambling to preserve control. In fact just yesterday, the first hints of instability emerged, when during Erdogan’s first election rally, voters interrupted the Turkish president demanding job contracts. His reply: “Dont expect anything from us. We gave everything. Don’t provocate. I’m not an ordinary leader.” We soon may find out just how extraordinary Turkey’s freshly-heckled leader truly is.

Voters interrupt #Erdogan‘s first local election rally, demanding job contracts. His reply: ‘Dont expect anything from us. We gave everything. Don’t provocate. I’m not an ordinary leader.’

Is the man of the people losing touch? #Turkey pic.twitter.com/fs5TjTsOm8

— Melvyn Ingleby (@MelvynIngleby) February 10, 2019

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

Authored by Roger Harris via Counterpunch.org,

Donald Trump imagines Juan Guaidó is the rightful president of Venezuela. Mr. Guaidó, a man of impeccable illegitimacy, was exposed by Cohen and Blumenthal as “a product of a decade-long project overseen by Washington’s elite regime change trainers.”

Argentinian sociologist Marco Teruggi described Guaidó in the same article as “a character that has been created for this circumstance” of regime change.

Here, his constitutional credentials to be interim president of Venezuela are deconstructed.

Educated at George Washington University in DC, Guaidó was virtually unknown in his native Venezuela before being thrust on to the world stage in a rapidly unfolding series of events. In a poll conducted a little more than a week before Guaidó appointed himself president of the country, 81% of Venezuelans had never even heard of the 35-year-old.

To make a short story shorter, US Vice President Pence phoned Guaidó on the evening of January 22rd and presumably asked him how’d he like to be made president of Venezuela. The next day, Guaidó announced that he considered himself president of Venezuela, followed within minutes by US President Trump confirming the self-appointment.

A few weeks before on January 5, Guaidó had been installed as president of Venezuela’s National Assembly, their unicameral legislature. He had been elected to the assembly from a coastal district with 26% of the vote. It was his party’s turn for the presidency of the body, and he was hand-picked for the position. Guaidó, even within his own party, was not in the top leadership.

Guaidó’s party, Popular Will, is a far-right marginal group whose most enthusiastic boosters are John Bolton, Elliott Abrams, and Mike Pompeo. Popular Will had adopted a strategy of regime change by extra-parliamentary means rather than engage in the democratic electoral process and had not participated in recent Venezuelan elections.

Although anointed by Trump and company, Guaidó’s Popular Will Party is not representative of the “Venezuelan opposition,” which is a fractious bunch whose hatred of Maduro is only matched by their abhorrence of each other. Leading opposition candidate Henri Falcón, who ran against Maduro in 2018 on a neoliberal austerity platform, had been vehemently opposed by Popular Will who demanded that he join their US-backed boycott of the election.

The Venezuelan news outlet, Ultimas Noticias, reported that prominent opposition politician Henrique Capriles, who had run against Maduro in 2013, “affirmed during an interview that the majority of opposition parties did not agree with the self-swearing in of Juan Guaidó as interim president of the country.”  Claudio Fermin, president of the party Solutions for Venezuela, wrote “we believe in the vote, in dialogue, we believe in coming to an understanding, we believe Venezuelans need to part ways with the extremist sectors that only offer hatred, revenge, lynching.” Key opposition governor of the State of Táchira, Laidy Gómez, has rejected Guaidó’s support of intervention by the US, warning that it “would generate death of Venezuelans.”

The Guaidó/Trump cabal does not reflect the democratic consensus in Venezuela, where polls consistently show super majorities oppose outside intervention. Popular opinion in Venezuela supports negotiations between the government and the opposition as proposed by Mexico, Uruguay, and the Vatican. The Maduro administration has embraced the negotiations as a peaceful solution to the crisis facing Venezuela.

The US government rejects a negotiated solution, in the words of Vice President Pence: “This is no time for dialogue; this is time for action.” This intransigent position is faithfully echoed by Guaidó. So while most Venezuelans want peace, the self-appointed president, backed by the full force of US military power, wrote in a New York Times op-ed that it was possible to “end the Maduro regime with a minimum of bloodshed.”

The Guaidó/Trump cabal’s fig leaf for legitimacy is based on the bogus argument that Article 233 of the Venezuelan constitution gives the National Assembly the power to declare a national president’s “abandonment” of the office. In which case, the president of the National Assembly can serve as an interim national president, until presidential elections are held. The inconvenient truth is that Maduro has shown no inclination to abandon his post, and the constitution says no such thing.

