Month: November 2023

Via SchiffGold.com,

The mainstream remains optimistic about the trajectory of the economy. Price inflation has supposedly been beaten down. GDP growth was even better than expected, and most economists have tabled their recession predictions. But in his podcast, Peter Schiff explained that it’s all an illusion. The financial crisis has already started, and it continues to play out beneath the radar.

Nobody understands that this crisis has started. But believe me, it has. This was the way the 2008 financial crisis started. It didn’t just happen when Lehman Brothers went bankrupt.”

By the time Lehman went under, everybody knew there was a crisis. But it was obvious long before that.

That’s the reason it went under. It didn’t just go out of business out of the dark. It wasn’t just happenstance. The reason that Lehman Brothers, and Bear Sterns, and Fanny and Freddy, and AIG, and all these companies went under was their exposure to the mortgage market. That exposure was obvious to me for years, but particularly in 2007 when the subprime market blew up. That was the point where even the village idiot should have been able to figure out what was coming. The problem was most people on Wall Street weren’t even smart enough to qualify as the village idiot, so they still couldn’t figure it out.”

They needed the proverbial anvil to fall on their head. That finally happened in 2008. But even in the summer of ’08, a lot of people were oblivious.

So, if you’re wondering, ‘Peter, how can we be so close to this massive crisis, in fact, how could this crisis have already started if nobody is talking about it?’ Well, just go back to the summer of 2008. Nobody was talking about it.”

Peter emphasized that this crisis is much bigger because the problems driving it are much bigger.

They’re the same problems. They just dwarf the size of the problems we had before. Because instead of actually dealing with the problems, we kicked the can down the road and made the problems bigger. Now we have to deal with the consequences of that.”

Fed officials keep saying that the banking system is “sound.” But Peter said all of the big banks are insolvent.

Now, as long as they pretend that all their underwater assets, they’re going to hold them to maturity, well, they can pretend that they don’t have a problem. But eventually, they have to stop pretending because circumstances intervene, and they actually need to sell the securities that they had intended to hold to maturity.”

Newsweek recently published an article titled “America Is Heading for an Interest Payment Crisis.” Peter noted that at least they’re writing about that, but they still miss the root of the problem. It’s not just the interest. It’s also the principal.

A lot of people claim the principal doesn’t matter. As long as the US can make interest payments, everything is fine. But as Peter pointed out, the national debt wasn’t a gift. It’s debt. But it’s nature it has to be paid back.

So, when they would say, ‘We don’t have to repay the debt,’ I would say, ‘Well, did you run that by the Chinese? Did you run it by the Japanese? Do they know that that’s the deal? Do they know that they’re loaning us money but they’re never going to get it back?’ Because that’s not a loan. That is a gift.”

Of course, the response is always, “We can just borrow from somebody else to pay it back.”

In other words, it’s a Ponzi scheme. So, Bernie Madoff never had to worry about paying back money because he would get it from the next sucker who didn’t realize it was a Ponzi scheme. But what happens when people realize it’s a Ponzi scheme? They don’t want to participate. And that’s what’s going on. Our creditors don’t want to loan us more money to pay back other creditors. That is what is happening. That is why bond yields are going up because the people who own the bonds want their money back as they mature and we can’t find new buyers.”

Rising interest rates impede the solvency of the United States. As rates rise, the Treasury has to borrow even more to keep up with the interest payments. As debt goes up, the US becomes a bigger credit risk. It also becomes more likely that the government and central bank will have to create more inflation to service the debt.

So, higher interest rates don’t actually make Treasuries more attractive. They make them less attractive. That is a problem. This is a bottomless pit. This is a self-perpetuating collapse that we are witnessing that is going to gather momentum.”

During an interview, new House Speaker Mike Johnson claimed that during the Trump years, the US had the greatest economy ever. Peter called that “a lie.”

We didn’t have the greatest economy in the history of the world. It wasn’t even close. We didn’t even have the greatest economy in the history of America. We didn’t have the greatest economy in the 21st century. We had a bubble under Trump. Trump didn’t create the bubble. He inherited the bubble, and he made it bigger. That bubble is now popped.”

