Tag: news

North Korea Strikes Back With Human Rights Report of Its Own

america also responsible for meme epidemicIn response to a scathing
United Nations report on human rights violations in the country,
North Korea has released its own human rights report, targeting the
United States. Its main points, via the North Korean state news
agency
KCNA:

Under the citizenship act, racialism is getting more
severe in the U.S. The gaps between the minorities and the whites
are very wide in the exercise of such rights to work and elect. The
U.S. true colors as a kingdom of racial discrimination was fully
revealed by last year’s case that the Florida Court gave a verdict
of not guilty to a white policeman who shot to death an innocent
black boy.

That’s why 52 percent of the Americans have said that racism still
exists in the country while 46 percent contended that all sorts of
discrimination would be everlasting.

The U.S. is a living hell as elementary rights to existence are
ruthlessly violated.

At present, an average of 300,000 people a week are registered as
unemployed, but any proper measure has not been taken.

The housing price soared 11.5 percent last year than 2012 and 13.2
percent in January this year than 2013, leaving many people
homeless.

The number of impoverished people increased to 46.5 millions last
year, and one sixth of the citizens and 20-odd percent of the
children are in the grip of famine in New York City.

All sorts of crimes rampant in the U.S. pose a serious threat to
the people’s rights to existence and their inviolable
rights. 

The U.S. government has monitored every movement of its citizens
and foreigners, with many cameras and tapping devices and even
drones involved, under the pretext of “national security”.

Meanwhile, bills on easing arms control were adopted in various
states of the country, boosting murderous crimes. As a result, the
U.S. has witnessed an increasing number of gun-related crimes in
all parts of the country and even its military bases this year. In
this regard, the United Nations on April 10 put the U.S. on the top
of the world list of homicide rates.

The U.S. also has 2.2 millions of prisoners at present, the highest
number in the world. For lack of prisons on the part of the
government, individuals are providing detention facilities to make
money.

A Russian TV said that in the U.S. the wealthy classes are now keen
on the investment in providing private prisons for their high
profit and so more people will be imprisoned…

Its chief executive, Obama, indulges himself in luxury almost every
day, squandering hundred millions of dollars on his foreign trip in
disregard of his people’s wretched life.

The Washington Post
relays these same points from the KCNA, noting that most of
these are criticisms based on issues many Americans care about and
contends that “the only truly debatable part is on gun crime.”
Despite North Korea’s assertions, the violent crime rate has
declined in recent years.

But I’d say a few more of the points above are highly debatable
too. I don’t know of any “citizenship act” exacerbating racialism.
(Voter ID laws don’t count—I showed my ID to vote in New Jersey,
which doesn’t have a voter ID law, for years. In fact, the first
time I remember not showing my ID was in 2012, when voter
ID laws had become the new outrage).

While the Washington Post suggests the latter part of
the first point is about Trayvon Martin, in that case the shooter,
George Zimmerman, was not a policemen. Other policemen, white and
black, have gotten away with killing unarmed (and non-threatening)
individuals, black and white. As someone who’s covered a lot of
police abuse stories, I would suggest that while racism plays a
role in some of the cases, the fundamental issue in police abuse is
not racism but a lack of accountability among and an abundance of
deference to police forces and other classes of government
employees, especially the armed ones. In general I don’t think
police officers who end up killing innocent people do so because of
race, they do it because their peers have gotten away with it
almost every time.

The third point, about the U.S. being a living hell, is,
admittedly, not debatable. It’s just plain false by any metric you
choose. The sixth point sounds false too, and certainly needs a
citation, from the North Koreans or the Post. Neither did
the U.S. actually end up at the top of a U.N. list of homicide
rates. As the Post notes, that spot was taken by
Honduras.

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Former CBS Reporter Sharyl Attkisson on Benghazi Emails

Former CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson says that
the Benghazi
emails revealed earlier this week show a deliberate attempt by
the Obama administration to mislead the American public about the
September 2012 attack.  

Attkisson, an investigative reporter, sat down with Reason TV’s
Nick Gillespie to discuss her separation from her long-time
employer CBS, her reporting on Benghazi and Fast and Furious, and
the decline of investigative journalism in America. 

View this article.

