Iran certainly isn’t planning on backing down in the face of Washington’s accusations about the country’s role in last week’s tanker bombings, and as a result, the possibility of a boots-on-the-ground military conflict in the Islamic Republic cannot yet be ruled out. Making an already tense situation infinitely more precarious, Iran on Monday reminded the world that it’s preparing to violate the terms of the Iran deal during the next ten days.
By increasing its stockpiles of enriched uranium, Iran is bound to elicit accusations that it’s once again working on a nuclear bomb. Tehran has always maintained that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, but American neocons like John Bolton have warned that this was merely a ruse, and that Iran could target American allies like Israel with a missile.
The Iranian government announced on Monday that it was set to breach the cap on enriched uranium, unless Europe finds a way to trade with Iran, or otherwise fulfill its financial obligations made under the deal.
European officials have been somewhat more skeptical of Iran’s role in last week’s tanker attacks, though many have acknowledged that if this were to be true, it could seriously complicate efforts to preserve the nuclear deal. German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, who visited Tehran last week, said Germany is still looking at evidence on whether Iran was responsible for last week’s attacks. Meanwhile, the UK has decided to deploy 100 Elite Royal Marines to the region to serve as a “rapid reaction force” to protect British assets.
Behrouz Kamalvandi, a spokesperson for the Iranian atomic energy agency, said Iran has “already increased” uranium production at a nuclear research site in Natanz in the central Isfahan province, according to RT.
“From today, the countdown has begun, and by June 27, our uranium production will have surpassed 300kg,” Kamalvandi said.
Last month, Tehran announced that it would partially suspend its commitments under the JCPOA, giving the EU 60 days to reaffirm its commitment to the deal. Speaking to reporters on Monday, Kamalvandi criticized the EU, saying that the bloc “either do not want to do something, or they just don’t have the ability to do it,” but he added that “Europeans still have time”to save the deal
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2ITCqBI Tyler Durden
On Sunday, more than 2 million Hong Kongers, more than one-quarter of the city-state’s population, took to the streets in what were the biggest marches in Hong Kong since the dawn of Chinese rule. Even after City Executive Carrie Lam ‘indefinitely’ dropped the hated extradition bill that had catalyzed the protest movement on Saturday, a march planned for Sunday went ahead anyway. It was the biggest march yet, a sign that a popular mandate to oust Lam and secure the release of all of those arrested during the marches – the movement’s two biggest remaining demands – was strong.
Calm returned to the city on Monday, though small bands of students continued to protest, while workers engaged in scattered strikes.
A new day. For those wondering what Hong Kong looks like this morning, here’s the scene on the road outside the city’s parliament via my colleague Maria Kuiper. A few hundred students are keeping the road occupied, no sign of cops. We expect more protests & a strike today pic.twitter.com/1jcYQbDpNs
Hong Kong markets rewarded the city executive for withdrawing the extradition bill, with the Hang Seng index outperforming broader Asian benchmarks. Homebuilder shares, which sold off sharply during Wednesday’s violent protests, led the rebound.
Lam issued an apology yesterday that many deemed to be too little, too late. Now, marchers are demanding she resign for not withdrawing the extradition bill sooner.
These standards might seem harsh, but leading Hong Kong has become an increasingly difficult job since Beijing started tightening its grip, according to Bloomberg.
“It’s an impossible job,” said Jean-Pierre Cabestan, author of “China Tomorrow: Democracy or Dictatorship?” who teaches at Hong Kong Baptist University. “You’re sandwiched between Beijing, which keeps giving orders, wants the Hong Kong government to toe the line on everything. Then you have the demands and expectations of Hong Kong society on the other hand.”
Adding an extra twist to the demonstrations against Lam, infamous Hong Kong student protest leader Joshua Wong was released on Monday after serving a month in prison over charges stemming from the 2014 Umbrella Movement, the pro-democracy marches which rocked the city back in 2014.
During interviews given almost immediately after his release from prison, Wong called on Lam to resign, and tweeted for the people of Hong Kong to keep marching until she goes
Hello world and hello freedom. I have just been released from prison. GO HONG KONG!! Withdraw the extradition bill. Carrie Lam step down. Drop all political prosecutions!
Wong noted that the opposition to Lam had formed a “political consensus,” given that more than one-quarter of the city’s population turned up to march on Sunday.
“It’s really good timing to join the fight for freedom and democracy,” he told CNN after his release. “Five years ago after the end of the Umbrella Movement, we claimed we would be back. Yesterday two million people came to the streets…it shows Hong Kong people realize this is a long term battle.”
