Tag: news

Meet The New European Union, Same As The Old One

Authored by Tom Luongo,

The European Union chose new leadership this week. It was, for once, a fraught affair.

No rubber stamps were anywhere to be seen.

In the end all four of the new European Union leadership were not the frontrunners as put forth by German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Her choice for EU Commission President was rejected.

So too was Mario Draghi’s replacement at the top of the European Central Bank, Bundesbanke President Jens Weidmann.

French President Emmanuel Macron was the clear winner this weekend.

The choices for these positions are all designed to both maintain the path of European integration but also weaken the hold Germany has on European Union power politics.

And this thorough rebuke to Merkel immediately threw the euro into defensive mode. But, don’t kid yourself. Weidmann was never an acceptable choice as ECB President. More on this later.

The new Commission President, replacing the odious Jean-Claude Juncker, is German Defense Minister Ursula Von der Leyen. She’s a thorough Europhile and Russophobe. Since she’s a Social Democrat, to me it looks like ALDE’s Guy Verhofstadt flexed his expanded presence in the room. He helped ensure no populist upstarts would control EU foreign policy.

It will will continue being virulently anti-Russian, if not more so than in the past.

Von der Leyen is a perfect example of leadership chosen by committee (and The Davos Crowd behind them) to be nothing more than a puppet of the globalist/neo-liberal forces which control the direction of the EU.

Merkel’s a lame-duck trying to get what she wants from Russia while maintaining a brave face to the United States. Putting Von der Leyen in charge ensures any good relations between here and Vladimir Putin should be heavily discounted going forward.

The rest of the new cast is as follows:

Also nominated are the liberal Belgium prime minister Charles Michel (who would replace Donald Tusk as EU Council president), current IMF director and former French finance minister Christine Lagarde (as head of the European Central Bank) and current Spanish foreign minister Josep Borrell (as EU foreign policy chief). 

It is Lagarde, however, that is the most interesting. The Euro began rolling over the minute she was announced as Mario Draghi’s replacement at the European Central Bank.

Lagarde is not an economist. She’s a politician who was put in charge of the IMF to ensure a particular policy path. She got the job under dubious circumstances when Dominique Strauss-Khan “nuts and sluts’d.”

She was there to make sure IMF policy kept the European project on track through Greece, Spain and soon, Italy.

She marks the end of German-led austerity as the prime directive of European fiscal policy.

But, again, she’s no economist. At this point I wouldn’t be surprised for Mario Draghi to replace her at the IMF, if only to completely inform us of who is really in charge.

Lagarde will provide whatever money is needed to keep the European project from failing. Everyone knows the euro is beyond repair without Germany leaving the currency bloc. With Lagarde at the helm of the ECB when things melt down and the SDR is proposed to replace the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency Lagarde will keep the euro-philes in line.

Don’t forget that Lagarde herself is a convicted criminal who can easily be controlled. So, the fix is in folks.

This is Merkel’s last betrayal of her country on her way out the door. Broker a deal which promotes a rank incompetent to the Commission presidency, Von der Leyan, who will do as she is told while bringing in the perfect person to strong arm further European Union fiscal integration.

Germany will likely be asked to leave the euro once the crisis begins in earnest, because that is the only real path to keeping the project from collapsing.

And the markets know this.

The pundits fell all over themselves trying to play up her managerial experience. I couldn’t help but laugh at the obvious spin doctoring.

We started the week coming out of the G-20 and Trump’s trip to North Korea with renewed enthusiasm for an end to the trade war and some good will towards cutting through some geopolitical Gordian knots.

The dollar tanked, gold and cryptos rallied alongside stocks (mildly) and sovereign debt (strongly).

But underneath it all was topping action after the mildest of bounces in the euro and the British pound. Did anyone miss the non-committal attitude of equity traders for taking indexes much past recently achieved all-time highs?

I didn’t.

But were these all just bull traps while the dollar went through a short bear trap?

Given the price action after the U.S. jobs report for June that thesis looks solid.

So, to me, the sell-off to end this week has more to do with the changes at the top of the European Union than it does a blow-out jobs report staying the Fed’s hand on lowering rates in July.

That’s the cover story for the real coup that took place in Brussels this week. Merkel takes the political hit publicly while appeasing the rising Greens domestically. Lagarde, the ultimate insider, is in charge of monetary policy but in name only.

So meet the new gang where politics trumps everything else. The only good thing to come out of this weekend was that we no longer have to be regaled by Mr. “When things get tough you have to lie,” Juncker.

But this will ultimately be the undoing of the EU. Politics is not an end but a means. The European Union jumped that shark a long time ago.

*  *  *

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via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2JqvOe8 Tyler Durden

Socialism Is Back, and the Kids Are Loving It

For decades, democratic socialism was an old man’s ideology. Its adherents were aging hippies, old-time union organizers, and folks who fondly remembered the pre-’60s left. As recently as 2013, the average member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) was 68 years old. Even today, the ideology’s best-known spokesperson, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), is 77.

But Sanders is suddenly an outlier. Today, most DSAers are young: The average member is 33. The ideology’s second-best-known spokesperson, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.), is just 29. And the DSA’s ranks have grown larger as well as younger. Socialist gatherings buzz with youthful energy, and they are taking place all over the country.

This movement is flexing its political muscles, having helped elect a number of candidates to office—most famously Ocasio-Cortez, who has quickly become a prominent voice in Congress. The DSA has every intention of shifting the “Overton window” of American politics far to the left. And if we’re not careful, it might succeed.