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“We Are Essentially At War” Ukraine Admits, After Dozens Killed

While there may be some confusion about why massive bond buying greeted yesterday’s “better than expected” loss of 209 jobs in the 25-54 age group, dragging stocks down, the answer is actually very simple: there is a war in the Ukraine.

A war which just took a turn for the worst after at least 42 people were killed according to Reuters in street battles between supporters and opponents of Russia in southern Ukraine that ended with dozens of pro-Russian protesters incinerated in a burning building. The riot in the Black Sea port of Odessa, ending in a deadly blaze in a besieged trade union building, was by far the worst incident in Ukraine since a February uprising that ended with a pro-Russian president fleeing the country.

The clip below, not for the faint of heart, shows anti-government protesters jumping from the burning Odessa trade unions house: it appears when Yanukovich was “killing” protesters in February, the west couldn’t get up in arms fast enough screaming for the former president’s overthrow. But now that the acting post-CIA funded coup government is doing the same thing to its own protesters, the radio silence is stunning.

But while yesterday’s tragic events in Odessa were the first time the Ukraine conflict manifested itself in pro and anti-Russian clashes in the Black Sea town, it will hardly be the last: not only does the port city have economic and military significance, it also sits between Crimea and pro-Russian areas in eastern Ukraine and the breakaway Transnistria region of neighboring Moldova.

The admission of the true state of affairs finally came from Kiev itself which said that Ukrainian forces pressed their assault on separatists today, freeing up a regional airport as the head of the country’s anti-terrorist center warned eastern regions are “essentially” at war.

The campaign in the Donetsk region left five dead from the Ukrainian anti-terrorist operation and 12 wounded, said the center’s chief, Vasyl Krutov, at a Kiev briefing, even as military observers were freed by anti-Kiev militants. Government forces have secured the town of Slovyansk as operations in Kramatorsk continue.

“What is happening in the east is not a short-term action, this is essentially a war,” Krutov said today.

War it is:

Open clashes are sweeping Ukraine’s east, from Donetsk near the Russian border to Odessa, about 100 miles from the European Union’s southeastern frontier in Romania, amid signs the industrial and coastal regions are slipping out of the Kiev government’s control. The U.S. and the European Union accuse Russia of being behind the unrest, while Russian President Vladimir Putin is “extremely concerned” and is studying the situation, his spokesman Dmitry Peskov, said today.

There was some good news: military observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe who were taken hostage a week ago were freed and will be delivered to the Council of Europe in Slovyansk near Donetsk, the council said today in a statement.

Bloomberg reports further that the U.S. and EU accuse Russia of stirring unrest to undermine Ukraine’s May 25 presidential election. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said at a briefing today in Jezioro, Poland, that officials are “losing hope” about a diplomatic solution to end the crisis.

“This is a war of maybe a different kind, it is a war that’s undeclared,” Tusk was quoted as saying by PAP newswire at a media briefing. “But what we’re really dealing with is de-facto a war. You can clearly see that actions taken by the international community haven’t brought results.”

To be sure, Ukraine and NATO is putting all the blame on Russia – not only for instigating the conflict but arming the separatists, seemingly oblivious of factual evidence that it was the US that was doing precisely the same just over three months ago when it was orchestarting the overthrow of the then government.

Ukraine’s Defense Ministry said the use of advanced weapons showed the separatists were “professional saboteur groups” rather than peaceful protesters. In a statement, it called their tactics “characteristic of foreign military or mercenaries.”

 

Turmoil erupted yesterday in Odessa, where more than 130 people had been detained by police, with 10 criminal cases already started, according to Petro Lutsyuk, the head of the Interior Ministry’s directorate in the city, said on the agency’s website. The Interior Ministry later said on its website that Lutsyuk was fired.

 

The nearby city of Nikolaev hosts much of the country’s defense and shipbuilding industry, as well as Zorya-Mashproekt, a state enterprise that manufactures gas turbines for OAO Gazprom (GAZP), the Russian natural gas producer and exporter.