“Hong Kong is just a small international city with seven million citizens, but two million people came to the streets, it shows that we have the consensus,” he said. “She has to end her political career.”
Even a former government minister, ex-transport chief Anthony Cheung, called for Lam to observe a one-day deadline for Hong Kong leader to deliver sincere apology and appoint a commission to investigate the police, according to the SCMP.
“The crisis underscores the complete failure of our political system. The central government can no longer expect the problems in Hong Kong to be resolved by focusing on economic and livelihood issues, while avoiding political reform,” said Cheung
However, Lam has retained Beijing’s support, and with it, is attempting to cling to power for now.
“The Central Government fully recognizes the work of the Chief Executive Carrie Lam and the SAR government, and will continue to firmly support the chief executive and the SAR government in exercising power in accordance with the law,” said Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs Spokesman Lu Kang on Monday.
Though Beijing’s reluctance to pressure the police to crush the protests might seem surprising, what Beijing clearly fears most is the possibility that the marches could spread across the border into Shenzen. Since the 2003 demonstrations, the overriding instruction from Beijing to Hong Kong has been to avoid large public protests that could risk spreading to the mainland, said activist investor David Webb.
This gives the marchers leverage. Though a power vacuum at the top of the city’s hierarchy could also create serious headaches for Beijing.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/31Cw3ev Tyler Durden
Based on ECRI’s research on the U.S. Future Inflation Gauge (USFIG), the Fed should have started a rate cut cycle last September.
This is because, when the Fed started rate cut cycles as soon as the USFIG signaled inflation cycle downturns, we’ve had soft landings, like in the mid-1980s and mid-1990s. But when their rate cut cycles lagged those inflation cycle downturn signals, the economy has gone into recession, like in 1990, 2001 and 2007.
This time around, the inflation cycle downturn signal came last September, so it looks like the Fed is nine months late already (see page 16 of Probing Powell’s Patience).
We shall see. Maybe this time it’s different, and a recession won’t follow. But our leading indexes of the business cycle will tell us either way.
Of course, if the Fed does cut rates next week, their problem will be to justify it in terms of their standard metrics, since they’re now backed into a corner where a cut could spook the markets.
Notably, the Fed and the bond market have both been way behind the curve in recognizing this inflation cycle downturn. And the plunge in the market’s inflation expectations tells you that’s the key reason yields have plummeted.
It’s really a lack of understanding of the inflation cycle that was behind the Fed’s earlier abrupt about-face, as well as the plunge in bond yields.
Our USFIG was far more prescient. It leads inflation cycle turning points and, in fact, also leads inflation expectations. The USFIG turned down in early 2018, and by last summer it was clear to us that a fresh inflation cycle downturn was at hand.
Certainly, that inflation cycle downturn wasn’t obvious to the Fed, which hiked rates in September and December.
And the bond market was also caught flat-footed, with market inflation expectations – the spread between 10-year treasury yields and 10-year TIPS yields – remaining high through late fall. Those inflated inflation expectations made bond market “royalty” pound the table about a bond bear market as treasury yields pushed near 3¼%. And remember, at the time, prominent Wall Street houses were also predicting four rate hikes in 2019. ECRI took the other side back then, based on the USFIG, saying that the Fed’s planned 2019 rate hikes weren’t going to happen.
On heels of the subsequent December rate hike, we said on this show: “We have our inflation cycle downturn call. The Fed is going to get there whether they like it or not – they are going to become more dovish.”
Looking forward to talking Fed & inflation on @TradingNation today. Flashback to Dec 2018 @CNBCClosingBell on heels of Fed hike: “…we have our inflation cycle downturn call. The Fed is going to get there whether they like it or not. They are going to become more dovish.” pic.twitter.com/ESJF2TxeXv
Last week the USFIG plunged further, meaning that the U.S. inflation cycle – a concept that most economists, including those at the Fed, don’t seem to understand – will stay in a downturn.
We’re talking about the direction of the inflation cycle. Any which way you measure it, overall inflation has been falling since last July. And that downturn isn’t over.
Sure, economic growth looks okay at the moment. But coincident economic indicators tell you nothing about recession risk. Nobody remembers that the latest real-time GDP print, right before we entered the Great Recession, was 4.9%.
The point is that, while a recession may not be imminent right now, there’s still real recession risk. And – remembering the long and variable lags with which monetary policy impacts the economy – you don’t want to do what the Fed did ahead of the last two recessions, when they started cutting rates just a couple of months before those recessions began. It was too late.
