Mebbe You Can't Grab the World By the Pussy - And Get Away With It?

moonofalabama |  Trump said he would ask Iraq to pay for the bases the U.S. has built should the U.S. troops be kicked out of Iraq. The U.S. already has binding legal agreements with Iraq which stipulate that the bases, and all fixed installations the U.S. has built there, are the property of Iraq.

Trump had already asked Iraqi Prime Ministers -twice- if the U.S. could get Iraq's oil as reward for invading and destroying their country. The requests were rejected. Now we learn that Trump also uses gangster methods (ar) to get the oil of Iraq. The talk by the Iraqi Prime Minister Abdul Mahdi happened during the recent parliament session in Iraq (machine translation):

Al-Halbousi, Speaker of the Iraqi Council of Representatives, blocked the speech of Mr. Abdul Mahdi in the scheduled session to discuss the decision to remove American forces from Iraq. 

At the beginning of the session, Al-Halbousi left the presidential seat and sat next to Mr. Abdul-Mahdi, after his request to cut off the live broadcast of the session, a public conversation took place between the two parties. The voice of Adel Abdul Mahdi was raised.

Mr. Abdul Mahdi spoke with an angry tone, saying:

"The Americans are the ones who destroyed the country and wreaked havoc on it. They are those who refuse to complete building the electrical system and infrastructure projects. They have bargained for the reconstruction of Iraq in exchange for giving up 50% of Iraqi oil imports, so I refused and decided to go to China and concluded an important and strategic agreement with it, and today Trump is trying to cancel this important agreement."

The American President's threatened the Iraqi Prime Minister to liquidate him directly with the Minister of Defense. The Marines are the third party that sniped the demonstrators and the security men:

Abdul Mahdi continued:
"After my return from China, Trump called me and asked me to cancel the agreement, so I also refused, and he threatened me with massive demonstrations that would topple me.

Indeed, the demonstrations started and then Trump called, threatening to escalate in the event of non-cooperation and responding to his wishes, so that the third party (Marines snipers) would target the demonstrators and security forces and kill them from the highest structures and the US embassy in an attempt to pressure me and submit to his wishes and cancel the China agreement, so I did not respond and submitted my resignation and the Americans still insist to this day on canceling the China agreement and when the defense minister said that who kills the demonstrators is a third party, Trump called me immediately and physically threatened me and defense minister in the event of talk about the third party."

Tracking Monsters Presumes You Have the Nerve and Means to Do Something About Them

project-syndicate |  We are living in the Dark Ages of inequality statistics. More than a decade after the “Great Recession,” governments are still unable to track accurately the evolution of income and wealth. Statistical agencies produce income-growth statistics for the population as a whole (national accounts), but not for the “middle class,” the “working class,” or the richest 1% and 0.1%. At a time when Google, Facebook, Visa, Mastercard, and other multinational corporations know intimate details about our private lives, governments still do not capture, let alone publish, the most basic statistics concerning the distribution of income and wealth.

This failure has huge costs for society. The perception that inequalities are reaching unjustifiable heights in many countries, combined with a lack of any possible informed choice for voters, is fodder for demagogues and critics of democracy.

Making matters worse, experts in the field of inequality are sometimes depicted as being overly reliant on specific methodological approaches, as illustrated in The Economist’s recent cover story, “Inequality illusions.” But, of course, data in the social sciences are by their very nature open to challenge, which makes methodological debates largely unavoidable. The question is where to draw the line between legitimate academic disagreement about inequality levels and trends and outright inequality denialism.

Whether or not inequality is acceptable – and whether or not something should be done about it – is a matter of collective choice. To help inform the debate, more than 100 researchers from around the world have joined forces to develop innovative methods for compiling inequality statistics through the World Inequality Database, which now covers more than 100 countries. The WID includes the widest possible array of available data sources, from household surveys, tax-administration data, national accounts, and wealth rankings published in the media, to the “Panama Papers,” through which the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists exposed stockpiles of wealth stashed in various tax havens.

Monsters Cause Wars and Go to Exhausting Lengths to Cover-Up Their Crimes

speigel |  On Nov. 23, DER SPIEGEL reported on the background of the so-called Magnitsky sanctions (the English report was published on Nov. 26). The sanctions, applied by the U.S. and others to Russian officials, are largely based on depictions provided by the former investor Bill Browder and are related to the fate of his employee Sergei Magnitsky.