Meanwhile, the theater by western leaders hit a new peak yesterday when Obama and Merkel did all they could: threaten more sanctions. At their news conference in Washington, Obama and Merkel said Russia must pull back support for the separatists so Ukraine’s May 25 presidential election can go ahead unimpeded. If the vote can’t be held, “we will not have a choice but to move forward” with more sanctions, Obama said. Merkel called the election “crucial” and said she’s ready to support economic sanctions if needed.

Ironically, it is German commercial interests which as we said back in March, are doing all they can to prevent sanctions of Russia as they know well they would be the biggest losers. Germany is Europe’s largest economy and had $127 billion in trade with Russia in 2013, according to the International Monetary Fund, making Germany is Russia’s second-biggest trading partner. Putin has threatened to escalate economic warfare if further sanctions are imposed.

“When we will reach a particular tipping point is very hard to say in advance,” Merkel said. “But all I can say is that the elections on May 25 are a decisive juncture for me and if there is further destabilization, things will get more and more difficult.”

Expect more furious bluster out of Germany and Obama, hoping that verbal escalation will finally cause Putin to pull back. It won’t. Meanwhile Putin is keeping quiet. Which is the second good news because as we showed yesterday, all Putin has to do is give the command.




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Baylen Linnekin on Absurd State Food Rules

VidaliaIt’s
hardly surprising that the Farm Bill passed this year by Congress
is a bloated and idiotic boondoggle. Baylen Linnekin is one of many
who’s written thousands of words on the topic. But lost perhaps
amidst the focus on Congress’s role in (mis)shaping American
agriculture are less newsworthy state laws that have similarly
nefarious impact on farmers and consumers alike. Take Georgia’s
Vidalia® Onion Committee (yes, “Vidalia® Onion” is a registered
trademark). That’s right. The state has a Vidalia® Onion Committee.
The stated role of the commission is “to jointly fund research and
promotional programs.” The committee has been in the new recently
thanks to a court case challenging rules it established that
mandate specific shipment and marketing dates for Vidalia
onions.

The existence of rules like those that handcuff many Georgia
Vidalia farmers aren’t new and are by no means restricted to
Georgia, warns Linnekin.

View this article.

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China, Russia Military Ties Deepen With Naval Drill In East China Sea

Submitted by Zachary Zeck via The Diplomat,

On Wednesday, China announced that it plans to hold joint naval drills with Russia in the East China Sea later this month.

“These drills are regular exercises held by China and Russia’s navies, and the purpose is to deepen practical cooperation between the two militaries, to raise the ability to jointly deal with maritime security threats,” China’s Defense Ministry said in a statement published on its website.

Voice of America reports that the joint naval drills will be held in late May off the coast of Shanghai. This is significantly north of the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands that have been the source of ongoing tensions between Japan and China in recent years. Russia also has an ongoing territorial dispute with Japan over the Kuril Islands located even further north off the far eastern coast of Russia.

Few details have been released about the scope of the naval drills at this time.

Still, the announcement is not surprising, and is not likely aimed at Japan in particular. As China’s Defense Ministry noted, Russia and China have a history of holding joint naval drills, and their military ties have grown stronger in recent years. For example, last July, Moscow and Beijing held a massive naval drill with live firing exercises off the coast of the Russian city of Vladivostok. According to Chinese media reports at the time, the drill was the People’s Liberation Army’s largest ever with a foreign country.

The New York Times reported that China’s Navy sent “seven warships, including a guided-missile destroyer with Aegis-type radars that track and guide weapons to destroy enemy targets, and missile frigates with antisubmarine abilities” to last year’s drill. These vessels were from China’s North Sea Fleet and the South Sea Fleet.  Beijing also deployed three helicopters and a special warfare unit to last year’s drill. The Russian Navy, on the other hand, deployed a kilo-class submarine and the guided-missile cruiser Varyag, which is the flag ship of the Russian Pacific Fleet.

“This shows unprecedented good relations between China and Russia,” Professor Wang Ning, director of the Center for Russian Studies at the Shanghai International Studies University, told the New York Times about last year’s drill. “It shows that the two countries will support each other on the global stage.”

Indeed, the joint naval drills are merely one example (and result) of the stronger bilateral ties Russia and China have enjoyed since President Xi Jinping took over the Chinese Communist Party in November 2012. China began a new charm offensive towards Russia early in Xi’s tenure. This was demonstrated by, among other things, the fact that Xi Jinping chose Russia as the destination for his first official foreign trip as China’s president in March 2013. He returned later in the year for the G-20 summit, and was back again earlier this year to attend the opening ceremony of the Sochi Olympics.