You can trace the origins of the bubble all the way back to the Bill Clinton era and the monetary policy initiated by Alan Greenspan. That bubble popped the first time under Bush 2, was reinflated, popped again in 2008, and then they managed to blow it back up again.

The idea that people think everything was great just a few years ago and it’s all gone to hell — that’s wrong because it assumes that we could just fix it, really simple. We just have to go back to the Trump policies and we’re going to be great again. No! This problem is much bigger than just the bad things that Biden has done.”

Peter explained how the Clinton administration started the trend of using shorter-term financing to lower interest payments. They could do that because rates were so low. Of course, that created more risk because rising rates can quickly make those payments skyrocket. That’s where we are today. Interest rates are soaring and all of that short-term debt is maturing. That means the Treasury has to borrow at a much higher rate to replace that debt.

It’s going to escalate into this complete sovereign debt and currency crisis, which is already started, but it’s a long way from ending.”

In this podcast, Peter also explains why the future of the US looks more like Argentina than Japan.

Recent data from Edmunds reveals that an unprecedented 17% of American car purchasers now have monthly car payments of $1,000, a significant increase from just 7% three years ago. This trend highlights the extent to which consumers, despite being financially stretched, are willing to take on massive auto debt in these uncertain economic times as macroeconomic headwinds pile up.

New Google data, first revealed by X user CarDealershipGuy, shows Americans are searching “give car back” on the internet has soared to a record high. 

CarDealershipGuy added, “For everyone DMing me: No, you can’t “give back” a car – That’s a repossession.”

This year, we have been dutifully tracking the auto sector, considered a leading economic indicator, to pinpoint the arrival of the crushing auto loan crisis and even the possibility of the onset of the next recession.

The latest sign of an auto crisis emerging materialized in recent weeks:

The percent of subprime auto borrowers at least 60 days past due on their loans rose to 6.11% in September, the highest in data going back to 1994, according to Fitch Ratings. -Bloomberg

What’s clear is the subprime borrower, who took out 84-month +$1,000 monthly car payments, is getting squeezed in the high-rate environment. 

The auto loan crisis, something we called a “perfect storm” earlier this year, appears to be unfolding. 

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The U.S. Supreme Court rejected a challenge from a manufacturer to tariffs on steel imports that were created by former President Donald Trump and have been kept in place by President Joe Biden.

The justices declined to hear PrimeSource Building Products’ appeal of a lower court decision that upheld a 25 percent tariff on imports of steel derivatives.

The court did not explain its decision.

PrimeSource’s lawyers did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

President Trump in 2018 signed orders imposing tariffs on imported steel and aluminum, citing the results of an investigation carried out under the Trade Expansion Act. Officials found that the imports “threaten to impair national security” and had recommended action.

The tariffs were adjusted in 2020 to include some steel derivatives, such as nails.

The original orders followed the law because they came after officials found a threat to national security, but the expansion did not because it came years later without a fresh finding of a threat, Texas-based PrimeSource, a nail importer, has argued.

Then-Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross found in a 2018 report that “domestic steel production is important for national security applications” and that steel imports were on track to account for more than 30 percent of domestic consumption. He also determined that “excessive quantities of imports has the effect of weakening the internal economy of the United States, threatening to impair the national security.”

The New York-based U.S. Court of International Trade struck down the steel derivatives tariffs in 2021, saying the White House missed statutory deadlines to impose them.

The expansion “does not comply with the limitation on the President’s authority imposed by the 105-day time limitation” of the law, U.S. trade Judge Timothy Stanceu, appointed under President George W. Bush, said in the ruling.

But the Washington-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in February reversed that decision, citing its own 2022 ruling that presidents are authorized to impose “contingency-dependent” tariff increases to fulfill their original national security objectives, if those objectives remain valid.

President Trump created the 2020 tariffs to “close a loophole exploited by steel-derivatives importers … to address a specific form of circumvention,” U.S. Circuit Judge Richard Taranto, appointed under President Barack Obama, wrote in the federal circuit’s decision.

PrimeSource was among the companies urging the Supreme Court to review the decision, saying the expansion of the tariffs implicated how Congress delegates power and warranted “special separation of powers scrutiny.”

