Month: September 2017

In what may be the most bizarre development of the day, the WaPo reports that in their ongoing feud with President Trump, the North Korean government has quietly sought the help of an unlikely counterparty: Republicans.

As the WaPo details, officials in Pyongyang have been quietly trying to arrange talks with Republican-linked analysts in Washington, “in an apparent attempt to make sense of President Trump and his confusing messages to Kim Jong Un’s regime.” The outreach is said to have begun before the current eruption of threats between the two leaders, but will likely become only more urgent “as Trump and Kim have descended into name-calling that sharply increases the chances of potentially catastrophic misunderstandings.”

“Their No. 1 concern is Trump. They can’t figure him out,” a source with direct knowledge of North Korea’s approach to Asia experts with Republican connections told the WaPo.

While the North Koreans do not appear to be interested in negotiations about their nuclear program, they want forums for insisting on being recognized as a nuclear state, something the Trump administration has made clear it is not interested in. At a multilateral meeting here in Switzerland earlier this month, North Korea’s representatives were adamant about being recognized as a nuclear weapons state and showed no willingness to even talk about denuclearization.

But to get a better understanding of American intentions, in the absence official diplomatic talks with the U.S. government, North Korea’s mission to the United Nations invited Bruce Klingner, a former CIA analyst who is now the Heritage Foundation’s top expert on North Korea, to visit Pyongyang for meetings.

 

Trump has close ties to Heritage, a conservative think-tank which has influenced the president on everything from travel restrictions to defense spending, although not to Klingner personally.

“They’re on a new binge of reaching out to American scholars and ex-officials,” said Klingner, who declined the North Korean invitation. “While such meetings are useful, if the regime wants to send a clear message, it should reach out directly to the U.S. government.”

North Korean intermediaries have also approached Douglas Paal, who served as an Asia expert on the national security councils of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, and is now vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

They wanted Paal to arrange talks between North Korean officials and American experts with Republican ties in a neutral place like Switzerland. He also declined the North Korean request.

 

“The North Koreans are clearly eager to deliver a message. But I think they’re only interested in getting some travel, in getting out of the country for a bit,” Paal said.

While in the past North Korea has traditionally participated in strategy meeting with foreign power on neutral soil such as Geneva, Singapore and Malaysia, since Trump’s election in November, the North Korean representatives have been predominantly interested in figuring out the unconventional president’s strategy, according to almost a dozen people involved in the discussions. 

While early in Trump’s term, the North Koreans had been asking broad questions – Is President Trump serious about closing American military bases in South Korea and Japan,  as he said on the campaign trail? Might he really send American nuclear weapons back to the southern half of the Korean Peninsula – the questions have since become more specific. Why are Trump’s top officials, notably Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, directly contradicting the president so often?

“My own guess is that they are somewhat puzzled as to the direction in which the U.S. is going, so they’re trying to open up channels to take the pulse in Washington,” said Evans Revere, a former State Department official. “They haven’t seen the U.S. act like this before.”

Still, participants at various international summits which included the North Koreans are skeptical about this approach: “I’m very pessimistic,” said Shin Beom-chul, a North Korea expert at the South’s Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security, after participating in the meeting in Glion. “They want to keep their nuclear weapons and they will only return to dialogue after the United States nullifies its ‘hostile policy.’ They want the U.S. to stop all military exercises and lift all sanctions on them.”

The bottom line: “North Korea wants to be recognized as a nuclear weapons state,” said Ken Jimbo, who teaches at Keio University in Japan. “But when is North Korea ready for talks? This is what I kept asking the North Koreans: How much is enough?”

While we doubt that Pyongyang will ever be able to figure out Trump, perhaps as a token of diplomacy, Kim Jong-Un can create a twitter account and engage in direct head-to-head tweetstorms with Trump. While that would hardly prevent a potential adverse fallout from the two leaders’ relentless jawboning, at least the devolution of the world to a pre-nuclear war state will be far more entertaining.

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Authored by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog,

“Forget Germany, Spain Is The Real Problem”, reads a headline. Eh… no. Germany is definitely the problem in Europe. Spain is a bit player. That doesn’t mean nothing major could happen in Spain in its fight with Catalonia, and soon, but Spain, like all EU nations, is a de facto province of Germany.