Despite his own advanced age—and even though he’s not a member of the group himself— Sanders is by far the person most responsible for bringing this wave of young people into the DSA. His groundbreaking 2016 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination helped spread socialist ideas to a generation born after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

“Bernie Sanders is who introduced me to socialism,” says Alex Pellitteri, co-chair of New York City’s chapter of the DSA’s youth arm, the Young Democratic Socialists of America. “I was a Democrat, I was a liberal, but I had never really crossed that line to socialism.”

Essentially, Sanders has done for democratic socialism what Ron Paul did for libertarianism in the late ’00s: make it an exciting, cool, radical alternative to the mainstream parties’ staid orthodoxies. Just as Paul challenged other Republicans’ commitment to waging increasingly unpopular wars, Sanders slammed Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton for her Wall Street ties, her hawkish foreign policy, and her general lack of left-wing bona fides. Clinton won the nomination, but Sanders put up a much better fight than expected—a testament to the popular appeal of the ideas he was proposing.

Those ideas included a single-payer health insurance system, free tuition for all college students, a federal minimum wage of $15 an hour, and a more progressive tax system that confiscates wealth from the richest 1 percent and redistributes it to everyone else. Such proposals are particularly popular with younger Americans. According to a 2018 Harvard Institute of Politics poll, 55 percent or more of 18- to 29-year-olds support a $15-an-hour federal job guarantee, free college tuition, and Medicare for All. In a Harris Poll this year, 73 percent of millennial and Gen Z respondents thought the government should provide universal health care, and about half said they’d prefer to live in a socialist country. While Americans overall have a much more favorable view of capitalism than socialism, Americans between 18 and 24 do not: 61 percent have a positive reaction to the word socialism, compared to 58 percent for capitalism.

One reason for this is that people like Sanders have studiously worked to get a softer definition of socialism into circulation. Throughout the 20th century, the word evoked either the working class directly seizing the means of production or the government nationalizing industries, setting prices, and reducing or abolishing the right to own private property. The latter was much more common in practice, and the countries that took that route—the Soviet Union, mainland China, the Eastern European states, etc.—had horrific human rights records. Socialist regimes found it necessary to negate a whole host of individual rights and to arrest or murder dissidents in order to realize their ends.

But the founders of the DSA rejected Soviet-style socialism. They had more in common with the socialist parties of Western Europe, which established generous welfare states and sometimes nationalized industries, but which operated within the boundaries of a democratic political system, not a one-party police state. In 1962, future DSA founder Michael Harrington quarreled with the authors of the Port Huron Statement, a leftist student manifesto, because he felt they hadn’t denounced the Soviet Union in strong enough terms. About a decade later, Harrington’s former faction of the Socialist Party split off to form the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, which later merged with another organization to become the DSA.

When today’s most prominent democratic socialists are asked to explain their ideology, they tend to skimp on the substantial structural questions and lean on paeans to dignity, generosity, and equality. Sanders has defined democratic socialism as “the understanding that all of our people live in security and dignity” and “a government and an economy and a society which works for all.” Ocasio-Cortez defines it as “democratic participation in our economic dignity.”

It shouldn’t be surprising that democratic socialism, reduced to a set of pleasant-sounding buzzwords and some proposals to give more people free stuff, is having a moment.

And what a moment it is. “When Harrington died in 1989,” The Nation observes, “his organization hadn’t grown much beyond the 6,000 aging members it had had at its founding.” After a quarter-century, the members were even more aged and little else had changed. The DSA’s official magazine, Democratic Left, had 6,700 subscribers in 2016.

A year later, in the wake of Sanders’ first presidential campaign, the magazine had more than 28,000 paid subscribers. By 2018, it had 46,000. The organization now claims about 50,000 members. Many of them are concentrated in New York City, but DSA chapters can be found in 180 towns across the country.

The success of democratic socialism is much broader than just one organization. The socialist magazine Jacobin, founded in 2010 by Bhaskar Sunkara, increased its circulation from 10,000 in 2015 to 40,000 in 2018. The socialist podcast Chapo Trap House, which debuted in March 2016, is now the second most popular account on the crowdfunding platform Patreon, and its hosts rake in an average of $123,500 in donations per month.

Democratic socialists have won electoral victories too. The DSA is not a political party and does not run its own candidates, instead endorsing Democrats and independents who it feels are sufficiently committed to socialism. (Sex and the City actress Cynthia Nixon, for instance, received the DSA’s endorsement in her unsuccessful 2018 primary run against New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.) In the 2016 and 2017 elections, DSA-backed candidates won a smattering of races around the country, including a seat in the Virginia House of Delegates. And in 2018, Ocasio-Cortez, a 20-something organizer and complete political unknown, won a stunning Democratic primary victory over incumbent Rep. Joe Crowley. She became an overnight sensation, and in the general election she was one of two DSA members to capture House seats. Rashida Tlaib (D–Mich.) was the other.

Ocasio-Cortez’s savvy use of social media has generated tons of press coverage. She now has more Twitter followers than House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.). Conservative websites and cable channels love to pillory her, but that has only helped her become one of the most visible members of Congress.

Sanders is the only major 2020 presidential candidate to self-identify as a democratic socialist. But most of the Democrats have signed on to DSA-friendly policies. Sens. Kamala Harris (D–Calif.), Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.), and Kirsten Gillibrand (D–N.Y.) have joined Sanders in backing Medicare for All. The Green New Deal, Ocasio-Cortez’s pie-in-the-sky plan to tackle climate change while creating public works projects, has been endorsed by a host of candidates: Sanders, Warren, Harris, Gillibrand, Sens. Cory Booker (D–N.J.) and Amy Klobuchar (D–Minn.), and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro.

If the centrist standard-bearer, Vice President Joe Biden, wins the Democratic nomination, it will be a setback for the movement. But democratic socialists are not pinning all their hopes on the presidency, even as they work to install Sanders in the White House. They are patiently growing their ranks, expanding their influence, and increasing their cultural cachet.