Maybe we just don’t understand the scuba diving community quite as well as the country of Turkey does.
Because, to us, dropping an Airbus A330 commercial airliner into the middle of the ocean in Northwest Turkey as a way to “boost scuba diving tourism” and create an “artificial reef” doesn’t seem to make any immediate sense.
But, nonetheless, that’s exactly what has happened.
The plane was “scuttled a mile away off the Ibrice Port in Edirne province at a ceremony which was attended by Ali Uysal, deputy governor, among others,” according to AA.
Uysal said:
“[…] Scuba diving tourism has a different market segment than mass tourism.”
He stated that an ordinary tourist generates income in the range of $500-600, while a tourist coming for scuba diving generates $2,000-3,000.
He continued: “For this reason, I think that the scuttled plane and artificial reef are very important.”
The plane is about 98 feet under the sea’s surface and was retired from flying last year, after starting its service in 1995. It was brought to the Kesan district of Edirne from Mediterranean resort city of Antalya in March of this year.
In addition to the plane, the Turkish government also dropped “various objects, and figures representing [the] Canakkale War” as part of the artificial reef.
The mayor of Kesan, Mustafa Helvacioglu, called it a “historical day” in the Gulf of Saros.
“Now, we are making underwater in the Gulf of Saros valuable as well,” Helvacioglu said.
Fatih Erdem, director of the Trans Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline Project (TANAP), said the project will contribute to both tourism and aquatic life.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2XkiJfw Tyler Durden
It was like a day from the 1970s. Except the close encounter between a Russian SU-27 fighter-interceptor and a US Air Force RC-135V intelligence-gathering plane and a Swedish Gulfstream IV spy plane occurred on June 10. The incident, which occurred within Polish maritime airspace near the airspace of the Russian Kaliningrad region, resulted in diplomatic protests being lodged with the Russian Foreign and Defense ministries by the US embassy in Moscow.
The air encounter took place on the second day of the Baltops-2019 NATO naval and air exercise in the Baltic Sea, in which the United States, Sweden (a non-NATO member), and sixteen other nations, including non-NATO member Finland, were taking part. Not taking part in the exercise were NATO members Greece, Hungary, Luxembourg, Canada, Czechia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Iceland, Croatia, and Montenegro. The exercise was scheduled for June 9-21.
The Baltops exercise was being held under the command of the newly-reconstituted US Second Fleet, which is headquartered in Norfolk, Virginia. The annual exercise concludes with the participating ships and submarines sailing to Kiel in Germany to participate in the annual Kielerwochen naval parade, which also serves an opportunity for sailors to drink copious amounts of beer during the week-long festivities.
There is little doubt that the Western military alliance is attempting to turn the Baltic Sea into a “NATO lake.” With Sweden and Finland now openly participating in NATO military exercises and making no real secret of their participation in the operations with the FIVE EYES signals intelligence alliance of core members Britain, the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, there is but one nation in the Baltic that remains both outside the NATO construct and NATO’s sole target: Russia.
NATO and its “non-member” partners, Sweden and Finland, have upped Baltic military tensions over the proposed Russian Gazprom’s Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline that will provide Russian gas directly to Germany. The pipeline passes just south of the Danish island of Bornholm, which lies closer to Sweden that it does to Denmark. Four countries involved in Nord Stream 2 have approved plans for the pipeline’s construction. The only holdout is Denmark. Donald Trump has praised Denmark’s refusal to back Nord Stream. However, Trump’s praise for the decision of Danish right-wing prime minster Lars Lokke Rasmussen was both premature and short-lived. On June 5, a “red alliance,” consisting of incoming Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen’s Social Democrats, along with the Social Liberals, Socialist People’s Party, the Red–Green Alliance, the Faroese Social Democratic Party, and the Greenlandic Siumut defeated Rasmussen’s rightist coalition in the general election.
As prime minister, Frederiksen is widely believed to want Denmark to reassert its independent foreign policy without taking orders from Washington, especially from an American administration that opposes the social democratic, environmental, and civil liberties platform of the Social Democrats and their coalition allies. The Red-Green Alliance favors Denmark’s withdrawal from NATO.
Frederiksen will be forced to deal with the Danish Intelligence Service (“Forsvarets Efterretningstjeneste” or FE), which has helped to turn Denmark into an intelligence ally of the US National Security Agency and a stalwart member of the Nordic intelligence alliance of Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland that has existed since the days of the Cold War.