What matters in the end is how Brussels and Merkel deal with Spain. And while it’s tempting to say that perhaps Brussels, the EU, is the main European problem, the European Union is run exclusively by and for Germany, so that doesn’t work either.

The only thing that might work if you really want to find a bigger issue than Germany is if you would point at the role the incessant lies about economic conditions for people play. But that’s not a European issue, that’s global.

The talk about how economies are recovering, how there’s light at the end of the tunnel, and how any day now we’ll be back to where we were at some point in time that many can not even remember. But then, at least when it comes to Europe, that happy talk comes from Germany too, to a large degree. Just wait till Draghi starts cutting his QE.

You can try and tell people that they’re doing just great, using the media you control, and it’ll work for a stretch, if only because they want to believe it, badly, but when these same people can’t even feed their children while you make such claims, you will eventually lose their attention and support. The difference between beliefs and experiences.

If you’re a politician, you try to feed people what they want to hear, invariably an upbeat message, but there comes a time when you have to back it up. You can say that austerity is necessary, inevitable, and the only choice, and it will be beneficial to them, but austerity is one of those things that have a very limited best before date.

If you can only make employment numbers look good by creating a gig economy that takes away all their benefits, and their entire sense of security, they’re going to turn their backs on you. Because you’re lying.

Rising inequality is a one way street right up to the point where it turns into a dead end alley. Inequality breeds more inequality until it no longer can, until people say ‘I want that cake you are having because my kids are hungry. And I brought a pitchfork’.

That is where we’re at, and that is why Merkel lost some 25% of her votes. That is why there’s Trump and Brexit, and why an impossible candidate like Marine Le Pen in France gathered so much attention and support. It’s why eastern European countries will start fighting Brussels and Berlin much harder than they have to date, and why Berlin will fight back harder than it has. Poor Greece.

In the US, there’s only one party, and it divvies up the spoils of very rich campaign contributions. Bernie Sanders tried to circumvent this; not a chance. Trump succeeded. In Britain, there was no difference between left and right for a long time, and no alternative party either. That led to Brexit. In France, Macron started a whole new party from scratch and somehow got it funded (bankers?!). It wiped the left off the map.

The same happened in Holland, where like in France the right wing alternative was judged too unpalatable by too many. No left left. The leaders of Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland do not have the visibility for that yet. In Italy, Five Star have a good shot at the throne. Greece’s Syriza already overtook both left and right. In eastern Europe, right wing parties often didn’t even have to overthrow an existing order, they could just slide in.

The pattern is so obvious only those who stand to lose from acknowledging it end up not seeing it, or telling themselves it’s all just an incident. But it’s not, because the shrinking economies everywhere are not. When left and right, either in public or in practice, rule a country together and their promises don’t hold up, people will look for a way out. If far right is the only way available, they will pick that.

It’s not because they’re all nazis or something like that. But people do lean towards smaller units of organization, decentralization, when they get poorer. And despite all the talk of recovery, that is what most people have seen happen to their lives, while their leaders told them they’re just fine. So you get this kind of headline (and map) for the US (h/t Mish/ZH).

Large Parts Of America Are Being Left Behind

Economic prosperity is concentrated in America’s elite zip codes, but in an interesting report on Distressed Communities, from The Economic Innovation Group, it is increasingly clear that economic stability outside of those communities is rapidly deteriorating. As Axios noted, this isn’t a Republican or Democratic problem. At every level of government, both parties represent distressed areas. But the economic fortunes of the haves and have-nots have only helped to widen the political chasm between them, and it has yet to be addressed by substantial policy proposals on either side of the aisle. Economic Prosperity Quintiles.

 

 

And a very similar headline appears in the Guardian in a report about the German election.

‘A Lot of People Feel Left Behind’: Voters on the Far-Right Surge in Germany

Sarah, 37, teacher, Bonn: “A lot of people feel left behind. They are looking for scapegoats. It is the easy way to deal with problems. The AFD makes use of this feeling. With the grand coalition, there was no real debating culture left. The CDU went too much into the middle, leaving the right out. Just like the SPD under Schröder left the left-wing out.”