So far, the strategy is working. If you assumed that socialism’s appalling 20th century failures would relegate it permanently to the ash heap of history, you were wrong.

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Socialism Is Back, and the Kids Are Loving It

For decades, democratic socialism was an old man’s ideology. Its adherents were aging hippies, old-time union organizers, and folks who fondly remembered the pre-’60s left. As recently as 2013, the average member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) was 68 years old. Even today, the ideology’s best-known spokesperson, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), is 77.

But Sanders is suddenly an outlier. Today, most DSAers are young: The average member is 33. The ideology’s second-best-known spokesperson, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.), is just 29. And the DSA’s ranks have grown larger as well as younger. Socialist gatherings buzz with youthful energy, and they are taking place all over the country.

This movement is flexing its political muscles, having helped elect a number of candidates to office—most famously Ocasio-Cortez, who has quickly become a prominent voice in Congress. The DSA has every intention of shifting the “Overton window” of American politics far to the left. And if we’re not careful, it might succeed.

Despite his own advanced age—and even though he’s not a member of the group himself— Sanders is by far the person most responsible for bringing this wave of young people into the DSA. His groundbreaking 2016 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination helped spread socialist ideas to a generation born after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

“Bernie Sanders is who introduced me to socialism,” says Alex Pellitteri, co-chair of New York City’s chapter of the DSA’s youth arm, the Young Democratic Socialists of America. “I was a Democrat, I was a liberal, but I had never really crossed that line to socialism.”

Essentially, Sanders has done for democratic socialism what Ron Paul did for libertarianism in the late ’00s: make it an exciting, cool, radical alternative to the mainstream parties’ staid orthodoxies. Just as Paul challenged other Republicans’ commitment to waging increasingly unpopular wars, Sanders slammed Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton for her Wall Street ties, her hawkish foreign policy, and her general lack of left-wing bona fides. Clinton won the nomination, but Sanders put up a much better fight than expected—a testament to the popular appeal of the ideas he was proposing.

Those ideas included a single-payer health insurance system, free tuition for all college students, a federal minimum wage of $15 an hour, and a more progressive tax system that confiscates wealth from the richest 1 percent and redistributes it to everyone else. Such proposals are particularly popular with younger Americans. According to a 2018 Harvard Institute of Politics poll, 55 percent or more of 18- to 29-year-olds support a $15-an-hour federal job guarantee, free college tuition, and Medicare for All. In a Harris Poll this year, 73 percent of millennial and Gen Z respondents thought the government should provide universal health care, and about half said they’d prefer to live in a socialist country. While Americans overall have a much more favorable view of capitalism than socialism, Americans between 18 and 24 do not: 61 percent have a positive reaction to the word socialism, compared to 58 percent for capitalism.

One reason for this is that people like Sanders have studiously worked to get a softer definition of socialism into circulation. Throughout the 20th century, the word evoked either the working class directly seizing the means of production or the government nationalizing industries, setting prices, and reducing or abolishing the right to own private property. The latter was much more common in practice, and the countries that took that route—the Soviet Union, mainland China, the Eastern European states, etc.—had horrific human rights records. Socialist regimes found it necessary to negate a whole host of individual rights and to arrest or murder dissidents in order to realize their ends.

But the founders of the DSA rejected Soviet-style socialism. They had more in common with the socialist parties of Western Europe, which established generous welfare states and sometimes nationalized industries, but which operated within the boundaries of a democratic political system, not a one-party police state. In 1962, future DSA founder Michael Harrington quarreled with the authors of the Port Huron Statement, a leftist student manifesto, because he felt they hadn’t denounced the Soviet Union in strong enough terms. About a decade later, Harrington’s former faction of the Socialist Party split off to form the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, which later merged with another organization to become the DSA.

When today’s most prominent democratic socialists are asked to explain their ideology, they tend to skimp on the substantial structural questions and lean on paeans to dignity, generosity, and equality. Sanders has defined democratic socialism as “the understanding that all of our people live in security and dignity” and “a government and an economy and a society which works for all.” Ocasio-Cortez defines it as “democratic participation in our economic dignity.”

It shouldn’t be surprising that democratic socialism, reduced to a set of pleasant-sounding buzzwords and some proposals to give more people free stuff, is having a moment.

And what a moment it is. “When Harrington died in 1989,” The Nation observes, “his organization hadn’t grown much beyond the 6,000 aging members it had had at its founding.” After a quarter-century, the members were even more aged and little else had changed. The DSA’s official magazine, Democratic Left, had 6,700 subscribers in 2016.

A year later, in the wake of Sanders’ first presidential campaign, the magazine had more than 28,000 paid subscribers. By 2018, it had 46,000. The organization now claims about 50,000 members. Many of them are concentrated in New York City, but DSA chapters can be found in 180 towns across the country.

The success of democratic socialism is much broader than just one organization. The socialist magazine Jacobin, founded in 2010 by Bhaskar Sunkara, increased its circulation from 10,000 in 2015 to 40,000 in 2018. The socialist podcast Chapo Trap House, which debuted in March 2016, is now the second most popular account on the crowdfunding platform Patreon, and its hosts rake in an average of $123,500 in donations per month.

Democratic socialists have won electoral victories too. The DSA is not a political party and does not run its own candidates, instead endorsing Democrats and independents who it feels are sufficiently committed to socialism. (Sex and the City actress Cynthia Nixon, for instance, received the DSA’s endorsement in her unsuccessful 2018 primary run against New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.) In the 2016 and 2017 elections, DSA-backed candidates won a smattering of races around the country, including a seat in the Virginia House of Delegates. And in 2018, Ocasio-Cortez, a 20-something organizer and complete political unknown, won a stunning Democratic primary victory over incumbent Rep. Joe Crowley. She became an overnight sensation, and in the general election she was one of two DSA members to capture House seats. Rashida Tlaib (D–Mich.) was the other.