“One might think that courts would strictly construe the statutory conditions on such extraordinary delegations lest the judiciary permit an even greater injury to separation of powers than Congress intended,” the company said in a petition to the nation’s top court. “But the federal circuit applies the opposite rule, deferring to the executive’s view of the statutory limits on its own authority unless it is clearly wrong.”

President Biden’s administration defended the tariffs, telling the Supreme Court a review was not necessary because the appeals court decision does not conflict with any decisions from another appeals court.

Government lawyers pointed out that after then-President Dwight Eisenhower adjusted tariffs on oil imports in 1959 after receiving a report from the secretary of commerce, dozens of adjustments to the tariffs were made over the next 16 years without any new reports. The Office of the Attorney General has said in the past that Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act “contemplate[s] a continuing course of action, with the possibility of future modifications.”

“Section 232’s deadlines do not restrict the president’s power to adopt such amendments,” Biden administration attorneys said in a brief to the Supreme Court. “The relevant statutory provisions set deadlines for ‘the adoption and initiation of a plan of action or course of action,’ not for ‘each individual discrete imposition on imports.'”

PrimeSource appealed to the Supreme Court in July. Oman Fasteners, another company challenging the tariffs, filed a separate appeal on Oct. 20 that is currently pending.

The Supreme Court in March turned away a challenge to the 2018 tariffs by a group of U.S.-based steel importers. The justices in 2022 refused to hear a separate challenge by steel companies to President Trump’s 2018 decision to double tariffs on steel imports from Turkey, also on national security grounds.

Matthew Vadum and Reuters contributed to this report.

Pro-Palestinian activists in the west (many of them far-leftists with no ties to Palestinians or Muslim culture) have called for boycotts and punishment directed at any major companies seen as providing aid to Israel. 

McDonald’s angered the woke mob recently with its offer of free food to members of the Israeli military (McDonald’s also gave $1 million to the Red Cross and the World Food Program providing aid to Palestinians), while Starbucks and Google have triggered their wrath as well. 

Given that woke activism has been on the decline in terms of effectiveness and many in the public have taken to ignoring their demands, protesters are changing their tactics in some bizarre ways.  

Customers were waiting for meals at the McDonald’s branch at the Star City leisure complex in Birmingham as an activist threw a box of what appear to be rats into the building.

The rats were spray painted the colors of the Palestinian flag…

Activists release rats into a British McDonalds in support of Palestine pic.twitter.com/ATPr6pPyKs

— ɖʀʊӄքǟ ӄʊռʟɛʏ 🇧🇹🇹🇩 (@kunley_drukpa) October 30, 2023

Actions like this might be sending a message that pro-Palestinians did not intend.

By Tsvetana Paraskova of OilPrice.com

Russia’s crude oil exports by sea have been exceeding the country’s targeted export reductions as part of the OPEC+ pact for weeks, with the most recent week’s observed shipments as high as 360,000 barrels per day (bpd) above target, tanker-tracking data monitored by Bloomberg showed on Tuesday. Despite edging lower, four-week average volumes exceeded it by almost 200,000 barrels a day in the most recent period.

In the week to October 29, Russia shipped around 3.64 million bpd of crude oil from its oil export terminals, up by 110,000 compared to the week prior, according to the data reported by Bloomberg’s Julian Lee. 

Higher shipments out of the port of Novorossiysk in the Black Sea contributed to most of the gains in crude flows from Russia in the last week of October and were only partially offset by a lower number of crude oil tankers that left Russia’s ports in the Baltic Sea and on the Pacific.

The four-week average crude oil shipments out of Russia were slightly lower at 3.48 million bpd in the week to October 29, a drop of around 20,000 bpd compared to the four-week average in the four weeks to October 22.

Even this slightly lower 3.48 million bpd export volume for the average of the four weeks to October 29 was nearly 200,000 bpd higher than the exports Russia would have to ideally stick to in order to fulfill its pledge to cut exports by 300,000 bpd, Bloomberg notes.

Russia has never been quite clear about what exports it is cutting and how it calculates those volumes.