Magnitsky died in 2009 in a Moscow prison under circumstances that haven't been completely clarified. Browder claims that Magnitsky was murdered because he had uncovered a tax scandal. The report from DER SPIEGEL describes the inconsistencies in Browder's version of events and demonstrates that he is unable to present sufficient proof for his claims.

Browder has now gone public with his complaints about the DER SPIEGEL story in the form of a letter to the newsmagazine's editor-in-chief in addition to a complaint filed with the German Press Council. In his letter, he accuses DER SPIEGEL of having misrepresented the facts.

We believe his complaint has no basis and would like to review why we have considerable doubts about Browder's story and why we felt it necessary to present those doubts publicly. The English text of the original story can be found here, and the paywall has been removed from the German version, which can be read here. In addition, you will find links below to some of the sources that we relied on in our reporting.

Peasants Tolerate the Hot Breath of Monsters on the Backs of Their Necks...,

Kunstler |  What is most perilous for our country now, would be to journey through a second epic crisis of authority in recent times without anybody facing the consequences of crimes they might have committed. The result will be a people turned utterly cynical, with no faith in their institutions or the rule of law, and no way to imagine a restoration of their lost faith within the bounds of law. It will be a deadly divorce between truth and reality. It will be an invitation to civil violence, a broken social contract, and the end of the framework for American life that was set up in 1788.

The first crisis of the era was the Great Financial Crash of 2008 based on widespread malfeasance in the banking world, an unprecedented suspension of rules, norms, and laws. GFC poster-boy Angelo Mozilo, CEO and chairman of Countrywide Financial, a sub-prime mortgage racketeering outfit, sucked at least half a billion dollars out of his operation before it blew up, and finally was nicked for $67 million in fines by the SEC — partly paid by Countrywide’s indemnity insurer — with criminal charges of securities fraud eventually dropped in the janky “settlement.” In other words, the cost of doing business. Scores of other fraudsters and swindlers in that orgy of banking malfeasance were never marched into a courtroom, never had to answer for their depredations, and remained at their desks in the C-suites collecting extravagant bonuses. The problems they caused were papered over with trillions of dollars that all of us are still on-the-hook for. And, contrary to appearances, the banking system never actually recovered. It is permanently demoralized.

How it was that Barack Obama came on-duty in January of 2009 and got away with doing absolutely nothing about all that for eight years remains one of the abiding mysteries of life on earth. Perhaps getting the first black president into the White House was such an intoxicating triumph of righteousness that nothing else seemed to matter anymore. Perhaps Mr. Obama was just a cat’s paw for banksterdom. (Sure kinda seems like it, when your first two hires are Robert Rubin and Larry Summers.) The failure to assign penalties for massive bad behavior has set up the nation for another financial fiasco, surely of greater magnitude than the blow-up of 2008, considering the current debt landscape. Not a few astute observers say they feel the hot breath of that monster on the back of their necks lately, with all the strange action in the RePo market — $500 billion “liquidity” injections in six weeks.

Remove Fairness from Society and You Create the Conditions for Revolt

nakedcapitalism |  This site regularly discusses the rise of neoliberalism and its consequences, such as rising inequality and lower labor bargaining rights. But it’s also important to understand that these changes were not organic but were the result of a well-financed campaign to change the values of judges and society at large to be more business-friendly. But the sacrifice of fair dealing as a bedrock business and social principle has had large costs. 

We’ve pointed out how lower trust has increased contracting costs: things that use to be done on a handshake or a simple letter agreement are now elaborately papered up. The fact that job candidates will now engage in ghosting, simply stopping to communicate with a recruiter rather than giving a ritually minimalistic sign off, is a testament to how impersonal hiring is now perceived to be, as well as often-abused workers engaging in some power tit for tat when they can. 

But on a higher level, the idea of fair play was about self-regulation of conduct. Most people want to see themselves as morally upright, even if some have to go through awfully complicated rationalizations to believe that. But when most individuals lived in fairly stable social and business communities, they had reason to be concerned that bad conduct might catch up with them. It even happens to a small degree now. Greg Lippmann, patient zero of toxic CDOs at Deutsche Bank, was unable to get his kids into fancy Manhattan private schools because his reputation preceded him. But the case examples for decades have gone overwhelmingly the other way. My belief is that a watershed event was the ability of Wall Street renegade, and later convicted felon Mike Milken, to rehabilitate himself spoke volumes as to the new normal of money trumping propriety. 

Another aspect of the decline in the importance of fair dealing is the notion of the obligations of power, that individuals in a position of authority have a duty to those in their sway. 