Perhaps a lot of those who voted for Trump, and Brexit, Le Pen, Wilders, the AfD, are not so much looking for scapegoats, they’ve identified those as their incumbent politicians; they’re instead looking for a way away from them. All these people who feel left behind base that feeling primarily on their deteriorating economic circumstances. And if the only alternative they have rants, against foreigners and immigrants, they’ll go with that.

Angela Merkel pushed over 1 million refugees and immigrants down the German population’s throats. She never asked their opinion. But many Germans are not doing any better than many Americans or French or British. So the consequences of such things are predictable. You have to explain, you have to communicate with your people. Just saying ‘we can do this’ is not enough. No more than ‘change we can believe in’ was. It’s just hollow.

Merkel lost ‘only’ 25% of her votes. Because Germans know what right wing is, and what it can do. Germany is not full of nazis, no more than America is. Both countries just have a lot of people who feel trapped in a web of lies, and their existing and alleged democratic systems offer no way out of that web.

All these countries, the people and their politicians, have the tendency to see their situations as somehow unique, but they’d be much better off looking at what they have in common with others.

The only solution is to tell people the truth, that the incumbent political class has screwed up badly because of limited brain capacity and unlimited greed, and that they should elect people next time who are both smarter and less sociopathic. But that is not something that comes voluntarily, that takes a battle. And it tends to end careers, and lives.

That is what we can expect. In many different shapes and forms, but all for the same underlying reasons. You can’t fool all of the people all of the time, you can’t even fool a majority for long. You can only fool a limited number of them for a limited amount of time.

Well, time’s up.

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As the NFL’s feud with President Trump continues to dominate headlines, a feud which has effectively turned ESPN into a politically-themed talk show, the league has decided to recruit additional talent to “provide crisis communications counsel to leagues executives.”  Per a job listing posted to Daybook, the NFL says they’re looking for a “Senior Communications Strategist” to be based out of New York City who can assist with “crisis communications” and “devise a strategy and long term vision to strategically position the NFL in the sports marketplace.”  Here are some highlights:

Responsibilities:

 

The senior communications strategist will be responsible for proactively developing plans and strategies aimed at publicly positioning the NFL to key audiences through all communication channels, both traditional and emerging media. They will work closely with communications department leadership to create messaging to reflect the league’s wide variety of priorities and expedite organizational decision-making.

 

Additionally, the strategist will:

•  Provide crisis communications counsel to leagues executives.
• Devise strategy and long term vision to strategically position the NFL in the sports marketplace.
• Provide guidance to senior leadership, including executive vice presidents and COO to achieve desired reputational results and develop metrics to measure success.

 

So, what kind of skills are required for such a position?  Well, you’ll need to be an “expert” in “storytelling” and you’ll need to be “comfortable working in a diverse environment”…so, no Trump-supporting racists allowed, please.

Required Education and Experience:

•  Bachelor’s degree in related field and a minimum of 8+ years of experience in communications or journalism with expertise in storytelling, issue management and long term planning
• Successfully demonstrated ability to lead, participate in, and support cross-departmental activities.
• Strong written and verbal communications skills, excellent organizational skills and strong interpersonal skills.
• Excellent working knowledge of the PR field including documented experience working in public, fast paced, high-pressure situations.

 

Other Key Attributes / Characteristics:

• Strategic Leader: The successful candidate will think and act strategically as a valued member of the communications department and other NFL units.
• Trusted Advisor: He/she will serve as a credible PR resource to clubs and league executives
• An individual with intense and dedicated work habits. Someone who takes initiative, speaks his/her mind, and sets high standards in all he/she does.
• An individual comfortable working in a diverse environment
• A creative, imaginative individual who has the business acumen, curiosity and ability to define innovative strategy and deliver against it.
• A person with the highest moral and ethical standards, who can be relied upon to always act in the best long-term interests of the League.
• A person with the capacity to be a hands-on, sleeves-up team player.
• Superior judgement and communication skills, as well as political sensitivity both internally and externally
• Experience in corporate communications, sports or entertainment is preferred.