Ocasio-Cortez’s savvy use of social media has generated tons of press coverage. She now has more Twitter followers than House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.). Conservative websites and cable channels love to pillory her, but that has only helped her become one of the most visible members of Congress.

Sanders is the only major 2020 presidential candidate to self-identify as a democratic socialist. But most of the Democrats have signed on to DSA-friendly policies. Sens. Kamala Harris (D–Calif.), Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.), and Kirsten Gillibrand (D–N.Y.) have joined Sanders in backing Medicare for All. The Green New Deal, Ocasio-Cortez’s pie-in-the-sky plan to tackle climate change while creating public works projects, has been endorsed by a host of candidates: Sanders, Warren, Harris, Gillibrand, Sens. Cory Booker (D–N.J.) and Amy Klobuchar (D–Minn.), and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro.

If the centrist standard-bearer, Vice President Joe Biden, wins the Democratic nomination, it will be a setback for the movement. But democratic socialists are not pinning all their hopes on the presidency, even as they work to install Sanders in the White House. They are patiently growing their ranks, expanding their influence, and increasing their cultural cachet.

So far, the strategy is working. If you assumed that socialism’s appalling 20th century failures would relegate it permanently to the ash heap of history, you were wrong.

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Escobar: The Un-Submersible US-Iran Stalemate

Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Asia Times,

Lost in the submarine uproar, the deadline set by Tehran for the EU-3 to support Iranian crude sales expires Sunday…

A thick veil of mystery surrounds the fire that broke out in a state of the art Russian submersible in the Barents Sea, leading to the death of 14 crew members poisoned by toxic fumes.

According to the Russian Defense Ministry, the submersible was conducting bathymetric measurements, as in examining and mapping deep sea conditions. The crew on board was composed of “unique naval specialists, high-class professionals, who conducted important research of the Earth’s hydrosphere.” Now the – so far unnamed – nuclear-powered vessel is at the Arctic port of Severomorsk, the main base of Russia’s Northern Fleet.

A serious, comprehensive military investigation is in progress. According to the Kremlin, “the Supreme Commander-in-Chief has all the information, but this data cannot be made public, because this refers to the category of absolutely classified data.”

The submersible is a Losharik. Its Russian code is AS-12 (for “Atomnaya Stantsiya” or “Nuclear Station“). NATO calls it Norsub-5. It’s been in service since 2003. Giant Delta III nuclear submarines, also able to launch ICBMs, have been modified to transport the submersible across the seas.

NATO’s spin is that the AS-12/Norsub-5 is a “spy” sub, and a major “threat” to undersea telecommunication cables, mostly installed by the West. The submersible’s operating depth is 1,000 meters and it may have operated as deep as 2,500 meters in the Arctic Ocean. It may be comparable to, or be something of an advanced version of, the US deep submergence vessel NR-1 (operating depth 910m) famous for being used to search for and recover critical parts of the space shuttle Challenger, lost in 1986.

It’s quite enlightening to place the Losharik within the scope of the latest Pentagon report about Russian strategic intentions. Amid the proverbial demonization terminology – “Russia’s gray zone tactics,” “Russian aggression.” Russian “deep-seated sense of geopolitical insecurity” – the report claims that “Russia is adopting coercive strategies that involve the orchestrated employment of military and nonmilitary means to deter and compel the US, its allies and partners prior to and after the outbreak of hostilities. These strategies must be proactively confronted, or the threat of significant armed conflict may increase.”

It’s no wonder that, considering the incandescence of US-Russia relations on the geopolitical chessboard, what happened to the Losharik fueled frenetic speculation  including totally unsubstantiated rumors it had been torpedoed by a US submarine in a firefight – on top of it, in Russian territorial waters.

Connections were made between US Vice-President Mike Pence’s suddenly being ordered to return to the White House while the Europeans were also huddled in Brussels, as President Putin had an emergency meeting with Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu.

In the end, it was nothing but mere speculation.

Submersible incident

The submersible incident – complete with the speculative plot line of a US-Russia firefight in the Arctic – did drown, at least for a while, the prime, current geopolitical incandescence: the US economic war on Iran.

Expanding on serious discussions at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Bishkek – which included Iran’s President Rouhani – and the Putin-Xi meetings in Moscow and St. Petersburg and at the G20 in Osaka, both Russia and China are fully invested in keeping Iran stable and protected from the Trump administration’s strategy of chaos.

Both Moscow and Beijing are fully aware Washington’s divide-and-rule tactics are geared towards stopping the momentum of Eurasia integration – which includes everything from bilateral trade in local currencies and bypassing the US dollar to further interconnection of the New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road Initiative, the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) and the International North-South Transportation Corridor (INSTC).

Beijing plays a shadow game, keeping very quiet on the de facto US economic blockade against one of its key Belt and Road allies. Yet the fact is China continues to buy Iranian crude, and bilateral trade is being settled in yuan and rial.

The Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges (INSTEX), the mechanism set up by the EU-3 (France, UK and Germany) to bypass the US dollar for trade between Iran and the EU after the US unilaterally abandoned the nuclear deal, or JCPOA, may finally be in place. But there’s no evidence INSTEX will be adopted by myriad European companies, as it essentially covers Iranian purchases of food and medicine.

