Tag: news

Authored by Bloomberg macro commentator and former Lehman trader, Mark Cudmore

Under the looming threat of a major trade war between the world’s two largest economies, it turns out that successful navigation of financial markets boils down to focusing on facts over speculation. Who’d have thunk it?

The newswires have been dominated by the theme of trade wars for months, but analysts are increasingly finding it difficult to explain asset price moves through that lens.

U.S. equities at five-month highs, gold at one-year lows, the yen at five-month lows and Treasuries having their tightest yield range in almost 20 years on the week that tariffs were implemented. Where’s the risk aversion and the panic? Where’s the haven bid?

It turns out trade wars aren’t a key driver of markets, yet. Economic forecasts aren’t shifting dramatically, policy makers such as the Fed’s Powell aren’t letting the issue drive monetary settings and surprisingly few company owners are making a big deal about it in earnings calls and guidance forecasts.

If your economy or business is struggling, you can blame it on trade wars (whether validly or not), but for most it’s a risk to keep an eye on rather than a key decision input right now.

“Wait a minute!” I hear you cry, “What about China stocks, emerging markets and commodities?” Sure, they’ve been trading terribly for months, but is that more about trade wars or something else?

My colleague Garfield Reynolds provided some excellent analysis to show that China’s equity rout is much more about the domestic deleveraging drive rather than any trade war impact.

In turn, it makes complete sense that both emerging market assets and commodities would suffer during a period of China deleveraging and Fed tightening. No need to attribute it to trade wars even if that further hinders sentiment at the margin.

All this isn’t to suggest that trade wars are irrelevant. They may yet become the dominant driver for all markets and they are already having an impact at the margin — delaying investment decisions, hurting individual companies and disrupting supply chains.

But, traders and investors are also realistic enough to register that the real economic impact of already-imposed tariffs is minor; that there’s a long lag that gives time for compromise before a much larger wave of duties gets implemented; that it’s easier and quicker to unwind tariffs than set them up, which incentivizes a hard-line approach; that China is refusing to intensify the spat by choosing to react rather than take aggressive action; and that Trump has a history of quick policy U-turns, displayed most relevantly in relation to China technology company ZTE Corporation.

The conclusion of all that is quite bullish for many risk assets globally, particularly U.S. equities. Although a corollary is that China’s upcoming policy decisions take on even more relevance than usual.

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Submitted by Matthew Bennett, an independent journalist in Spain. Support his analysis on Patreon.

El País reported on Wednesday that Spain’s struggling new S-80 submarine procurement programme had run into another problem. After previously being found too heavy to resurface, the boats, which are 81m long and weigh 3,000-tons, were now too long to fit in the submarine pens at the Cartagena naval base, meaning millions would need to be spent extending them. The submarines were lengthened—and re-baptised the S-80 Plus—to fix the weight problem.

“The MoD will have to make the docks at the Cartagena base bigger because the new submarine doesn’t fit”, the paper headlined, reporting the new €16 million overrun would go into the nearly €4 billion project cost, or nearly a billion euros per submarine.

El Pais published an infographic suggesting the new length of the boats was the new reason the submarine pens would have to be extended lengthways.

“For the four submarines to fit”, wrote the paper: “the pens will need to be dragged and lengthened”.

An irate Ministry of Defence spokesman told me there was “nothing new” in the El País story and confirmed that the extension of the width—not the length—of the submarine pens at the Cartagena naval base had been in budget documents “since before 2009”.

That widening of the pens, by two metres, is part of a package that also includes battery workshops and IT updates to deal with the new boats.

“There is no modification of the project or decision taken in the MoD that implies the lengthening of the pens for the submarines”, he said. “It is possible that they won’t need lengthening because they don’t have to fit on the dock lengthways anyway.”

Context

Spain’s S80 diesel-electric (non-nuclear) submarine programme dates from 2003, when José María Aznar (PP) was still Prime Minister. Four boats are planned, with the first now due to be handed over from shipbuilder Navantia to the Spanish Navy in 2022, and the last one in 2027.

As well as the weight problem and today’s confusion about the submarine pens, the project is also attempting to develop an innovative ethanol “air-independent propulsion” (AIP) system that would allow each boat to remain submerged and operate for up to two weeks without surfacing.

El País reported in its story on Wednesday that the plan was to introduce the Spanish AIP system, based on bioethanol, on the third S-80 submarine, not due for delivery until 2026, but that this part of the project still had to be proven to work properly.