In fact, the grounds for replacing a president are very clearly laid out in the first paragraph of Article 233 of the Venezuelan constitution and do not include fraudulent or illegitimate election, which is what the cabal has been claiming. In the convoluted logic of the US government and its epigones, if the people elect someone the cabal doesn’t like, the election is by definition fraudulent and the democratically elected winner is ipso facto a dictator.

The function of adjudicating the validity of an election, as in any country, is to be dealt with through court challenges, not by turning to Donald Trump for his approval.

And certainly not by anointing an individual from a party that could have run in the 2018 election but decided to boycott.

The Supreme Tribunal of Justice (TSJ), which is the separate supreme court branch of the Venezuelan government has certified Maduro’s reelection, as have independent international observers. Further, no appeal was filed by any of the boycotting parties, while all participating parties – including opposition ones – signed off on the validity of the election after the polls closed.

The far-right opposition has boycotted the high court as well as the electoral process. They contest the legitimacy of the TSJ because some members of the TSJ were appointed by a lame duck National Assembly favorable to Maduro, after a new National Assembly with a majority in opposition had been elected in December 2015 but not yet seated.

Even if President Maduro were somehow deemed to have experienced what is termed a falta absoluta (i.e., some sort of void in the presidency due to death, insanity, absence, etc.), the National Assembly president is only authorized to take over if the falta absoluta occurs before the lawful president “takes possession.” However, Maduro was already “in possession” before the January 10, 2019 presidential inauguration and even before the May 10, 2018 presidential election. Maduro had won the presidency in the 2013 election and ran and won reelection last May.

If the falta absoluta is deemed to have occurred during the first four years of the presidential term, the vice president takes over. Then the constitution decrees that a snap election for the presidency must be held within 30 days. This is what happened when President Hugo Chávez died while in office in 2013. Then Vice President Nicolás Maduro succeeded to the presidency, called for new elections, and was elected by the people of Venezuela.

If it is deemed that the falta absoluta occurred during the last two years of the six-year presidential term, the vice president serves until the end of the term, according to the Venezuelan constitution. And if the time of the alleged falta absoluta is unclear – when Maduro presided over “illegitimate” elections in 2018, as is claimed by the far-right opposition – it is up to the TSJ to decide, not the head of the National Assembly or even such an august authority as US Senator Marco Rubio. Or the craven US press (too numerous to cite), which without bothering to read the plain language of the Bolivarian Constitution, repeatedly refers to Guaidó as the “constitutionally authorized” or “legitimate” president.

As Alfred de Zayas, United Nations independent expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order, tweeted: “Article 233 of the Venezuelan constitution is inapplicable and cannot be twisted into legitimizing Guaidó’s self-proclamation as interim President. A coup is a coup.”

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

 

A state of emergency has been declared in a remote Russian settlement on the Polar archipelago of Novaya Zemla after more than 50 polar bears recently rolled into town in search of food, and started wreaking havoc for the locals.

People are fearful of going outside since the aggressive bears are more than capable of mauling a human to death.

This has made daily life in the arctic village even more difficult.

Residents of the remote village are “afraid to go outside” and “daily life is in turmoil”, according to Aleksandr Minayev, deputy head of the local administration.

“Parents are wary of letting children to go to schools and kindergartens,” he made clear.

However, locals cannot shoot the bears because they are an endangered species. The Russian agency tasked with protecting natural resources denied a request by local officials to shoot the bears.

Zigansha Musin, the head of the local government authority, said “I have been in Novaya Zemlya since 1983, yet I’ve never seen such a massive polar bear invasion.”

He added that the polar bears are “literally chasing people and even entering the entrances of residential buildings” as one of the videos posted to YouTube shows.

In the village, 52 polar bears have been spotted entering settlements occupied by people. There have been numerous reports of the wild animals attacking people, entering residences and offices buildings, and rooting through trash.

One official said that six to ten bears can regularly be spotted in the village proper. Schools and nurseries have filed statements saying they are worried about their security.

One resident said the bears are no longer afraid of people and have become “insolent.”

“There are no more enemies. That is they became insolent. This is scary. When they walk under your window at night, it is creepy.”

The town, which boasts about 2,000 residents, is mostly occupied by Russian military personnel. So far, the government in Moscow has promised to send in a team of specialists to deal with the bears.

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

Authored by Tim Kirby via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

The US Military Industrial Complex no longer needs neither actual wars nor the threat of war for its own survival. This factor could actually change dynamic of this institution/bureaucracy in our lifetimes and it may actually be changing as we speak.