After never really adjusting to the realities of the post-Cold War era, the FE is still organized as a NATO Baltic front line intelligence service geared up for the defense of the Baltic Straits from military action from a non-existent German Democratic Republic and USSR, as well as a non-existent Warsaw Pact member, Poland. The FE’s signals intelligence (SIGINT) capabilities (for example, from its Sandagergård SIGINT station at Aflandshage near Copenhagen) are targeted against commercial satellite communications traffic. The FE’s SIGINT unit has little or no capability to target Middle East communications. The FE’s small budget has resulted on its over-reliance on hugely sanitized and overly-edited intelligence from the Central Intelligence Agency. What the Danish intelligence analysts receive from the CIA is not that much more revelatory than what one can normally read in The Economist magazine, Financial Times, or the New York Times. For example, the FE continues to emphasize outmoded language skill sets – Russian, German, and Polish – while paying scant attention to the more critical Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, Tamil, Turkish, and Kurdish languages spoken by many immigrant and first- and second-generation Danish citizens.
There have been suggestions from within the FE for it to build its own ship-based SIGINT platforms that would independently collect intelligence from the Persian Gulf, Arabian Sea, and other hot spots involving Danish interests. However, the Danish government is content with its very junior status to the Americans. The rising importance of Sweden’s airborne SIGINT fleet of aircraft, including the Gulfstream IV spy plane intercepted by the Russian SU-27 near Kaliningrad, is witnessed by the fact that Sweden and the United States have totally integrated their airborne SIGINT capabilities under the NATO umbrella. In many ways, Sweden’s National Defense Radio Establishment or “Försvarets radioanstalt” (FRA), which operates Sweden’s SIGINT aircraft, including the Gulfstream IV intercepted by Russia with the US RC-135V, has become an even more important ally for the United States than the SIGINT agencies of full NATO members.
Although Sweden and Finland are dragging their political feet on joining NATO, their military policies have made both countries de facto members of the military bloc. While the Baltic Sea is not yet a “NATO lake,” the same cannot be said of the Gulf of Bothnia between Sweden and Finland. Finland’s VKL (“Viestikoelaitos”) SIGINT agency is a close partner of the NSA. The US Navy has also reportedly shared a passive sonar “library” of Russian submarine acoustic signatures with their Finnish and Swedish naval counterparts. In addition, naval intelligence cooperation between the navies of the United States, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and Estonia in monitoring activities in the Gulf of Finland has never been greater. But why? The Cold War has been over for some two decades and northern Europe, frankly, has other worries, from climate change to the threat of re-emerging threats from Nazi and fascist political movements.
If Denmark should drift away from NATO intelligence activities in the Baltic, its place will gladly be taken by Poland. Polish President Andrzej Duda, who has established a close relationship with Trump, has agreed to foot the bill for the construction of US military bases in Poland. However, the NSA has been in Poland for several years and works with its Polish counterparts to extend a giant electronic intercept “ear” over Kaliningrad. Since 2013, NSA personnel have worked with Polish SIGINT analysts at a joint intercept in Olsztyn. The Olsztyn “outstation,” which is codenamed AMBERWIND, conducts electronic and communications intercepts of Russian military and other communications in Kaliningrad, the headquarters of the Russian Baltic Fleet. Just as with the troop bases in Poland, the Poles helped pay for the NSA SIGINT facility.
NATO and Trump are trying to have it both ways. While Trump has done everything possible to stymie the construction of Nord Stream 2, his national security policy makers have warned Russia not to interfere with Baltic undersea fiber-optic communications cables or the NordBalt power cable between Klaipeda, Lithuania and Nybro, Sweden. During the Cold War, there were serious suggestions from Sweden, Finland, the USSR, Poland, and even Denmark and Norway for the Baltic region to become a “zone of peace.” It appears that during a time of peace, certain Western interests want to turn the Baltic into a zone of war.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2IkNsAB Tyler Durden
Researchers at Substance abuse charity, Addaction, discovered cocaine use in the UK is much higher than previously thought.
Approximately 80% of the respondents admitted using marijuana, while 70% said they use cocaine and crack cocaine.
This is the most extensive study of its kind, surveyed 8,500 drug users in Scotland through social media polls. They shared their findings exclusively with Sky News, determined that cocaine is being used “everywhere” in the UK.
Seven in 10 drug users believe cocaine is their first drug of choice, only 14% of them have sought help from healthcare professionals or charities about their addiction problems.
About 90% of respondents said they’re millennials (aged between 18 and 45). Another 90% said they’re employed or in college.