What’s at stake?

Billions of euros and Spain’s reputation as a military shipbuilder. Defence procurement projects are notoriously costly and frequently require even bigger budgets than are initially pencilled in to reach the finish line.

Britain’s Type 45 destroyer programme came in at 30% more than the initial budget—at a billion pounds a ship—and the first one entered service three years late.

In 2015, Politico reported America’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter programme was “$163 billion over budget, seven years behind schedule, and will cost taxpayers about twice as much as sending a man to the moon”.

In 2017, Reuters reported the “20 billion-euro” European A400M military transport aircraft project “continues to encounter technical problems, seven years after winning a 3.5 billion-euro bailout from seven NATO nations”.

More broadly, should a country be ploughing so many billions into military hardware when it has other demands on its budget? Or should it buy vehicles and equipment off-the-shelf but manufactured somewhere else?

* * *

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Late last month, the Fed declared that six of the country’s biggest banks needed to scale back their plans for returning cash to shareholders to strengthen their capital buffers, a striking reminder that banks shouldn’t be overeager to put the legacy of the financial crisis behind them. Perhaps this is why, during a private round table discussion last week that Timothy Geithner, Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke, three officials who helped combat (and many would argue also helped cause) the financial crisis warned that the lessons of the financial crisis are already being forgotten, according to the Associated Press,

Paulson, who was Treasury Secretary when Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy in September 2008, said that as banks scramble to return money to their investors, “it’s important that people focus on the lessons” of the crisis. “We are not sure people remember everything they need to remember.”

The roundtable took place ahead of a meeting in September at the Brookings Institution (former Fed Chair Bernanke’s current employer) where officials from the Fed, Treasury and other federal agencies will discuss how the US can prepare for the next crisis. The meeting appears to be a counterbalance to the Trump administration’s “deregulatory zeal” as lawmakers and leaders of federal agencies work to undo or sideline some aspects of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform bill. Though all three men agreed that the reversal implemented so far by the Trump administration had been “sensible.”

Still, while the safeguards implemented by the law will help the banking system fend off smaller crises, an extreme crisis could pose an existential threat.

“We’ve got better defenses against the more mild, typical sets of shocks that happen to economies and financial systems but in the extreme crisis probably less degree of freedom, more constraints than would be ideal,” former Treasury Secretary and New York Federal Reserve Bank President Geithner said.

Bernanke and Paulson complained that, if another serious crisis were to break out, Congress hasn’t allowed the FDIC and the Treasury’s Exchange Stabilization Fund enough flexibility to respond adequately, per Bloomberg. 

“There is some concern there,” said former Fed Chairman Bernanke, who is now a distinguished fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, though he also noted that regulators are now more attuned to potential systemic risks.

And that’s extremely important, because there’s nothing more dangerous than failing to act, Paulson said.

“If we don’t act, that is the most certain fiscal or economic crisis we will have,” said Paulson, who chairs his own institute in Chicago. “It will slowly strangle us.”

Bernanke also took a few minutes to defend his handling of the crisis, while warning about the social ructions that often result from economic downturns.

The resulting economic discontent, fed by widening financial inequality, contributed to Trump’s presidential victory. Similarly weak recoveries fueled populist backlashes in other nations, too.

“Financial crises, particularly big ones, do tend to get followed by a population reaction; that was certainly the case in the 1930s,” Bernanke said, alluding to the rise of Hitler in Germany and other fascist movements.

[…]

The three agreed that one of their mistakes during the crisis was failing to adequately explain publicly why billions in bailout dollars were being provided to the big banks, whose executives were able to keep their huge bonuses even though they ran the institutions that caused the crisis.

The three asserted that they had no choice but to use taxpayer money to stabilize the financial institutions — money that was eventually repaid — because the only alternative would have been to allow the entire banking system to collapse, with far graver consequences for the country.

“The public was angry; they wanted to see us, if not punish the banks, (then) put limits on bonuses,” Paulson said. “I was totally ineffective at having the American people understand that what we were doing was for them and not for Wall Street.”

Geithner, who was the head of the New York Fed during the crisis and later served as Treasury Secretary under Obama, said that one of the most enduring lessons from the crisis was that preventative measures (like, say, the Glass-Steagall Act) are absolutely vital. Yet, it doesn’t appear that the federal government has learned this lesson.