Plan B would be for the Russian Central Bank to extend access to Iran as one the nations possibly adopting SPFS (System for Transfer of Financial Messages), the Russian mechanism for trade sanctioned by the US that bypasses SWIFT. Moscow has been working on the SPFS since 2104, when the threat to expel Russia from SWIFT became a distinct possibility.

As for Iran being accused – by the US – of “breaching” the JCPOA, that’s absolute nonsense. To start with, Tehran cannot possibly “breach” a multinational deal that was declared null and void by one of the signatories, the US.

In fact the alleged “breach” is due to the fact the EU-3 were not buying Iran’s low-enriched uranium, as promised, because of the US embargo. Washington has de facto forced the EU-3 not to buy it. Tehran duly notified all JCPOA parties that, as they are not buying it, Iran will have to store more low enriched uranium than the JCPOA allows for. If the EU-3 resumes buying it that automatically means Iran is not “breaching” anything.

Cliffhanger

Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif is correct; INSTEX, already too little too late, is not even enough, as the mechanism does not allow Tehran to continue to export oil, which is the nation’s right. As for the “breach,” Zarif says it’s easily “reversible” – as long as the EU-3 abide by their commitments.

Russian energy minister Alexander Novak concurs: “As regards restrictions on Iranian exports, we support Iran and we believe that the sanctions are unlawful; they have not been approved by the UN.”

Still, Iran continues to export crude, by all means available, especially to Asia, with the National Iranian Oil Co (NIOC) predictably shutting off satellite tracking on its fleet. But, ominously, the deadline set by Tehran for the EU-3 to actively support the sale of Iranian crude expires this coming Sunday. That’s a major cliffhanger. After that, the stalemate won’t be submersible anymore.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2JvKl8B Tyler Durden

How Advanced Robotics Will Impact Job Markets

Robots are set to have a major impact on workforces around the world over the coming years with jobs involving routine manual activity most at risk from automation.

As Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes, in order to gauge how the adoption of advanced robotics will affect the labor market, the Boston Consulting Group carried out a survey of executives and managers from 1,314 global companies in early 2019.

Infographic: How Advanced Robotics Will Impact Job Markets | Statista

You will find more infographics at Statista

The research found that 67 percent of Chinese companies are expecting a reduction in the number of employees due to automation, along with 60 percent in Poland and 57 percent in Japan. Some companies are more at risk than others with only 34 percent of organizations in Italy expecting reductions by comparison.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2L3gEyD Tyler Durden

Power Versus The Press: The Extradition Cases Of Pinochet & Assange

Authored by Disobedient Media’s Elizabeth Vos, via ConsortiumNews.com,

With Julian Assange facing possible extradition from Britain to the U.S. for publishing classified secrets, it is worth reflecting on the parallel but divergent case of a notorious Chilean dictator…

Eight months from now one of the most consequential extradition hearings in recent history will take place in Great Britain when a British court and the home secretary will determine whether WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange will be extradited to the United States to face espionage charges for the crime of journalism.

Twenty-one years ago, in another historic extradition case, Britain had to decide whether to send former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet to Spain for the crime of mass murder.

Pinochet in 1982 motorcade. (Ben2, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

In October 1998, Pinochet, whose regime became a byword for political killings, “disappearances” and torture, was arrested in London while there for medical treatment.

A judge in Madrid,  Baltasar Garzón, sought his extradition in connection with the deaths of Spanish citizens in Chile.

Citing the aging Pinochet’s inability to stand trial, the United Kingdom in 2000 ultimatelyprevented him from being extradited to Spain where he would have faced prosecution for human rights abuses.

At an early point in the proceedings, Pinochet’s lawyer, Clare Montgomery, made an argument in his defense that had nothing to do with age or poor health.   

“States and the organs of state, including heads of state and former heads of state, are entitled to absolute immunity from criminal proceedings in the national courts of other countries,” the  Guardianquoted Montgomery as saying. She argued that crimes against humanity should be narrowly defined within the context of international warfare, as the BBC reported.

Montgomery’s immunity argument was overturned by the House of Lords. But the extradition court ruled that the poor health of Pinochet, a friend of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, would prevent him from being sent to Spain.

Same Participants

Assange in 2014, while in the Ecuadorian Embassy. (Cancillería del Ecuador, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Though the cases of Pinochet and Assange are separated by more than two decades, two of the participants are the same, this time playing very different roles.

Montgomery reappeared in the Assange case to argue on behalf of a Swedish prosecutor’s right to seek a European arrest warrant for Assange.

Her argument ultimately failed. ASwedish court recently denied the European arrest warrant. But as in the Pinochet case, Montgomery helped buy time, this time allowing Swedish sexual allegations to persist and muddy Assange’s reputation.

Garzón, the Spanish judge, who had requested Pinochet’s extradition, also reappears in Assange’s case.  He is a well-known defender of human rights, “viewed by many as Spain’s most courageous legal watchdog and the scourge of bent politicians and drug warlords the world over,” as the The Independent described him a few years ago.

He now leads Assange’s legal team.

Friends and Enemies

The question that stands out is whether the British legal system will let a notorious dictator like Pinochet go but send a publisher such as Assange to the United States to face life in prison.

The tide of political sentiment has been running against Assange.

Before the U.K. home secretary signed the U.S. extradition request for Assange, leading to the magistrate’s court setting up a five-day hearing at the end of February 2020, British lawmakers publicly urged that the case against Assange proceed. Few elected officials have defended Assange (his image tainted by the unproven Swedish allegations and criticism about the 2016 U.S. election that have nothing to do with the extradition request).

Pinochet, by contrast, had friends in high places. Thatcher openly called for his release.

“[Pinochet] reportedly made a habit of sending chocolates and flowers to [Thatcher] during his twice-yearly visits to London and took tea with her whenever possible. Just two weeks before his arrest, General Pinochet was entertained by the Thatchers at their Chester Square address in London,” the BBCreported.  CNN reported on the “famously close relationship.”