Of course, rather than prepare for a political war the NFL could also just play football…just a thought.

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Just days after Uber lost its license to operate in London, the online ride-hailing service that has been at the centre of various controversies and scandals for the past year, announced it would cease operations in Quebec as of Oct. 14. According to the Montreal Gazette, the final straw for Uber, which has been negotiating with the Quebec government for months in an effort to co-exist with the taxi industry, reportedly was a government demand that its drivers submit to a 35-hour training program already imposed on taxi drivers.

Montreal #uber GM Jean-Nicolas Guillemette says the company can’t operate under the new rules the province wants. Last day Oct 14. http://pic.twitter.com/SepE3u2Z0d

— Jason Magder (@JasonMagder) September 26, 2017

Uber reportedly felt such a program was incompatible with its business model, which relies on part-time drivers who would presumably not be ready to undertake the course. Other government demands included mandatory vehicle inspections every 12 months and background checks on drivers performed by police rather than a private firm.

In short, all hurdles that the company decided were a dealbreaker for its future operations.

As the Gazette adds, the stage seemed to be set for some kind of push back from Uber last Friday, after Quebec Transport minister Laurent Lessard announced the new conditions, describing them as merely an extension of a year-old pilot project permitted under the current rules.

That led Uber Quebec spokesperson Jean-Christophe de le Rue to accuse the government of adhering to “new and challenging regulations that favour old policies instead of incorporating the benefits of new technology … based on our current understanding, these changes significantly threaten Uber‘s ability to continue operating in Quebec.”

Statement from Uber following today’s announcement from the Ministry of Transportation #Uber #polqc http://pic.twitter.com/p6vHEmEgQK

— Uber Québec (@Uber_QC) September 22, 2017

The measures came after a year of discussions with the taxi industry, which resulted in 19 recommendations to Lessard. But those discussions followed a series of public splits and policy reversals within the Quebec Liberal government over whether Über could co-exist with the province’s taxi industry.

In May of 2016, the youth wing of the Quebec Liberal Party and some business groups criticized the government’s lukewarm or sometimes hostile attitude toward the ride-hailing service, and while the Couillard government and then Transport minister Jacques Daoust took a tough line with the service, insisting drivers obtain Class 4C driver’s licences and taxi permits, those conditions were eventually dropped and a pilot project developed to try and marry Uber’s business model within the existing taxi industry.

According to the Gazette, Uber has been making waves for the taxi industry and the Couillard government since it became a part of Montreal’s transportation landscape in 2015. The taxi industry complained Uber was engaging in unfair competition, since its drivers didn’t hold expensive permits required of taxi drivers, some of which sold on the second-hand market for nearly $200,000.

Reacting to the news, a coalition of taxi owners said the government must not bend to Uber’s threats to pull out if it doesn’t get its way. “Uber is not obliged to cease operations it is only doing so to frustrate users so they can put pressure on the government,” said Georges Malouf, a spokesperson fort he group. “Once again, instead of negotiating in good faith, Uber prefers to use bullying tactics.”

While the Quebec blowback against Uber may have been many months in the making, with two major markets lost in under one week, one wonders which city will be next, and where the biggest transportation disruptor to emerge in recent years will itself be disrupted as legacy service providers and local politicians continue to push back against the deflation-creating and money-losing company.

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President Trump announced on Tuesday morning that he will travel to Puerto Rico next week to survey damage from Hurricane Maria, however he said that next Tuesday is the earliest he is able to travel to the island due to the damage. Trump said the island is “literally destroyed” but expressed confidence “they’ll be back.” He said the people of Puerto Rico “are important to all of us.”

.@POTUS: “Puerto Rico is very important to me…These are great people and we have to help them.” http://pic.twitter.com/bnBjyILJQr

— Fox News (@FoxNews) September 26, 2017

And while Trump added that federal authorities are landing relief supplies “on an hourly basis”, Trump’s act may come as too little, too late for some of the locals, who felt the urge to remind the White House they are also Americans. That’s just what Governor Ricardo Rossello and the commonwealth’s government have done, over and over, in the wake of Hurricane Maria. “There needs to be unprecedented relief for Puerto Rico so that we can start the immediate effort right now,” Rossello said Tuesday on MSNBC.