Russia’s commitment to reduce its oil exports by 300,000 bpd includes oil products, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak said earlier this month in remarks that sowed further confusion about how much oil supply Russia is really withholding from the market.

Russia has pledged to reduce its oil exports by 300,000 bpd until the end of 2023, in a show of solidarity with its OPEC+ partner Saudi Arabia, which is voluntarily reducing its oil production by 1 million bpd until 2023.

Starting last month, top Ukrainian officials began pushing an alarmist narrative that “world war 3 has already begun” – as the head Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council Aleksey Danilov had claimed in early September. The words were spoken after it became clear that Ukraine’s military was losing, and now Time magazine has confirmed the military doesn’t have the manpower to fight off the Russians. Naturally, Kiev must find new ways to draw in more direct support of key European powers.

“If somebody thinks that World War III hasn’t started then it’s a huge mistake. It has already begun. It had been underway in a hybrid period for some time and has now entered an active phase,” Danilov said before the Kiev Security Forum at the time (early Sept). More than a month later, some European leaders have begun to echo the same warning.

Significantly, this week Germany Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said in a media interview that German residents must start getting used to the idea of the specter of war in Europe. 

“We have to get used to the idea that there may be a threat of war in Europe,” he said in the national broadcast interview. “Germany must be able to defend itself. We must be prepared for war.”

He was responding to questions related to Germany being slow to rearmament itself in the wake of the Russian war in Ukraine, and now with the prospect of the Gaza-Israel conflict spilling over into broader Mideast regional war:

He believes that the conflict in the Middle East and Russia’s war against Ukraine shall have consequences for German society. In particular, Germany must be able to defend itself, and this applies to both the Bundeswehr and society.

“We have to become capable of fighting,” Pistorius said.

“Unfortunately, everything that has been spoiled for 30 years cannot be fixed in 19 months,” Pistorius admitted in the fresh remarks. But he still pushed back against the critics:

Pistorius rejected accusations that the federal government was too slow to react to the so-called turning point. He stressed that not only had a €100 billion special fund for the Bundeswehr been set up, but that state bodies had also been changed.

Germany has meanwhile been among those western powers which see conflicts in the Middle East and Eastern Europe as related, with Russia being a prime bad actor exacerbating tensions (the Kremlin has in turn said the same thing about the West, and the US in particular). 

On Monday, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock at a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Luxembourg claimed that President Vladimir Putin is taking joy in the crisis in the Middle East. “We can see that the Russian president is certainly happy, given the situation in the Middle East. That is why we are looking at Ukraine even more closely than we have done in the past,” she said.

Zelensky too has expressed increased concern that world powers have taken their eye off the ball as they focus on events in Gaza. But Defense Minister Pistorius has along with Baerbock sought to assure the Ukrainians that Berlin will not lessen its support to Kiev based on the Israel-Gaza conflict.

A fresh segment on Russian TV wherein popular pundits threaten war on Germany:

💬 Today German Leopards are burning in Ukraine, and in the future they will be burning on the streets of Berlin, – Russian propagandist Soloviev threatens Germany with war. pic.twitter.com/wjeeyKSr1t

— TheKremlinYap (@TheKremlinYap) October 31, 2023

Meanwhile, Germany’s new ‘turn’ toward rebuilding its military could helping drive new populist politicians’ efforts at curtailing this new expanse of Berlin’s reviving military-industrial complex: 

Wagenknecht’s politics clearly resonate with the German public. A recent survey of German voters found that 14% would vote for a Wagenknecht party, putting it just one point behind the governing Social Democrats (SPD) and two points ahead of the Green party. It speaks to the breadth of Wagenknecht’s coalition that, if initial polls are to be believed, she would take votes not only from her own former political home, but also from the centre-right CDU, the left-leaning Greens and the pro-business FDP. Most of all, though, Wagenknecht is trying to appeal to a section of AfD voters. Much of the party’s success in recent elections, she claims, comes from Germans who “don’t vote for the AfD because they’re rightwing. They vote for the AfD because they’re angry.” Wagenknecht’s attempts to siphon off the AfD’s protest voters currently seems like the only viable plan to mitigate the far-right party’s electoral success.