Similar affection was also documented between Pinochet and former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. The Nation reported on a declassified memo of a private conversation in Santiago, Chile, in June 1976, that revealed “Kissinger’s expressions of ‘friendship,’ ‘sympathetic’ understanding and wishes for success to Pinochet at the height of his repression, when many of those crimes – torture, disappearances, international terrorism – were being committed.”

Pinochet, left, greeting Kissinger in 1976. (Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores de Chile, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Systematic, Widespread Abuse

Pinochet rose to power following a U.S.-backed, violent coup by the Chilean army on Sept. 11, 1973, which ousted the country’s democratically-elected president, the socialist Salvador Allende. The couphas been called “one of the most brutal in modern Latin American history.”

The CIA funded operations in Chile with millions of U.S. tax dollars both before and after Allende’s election, the 1975 U.S. Senate Church Committee reported. 

Although the Church Committee report found no evidence of the agency directly funding the coup, theNational Security Archive noted that the CIA “actively supported the military Junta after the overthrow of President Allende. Many of Pinochet’s officers were involved in systematic and widespread human rights abuses. Some of these were contacts or agents of the CIA or US military.”

The violence Pinochet inflicted spilled over the borders of Chile. His orders for murder have been linked to the killing of an exiled Chilean dissident, Orlando Letelier, in a car bomb blast on U.S. soil. The attack also killed Ronni Moffitt, a U.S. citizen.

Villa Grimaldi, one of the largest torture centers during the Pinochet military dictatorship. (CC BY 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons)

More than 40,000 people, many only tangentially tied to dissidents, were “disappeared,” tortured or killed during Pinochet’s 17-year reign of terror.

Pinochet’s Chile almost immediately after the coup became the laboratory for the Chicago School’s economic theory of neoliberalism, or a new laissez-faire, enforced at the point of a gun.  Thatcher and President Ronald Reagan championed a system of privatization, free trade, cuts to social services and deregulation of banking and business that has led to the greatest inequality in a century.

By contrast to these crimes and corruption, Assange has published thousands of classified documents showing U.S. and other nations’ officials engaged in the very acts of crime and corruption. 

Yet it is far from certain that Assange will receive the leniency from the British extradition process that Pinochet enjoyed.

After the dictator’s death, Christopher Hitchens wrote that the U.S. Department of Justice had an indictment for Pinochet completed for some time. “But the indictment has never been unsealed,” Hitchens reported in Slate.

Assange’s indictment, by contrast, was not only unsealed, more charges were heaped on.

Given the longstanding difficulties he has had accessing justice, it’s fair to say that the U.K. and the rest of the Western world are committing a slow-motion “enforced disappearance” of Assange.

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

Carmageddon Continues: New Vehicle Sales Plunge To “Horribly Mature” 1999 Levels

The auto industry continues to look like a bursting bubble in progress and all around sad state of affairs, despite low rates and the “prosperity” of the stock market hitting new all time highs. Meanwhile, under the surface of those numbers, the actual economy – especially in autos – is telling a different story.

New vehicle deliveries, combining fleet sales and retail sales, were down 1.5% in Q2 to 4.5 million vehicles, according to Wolf Street.

For the first half of the year, vehicle deliveries fell 2.4% to 8.4 million vehicles. This puts the pace for new vehicle sales on track to fall below 17 million for the year, which would be the worst level since 2014. Further, it has lowered estimates for the full year to 16.95 million units delivered, on par with a “horribly mature market” in 1999. In addition to a struggling consumer, these lowered estimates are also result of rising interest rates and competition from off-lease vehicles. 

This has resulted, simply, in fewer customers splurging on new cars.

As we noted on Friday morning, it’s likely Ford and General Motors are breaking a sweat after the latest slate of economic data hit the wires. Though its overall truck sales held up, those of Ford’s signature F-Series pickup truck fell over last year in June. GM was not as fortunate with sales of its Silverado and Sierra trucks down, especially on the heavy-duty side of the line-up. With the caveat that fleet sales can indeed be trucks and comprised 24% of Fiat Chrysler’s June sales, Ram pickups were nonetheless the standout as a fresh redesign and fat incentives drove sales up over 2018.

Ford’s sales fell 4.1% in Q2. Car sales at Ford plunged another 21.4% to just 110,195 units, as customers continue to favor new pick up trucks, SUVs and vans instead. Truck sales rose 7.5% but F-series pickups fell 1.3%, cannibalized by Ford’s midsized pick up, the Ranger. However, even the company’s SUV sales look ugly – they fell 8.6% to 215,898 units.

According to newly released data on Friday, Ford also posted an abysmal quarter in China, selling a total of 154,042 vehicles in the second quarter, a 21.7% decrease compared to the same period last year. 

General Motors saw sales fall 1.5% in Q2 after plunging 7% in Q1. Fiat Chrysler sales fell 0.5% in Q2 and the company announced that it will abandon reporting deliveries on a monthly basis, following in the footsteps of Ford and GM. Here’s a better look at Q2 numbers for most auto makers:

No matter how you look at it, 2019 has been ugly:

  • Year to date, Toyota Motor sales are down 3.1% to 1,152,108 vehicles.

  • Year to date, Honda Motor sales have fallen 1.4% to 776,995 vehicles.

  • Year to date, Nissan sales are down 8.2% to 717,036 vehicles.

  • Year to date, Fiat Chrysler sales are down 2% to 1,096,110 vehicles.

  • Year to date, total GM auto sales in the U.S. are down 4.2% to 1,412,499.