Very often something will evolve and become ubiquitous to the degree that we forget its origin. Putting a dead tree in your house on Christmas is a good example, few people think of why this is done, they just do it because it has been done for a long time and thus seems completely natural and important to do so every year. A justification for doing it is no longer needed, it is something done by default. In some ways the necessity to start questionable wars of luxury is much like that Christmas tree – an odd tradition that is not of an importance or value anymore.

In order to break this down we need to go back to the start.

It is hard for people in our times, especially foreign people to understand the fact that the United States was not a massive military power until WWII. Today sole hyperpower was at a time not that long ago a much different nation militarily and foreign policy speaking. In 1914 at the start of the Great War in Europe the territorially massive United States had a total armed forces of around 166,000 men. From 1776 until that point the manpower of US forces was minimal by European standards. That America of those times was an isolated self-focused America that many today long for. When the US entered WWI shedding the binds of its isolationist tendencies it bulked up to nearly 3,000,000 soldiers by the end of 1918. However, directly after the Great War finally ended the military severely deflated itself back down much closer to its original size.

“The Good War” in the 1940’s was the final nail in the isolationist coffin as American forces would forever remain in the millions of men after the defeat of Germany and Japan by the Allies.

The 1940s are the point where the permanent military industrial complex that we know of today starts to take hold. Slightly later it got the name by which we call it today thanks to a speech by President Eisenhower at the very tail end of his presidency in 1961. Sadly Mr. Eisenhower did nothing to stop the growth of the war-machine only choosing to warn us about it with nearly no time left in office. One would have expected bold action from a man known for his bravery and cunning.

The ideological justification for retaining a massive US military in peacetime was Communism. A global Communist threat seemed like something grand enough to be worth throwing away a large portion of America’s traditional (and very successful) identity.

As time went on wars of questionable origins in Korea and Vietnam continued to provide proof of the need for massive military spending and continued expansion.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 90’s American forces could have (in theory) reduced in size as there was no longer any real geopolitical competitor to the US. This was a “turning point” moment when America could possibly have gone back to being the America that was and scaled down to a few hundred thousand men under the umbrella of a few thousand nuclear warheads and enough billions of dollars to make sure that the US would never “fall behind” from a weapons standpoint.

But this was not to be. Washington chose to go with “Global Hegemon” America and has not looked back. But at this point massive military spending still required some sort of reason to spend hundreds of billions per year. Iraq and Afghanistan were enough justification to keep millions of men in uniforms on bases all over the world mostly doing pushups and cleaning the toilets in a “global war on terror”.

Now there is a new “Russian threat” that is hard for politicians to define or prove exists but is just juicy enough for them it is still call for increasing defense spending or build system X in European country Y that they can’t find on a map.

As we can see since WWII, the US military has gone from dealing with direct threats (Germany, Japan) to direct threats via proxy (The Soviet Union in Korea/Vietnam) to overinflated threats (Iraq, Afghanistan) to fake threats (today’s Russia). I would argue and even offer that at this point there is no political means nor will to ever go “back” to the isolated America. That America as a concept is dead and both the politicians and the public understand and support the US having a massive military. No threat is needed any more as having a massive military is no longer even a question. It is a default position like seeing the world as round – only a tiny handful of lunatics of zero influence could argue otherwise and debating with them is pointless.

Furthermore as we have seen any politician who goes against the military industrial complex (MIC) is deemed a traitor and “against the troops”.

This current state of things is actually very good from the standpoint of peace and America’s reputation. Since war is no longer necessary to justify the MIC the US is much more free to not engage in warfare. In fact war is completely unnecessary. At some point advertisements for automobiles had to stop mentioning their superiority to horses. We are at the same point with the MIC. Politicians and the mainstream media do not need to search for/create enemies because they are no longer needed. The US military is to be forever massive and expensive and profitable and it may even become very peaceful because of this. Why work when you can make billions doing virtually nothing?

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2GEko6Y Tyler Durden

Rep. Walter Jones, Jr. died at the age of 76 on Sunday after an extended illness for which was a granted a leave of absence from Congress last year.

The Republican representative for North Carolina’s 3rd congressional district since 1995 had initially been a strong supporter of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and even became well-known for getting french fries renamed as “freedom fries” in the House cafeteria as a protest against French condemnation of the US invasion. 

However, he was one of the few politicians initially supporting the Iraq invasion to later express profound public regret over his decision, and went on to become a consistent advocate for ending regime change wars and Washington’s military adventurism abroad. As part of these efforts, he was an original Board Member of the Ron Paul Institute.