“Cocaine is generally seen as a party drug, has a stigma attached with it, is widely used and still nobody is talking about it,” said Andrew Horne, Director of Addaction, Scotland.
“Even to this day, people think that cocaine is a middle-aged dinner party, middle-class drug, but the results of the survey show it’s everywhere.”
The study comes as prime ministerial candidate Michael Gove was criticized for previous cocaine addiction, and Boris Johnson recently refused to deny using the drug.
Yesterday I observed that there is a stark set of double standards operating about the cocaine use of Michael Gove vs Boris Johnsson in this leadership contest. Johnson has now denied he ever took the drug. I have scoured the archives for everything we know about it. Here it is. https://t.co/9QEUnZgMRY
Sky News noted that Author and columnist Bryony Gordon had described her addiction with cocaine: “My addiction to cocaine crept up on me while I was busy with a hectic social life. Cocaine destroys lives; it makes one inherently risky.”
A millennial in his 30s, who remained anonymous in a Sky News interview said: “It’s usually just a weekend thing, when I’m out with the lads, in a pub or club or festival or something like that.”
And since it appears a vast majority of UK millennials are blowing lines or smoking crack, a separate report has shown small amounts of cocaine have been found in freshwater shrimp in the country.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2RnoEuH Tyler Durden
The spectre of nuclear war has long hung over the world like a nightmarish sword of Damocles offering humanity much cause for despair at the dual nature of science as a beautiful source of creative power that uplifts and ennobles on the one hand and acts as a harbinger of death and chaos on the other.
However, it would be wrong to blame science for the crisis which mankind unlocked with the atom, when the reality is that we have never freed ourselves from the pest of oligarchical systems of rule. Going back to records of the Roman, Persian and Babylon empires, such systems have always sought to manipulate the masses into patterns of behaviour of self-policing and constant conflict.
Whether we are talking about the Crusades, European religious wars, Napoleonic wars, Crimean War, Opium Wars, or WWI and WWII, it has always been the same recipe: Get victims to define their interests around material constraints, diminishing resources, or religious/ethnic/linguistic biases that prevent each person from recognizing their common interests with their neighbor and then get them to fight. Classic divide and conquer.
By the close of WWII, that ancient recipe for managed chaos no longer functioned as a new ingredient was introduced into the geopolitical “great game”. This atomic ingredient was so powerful that those “game masters” managing the affairs of the earth from above like detached Olympian gods, understood that they could now be annihilated as fast as their victims and a new set of rules had to be created post haste.
Lord Russell’s Nuclear Gamble
A leading representative of the genocidal mind of the British Empire was one Lord Bertrand Russell, 7th generation member of the hereditary elite known today for his celebrated pacifism and profound philosophical depth. It is an uncomfortable fact that this paragon of “logic” and peace was one of the earliest thinkers on record calling for the nuclear annihilation of the Soviet Union in the wake of the surrender of Nazi Germany. Should the Soviet Union not submit to a One World Government, argued Lord Russell in the September 1946 Bulletin for Atomic Scientists, then it would simply have to face a nuclear punishment.
Of course that threat was short lived, as Russia’s surprise announcement of their “cracking the atomic code” broke the monopoly which the Anglo-Americans had been salivating over in 1945 as they watched Japan (whose backchannel surrender had already been negotiated) burn under the shadow of a newly emerging Anglo-American Leviathan.
Lord Russell, then heading the CIA/MI6 Congress for Cultural Freedom (whose goal was to create a new anti-culture of hedonism and irrationalism in the arts during the Cold War) was forced to change tune and instead unleash a new doctrine which came to be known as “Mutually Assured Destruction” (MAD). Russell’s obsession with trying to enslave all of physics to a strict mathematical determinism as displayed in his Principia Mathematica (1910) and his leading role in the CIA’s promotion of abstract art/atonal music under the CCF banner is a useful insight into how societies are managed by oligarchs.
In a BBC interview years after Russell changed his views on a first strike on Russia, the British aristocratic, now-turned anti-nuclear advocate described his change of heart thus:
“Q: Is it true or untrue that in recent years you advocated that a preventive war might be made against communism, against Soviet Russia?”
RUSSELL: It’s entirely true, and I don’t repent of it now. It was not inconsistent with what I think now…. There was a time, just after the last war, when the Americans had a monopoly of nuclear weapons and offered to internationalise nuclear weapons by the Baruch proposal, and I thought this an extremely generous proposal on their part, one which it would be very desirable that the world should accept; not that I advocated a nuclear war, but I did think that great pressure should be put upon Russia to accept the Baruch proposal, and I did think that if they continued to refuse it might be necessary actually to go to war. At that time nuclear weapons existed only on one side, and therefore the odds were the Russians would have given way. I thought they would … .