Far left and far right movements in Germany, and broadly in Europe remain distrustful of increased military spending, especially accompanied by politicians’ pleas for society to “prepare for war” – while silencing voices which seek ceasefire and a diplomatic offramp. 

Authored by Nick Corbishley via NakedCapitalism.com,

“The lack of attention being paid to [public safeguards] at such a crucial time is shocking, and destruction of the surveillance camera code that we’ve all been using successfully for over a decade is tantamount to vandalism.”

The United Kingdom is at the leading edge of many of the digital authoritarian trends sweeping ostensibly democratic nations. In one of the many dark ironies of our age, it is the government of George Orwell’s native Britain that is seeking to massively escalate its deployment of live facial recognition (LFR) technologies, despite the concerns raised about its potential impact. In late September, 180 rights groups and tech experts called on governments around the world to halt their use of facial recognition surveillance.

On the other side of the English channel, the EU Parliament has voted for a blanket ban on the use of LFR in public spaces, as too have some US cities. By contrast, the UK government is escalating its deployment of the controversial surveillance technology.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, the son-in-law of Indian tech billionaire N R Narayana Murthy, is determined to transform the UK into a world leader in AI governance. Said governance apparently involves gutting many of the limited safeguards protecting the public from the potential downsides and dangers of AI, of which there are many. This, of course, is no accident; if there was any time the British public needed those safeguards, it would be right now, as the government unleashes facial recognition technologies across the urban landscape.

As we reported in early August, live facial recognition (LFR) surveillance, where people’s faces are biometrically scanned by cameras in real-time and checked against a database, is being used by an increasing number of UK retailers amid a sharp upsurge in shoplifting — with the blessing, of course, of the UK government. Police forces are also being urged to step up their use of LFR. The technology has also been deployed at the Coronation of King Charles III, sports events including Formula 1, and concerts, despite ongoing concerns about its accuracy as well as the huge ethical and privacy issues it raises.

According to the UK government, this is all about fighting crime:

⚖️ Police are using innovative technology, like facial recognition, to fight crime, apprehend offenders and protect the public.

We are encouraging police to double the number of searches made using AI-enabled retrospective facial recognition by May 2024. pic.twitter.com/Z7o1Ge0W3V

— Home Office (@ukhomeoffice) October 30, 2023

But research by Big Brother Watch, a London-based civil rights and privacy organisation, found that more than 89% of UK police facial recognition alerts to date have wrongly identified members of the public as people of interest. The (likely) real object of the government’s interest is not shoplifters, but rather political activists, as a recent article in the Guardian hinted:

[D]ocuments obtained through a freedom of information request revealed that two-thirds of people on a secret watchlist drawn up by Northamptonshire police were not wanted for arrest or suspected of “criminal activity”, prompting campaigners to believe that the majority are likely to have been protesters.

Of 790 names on the watchlist, just 234 people were “wanted for arrest, either on a warrant and/or suspicion of criminal activity”, with 556 others not wanted for arrest.

Critics say using biometric surveillance could impinge on a person’s “freedom of expression” and deter people from protesting. Madeleine Stone, senior advocacy officer at Big Brother Watch, said: “Live facial recognition is a dystopian mass surveillance tool that turns streets into police lineups..”

But the government is not stopping there. Its new Data Protection and Digital Information Act, expected to become law in the Spring of 2024, seeks to abolish the roles of the Biometrics and Surveillance Camera Commission (BSCC), an independent advisory board that was, to some extent, helping to hold the public sector to account for its use of AI. The BSCC’s oversight functions include:

• Reviewing police handling of DNA samples, DNA profiles and fingerprints.

• Maintaining an up-to-date surveillance camera code of practice with standards and guidance for practitioners.

• Setting out technical and governance matters for most public body surveillance systems.

• Providing guidance on technical and procurement matters to ensure that future surveillance systems are of the right standard and purchased from reliable suppliers.