“We let the financial system outgrow the protections we put in place in the Great Depressions and…made the system very fragile and vulnerable to panic,” Geithner said. “One of the most powerful lessons from this crisis should be that you want to work very hard to make sure that your defenses are robust.”

While the government has tightened its oversight of the banking system, a ballooning budget deficit has caused public debt to swell. And soon, the Trump tax cuts will pile on even more debt. On the Fed side, interest rates remain low, limiting the central bank’s ability to respond if a crisis were to break out tomorrow. Meanwhile, “elevated valuation pressures” (in everything from equities to home valuations) and extreme levels of consumer debt provide myriad risks for the economy.

With all of this in mind, it doesn’t seem like the banking system has “forgotten” the lessons of the financial crisis. It’s more like they were never learned in the first place.

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Authored by Soeren Kern via The Gatestone Institute,

A court in Gelsenkirchen has ruled that deporting a self-declared Islamist – suspected of being a bodyguard of the former al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden – was “grossly unlawful” and ordered him returned to Germany.

The case has cast a spotlight on the dysfunctional nature of Germany’s deportation system, as well as on Germany’s politicized judicial system, which on human rights grounds is making it nearly impossible to expel illegal migrants, including those who pose security threats.

The 42-year-old failed asylum seeker from Tunisia – identified by German authorities as Sami A., but known in his native country as Sami Aidoudi – had been living in Germany since 1997. Aidoudi, a Salafist Islamist, is believed by German authorities to have spent time in Afghanistan and Pakistan before the al-Qaeda attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001. Since then, he was under surveillance by German intelligence for propagating Islamist teachings and attempting to radicalize young Muslims. He had “far reaching” relationships with Salafist and jihadist networks, according to an official report leaked to the German newsmagazine, Focus.

Aidoudi’s asylum request was rejected in 2007 after allegations surfaced that he had undergone military training at an al-Qaeda jihadi camp in Afghanistan between 1999 and 2000. During his training, he had allegedly worked as a bodyguard for Osama bin-Laden. Aidoudi denied the charges and claimed to have been studying during that time in Karachi, Pakistan.

Sami Aidoudi (left) lived in Germany since 1997, until he was deported to his homeland of Tunisia on July 13, 2018. He is alleged to have undergone military training at an al-Qaeda jihadi camp in Afghanistan between 1999 and 2000. He had allegedly worked as a bodyguard for Osama bin-Laden (right) during his training. (Image sources: Aidoudi – SpiegelTV video screenshot; Bin Laden – Wikimedia Commons)

Despite rejecting Aidoudi’s asylum application, German courts repeatedly blocked his deportation out of fears that he could be tortured or mistreated in his homeland.

In April 2017, for instance, a court in Münster ruled that Aidoudi faced “the considerable likelihood” of “torture and inhumane or degrading treatment” if he returned to Tunisia.

In April 2018, Aidoudi’s continued presence in Germany sparked public outrage when it emerged that he had been living in Bochum for more than a decade with his German wife and their four children – at taxpayer expense – even though German intelligence agencies had classified him as a security threat.

In response to an inquiry from the anti-immigration party Alternative for Germany (AfD), the government in North Rhine-Westphalia confirmed that for years Aidoudi had been receiving €1,168 ($1,400) each month in welfare and child-support payments.

In May 2018, Germany’s Constitutional Court ruled that another Tunisian jihadi – identified only as 37-year-old Heikel S., accused of involvement in the March 2015 jihadi attack on the Bardo museum in Tunis – could be deported to his homeland.

Interior Minister Horst Seehofer seized on this ruling and called on immigration authorities to make Aidoudi’s case a top priority. “My goal is to achieve deportation,” he said.

On June 25, Aidoudi was detained after Seehofer ordered immigration authorities to expedite deportation proceedings.

A few weeks later, on July 13, before dawn, Aidoudi, escorted by four federal police officers and a doctor, was placed on a specially chartered Learjet and flown from Düsseldorf to Tunisia. Aidoudi’s deportation cost German taxpayers nearly €80,000 ($95,000), according to Focus magazine.

Although the Gelsenkirchen Administrative Court had blocked Aidoudi’s deportation the night before, the decision was not passed on to immigration authorities until the next morning — after the plane was already airborne.

When the court learned of Aidoudi’s deportation, it demanded that he be returned to Germany. The court said that Aidoudi’s deportation had infringed upon “fundamental principles of the rule of law.” The judges, apparently sensing that they had been duped, complained that German immigration authorities had failed to reveal to them the time of Aidoudi’s flight and implied that those authorities had “knowingly” defied the court’s order.