Q: Suppose they hadn’t given way.
RUSSELL: I thought and hoped that the Russians would give way, but of course you can’t threaten unless you’re prepared to have your bluff called.”
An End to the MAD World
The new game became “geopolitical balance of terror” under MAD, and in many ways the power it offered an oligarchy was greater than anything a pre-atomic society had to offer. While major wars were no longer desirable (though always a risk in this psychotic game of high stakes poker), asymmetric warfare and regime change became the new “big things” for the next 70 years. A population in constant terror of annihilation created a ripe ground for the spread of a new inquisition under the guidance of a megalomaniac cross-dresser running the FBI. This inquisition purged the west of qualified leaders who were committed to peace between east and west and included great scientists, artists, professors and politicians who watched their careers destroyed as the Deep State grew ever more powerful and atomic bombs more abundant.
While many foolishly celebrated the success of MAD with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of a unipolar world that would supposedly usher in a peaceful “end to history”, others recognised the grand sleight of hand as NATO continued to expand even though WWs raison d’être had disappeared. Yevgeni Primakov and a circle of Russian patriots (which included a rising Vladimir Putin) were among those who saw through the fraud. This network worked diligently with their Asian counterparts to create a foundation for survival which manifested in the form of the G20 in 1999 and Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in 2001.
As 2007 began, the wars in the Middle East unleashed after 9-11 had no end in sight, and an intention much darker than many ever imagined was emerging amidst the chaos. A NATO-led Anti-Ballistic Missile shield began construction around Russia’s southern perimeter on Dick Cheney’s initiative and was joined soon thereafter by an “Asia-Pivot” encirclement of China under Obama in 2011. Only the most naive fools then believed that Iran or North Korea were the real reasons for this Hobbesian power grab for a first strike monopoly. Lord Russell’s ghost could be felt across the world threatening a nuclear war if national sovereignty were not abandoned in favor of a world government managed by a “scientific dictatorship”,
Russia and China Call to Control the Fiery Serpent
President Putin along with Sergei Lavrov and President Xi Jinping have signalled an end to the era of MAD with an important call for a new international security doctrine based upon a “new operating system”.
Coming out of the St. Petersburg Economic Summit on June 6, Putin said:
“if we do not keep this ‘fiery serpent under control- if we let it out of the bottle, God forbid, this could lead to global catastrophe. Everyone is pretending to be deaf, blind or dyslexic. We have to react to this somehow, don’t we? Clearly so.”
Putin’s words were amplified by Sergei Lavrov on June 11 speaking at the Primakov Readings 2019 conference in Moscow which brought together diplomats, experts and politicians from 30 countries on the theme of “Returning to Confrontation: Are there Any Alternatives?” Lavrov said:
“It is of principle importance that Russia and the U.S. calm the rest of the world and pass a joint statement at a high level that there can be no victory in a nuclear war and therefore it is unacceptable and inadmissible. We do not understand why they cannot reconfirm this position now. Our proposal is being considered by the U.S. side.”
Since putting themselves between an Anglo-American firing squad and the nations of Syria and Venezuela, in tandem with the surprising unveiling of an array of new military technologies in March 2018, Putin has transformed the geopolitical “rules of the game” so that Lavrov’s proposal is now a real possibility. The new technologies unveiled by Russia in 2018 include supersonic missiles, underwater drones and other nuclear powered rockets that guarantee Russia’s retaliatory attack capability should anyone be stupid enough to launch a first strike against Russia.
The BRI and the New Operating System
The St. Petersburg Economic Summit from June 5-6 not only saw 19 000 participants from 145 countries signing $47.8 billion in agreements, but also featured an important meeting by China’s Xi Jinping and Putin who described their relationship as the best of friends and locked their nations ever more deeply into the new operating framework of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) which is quickly extending into the Arctic.
This meeting will be carried to a yet higher level with the June 13-14 Shanghai Cooperation Organisation Summit in Bishkek Kyrgyzstan which will integrate Eurasian nations ever more into the BRI. Putin and Xi will not only meet at this summit once again, but will also be joined by India’s newly re-elected Narendra Modi, whose participation is vital for the re-organisation of the world system.