  • Over the first half of 2019, total Ford sales are down 2.9% to 1,240,585.

To try and continue capitalizing on truck demand, automakers are flooding the market “with efficient and restructured versions of pickup trucks”. And the industry – not unlike most market participants across all sectors in general – is hoping for help from the Fed. A rate cut this summer could help drive more business to dealerships heading into the middle of the third quarter. 

Recall, we reported just days ago that more than 25% of June’s 41,977 announced job cuts came in the automotive industry, according to Managing Economist for Refinitiv Jeoff Hall. Hall commented on Twitter that the industry’s 10,904 redundancies were the most in seven months and the second most in seven years.

Hall also noted that excluding autos, there were only 31,073 job cuts in June, the fewest in 11 months, in low-normal range.

About a month ago we focused on layoffs in the auto industry, noting that China, the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada and the United States have all seen at least 38,000 job cuts over the last six months.

Recall, at the beginning of June we noted that Bank of America had said that “the auto cycle had peaked”. 

While Bank of America attributed much of the downturn in the manufacturing sector to the ongoing trade war, it singled out the automotive industry as a specific area for concern. Calling the problem a “classic story of demand/supply mismatch”, the bank pointed out that producers continue to ramp up output at a time when demand has softened. It’s easy to see in the two following charts – one showing auto sales topping out and the other showing output and production not falling.

 

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Why Gold Is Money: A Periodic Perspective

Authord by Nicholas LePan via Visual Capitalist,

The economist John Maynard Keynes famously called gold a “barbarous relic”, suggesting that its usefulness as money is an artifact of the past. In an era filled with cashless transactions and hundreds of cryptocurrencies, this statement seems truer today than in Keynes’ time.

However, gold also possesses elemental properties that has made it an ideal metal for money throughout history.

Sanat Kumar, a chemical engineer from Columbia University, broke down the periodic table to show why gold has been used as a monetary metal for thousands of years.

The Periodic Table

The periodic table organizes 118 elements in rows by increasing atomic number (periods) and columns (groups) with similar electron configurations.

Just as in today’s animation, let’s apply the process of elimination to the periodic table to see why gold is money:

  • Gases and Liquids
    Noble gases (such as argon and helium), as well as elements such as hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, fluorine and chlorine are gaseous at room temperature and standard pressure. Meanwhile, mercury and bromine are liquids. As a form of money, these are implausible and impractical.

  • Lanthanides and Actinides
    Next, lanthanides and actinides are both generally elements that can decay and become radioactive. If you were to carry these around in your pocket they could irradiate or poison you.

  • Alkali and Alkaline-Earth Metals
    Alkali and alkaline earth metals are located on the left-hand side of the periodic table, and are highly reactive at standard pressure and room temperature. Some can even burst into flames.

  • Transition, Post Transition Metals, and Metalloids
    There are about 30 elements that are solid, nonflammable, and nontoxic. For an element to be used as money it needs to be rare, but not too rare. Nickel and copper, for example, are found throughout the Earth’s crust in relative abundance.

  • Super Rare and Synthetic Elements
    Osmium only exists in the Earth’s crust from meteorites. Meanwhile, synthetic elements such as rutherfordium and nihonium must be created in a laboratory.

Once the above elements are eliminated, there are only five precious metals left: platinum, palladium, rhodium, silver and gold. People have used silver as money, but it tarnishes over time. Rhodium and palladium are more recent discoveries, with limited historical uses.

Platinum and gold are the remaining elements. Platinum’s extremely high melting point would require a furnace of the Gods to melt back in ancient times, making it impractical. This leaves us with gold. It melts at a lower temperature and is malleable, making it easy to work with.

Gold as Money

Gold does not dissipate into the atmosphere, it does not burst into flames, and it does not poison or irradiate the holder. It is rare enough to make it difficult to overproduce and malleable to mint into coins, bars, and bricks. Civilizations have consistently used gold as a material of value.

Perhaps modern societies would be well-served by looking at the properties of gold, to see why it has served as money for millennia, especially when someone’s wealth could disappear in a click.

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

Japan Is Once Again Inflating A Massive Real Estate Bubble

Real estate firms in Japan are once again “entering dangerous territory,” according to Bloomberg. S&P Global Ratings said on Friday that the sector’s debt levels are now higher than the nation’s bubble era.

 

It is bringing back memories of the 1980s, when the grounds of the Tokyo Imperial Palace were being proclaimed as more valuable than all of the real estate in California. This proclamation was then famously followed by a quarter of a century of stagnation in the country’s real estate sector. 

S&P said:

“Japan’s real estate market is peaking out and ready to head down. Although the conditions in the office leasing market are solid, there are signs of a slowdown in corporate earnings, particularly among manufacturers. In addition, we expect major upticks in central Tokyo office building supply in 2020 and 2023.”

Companies that are said to be most at risk include Mitsubishi Estate Co., Mitsui Fudosan Co., Sumitomo Realty & Development Co. and Nomura Real Estate Holdings Inc.

Low interest rates in Japan haven’t prevented domestic lenders from seeing their profitability weaken, mostly due to lower net interest margins. These lenders have increased loans to developers because demand from other corporate customers is relatively weak.

This, in turn, has prompted developers to take on large redevelopment projects and acquisitions. S&P thinks that financial leverage in the sector is only going to increase as firms use more debt to finance its growth.

S&P concluded: 

“If banks reduce their loans to real-estate companies as financial conditions deteriorate, they could pull down property prices and push up debt financing costs. This, in turn, could worsen the financial standing of real estate majors.”

    via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2XQ9Kmq Tyler Durden

    Corporate America’s Virtue-Signaling Is Opportunist, Dangerous, And Undermines The Spirit Of Capitalism

    Authored by Robert Bridge via RT.com,

    Once upon a time, the raison d’être of US companies was to simply make a buck. Those days are long gone. Today, corporations are in the business of radicalizing the country by taking sides in cultural standoffs.