The next day, on July 14, Tunisian authorities added fuel to the fire by saying that they had no plans to return Aidoudi to Germany. “We have a sovereign justice system that is investigating him,” a spokesperson for Tunisia’s public prosecutor’s office, Sofiene Sliti, told the DPA German news agency.

On July 17, Aidoudi claimed that his deportation was “pure racism” and implied that he would file a lawsuit against the German government. In an interview with Bild, he said:

“I was kidnapped from Germany. At three o’clock in the morning they simply took me away. I told the police: ‘This is not possible. A court has blocked my deportation.’ But they said the order had come from the top and that I could not do anything about it. I was not even allowed to see my lawyer. They also prevented me from contacting my wife and children.”

Seehofer blamed the deportation on a “communication failure” but his critics accused him of knowingly trying to out-maneuver the German courts.

Justice Minister Katarina Barley, a Social Democrat, said:

“What independent courts decide, must apply. When the authorities choose which judicial decisions they will follow and which they will not, that is the end of the rule of law.”

In an interview with Süddeutsche Zeitung, Greens leader Robert Habeck said:

“Either it is absolutely embarrassing chaos, or it stinks to high heaven, because the authorities at the interior ministry wanted to make an example [of Sami A].

“First and foremost, we need to clarify whether Interior Minister Horst Seehofer personally tried to circumvent the court’s decision.

“In any event, the damage that has now been done is much greater than waiting for the court decision. The authorities are weak and stupid, especially in times when trust in institutions is dwindling.”

By contrast, critics of Germany’s deportation system called for changes to the existing laws. The CDU/CSU parliamentary group member Axel Fischer said that under the current system, “The personal rights of Islamists are given more weight than the security interests of the German people.” He added that current legislation “gives the impression that it is virtually impossible to deport Islamist perpetrators to countries such as Tunisia, regardless of how dangerous they are.”

In an editorial published before Idoudi’s expulsion, the newspaper Bildcommented on Germany’s dysfunctional deportation system:

“The deportation lunacy of ex-bin Laden bodyguard Sami A. is never-ending. German authorities still see no way to send the top Salafist back to his homeland — even though Tunisia’s Minister for Human Rights, Mehdi Ben Gharbia, assured Bild that there is NO risk of torture in Tunisia.

“Since 2006, the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) and the state government of North Rhine-Westphalia have been trying in vain to get rid of the former confidant of the mass murderer Osama bin Laden.

“Although the al-Qaeda man (living in Bochum since 1997) is classified by the constitutional protection as a ‘dangerous preacher,’ he continues to be tolerated in Germany, and collects 1,100 euros in monthly support.

“In the words of Alexander Dobrindt, a Member of the German Bundestag, ‘Salafists such as Sami A. have no business in Germany and should be deported. Germany should not be a retirement retreat for jihadists.'”

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Amazon will account for accounts for 49.1% of all online retail sales, up from 43% the year before, if they clear an expected $258 billion in sales this year.

The stunning figure provided by research firm eMarketer is tempered by the fact that Amazon’s near-majority share of online sales accounts for just 5% of all retail sales. Amazon is set to rake in $258.22 billion in US retail sales in 2018, while annual growth has jumped 29.2% year-over-year, reports Tech Crunch.

Fueling Amazon’s rise is a robust network of third-party sellers and a rapidly expanding range of goods from groceries to fashion – made all the more attractive for subscribers of their Prime services. 

Now, it is fast approaching a tipping point where more people will be spending money online with Amazon, than with all other retailers — combined. Amazon’s next-closest competitor, eBay, a very, very distant second at 6.6 percent, and Apple in third at 3.9 percent. Walmart, the world’s biggest retailer when counting physical stores, has yet to really hit the right note in e-commerce and comes in behind Apple with 3.7 percent of online sales in the US. –TC

Popular categories:

The most popular category on Amazon is consumer electronics and tech, with projected sales of $65.82 billion according to eMarketer; around a quarter of total turnover. Second in line is apparel and accessories, which should account for roughly $39.88 billion, followed by health, personal care and beauty with $16 billion. In last place is food and beverage trailing at $4.75 billion.

EMarketer arrives at their estimates “based on an analysis of quantitative and qualitative data from research firms, government agencies, media firms and public companies, plus interviews with top executives at publishers, ad buyers and agencies.” 