The abandonment of lofty-sounding principles like being fair has other costs. We’ve written about the concept of obliquity, how in complex systems, it’s not possible to chart a simple path though them because it’s impossible to understand it well enough to begin to do so. John Kay, who has made a study of the issue and eventually wrote a book about it, pointed out as an illustration that studies of similarly-sized companies in the same industry showed that ones that adopted nobler objectives did better in financial terms than ones that focused on maximizing shareholder value.

Regime Change in Mexico - Conspicuously Obvious to the Casual Observer...,

thegrayzone |  AMLO’s left-wing policies have caused shockwaves in Washington, which has long relied on neoliberal Mexican leaders ensuring a steady cheap exploitable labor base and maintaining a reliable market for US goods and open borders for US capital and corporations.

On November 27 — a day after declaring Nicaragua a “national security threat” — Trump announced that the US government will be designating Mexican drug cartels as “terrorist organizations.”

Such a designation could pave the way for direct US military intervention in Mexico.

The designation was particularly ironic considering some top drug cartel leaders in Mexico have long-standing ties to the US government. The leaders of the notoriously brutal cartel the Zetas, for instance, were originally trained in counter-insurgency tactics by the US military.

Throughout the Cold War, the US government armed, trained, and funded right-wing death squads throughout Latin America, many of which were involved in drug trafficking. The CIA also used drug money to fund far-right counter-insurgency paramilitary groups in Central America.

These tactics were also employed in the Middle East and South Asia. The United States armed, trained, and funded far-right Islamist extremists in Afghanistan in the 1980s in order to fight the Soviet Union. These same US-backed Salafi-jihadists then founded al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

This strategy was later repeated in the US wars on Libya and Syria. ISIS commander Omar al-Shishani, to take one example, had been trained by the US military and enjoyed direct support from Washington when he was fighting against Russia.

The Barack Obama administration also oversaw a campaign called Project Gunrunner and Operation Fast and Furious, in which the US government helped send thousands of guns to cartels in Mexico.

Mexican journalist Alina Duarte explained that, with the Trump administration’s designation of cartels as terrorists, “They are creating the idea that Mexico represents a threat to their national security.”

“Should we start talking about the possibility of a coup against Lopez Obrador in Mexico?” Duarte asked.

Greatest Wealth Transfer in 100 Years...., to Failed Managers!

epsilontheory |  There’s no way that the Justice Dept. will ever bring a criminal case against Boeing, not one that hits top management or really shackles the company.

And I know that Boeing said today that Muilenburg won’t get a bonus or (more) stock grants until the 737 MAX is flying again, but this article got Radical Me thinking …

I wonder how much money Muilenburg and his management team and his board of directors have pocketed since he took over as CEO in 2015 and Chairman in 2016?

I wonder if executive compensation practices have changed over that span since … you know … Boeing started buying back nine billion dollars of stock every year?

Tell you what, I’ll make it easy and I won’t even count the cash compensation of Boeing management since 2016. I’ll just stick to the direct value of the sterilized stock options they exercised and the restricted stock units they were vested. And I won’t count any compensation of any sort here in 2019.

Private Equity Vampires Are Killing Everything

thenation |  There are many, many different versions of the vampire’s tale, but in its most timeworn Eurocentric telling, vampires are evil’s upper crust: beautiful, blue-blooded aristocrats draped in velvet, exuding idle menace. Dracula and his cursed kin are the undead 1 percent and act accordingly: terrorizing villages, murdering peasants, siphoning off others’ lifeblood, and turning up their aquiline noses at the slightest hint of dissent.

An entire cottage industry operates around their stories, and vampire lore does not always confine itself to the page. In the 17th century, the very real and very sadistic Countess Bathory—she of Hungarian legend and historical infamy—is said to have broken the bodies of more than 650 village girls and bathed in serf blood to retain her youth. For that, history remembers her with a strange sort of fondness: as an unfathomably wealthy, castle-dwelling noblewoman always depicted as lavishly dressed and dripping in jewels. She was monstrous in an elegant sort of way, the kind that inspires gothic novels and Swedish black metal records. Vituperative inhumanity, but made fashionable. 

Vampires’ modern-day counterparts, on the other hand, leave much to be desired from an aesthetic standpoint. Unlike the ancient Romanian moroi, Irish dearg-due, or Ghanaian sasabonsam, today’s vampires are parasitic new money. Vulgar, ugly, and smug, their wrists are cluttered with hideous statement watches, their torsos clad in power suits or, worse, upmarket hipster threads. Some call them vulture capitalists, after the great birds who feast on carrion. While catchy, this term doesn’t quite fit; these monsters do not focus on the dead—they go after the living. They run hedge funds, trade stocks, and manage private equity firms, flush with generational wealth but always hungry for more. Instead of hot blood, these fancy fiends hunt for cold cash—and much like their spiritual predecessors, care little for how others must suffer in their pursuit thereof.