Remembering Jones as a tireless advocate of peace, Ron Paul notes that he “turned from pro-war to an antiwar firebrand after he discovered how Administrations lie us into war. His passing yesterday is deeply mourned by all who value peace and honesty over war and deception.” The Ron Paul Institute has also called him “a Hero of Peace” for both his voting record and efforts at shutting down the “endless wars”. 

And Antiwar.com also describes Jones as having been among the “most consistently antiwar members of Congress” and a huge supporter of their work:

By 2005, Jones had reversed his position on the Iraq War. Jones called on President George W. Bush to apologize for misinforming Congress to win authorization for the war. Jones said, “If I had known then what I know today, I wouldn’t have voted for that resolution.”

Jones went on to become one of the most antiwar members of Congress, fighting for ending US involvement in Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, and Yemen.

Also the BBC describes Rep. Jones’ “dramatic change of heart” concerning the Iraq war starting in 2005, after which he began reaching out to thousands of people who had lost loves ones in combat.

Rep. Walter Jones led an effort in the House to call French Fries “Freedom Fries” instead, but came to profoundly regret his role in supporting Bush’s war. 

Noting that “no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq” and that the war was justified by the Bush administration based entirely on lies and false intelligence, the BBC describes:

At the same time, Mr Jones met grieving families whose loved ones were killed in the war. This caused him to have a dramatic change of heart, and in 2005 he called for the troops to be brought home.

He spoke candidly on several occasions about how deeply he regretted supporting the war, which led to the deaths of more than 140,000 Iraqi and American people.

“I have signed over 12,000 letters to families and extended families who’ve lost loved ones in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars,” he told NPR in 2017. “That was, for me, asking God to forgive me for my mistake.”

In total he represented his district for 34 years, first in the North Carolina state legislature, then in Congress. He took a leave of absence last year after a number of missed House votes due to declining health.

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Rep. Walter Jones, Jr. turned from pro-war to an antiwar firebrand after he discovered how Administrations lie us into war. His passing yesterday is deeply mourned by all who value peace and honesty over war and deception. He was an original Board Member of the Ron Paul Institute. What kind of a man was he? We remember Walter Jones in today’s Ron Paul Liberty Report.

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

Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

Every day in my article comments and social media I get people warning me that this or that journalist, activist or politician is “controlled opposition”, meaning someone who pretends to oppose the establishment while covertly serving it. These warnings usually come after I’ve shared or written about something a dissident figure has said or done, and are usually accompanied by an admonishment not to ever do so again lest I spread their malign influence. If you’ve been involved in any kind of anti-establishment activism for any length of time, you’ve probably encountered this yourself.

Paranoia pervades dissident circles of all sorts, and it’s not entirely without merit, since establishment infiltration of political movements is the norm, not the exception. This article by Truthout documents multiple instances in which movements like the 1968 Chicago DNC protest and Peter Camejo’s 1976 anti-establishment presidential campaign were so heavily infiltrated by opaque government agencies that one out of every six people involved in them were secretly working for the feds. This trend of infiltration is known to have continued into the current day with movements like Occupy and Black Lives Matter, and we’d be ignorant not to assume that this has been at least as rampant in online circles where people organize and disseminate ideas and information.

So it’s understandable that people are extremely vigilant about prominent figures in dissident circles, and it’s understandable that people feel paranoid. Over and over again we see shining anti-establishment movements fizzle or rendered impotent, often seemingly with the help of people we once trusted, and it’s hard not to get frustrated and become suspicious of anyone who starts shining bright in antiwar, leftist, or other dissident circles.

The trouble with this paranoia and suspicion is that it doesn’t seem to function with any kind of intelligence. I have received such “controlled opposition” warnings about pretty much every prominent dissident figure in the English-speaking world at one time or another, and if I believed them all there’d be no one in the world whose words I could share or write about, including my own. I myself have been accused at different times of being a “plant” for the CIA, the Russians, Assad, the Chinese Communist Party, the Iranian mullahs, the alt-right, Trump, Pyongyang, and the Palestinians, which if all true would make me a very busy girl indeed. Since I know I’m not a plant for anybody, I know for myself that such accusations don’t come from a place of insight with any degree of reliability, and I’ve therefore had to find my own way to navigate this confusing landscape.

So since I know that infiltration and manipulation happens, but I don’t find other people’s whisperings about “controlled opposition” useful, how do I figure out who’s trustworthy and who isn’t? How do I figure out who it’s safe to cite in my work and who to avoid? How do I separate the fool’s gold from the genuine article? The shit from the Shinola?