The close relationship between the two leaders has yielded some notable results, as well. Besides the unprecedented naval drills mentioned above, Russia has signaled a greater willingness to sell China advanced defense technology during Xi’s tenure.

Around the time of Xi’s first trip to Russia last March, there were reports that China and Russia were negotiating their largest ever defense agreement. The deal would reportedly include Russia selling China as many as four Lada Class air-independent propulsion submarines as well as 24 Su-35 multirole fighter jets. The Su-35 fighters, in particular, would greatly enhance China’s ability to project air power in the South China Sea. More recently, there have been reports that Vladimir Putin has approved the sale of Russia’s most advanced air and missile defense system, the S-400, to China.

Perhaps of more lasting importance, Russia and China have been significantly boosting their energy ties, which could solidify a more long-term relationship between them. Most notably, in June of last year Rosneft, Russia’s state-owned energy giant, agreed to double its oil exports to China. Under the deal, which was worth an estimated $270 billion, Russia will ship 365 million tons of oil to China over the next 25 years.

Similarly, numerous signs suggest that after a decade of ongoing talks, Russia and China are in the final stages of negotiating a massive 30-year natural gas supply deal. Once the deal is completed, according to Bloomberg News, Russia’s “Gazprom plans to supply as much as 38 billion cubic meters of gas to China, about 24 percent of the company’s deliveries to Europe last year.” Achieving this will require the construction of a massive pipeline to carry the natural gas from eastern Russia into China. Russia will reportedly need to spend about $22 billion to build the pipeline.

The two sides are hoping that the deal will be ready in time for Putin’s trip to China on May 20, which will take place immediately prior to the joint naval drills.




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Things That Make You Go Hmmm… Like Is Japan Totally F##ked?

We have detailed the straitjacket into which the Japanese have been strapped for the past two decades numerous times in the last few years (in great detail here)  but as Grant Williams leaned back in his most comfortable chair after reading an article about proposed changes to the GPIF (Government Pension Investment Fund), Japan’s public pension fund; the thought popped into his mind – "Japan really is totally f##ked." What led him to that well-thought-out and eruditely expressed conclusion? Read on…

 

In an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria earlier this year, Abe explained the true significance of the third arrow:

“What is important about the third arrow, structural reform, is to convince those who resist the steps I am taking and to make them realize that what I have been doing is correct, and by so doing, to engage in structural reform.”

Read that again.

Yes folks, the important part of structural reform in Japan is to convince people that Abe is correct. If he can convince them he is right, they will have engaged in structural reform.

Confused?

You should be.

This is how Japan works — or doesn’t.

Immigration reform has been widely recognized as the only answer to Japan’s crippling demographic problem for well over three decades. Nothing has been done about it.

How about the “Wage Surprise” — increasing wages on a national basis — hailed by Abe as the key to lifting Japan out of the doldrums, and a key feature of Abenomics?

Doh?!

…

Markets will eventually tire of Abe’s continual promises that more is coming, so he desperately needs to somehow break the entrenched deflationary attitude in Japan.

(WSJ): In a survey of 1,000 consumers on March 29-30 by broadcaster Fuji News Network, 69% said they had not made any special purchases ahead of the sales tax rise, and 77.4% said they didn’t feel an economic recovery was under way.

Good luck with that attitude problem, Shinzo.

This week we got a look at how Abe is faring with one of his promises, that of guaranteed 2% inflation.

Core CPI (excluding food and energy) rose 1.3% in March — unchanged from the previous month and lower than analyst forecasts.

Of course, that was taken as a sign that further easing by the BoJ would be forthcoming…

And round and round it goes… until it stops.

The briefcase in Pulp Fiction ONLY works because we DON’T find out what is in it.

Abe’s third arrow can be loaded into the bow, but it can’t be fired once and for all, because if it IS fired, the game is up. There will still be continual promises of more to come, and markets may buy into that for a while; but, like all central bank-induced “boom times,” Abenomics has a shelf life, and that is nearing an end.