In its bid to eliminate the BSCC, the government clearly wants to have even freer reign to surveil and control the lives of British. The outgoing Biometrics and Surveillance Camera Commissioner, Professor Fraser Sampson, who leaves his post today (Oct. 31) with no replacement lined up, described the government’s latest move as “shocking” and “tantamount to vandalism”:

After receiving this report, I am more concerned than ever that, unless the government acts soon, there will be a worrying vacuum in our arrangements for overseeing and regulating these crucial areas of public life just when society needs those safeguards more than ever.

The lack of attention being paid to these important matters at such a crucial time is shocking, and destruction of the surveillance camera code that we’ve all been using successfully for over a decade is tantamount to vandalism…

There is no question that AI-driven biometric surveillance can be intrusive, and that the line between what is private and public surveillance is becoming increasingly blurred. The technology is among us already and the speed of change is dizzying with powerful capabilities evolving and combining in novel and challenging ways…

As proposed, the bill would remove the role of the independent commissioner providing oversight over biometrics databases, replacing it with a “Forensic Information Database Strategy Board.” The legislation does not make clear whether this board will be independent from government. It also allows the Secretary of State to change the databases which the board is required to oversee using statutory instruments, a form of secondary legislation that bypasses parliamentary votes.

This follows an announcement last month by the Minister of Policing Chris Filip of plans to create a vast facial recognition database out of passport photos of people in the UK. It is as brazen and as egregious an example of mission creep as you’re likely to find. At present, photos on the police national database are limited to individuals who have been arrested. The police can also check images from doorbell and dashcam technologies, as well as home and business security cameras. But it could soon have its hands on the photos of 45.7 million passport holders.

“Philp’s plan to subvert Brits’ passport photos into a giant police database is Orwellian and a gross violation of British privacy principles,” said Silkie Carlo, director of the civil liberties and privacy campaigning organisation Big Brother Watch:

It means that over 45 million of us with passports who gave our images for travel purposes will, without any kind of consent or the ability to object, be part of secret police lineups. To scan the population’s photos with highly inaccurate facial recognition technology and treat us like suspects is an outrageous assault on our privacy that totally overlooks the real reasons for shoplifting. Philp should concentrate on fixing broken policing rather than building an automated surveillance state.

Sampson reserved particular scorn for the government’s decision to eliminate the UK’s surveillance camera code, which, like other safeguards such as the BSCC, was created just over a decade ago by David Cameron’s coalition government:

The planned loss of the surveillance camera code is a good example of what will be lost if nothing is done.  It is the only legal instrument we have in this country that specifically governs public space surveillance. It is widely respected by the police, local authorities and the surveillance industry in general. It’s in one of those things that would have to be invented it didn’t already exist, so it seems absolutely senseless to destroy it now, junking the years of hard work it took to get it established.

A report by the Centre for Research into Information Surveillance and Privacy (CRISP), a collaborative initiative between the University of Stirling’s Management School, the University of St Andrews School of Management, and the University of Edinburgh’s School of Social and Political Sciences and School of Law, reached a similar conclusion, arguing that the code is widely valued among security and surveillance practitioners. Of the industry experts consulted, Alex Carmichael, from the Security Systems and Alarms Inspection Board, said:

Without the Surveillance Camera Commissioner you will go back to the old days when it was like the ‘wild west’, which means you can do anything with surveillance cameras so long as you don’t annoy the Information Commissioner…so, there will not be anyone looking at new emerging technologies, looking at their technical requirements or impacts, no one thinking about ethical implications for emerging technologies like face-recognition, it will be a free-for-all.

It would be bad enough if this were happening in isolation, but it isn’t. The UK government has also passed the Online Safety Bill, prompting many messaging apps to threaten to leave the UK due to the potential threat it poses to end-to-end encryption. It has granted police new powers to shut down protests as well as force employees to work during industrial action – or face being sacked. Police forces are also resorting to Section 60AA to require protesters to remove any item being worn for the purpose of concealing their identity. In other words, smile for the cameras!

Together with the Bank of England, the government is pushing hard for the creation of a “digital pound” to replace cash, once again ignoring the public’s deep-seated concerns about the ethical and privacy implications, not to mention their enduring affection for cash. It is also also seriously considering handing over full management of the National Health Service’s federated data platform to Palantir, a US tech giant with intimate ties to defense, intelligence and security industries around the world and whose founder Peter Thiel recently described the UK public’s affection for the NHS as Stockholm Syndrome.