    Just in time for the Fourth of July festivities, which this year celebrates the 243rd anniversary of America’s independence, Nike decided to ignite a political firestorm the size of a Chinese fireworks factory, thereby further dividing the nation.

    The Fortune 500 tennis shoe maker, with $30 billion in annual global sales, announced it would cancel the release of its ‘Air Max 1’ trainers after former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick told the company “he and others” found the Betsy Ross-era flag that adorned the sneaker “offensive.” Why? Because the symbol was stitched at a time when slavery was still part of the fledgling nation’s experience. And since a handful of right-wing ‘white supremacist’ groups have reportedly been seen waving this flag (as well as former President Barack Obama, incidentally), which celebrates the original 13 US colonies and their successful fight against the British crown, suddenly it is deemed toxic and unworthy of the mighty Nike.

    According to this warped logic, anything that came to fruition when slavery was still a thing – up to and including the Declaration of Independence, signed on July 4, 1776 – is eligible for eradication in history’s great dumpster fire.

    So who is Colin Kaepernick, and why should Nike kneel to his demands? It might be better to say what Kaepernick is not. He is not a historian, he is not a marketing executive, and he is not even a professional football player. Today, Kaepernick could best be described as an activist and an agitator. In 2017, after a year of refusing to stand during the US national anthem in protest against police brutality, he opted out of his NFL contract, eventually settling with the league in a confidential agreement rumored to be worth many millions of dollars.

    Incidentally, the ex-athlete starred in a 2018 Nike ad where he was featured before a huge American flag as the narrator said, “Believe in something even if it means sacrificing everything.” Does “sacrificing everything” include the very country of your birth, as well as the very flag it represents? Is that really the sort of controversial message a US corporation, built on the solid foundation of American freedom and ingenuity, should be endorsing?

    In any case, the bigger question here has little to do with Colin Kaepernick. The real question is: why do so many US corporations feel the need to take sides in the nation’s ongoing culture wars, triggered by political correctness and ‘social justice’ theory gone stark-raving mad? After all, this is not the first time America has passed through the fires of an existential challenge without the need for corporate sponsorship. In the 1960s and 70s, the country nearly tore itself apart during the anti-Vietnam War and Civil Rights battles, when violence on the streets between protesters and police was a daily occurrence. These social volcanoes brought to the surface a number of great orators and leaders, like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, individuals who did not cheapen their messages and work by appearing on TV with a Coca Cola, for example, or Nike footwear.

    Without subscribing to any absurd Illuminati conspiracy theories, it would seem that the largest US corporations have an agenda that goes far beyond the simple capitalistic ambition of turning a profit. Much like the Silicon Valley titans of tech, many Fortune 500 companies simply cannot resist expressing their political views, especially in these turbulent ‘Times of Trump’ when so many otherwise intelligent people have lost their minds. After all, what could be the purpose of a corporation endorsing a fiercely contestable message that alienates at least 50 percent of the American population, not to mention their consumer base? 

    The Gillette Company provides perhaps the best example of a corporation abandoning its primary mission – in this case, selling razor blades and shaving cream – to endear itself to the social warrior lunatic fringe.

    Despite a massive public outcry (1.4 million thumbs down and counting) following Gillette’s puke-inducing lecture ad on ‘toxic masculinity’ which showed American men abandoning their backyard barbecues en masse to (finally) teach their malevolent male offspring that bullying is bad, they waded back into the deep end of the public swimming pool, this time to make a pitch for transgender lifestyles. Without venturing into the politics of the idea, which essentially says that men and women can become the opposite sex regardless of their biological sex at birth, it is enough to wonder exactly what the company hopes to gain by appealing to an infinitesimal segment of the population that risks – once again – alienating millions of dedicated consumers who just want a close shave.  

    Even ice cream companies now feel the need to flash their political identities while diving headlong into the cultural bloodbath. Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, for example, last year unveiled their ‘Pecan Resist’ brand, handcrafted to appeal to those Americans who are “fighting President Trump’s regressive agenda.” Yum! And just like that, the subsidiary of the globe-straddling Unilever Corporation alienated millions of US Republicans who just want to enjoy a good bowl of ice cream, much like their Democratic counterparts. Again, the question must be asked: what kind of corporate strategy actively aims to lose half of its consumer base? Or have these corporations morphed into such vast money-making empires that they can afford to not give a good damn?

    In these dizzying days of political correctness a company can get embroiled in a cultural imbroglio without even trying. In 2012, for example, Jack Phillips, the proud owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood Colorado, refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple over his religious convictions. The couple sued and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court. Phillips was eventually found within his rights to refuse the request on the basis of the freedom of expression. That is a far cry, however, from a Fortune 500 company that actively dumps its ‘personal beliefs’ on the political landscape.

    For better or for worse, corporations today have come to dominate nearly every aspect of our waking hours, to the point that it is nearly impossible to imagine performing the simplest tasks without them. Now it seems these monstrosities have become confident enough in their economic and political power that they can lecture consumers on modern issues now dividing the nation. That approach seems to have very little in common with the spirit of capitalism, itself a complicated and controversial project, without the need for gratuitous virtue signaling that exasperates so many people.

    Considering everything that is at stake, it would seem far more expedient for corporations to stick to the capitalist credo of making a profit and distance themselves from the cultural battles now raging across the land. Nothing less than the very survival of American democracy, which provides the groundwork for free markets and capitalism, is at stake.

    via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2FW33Fb Tyler Durden