After the SCO summit, the world will await the potential meeting at the June 28-29 G20 summit in Osaka, Japan, where U.S. President Donald Trump has indicated his desire to meet with all three leaders for bilateral negotiations. Many onlookers have criticised the idea that Trump could actually desire an honest meeting, but Lavrov has indicated his higher understanding of the strategic complexity in America by making the point in a June 6 interviewthat President Trump’s failures to build constructive relations with Russia are due to sabotage by forces embedded within the government when he said:
“Certain US politicians, including those who tied President Trump’s hands, not allowing him to deliver on his campaign promises to normalise and improve relations with Russia, are still unable to accept this fact.”
In fact at a June 12 press conference alongside the President of Poland, Trump was pressed by a reporter to take a hard line against Russia who is apparently “threatening Poland”. While paying lip service to the Russia=bully narrative, Trump ended his response saying “I hope that Poland is going to have a great relationship with Russia. I hope we’re going to have a great relationship with Russia and, by the way, China and many other countries.” Trump had earlier called for Russia, China and America to convert their hundreds of millions of dollars in military spending into projects that are in the common interests of everyone.
During his keynote address to the Economic Forum, Putin called out the elephant in the room by bringing up the breakdown of the global financial system:
“the degeneration of the universalist globalisation model and its turning into a parody, a caricature of itself, where common international rules are replaced with the laws… of one country.”
Putin went on to warn of a “fragmentation of the global economic space by a policy of completely unlimited economic egoism and a forced breakdown. But this is the road to endless conflict, trade wars and maybe not just trade wars. Figuratively, this is the road to the ultimate fight of all against all.”
The point was driven home that ultimately without a new economic system, the danger of global annihilation and injustice will always hang over humanity. Echoing Xi Jinping’s philosophy of win-win cooperation, Putin said what is ultimately needed is “a more stable and fair development model. These agreements should not only be written clearly but should also be observed by all participants. However, I am convinced that talk about an economic world order like this will remain wishful thinking unless we return to the centre of the discussion, that is, notions like sovereignty, the unconditional right of every country to its own development road and, let me add, responsibility for universal sustainable development, not just for ones own development.”
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2Ik6W8s Tyler Durden
Iran says it has summoned the British ambassador over the weekend after the UK publicly came out in support of the White House assessment pinpointing Iranian forces behind last Thursday’s two tanker attacks in the Gulf of Oman.
Last Friday Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt said the attacks were “almost certainly” carried out by Tehran. Hunt also warned of the “great risk” of Iran drifting toward war against the US and its allies during a television interview.
Crucially, Britain is set to deploy 100 Royal Marines to the Persian Gulf in order to form a “rapid reaction force” to protect UK assets in the region.
Military sources said that 100 marines from 42 Commando, based near Plymouth, will form a rapid reaction force, Special Purpose Task Group 19. They will operate from ships patrolling the region from Britain’s new naval base in Bahrain.
The marines are expected to arrive in Bahrain “within weeks” as well as a team of British experts to assist in investigating precisely what materials were used in the tanker attacks, which contradictory accounts say could have been mines or torpedoes, or even an aerial projectile.
UK defence minister and MP Tobias Ellwood told Sky’s Ridge on Sunday: “We have a substantial presence in the Middle East that looks after our interests there. We understand the Middle East, we have a number of allies there as well.”
He added that Britain would beef up its presence in coordination with US forces: “We will be working with the United States to make sure this area is safe and to make sure that we actually deescalate the tensions there but I don’t think Iran should be under any doubt [about] that fact that we will be determined to protect our assets and our interests in the region.”
Among the more interesting quotes from the Sunday Times report suggests the ease with which a direct firefight between US-UK allied forces and Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) forces – which patrol the vital Strait of Hormuz – could erupt:
A military source said that having marines with machine guns on the decks of warships or merchant ships was likely to see off any Iranian speedboats trying to sneak up on them.
Meanwhile, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Fox News Sunday that while the US maintains the view that it is “unmistakable” that Iran is responsible for the attacks, and that it has “lots of data, lots of evidence” —the White House does not actually want war.
“President Trump has done everything he can to avoid war. We don’t want war,” he said. “The United States is going make sure that we take all the actions necessary, diplomatic and otherwise that achieve that outcome,” Pompeo added.
But given the potential for a rapid build-up of western forces in the already crowded Persian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz, and with Iran’s IRGC on a heightened state of alert, it could be too little too late given both sides appear “war ready” and are already blundering precisely toward that dire scenario.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2MTsrBp Tyler Durden
The old S-word bugaboo has surfaced again but the real threat comes from globalism and social progressivism…
At a dinner in his New Jersey home to which John O’Sullivan and I had both been invited, former president Richard Nixon posed the question: “What is politics?”