Sadly, most of these trends — particularly the tech-enabled drift toward authoritarianism and centralised technocracy — are generalised among the ostensibly democratic nations of the so-called “Free West.” And as I noted at the beginning of this post, the UK is at the leading edge of almost all of them.

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is apparently trying to make good on his threats issued before a large pro-Palestinian rally last week saying that he would “present Israel before the world” as a “war criminal” state. 

Turkish media is reporting Tuesday that officials are exploring ways to bring a war crimes case centered on Israel before the International Criminal Court (ICC). This was announced as the death toll in Gaza soars past 8,500. 

Erdogan had told a crowd of hundreds of thousands in Istanbul on Saturday, “Israel, we will also declare you as a war criminal to the world, we are preparing for it, and we will introduce Israel to the world as a war criminal,” according to a state broadcaster. “Israel is committing war crimes” as an “occupier.” He added: the “West owes you, but Türkiye does not owe you.”

But the only problem with Turkey bringing a war crimes case is that the country is not a party to the Rome Statute, which is the international treaty that established the ICC.

Turkey’s Daily Sabah explains: 

Thus, it cannot directly apply to the court. However, it can notify the Prosecutor’s office at the ICC through government agencies and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) about crimes against humanity. Under the Rome Statute’s Article 15, the Prosecutor may initiate investigations proprio motu (on one’s own initiative) based on information on crimes within the jurisdiction of the ICC. Therefore, Türkiye can issue notices about crimes committed by the Israeli government.

The publication also cited the following example, along with various statements of UN officials decrying Israel’s seeming indiscriminate attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure in Gaza:

ICC’s chief Prosecutor Karim Khan was at the Rafah crossing between Egypt and Gaza over the weekend and issued a stark warning to Israel, suggesting that obstructing the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza could potentially be considered a criminal act. “Impeding relief supplies as provided by the Geneva Conventions may constitute a crime within the court’s jurisdiction,” Khan stated.

Khan has also said, “Israel has clear obligations about its war with Hamas, not just moral obligations but legal obligations.”

In response to Erdogan’s blistering denunciations, Israel has withdrawn all of its diplomats from Turkey…

#WATCH | Turkey: Islamist President Recep Tayyip Erdogan leads an anti-Israel rally, blames the West for “the massacre taking place in Gaza” and accuses Israel of “war crimes.”

After Erdogan’s speech, the Jewish state withdrew its diplomats in Turkey. pic.twitter.com/7V4Nm0bAkZ

— VOZ (@Voz_US) October 28, 2023

“Given the grave statements coming from Turkey, I have ordered the return of diplomatic representatives there in order to conduct a reevaluation of the relations between Israel and Turkey,” Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen wrote on X this past weekend.

But while Turkey may have backers among BRICS and Global South countries in its efforts to get Israel branded with a war crimes charge, the reality is that the The Hague court has long been more under the West’s influence. The long-standing criticism has been that it typically tries and convicts African warlords, but never goes after US, UK, or European leaders responsible for overseeing wars that killed hundreds of thousands, such as in Iraq, Libya, or Yemen.

Via Remix News,

Polish truckers believe that relaxed regulations towards non-EU registered HGVs have given Ukrainian companies the edge over Poles…

Polish truckers are threatening to block all border crossings with Ukraine starting in November due to excessive competition after the liberalization of international transport between Ukraine and the European Union.

From November, Polish truckers will initiate protests and blockades at the Ukrainian border crossings in a move that threatens to disrupt border traffic potentially until the end of the year.

The announcement was made on social media by “Ukravtoprom,” the Association of Motor Vehicle Producers of Ukraine, citing the International Transport Association of Ukraine.

“The protest action is planned for a period of two months. The reason for the protests is the excessive competition after the liberalization of international transport between Ukraine and EU countries,” the message read.

Polish truckers argue that relaxed regulations towards non-EU registered HGVs have given Ukrainian companies the edge over Poles, experts from the International Transport Association of Ukraine revealed.

…

Read more here…