Here is my answer: I don’t.

I spend no mental energy whatsoever concerning myself with who may or may not be a secret pro-establishment influencer, and for good reason. There’s no way to know for sure if an individual is secretly scheming to sheep dog the populace into support for the status quo, and as long as government agencies remain opaque and unaccountable there will never be a way to know who might be secretly working for them. What I can know is (A) what I’ve learned about the world, (B) the ways the political/media class is lying about what I know about the world, and (C) when someone says something which highlights those lies. I therefore pay attention solely to the message, and no attention to what may or may not be the hidden underlying agenda of the messenger.

In other words, if someone says something which disrupts establishment narratives, I help elevate what they’re saying in that specific instance. I do this not because I know that the speaker is legit and uncorrupted, but because their message in that moment is worthy of elevation. You can navigate the entire political/media landscape in this way.

Since society is made of narrative and power ultimately rests in the hands of those who are able to control those narratives, it makes no sense to fixate on individuals and it makes perfect sense to focus on narrative. What narratives are being pushed by those in power? How are those narratives being disrupted, undermined and debunked by things that are being said by dissident voices? This is the most effective lens through which to view the battle against the unelected power establishment which is crushing us all to death, not some childish fixation on who should or shouldn’t be our hero.

Have no heroes. Trust nobody but your own inner sense-maker. If someone says something that disrupts establishment narratives based on what you understand those narratives to be, go ahead and help throw what they’re saying into the gears of the machine. Don’t make a religion out of it, don’t get attached to it, just use it as a weapon to attack the narrative matrix.

This by the way is also a useful lens to look through in spiritual development, if you’re into that sort of thing. When you enter spiritual circles concerned with enlightenment, you’ll see all sorts of debates about what teachers are really enlightened and which ones are just pretending, and these conversations mimic precisely the exact kinds of debates you’ll see in marginalized political circles about who’s the real deal and who’s controlled opposition. But the truth is there’s no way to know with certainty what’s going on in someone else’s head, and the best thing to do is to stop concerning yourself with who has and has not attained some special realization or whatever and just focus on what they’re saying. If a spiritual teacher says something which helps you notice something you’d never noticed before about consciousness or perception, then use what they said and maybe stick around to see if they have anything else useful to say. If not, move on.

There’s no reason to worry about what journalists, activists and politicians are coming from a place of authenticity if you know yourself to be coming from a place of authenticity. As you learn more about the world and get better at distinguishing fact from narrative, you will get better and better at seeing the narrative matrix clearly, and you’ll come to see all the things that are being said about what’s going on in the world as weapons in the battle of narrative control. Pick up whatever weapons seem useful to you and use them in whatever ways they’ll be useful, without wasting energy concerning yourself with the individuals who created them. Call the bullshit what it is and use the truth for what it is.

Or maybe I’m fulla shit! Maybe I myself am being paid to say these things by some powerful influencer; you can’t know for sure. All you can know is what’s useful for you. If you really find it useful to try and organize individual dissident figures into “hero” and “controlled opposition” boxes, if that genuinely helps you take apart the system that’s hurting us all, you’d know that better than I would. But if you find what I’m saying here useful, pick it up and add it to your toolbox.

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

Reddit have responded with alarm following reports that Chinese tech giant Tencent participated in a $300 million funding round for the website, with users fearing that the company might push Reddit to start censoring content on behalf of Beijing.

And they’re responding in the best way they know how: Making memes mocking the Chinese government.

According to Bloomberg, Tencent Holdings invested in the funding round, which valued the site at $3 billion, despite the fact that Reddit is banned in China. And, in typical Reddit fashion, users of the site responded by publishing images that are banned in China, like Winnie the Pooh (banned because users have mocked its resemblance to President Xi) and images of the famous “tank man” from the Tiananmen Square massacre. A concerted effort by a small group of Reddit users helped push the memes on to Reddit’s vaunted front page.

Winnie the Pooh

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman told BBG that Reddit’s focus on the video game community is part of what drew the two companies together.

“Video games are one category that’s really popular on Reddit,” Huffman told CNBC.

A spokeswoman for Reddit declined to comment on the controversy to Bloomberg.

One Reddit user quipped, “I thought it would be nice to post this picture of “Tank Man” at Tienanmen Square before our new glorious overlords decide we cannot post it anymore.”

But if Reddit users decided to abandon the site en masse, where, exactly would they go?

Back to 4Chan?

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2DG5071 Tyler Durden