What’s more, Amazon is expected to drive over 80% of ecommerce growth this year.

Bread and butter

By in large Amazon’s largest cash cow is their Marketplace – a third-party sales platform on which sellers can use Amazon’s retail and logistics infrastructure to hawk their wares. It currently accounts for 68% of all retail sales – or around $176 billion. Direct sales from Amazon comprise the remainder. 

It’s no wonder that so many other online commerce businesses are chasing the marketplace model, which essentially creates transactions on two fronts for the platform operator, thereby improving margins that might be cut by not selling items directly. –TC

“The continued growth of Amazon’s Marketplace makes sense on a number of levels,” said Andrew Lipsman, eMarketer’s principal analyst. “More buyers transacting more often on Amazon will naturally attract third-party sellers. But because third-party transactions are also more profitable, Amazon has every incentive to make the process as seamless as possible for those selling on the platform.”

Given that Amazon now accounts for roughly half of all online sales, one might think it’s ripe for an antitrust investigation. That said, all of Amazon’s sales only amount to five percent of all retail sales across the country. 

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Authored by Peter Korzun via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

The US-organized biennial Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) is the largest international exercise held in and around the Hawaiian Islands and Southern California. The RIMPAC- 2018, the 26th exercise in the series, is running from June 27 to Aug.2 under the motto “Capable, Adaptive, Partners.”

It involves 46 surface ships, five submarines, 18 national land forces, more than 200 aircraft and 25,000 personnel from twenty five nations. Defending sea lanes is the main mission and there are always political connotations.

Besides, many things happened for the first time to make the event stand out this year.

It was the first time Brazil, Israel, Sri Lanka and Vietnam were invited. Brazil had to reject the invitation at the last moment for internal reasons. Chile, a non-founding RIMPAC nation, had never before held a top leadership position (component commander) like this year, joining Canadian, Japanese and Australian admirals. The Philippines increased it participation, and Malaysia sent a warship – something it had not done in previous years.

For the first time, Israel is among the participants. It demonstrates the US readiness to counter Iran. Israeli sailors can share the experience of mine warfare operations, air defense and conducting commando raids at sea. This year, Israel is also participating for the first time ever in a US European Command exercise. Swift Response is held in Poland, Germany, Latvia, and Lithuania this month. 40 Israeli paratroopers will team with the US Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade in an operation to seize the Miroslawiec airfield in Poland. So, Israel goes global.

RIMPAC-2018 features live firing of a Long Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM) from a US Air Force aircraft, surface to ship missiles by the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force, and a Naval Strike Missile (NSM) by the US Army – the first time a land-based unit is participating in a live-fire event.

For the first time, the US 3d Fleet commander organized the RIMPAC Innovation Fair in Pearl Harbor (June 28-July 2) to showcase emerging and new technologies, which can be used by navies and marine corps.

This is also the first time a US newly created regional command is overseeing the exercise. On May 30, Secretary of Defense James Mattis announced that US Pacific Command (PACOM), which oversees all US military forces in Asia, had changed its name to be called the Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM) to reflect “the increasing connectivity between the Indian and Pacific Oceans,” as well as America’s determination to remain the dominant power in both.

The US Navy has stepped up patrols in the proximity of waters adjacent to China-claimed islands in the South China Sea (as has China), raising the prospect of clashes. “When it comes down to introducing what they have done in the South China Sea, there are consequences,” US Defense Secretary James Mattis warned China at the Shangri La Strategic Dialogue in Singapore on June 2. The Pentagon is planning to conduct “a steady drumbeat” of naval operations in waters abutting the disputed islands.

Now the main thing – China’s RIMPAC invitation was revoked in May. China first participated in the RIMPAC exercises in 2014. The formal reason given by US military is the “militarization” of artificial islands in the South China Sea. Secretary Mattis said he did not expect countries to choose between the US and China “because a friend does not demand you choose among them.” The Chinese Navy has sent a Type 815 intelligence gathering ship to observe the exercise.

The list of nations invited to the RIMPAC-2018 obviously reflects the US desire to strengthen its military ties with states on China’s perimeter in an effort to confine it. The US opposes China’s ambitious “One Belt, One Road” economic initiative and encircling the country with US-friendly actors is a vital component of the policy to counter it.