As Bloomberg writes, Puerto Rico, an island of 3.4 million American citizens without a vote in Congress, is lobbying Washington for what could be billions in funding to rebuild its infrastructure, including its decimated energy grid. And it’s doing so amid an already costly hurricane season.

The island was crawling with 10,000 federal relief workers who were conducting search-and-rescue missions, helping bring electricity to hospitals, and providing aid packages, baby food and more. But with the Washington visitors on hand, Rossello’s team missed no opportunity to remind them of why Puerto Rico — mired in bankruptcy and ill-equipped financially to go it alone — shouldn’t become an afterthought.

Capsized boats on land in San Juan, Puerto Rico on Sept. 25

At the San Juan airport Tuesday, there were signs of exodus. People waiting for standby flights have been camped out for days. One mother with two infants in car-seat carriers broke into tears, while desperate tourists took out smartphones to film video and demand answers on why there wasn’t water and other provisions, outside of the expensive airport shops.

Yamira Feliciano Ribera, 40, was there with a group of six relatives and friends, including two children, ages 1 and 3. She said they’d slept on the hard floor using luggage for pillows.

 

“We want to get out of Puerto Rico for a better situation,” she said, doling out Cheerios to the children. “We’re without water, without AC, without cash.”

Additionally, over the weekend, some Puerto Ricans took offense when Trump went on a Twitter rant about professional athletes and their views on race relations, but omitted any comment on Puerto Rico, which was by that time falling deeper into crisis. When he did tweet Monday night, the president drew a comparison between the aftermath of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma with that of Maria: “Texas & Florida are doing great but Puerto Rico, which was already suffering from broken infrastructure & massive debt, is in deep trouble.”

Noting that “much of the Island was destroyed” and that it still owes Wall Street billions of dollars, he added: “Food, water and medical are top priorities – and doing well. #FEMA”

 

The tweets came after criticism from some corners of Congress, with Representative Adam Smith, the ranking Democrat on the House’s Armed Services Committee, blasting the administration’s response as “wholly inadequate.”

Still, the island’s leaders have been effusive. The visitors Monday were “a clear indication that the administration is committed” to Puerto Rico, Rossello said.

There was still plenty to do, though.

Rossello said he requested a temporary waiver on the cost-sharing between FEMA and the commonwealth. Normally Puerto Rico would commit 25 percent of the recovery funds, but it was already in fiscal straits and had filed for a form of bankruptcy protection before the disaster. After a disastrous debt binge, enabled by tax breaks that for decades had investors clamoring for its securities, Puerto Rico owes $74 billion. Rubio said Puerto Rico should have access to low-interest loans, and Rossello later said that could be through the Fed or Treasury Department.

It doesn’t look like Puerto Rico will get all its requested fulfilled, however. Jenniffer Gonzalez, Puerto Rico’s nonvoting congressional representative, said in an interview Monday that Puerto Rico sought an extended waiver on the Jones Act, a century-old set of rules that many say make imports more costly by requiring most good to be brought in by U.S. ships. But as the AP reported, the Trump administration doesn’t plan to waive the act.

She’s also spoken with House Speaker Paul Ryan about having the Federal Emergency Management Agency temporarily cover the full cost of the damage, instead of the typical 75 percent, although it was unclear if the request will be granted.

Rossello reminded his visitors Monday of the role Puerto Rico played as an aid hub after Irma, when the U.S. Virgin Islands were badly hit. And he sent his visitors home with a message for the rest of Washington: “Let them know that we’re committed U.S. citizens, proud U.S. citizens, who helped others when they were going through difficult times, not more than 10 days ago,” he said. “Now it’s time to help Puerto Rico back.”

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Continuing the recent flurry of leaks of the Trump tax plan set to be unveiled tomorrow, Axios reports that “GOP leaders have agreed to raise the lowest individual tax rate from 10 to 12 percent, paired with doubling the standard deduction.”