The changes at the GPIF are potentially disastrous, and Kuroda’s BoJ and Abe’s government are desperately trying to MacGyver their way out of an impossible situation, armed only with hollow promises and faith, when what they really need is duct tape and a Swiss army knife.

Abenomics is a plan by which to change Japanese behaviour; but as anyone who has spent any time in that wonderful, perplexing country will tell you, the Japanese do NOT change their behaviour — even when facing a demographic disaster.

Sorry, but Abenomics is actually nothing at all.

 

To understand why it's all smoke and mirrors… here is Grant Williams fill letter:

 

TTMYGH_Apr_28_2014




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Behind The Curtain – Putin Is Admired

Submitted by Martin Armstrong via Armstrong Economics,

Putin at least stands for what he truly believes in. That is far more than we find in Western Politicians. Most Western Politicians admire Putin for he is tough and has backbone that they seriously lack not to mention perhaps brains. I disagree with Putin that landmass has anything to do with the power of a nation and Japan proved that to be a correct statement.

Russia could be a great major economic power if it reformed internally and set its people truly free. Russians are great programmers and still have embedded an entrepreneurial spirit.

It is my “opinion” that ever since Bush Jr, bureaucracy has taken hold and grabbed more power – i.e. NSA.

I say this simply based upon my personal observations dealing with government. Consequently, the very same neoconservatives who ran foreign policy under Bush are still there under Obama. The US President is just a puppet and the strings are pulled by the unelected bureaucracy. The problem with this group has been they are only concerned with power – not economics. They are totally ignorant about the economic trend and remain clueless with respect to how to run a government.

They totally fail to grasp that we need each other and cannot articulate for a single second why Russia or China should still be enemies when Communism has fallen.




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Marc Faber Warns “Social Media Stocks Are Just The Start, Market Crash Coming In 2nd Half”

Having called for the demise of the hype/hope growth stocks, biotech, and social media schemes at the end of 2013, Marc Faber believes the weakness in those sectors is a signal of things to come (and that the so-called “rotation” to quality stocks is fallacious in the medium-term). Faber carefully notes that the size of markets allows some stocks to move up as others move down and so the overall market “looks” ok, but warns “we have already had a big break in parts of the market… but we haven’t had the big break in the overall market,” adding that “it’s too late to buy the US stock market,” confirming what we noted about Jeremy Grantham’s dismal outlook for US equities in the medium-term (and how and when the bubble bursts). Simply out, given yields around the world and the fundamentals, “individual investors have excessively optimistic expectations about their future returns,” which is terrible news for the record amounts of Greater Fools piling in as professionals pile out.

 

 




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And Another Warning About Fascism… This Time From 1938

Yesterday we asked if the world was tumbling towards fascism. This is not the first such warning, as we noted previously (with Geoffrey Batt), in a Washington Post article from 1938 one finds an interesting warning from former president Herbert Hoover, in which he declares that the FDR “New Deal” is leading the US to fascism.


 

In a grass roots convention, Hoover stated that

“despite every alibi, this depression is the direct result of Government actions.

 

The torch of liberty has been dashed out by some sort of fascism in 14 nations of more than 240,000,000 people – they all undertook new deals under some title, usually planned economy.

 

The New Deal started with a government debt of $21 billion and today finds itself with a debt either direct or guaranteed of $42 billion.

 

It started with 12 million unemployed; it finds itself after five years with 12 million unemployed. If the 12 million unemployed are not due to [overextension in new construction or in capital equipment or speculation requiring liquidation] to what are they due?

 

Why have a recession in the face of low interest rates, no overextension of credit, no oversized inventories, no overextension of capital equipment, no overstock of goods, no speculation. If there are none of these sins or forces in the financial world, such as did exist in previous depressions, obviously the origins cannot be blamed upon finance and business.

 

There is only one place left to search for the causes of this depression. Despite every alibi, the depression is a direct result of governmental actions.”

We know how the 30s ended for America, and we wonder what would have happened had the US not joined the WWII fray, which according to many economists was the only exogenous factor which pushed the country out of the depression and realigned the global map. We do not know what Hoover would say about our current regime, but we doubt it would have been full of praise.




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