The US is testing its combat capability in the two oceans and is doing it with numerous partners. This month, USS Essex amphibious assault ship (jump-jet carrier) with Marine Corps F-35Bs onboard sailed into the Pacific – the second ever deployment of small-deck flattop with the new the aircraft onboard. The F-35 aircraft is known for its stealth design and advanced sensors and controls. Israel was the first nation to ever use the F-35 in combat. This year, it sent the stealth aircraft to attack Iranian training bases and weapons depots in Syria. The plans to sell F-35s to Taiwan are under consideration in the United States. If the deal goes through, the relations with China will greatly deteriorate – the eventuality RIMPAC is taking into account. The voices inside Congress are calling for approval of the sale.

RIMPAC is a tool of foreign policy. As US military leaders say it’s about “building relationships”, adopting an ‘I’m the popular kid on the block’ approach to all this,” as Peter Layton, visiting fellow at the Griffith Asia Institute in Australia, put it. “We work together, build relationships here, so later on … it’s hard to turn down a friend,” said Vice Adm. John Alexander, commander of the US Navy’s 3rd Fleet at the opening ceremony. The United States demonstrates its “openness” and the ability to bring together many nations while isolating China and Russia.

RIMPAC could have been an event of friendship and peace to bring all the seafaring nations of the region together.  Germany’s Kieler Woche (Kiel Week) maritime holiday is an example of how it can be done at global scale.

Keeping such large and powerful navies as that of Russia and China out turns RIMPAC into an event organized to bolster US foreign policy goals and challenge its rivals. Actually, it’s US, not international, because other participants have no say in the decision-making process and have to succumb to what America’s commanders tell them while it may not meet their foreign policy goals. The exercise was initially conceived to promote peace and deter terrorists in an international effort but has turned into a demonstration of US readiness to use force against the nations of the region.

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Chinese shipbuilders are constructing eight new submarines to protect its ally Pakistan with an aim to counter India. Currently, Pakistan’s Navy has ten subs, which suggests their submarine fleet could expand by 80 percent upon delivery, expected in the mid to late 2020s. Relations between both countries are incredibly complex, as the Kashmir conflict and the numerous military disputes on the Line of Control (LoC) have intensified in recent years.

According to unnamed sources, as quoted per Zee News, under Project Hangor, China’s shipbuilding industry could soon be delivering over eight new subs to Pakistan. India’s underwater warfare program is perceived to be far superior to Pakistan. As of now, India has sixteen submarines while Pakistan has about ten. However, China wants to scale up Pakistan’s underwater warfare capabilities to defend the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).

China and Pakistan have a close strategic relationship as both countries have supported each other financially, strategically and militarily. The move to increase Pakistan’s submarine fleet comes at a time when CPEC, a $50 billion collection of infrastructure projects throughout Pakistan that intends to modernize Pakistan’s energy infrastructure, transportation networks, and economy, threatens to reshape global trade and disrupt the status quo.

Connecting all of Eurasia and Africa to China through the One Belt, One Road (OBOR) is seen as a significant “security vulnerabilities” for the United States, said Kurt Tidd, chief of the US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), who spoke with US lawmakers at a Senate Armed Services Committee meeting, earlier this year.

China has put forth a cohesive strategy for future growth while the United States has offered zero solutions in response, other than weaponizing India and China’s neighbors [Tiawan], conducting Freedom of Navigation (FON) operations in the South China Sea, along with destabilizing countries in Eurasia to slow down the progression of OBOR.

In addition to submarines, China successfully launched two remote sensing satellites for Pakistan last week, which could help both countries monitor India and CPEC infrastructure. The satellites were on-board the Chinese Long March (LM-2C) spacecraft, while the PRSS1 – Pakistan’s first optical remote sensing unit – was developed by the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST).

China successfully launched 2 remote sensing satellites for Pakistan on Mon from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in NW China’s Gansu Province, marking the first intl commercial launch for the Long March-2C rocket in about 19 years. pic.twitter.com/nWdypSse2a

— People’s Daily,China (@PDChina) July 9, 2018

Furthermore, the fiber optic pipeline project connecting Pakistan to China was completed in June which now provides a direct link between Pakistan, Middle Asia, and East Asia and reduces the possibility of disruption to international traffic. This is amongst the only information and communication technology project under the CPEC. The project started in March 2016 and concluded last month. The cable extends over a distance of 509 miles and has 26 microwave transmission nodes from Rawalpindi to Karimabad and 106 miles of aerial fiber cable from Karimabad to Khunjerab as a back-up.