My response was “friend-enemy relations.”
“No,” said O’Sullivan. “It’s about finding themes for an electoral campaign.”
Our differing answers reflected a difference in backgrounds: I had just published a book on the very dark German political theorist Carl Schmitt and was a great fan of Thomas Hobbes; O’Sullivan had been a campaign advisor to Margaret Thatcher before going on to become National Review ‘s chief editor.
Of course, both of us were right. Political life in Western countries is about the organization of electoral campaigns, in which one side depicts the other as the Devil. Typically the ideological confrontations are not as substantive as they’re made to appear; the ritualized battles are waged over issues that politicians and their donors want to talk about.
I thought about this conversation while recently listening to political talking points, namely the babble coming from our Republicans and from Emmanuel Macron and his centrist coalition in France about a looming “socialist” danger. In neither country is this claim persuasive. I’m not denying that the Left isn’t demanding lots of “free stuff,” including free college education in the US, even for those who have neither the interest nor the inclination to engage in serious academic studies.Young people who hang around universities also want to restructure the economy around various “green deals,” such as the plan recently trotted out by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Her Green New Deal scheme would be incredibly costly and in any case would have only minimal effect on the environment. But the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, Joe Biden, doesn’t seem too eager to sign on to a radical ecological proposal anyway (though he does advocate a $1.7 trillion “clean energy” plan).
Simply put, what these “socialists” want is certainly not what exists in Venezuela, China, or Cuba. None of our Democratic presidential candidates are trying to establish economies that are similarly nationalized. A Democratic administration would likely slow down economic growth and impose more PC requirements on the commercial sector. But this would hardly make us Castro’s Cuba or the former German Democratic Republic. Someone who was once a true socialist is Bernie Sanders, but even Bernie is now pushing mostly the “free stuff,” together with “intersectional politics.”
Having socialized medicine may be a good or bad thing (I personally abhor it), but as I’ve argued before, advocating for it doesn’t make one a socialist. Countries that even our Republican think tanks consider to be “capitalistt”, like Canada, Germany, and Britain, all have single-payer medical systems.
Moreover, major corporate interests are backing our political Left and don’t seem concerned that the culturally leftist Democratic presidential hopefuls plan to inflict socialism on the hand that feeds.Procter and Gamble, Citibank, Coca Cola, Gillette, and Silicon Valley lavish gifts on Democrats, while pushing LGBT, gutting the Second Amendment , expanding abortion rights , and trying to weaken national borders.
I’m sure these corporate titans aren’t interested in having the state seize their holdings and redistribute their profits. They are backing the Left because the real ideological cleavage in our society doesn’t run in any case between capitalists and socialists.
Rather, it lies, as Steve Bannon recently pointed out in the French monthly L’incorrect, between globalists and “those who value their nations and civilization.”
The center-right in Western countries has rightly or wrongly decided that it can’t win elections by designating the real Leftist enemy for what they are – globalists who want to push their social values on everyone else. So they instead attack their adversaries as “socialists,” or what Macron denounces as “les socialo-communistes.”
On immigration and abortion, the goalposts have also moved leftward – at least in national electoral campaigns. The GOP is now officially against late-term abortion or killing newly born infants, but some states are seeking to prohibit abortions at an earlier point in pregnancy. Republican operatives call for controlling illegal immigration but avoid talking explicitly about reducing immigration.
In view of what is perceived as the declining utility of highlighting “Judeo-Christian values,” the RNC will in all likelihood run against that golden oldie: “socialism.” It may also bring back such ideas as being for the individual against the state and (better yet) “getting government off our backs.” In France, it’s also “déjà vu all over again.” There the globalists are railing against the ghost of the French Communists, who once collected a quarter of the national vote. But Macron’s major opponents are now on the nationalist Right and on the multicultural globalist Left, represented by the Greens—not real socialists.
Both the French president and the GOP need to find timelier and more honest rhetoric, or else risk losing more elections and partisan support. The socialist bugaboo has a limited shelf life, which may expire far sooner than its critics realize.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2IQ77HG Tyler Durden
There is a crisis in America. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 19.7 million children, more than 1 in 4, live without a father in the home. Consequently, there is a “father factor” in nearly all of the societal ills facing America today. Research shows when a child is raised in a father-absent home, he or she is aected in the following ways…