As previously leaked, the plan will also collapse the number of brackets from seven to three, while the standard deduction is set to almost double to $12,000 for a single filer and $24,000 for married couples, which means that Trump can correctly argue that many more low income earners would pay no tax under his plan. Also, as previously noted, the top tax bracket would fall from 39.6% to 35%.

According to Axios, Trump plans to sell the proposal tomorrow as a populist “tax cut” but notes that “as recently as yesterday top Republicans on Capitol Hill were nervous as they got word that Trump wasn’t entirely thrilled with the product that had been hashed out in immense secrecy for weeks with two members of his administration, Gary Cohn and Steven Mnuchin, working with GOP leaders.” However, that changed last night when Trump reportedly has come around to supporting the framework, “despite his misgivings about the corporate rate not being low enough and about the political risks of raising the lowest rate.”

The bottom line is that many more people will now pay no tax because of the increased deduction, which will allow Trump to pitch the proposal as a tax cut for the middle class as well as for the wealthy.

It was not immediately clear what the projected impact on the budget deficit will be as a result of said tax cut for both the middle class, for the highest earners, and for corporations and “pass thru” entities.

In previewing the rollout, Axios writes that Trump “won’t go into great detail when he talks about the tax plan tomorrow in Indiana, leaving plenty of negotiating room for the tax-writing committees in the House and Senate.”

As of yesterday morning Trump hadn’t signed off on the final product, and as with all policy announcements involving Trump, Republican Hill leaders will be holding their breaths to some extent until the president actually utters the words. Speaking with conservative groups at the White House yesterday Trump, reassured them of his commitment when he gushed about the “tax cut” he was planning to unveil.

Confirming his enthusiasm for the plan, moments ago President Trump said that “we will cut taxes tremendously for the middle class”, even as he added that he would discuss the framework for tax reform with lawmakers before it is released tomorrow.

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The Chinese military has for the first time staged live-fire drills at the country’s first overseas base opened recently in the Horn of Africa, near the strategic Straits of Hormuz in Djibouti.

Photo from Zha Chunming, Global Look Press

Less than two months after inaugurating and deploying troops to China’s first foreign naval military base abroad, the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLA) held live-fire drills for the first time in this east African location on Friday, the South China Morning Post reported on Monday.

Djibouti, on the Horn of Africa, is strategically located in the entrance from the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea and lies at the gateway to the busy Suez Canal. It provides a port to neighboring landlocked Ethiopia. It is considered one of the key middle-east energy chokepoints.

“This is the first time our soldiers stationed in Djibouti have left the camp to conduct combat training,” base commander Liang Yang said according to the SCMP. “The live-fire training will help explore a new training model for the [Chinese] overseas garrison.”

Scores of Chinese officers participated in the shooting exercise, which took place at the country’s national gendarmerie training range where the Chinese dispatched armored vehicles and used pistols, automatic rifles and machine guns to strike practice targets.

China’s first overseas military facility was inaugurated on August 1 after being under construction for more than a year. China’s military presence in Djibouti will continue until 2026, with a contingent of up to 10,000 soldiers. Beijing has long wanted to use its several footholds in Africa to seek closer ties with nations on the continent that could help it gain access to natural resources and provide new markets.

??????????????? ??????“????”?https://t.co/R12tYkC5mt http://pic.twitter.com/B28GG3LixS

— ??? (@TongMediaHK) September 24, 2017

China says it will use the base to assist anti-piracy operations and United Nations peacekeeping and humanitarian relief missions in Africa and West Asia. Beijing also says it will use the base to facilitate military cooperation and joint exercises. China may also be seeking to counter the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force presence, which has maintained a small contingent at its base in Djibouti since 2011.

?????????????? ???????
???????????????????????????????22???????https://t.co/TP8KbVcrUU http://pic.twitter.com/Nhu7xvMgzP

— ?????? (@cnfocus) September 24, 2017

Immediately after China wrapped up its drills, the Japanese forces in the country began their own military exercises, reportedly practicing the protection of Japanese nationals abroad. The third drills of their kind, according to the Japanese media, are taking place September 25-October 2.

As we reported previously, in addition to Chinese and Japanese military, the tiny but strategically important African country, also hosts troops and military bases for the United States, France  and several other countries.

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