Also, Chinese automakers are entering the Pakistani market with the likes of JAC Motor, DFSK, Luoyang Dahe, Lifan, Foton JW, and Changan. Some of the companies have already received the government’s approval. They have been awarded a Greenfield status to build their respective manufacturing facilities for the local market.

So all in all the relation between Pakistan and China is mutually beneficial for both the countries. CPEC enables China access to the Arabian Sea, thus allowing one of the six economic corridors via OBOR to come online.

In doing so, China recognizes CPEC and or the overall OBOR system can disrupt global trade, or better yet, the American empire. That is why China is beefing up Pakistan’s underwater warfare program, to deter US Indo-Pacific Command.

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Authored by Federico Pieraccini via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Observing the behavior of the United States over recent decades, it becomes clear that the American establishment has always relied on two fundamental factors to justify choices in foreign policy.

We have been accustomed in recent years to humanitarian interventions being justified on the assumption that the United States and the West were in some way intervening militarily in the interests of defending innocent civilians from brutal dictators. This justification for armed intervention has either been the key factor or the direct cause for the expansion of US imperialism.

The use of the media as an instrument of war – with lies, artfully constructed stories, intentional omissions, and targeted disinformation – has helped US imperialism to justify armed interventions abroad.

There is always some sort of justification, rationale or pretext offered when Washington intervenes to bring about conflict. These excuses were showcased in Yugoslavia in 1999, in Afghanistan in 2002, in Iraq in 2003, and in Libya in 2011. With Yugoslavia and Libya, the lie of protecting human rights was the justification offered to the public. The September 11, 2001 attacks were used to justify attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq in 2002 and 2003, pointing the finger of blame at these countries. The war on terror in general offered a perfect justification for bringing about chaos in every corner of the world.

Naturally, these are excuses meant to be peddled in the international arena. There is no justification for bombing a nation, completely destroying its services and infrastructure, and killing tens of thousands of its innocent people.

But US imperialism works like a steam-roller. The artful fabrication of a humanitarian cause gives the green light to rain down bombs to save the poor and downtrodden civilians. All this is possible thanks to the nauseating and false media rhetoric that creates the ideal conditions needed to justify the horrible war crime that is aggression against a sovereign nation.

Such justifications constitute some of the most deceptive and aggressive imperialist tools employed by the Euro-American power conglomerate to impose its unipolar vision of international relations and strong-arm those seeking a new path in international relations. The objective is to disrupt (with bombs and propaganda) the vision these countries have of fixing the corrupt and sickening world order guided by Washington.

In more recent times, this strategy of war based on (spurious) justifications has added a new type of ploy that is much more subtle and suitable for imperialist ends. Since Washington has lost the ability to decide the situation on the ground in different war theaters like in Iraq and Syria, it settles for sowing chaos and destruction.

This is done through the employment of plausible deniability, which helps mask covert operations. An example can be seen in Syria, where Washington arms the Free Syrian Army (FSA), an insurgency group labelled “moderate rebels”, but these weapons somehow seem to find their way into the hands of Al Nusra and Daesh. This situation has been going on for years, with Washington using Daesh and Al Nusra to fight against Assad, being able to plausible deny doing so by professing to be only arming the moderate rebels and not the extremist terrorists.

Clearly we are facing an obvious case of plausible deniabIlity. The United States claims to be arming only the “rebels” in its efforts to remove Assad, but in reality these rebels do not exist and are merely different acronyms for various Islamist extremists. It is therefore natural that the arms given to the rebels will wind up in the hands of ISIS or Al Nusra. On the rare occasions that journalists enquire as to how US weapons have ended up in the hands of Daesh or Al Nusra, US authorities can plausibly deny that they are intentionally arming any extremist groups.

Plausible deniability and justifications for war are two manifestations of the hallucinatory world in which we live, based on conjurations rather than reality. No newspaper or journalist questions whether the justification given for war is legitimate. No newspaper wonders whether Iraq really was linked to Al Qaeda, preferring instead to repeat US propaganda. No one bothers to dig and ask whether the FSA is just an acronym like the SDF and therefore another way of plausibly denying and covering for America’s illegal involvement in Syria.

Clearly there is no justification, or any plausible denial, that can exonerate the United States from the seventy-year attempt to consolidate its power over other countries or prevent them from pursuing foreign policies independently of Washington. But what is increasingly noticeable is how, thanks to more and more good reporting from alternative news sources, the justifications for war and plausible denials carry less and less credibility with the wider population.

Decades of lies and omissions have convinced the European and American populations that the press is probably more interested in protecting the interests of its management and owners than it is in revealing the truth. As a result, the alternative press, online media, and alternative giants like CGTN, RT, TeleSUR and PressTV widen their audience simply by exposing how the Western media’s packaged truth only aims to justify the deployment of Western troops to foreign countries, or provide plausible deniability for their less palatable covert operations.

The new perspective provided by the alternative media is ripping apart the lies of the past regarding Iraq, Syria, Yemen or Donbass, showing as fabrications the justifications used to drop bombs, kill civilians, subjugate entire populations in order to advance the US geopolitical goals.

The world population is increasingly better informed thanks to widespread Internet access and a growing thirst for news. This phenomenon is beginning to gain steam as the deceptions of the mainstream media are increasingly being called out with every passing day. CNN, The New York Times, Al Jazeera, the BBC, and many other broadcasters and newspapers have for many years shown European, American and Middle Eastern populations a partial, falsified and manipulated version of reality for the purposes of justifying criminal actions and providing plausible-denial cover to enable the sneaky killing of even more innocents.

As the chickens are coming home to roost, more and more old statements made by US officials are revisited and measured against new facts on the ground. Obama’s words about how the US never gave weapons to ISIS are today contradicted by evidence of the perverse flow of weapons from the US and her allies to Daesh terrorists. In the same way, Clinton’s celebration over Gaddafi’s death (“We came, we saw, he died”), or Madeleine Albright’s justification of the death of 500,000 Iraqi children as a result of US sanctions, as well as them bombings from 1991 to 2003, are coming back to haunt them. All these lies are exposed years later, delivering a devastating blow to the Western establishment’s credibility.

The three examples of Iraq, Libya and Obama himself represent the greatest expression of American deception, namely, the portrayal of the US as fighting for a noble cause, sacrificing itself for the sake of humanity in order to confront and overcome tyranny. But reality paints a different picture, showing the US as the bringer of chaos and destruction. It is the revelation of these lies more than anything else that can accelerate the global awakening and complete the rejection of imperialism that relies on false justifications and plausible denials to succeed.

With the credibility of their previous arguments shot to pieces, the corporate media find themselves with the now practically impossible task of attempting to deceive a woke population that can no longer be fooled as easily as in the past. People are fed up with war and the lies that are offered to justify them, and they are starting to understand the techniques and keywords employed to justify US Imperial policies.

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The San Francisco Department of Elections issued voter registration forms for non-citizens, including undocumented migrants, who are now eligible to vote for members of the SF Board of Education during the November elections, making the city the first in the state to allow non-citizens to vote in local elections.

The measure to allow non-citizens over the age of 18 to vote narrowly passed in 2016 in a vote of 54-46 percent following two failed attempts. In order to cast their ballot, however, non-citizens must also be city residents and have at least one child under the age of 19.  

Prospective voters can request a non-citizen voter registration form in-person at the Department of Elections, online or by phone. The deadline to register is October 22nd. Those who miss the deadline can visit the City Hall Voting Center to register and vote under conditional voter registration. –ABC7

“This is no-brainer legislation,” Hillary Ronen, a San Francisco supervisor, told the Chronicle. “Why would we not want our parents invested in the education of their children?”

“We want to give immigrants the right to vote,” Norman Yee, also a county supervisor, told KGO.

RNC member Harmeet Dhillon disagrees with the measure. 

“The reason I voted against it is that I think the right to vote is something that goes along with citizenship and should be,” Dhillon told KGO, adding that the school board is already obligated to look out for the interests of all children in the city. 

“I don’t think that people who have otherwise tenuous ties to San Francisco given their lack of legal residence should be making long term decisions about that structure and process,” said Dhillon.

The measure allowing non-citizen voting expires in 2022 unless it is renewed by the board of supervisors. 

Boston too?

Last week, the Boston City Council discussed the the idea of voting rights for non-US citizens living in the country legally.

The hearing called by Council President Andrea Campbell is aimed at a discussion on how to make city elections “more inclusive” for the roughly 190,000 foreign-born residents of the city, who would be allowed the right to vote in municipal races. 

That could include legal permanent residents, visa holders and those on Temporary Protected Status or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. –Boston.com

Foreign-born residents account for around 28% of Boston’s population according to Campbell’s order, which claims non-US citizens paid $116 million in local and state taxes, while generating over $3.4 billion in spending according to a 2015 city report.

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