Unsubstantiated Drug Price Increases

angrybearblog |  The ICER (Institute for Clinical and Economic Review)

Is an independent and non-partisan research organization. Its purpose is to evaluate the clinical and economic value of prescription drugs, medical tests, and health care and health care delivery innovations. ICER conducts rigorous analyses of all clinical data with key stakeholders to include patients, doctors, life science companies, private insurers, and the government and translate the evidence into policy decisions that lead to a more effective, efficient, and just health care system.

As explained by their site information, ICER is known as the nation’s independent watchdog on drug pricing. It’s drug assessment reports include a full analysis of how well each new drug works and the resulting “clinical value, quality of life, benefit to the health-care system and society” used to establish a price. Using the drug assessment report, a “value-based price benchmark” is established  reflecting how each drug should be priced addressing all four factors. Reports also evaluate the potential short-term budget impact of new drugs to alert policymakers to situations when short-term costs may strain health system budgets and lead to restrictions on patient access. Ensuring objectivity in its work, all ICER reports are produced with funding from non-profit foundations and other sources that are free of conflicts of interest from the life science industry or insurers.

What I have seen in the past is the ICER establishing pricing for new drugs taking into consideration these factors; “the patient’s quality of life, and the resulting benefits to the health-care system, and society.” This is the first time I am seeing the ICER looking at price increases and determining whether the value delivered substantiates a price increase. By the numbers: Here are the drugs (and manufacturers) highlighted in a recent ICER’s report, with the increase in net spending attributable to each drug’s price increase, and citing the increases could not be justified by the value delivered.

Did China Just Niggerize Do to the NBA What America Did to Johnson Publishing?

foxnews |  In recent years, the NBA has become famously political. During the heyday of the Black Lives Matter movement, the NBA permitted players to wear slogan-printed T-shirts in support, and stars like LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Paul spoke out loudly on the issue.

The Sacramento Kings actually announced a partnership with the local branch of the movement. And NBA players have had little problem denouncing President Trump, whom James called a "bum."

In 2017, Commissioner Adam Silver actually tried to blackmail the city of Charlotte, North Carolina, by pulling the All-Star Game, all in an attempt to restore the so-called "bathroom bill" for transgender people.

The NBA has reaped the benefit from its benevolent attitude toward left-leaning social activism, too. Silver, like former Commissioner David Stern before him, has been praised ad infinitum by the press, compared favorably to that alleged corporate hobgoblin Roger Goodell of the NFL.

Silver told CNN just last year that "part of being an NBA player" is social activism and a "sense of an obligation, social responsibility, a desire to speak up directly about issues that are important." Silver stated the league wants players to "be multi-dimensional people and fully participate as citizens." He specifically explained that the league had a role in ensuring that the situation remains "safe" for players afraid of suffering career blowback.

Then the NBA came up against its own corporate interests.

And the NBA caved.

Late last week, Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey tweeted an eminently uncontroversial statement: "Fight for freedom, stand with Hong Kong." That's about as milquetoast a statement about Hong Kong as it's possible to make. But that didn't matter to the Chinese government, which immediately stated that it would cut relations with the NBA and the Rockets in particular.

Speculation quickly ran rampant that Morey might lose his job. Morey was forced to delete his tweet and walk it back: "I did not intend my tweet to cause any offense to Rockets fans and friends of mine in China. I was merely voicing one thought, based on one interpretation, of one complicated event. I have had a lot of opportunity since that tweet to hear and consider other perspectives." James Harden, star of the team, tweeted, "We apologize. We love China. We love playing there." Silver's NBA put out an apology in Chinese saying (as translated), "We are extremely disappointed in the inappropriate comment by the general manager of the Houston Rockets."

REAL REVOLUTIONARY?

Peddling the Mythology of Continuous Neoliberal Progress

eand  |  Every year of my life so far, it seems, some wise and learned old man publishes a book which recites the same old gruesome and weird myth, almost word for word. It’s like groundhog day, but for…

The myth goes like this. Capitalism! Yay! It saved the world! The latest such person is Steven Pinker, and it’s his third? fourth? book proclaiming so. Needless to say, it must be something people feel the need to hear, over and over again,a And so it’s very much a modern myth: a tale we tell, ritually, to comfort ourselves. But from what, exactly? Probably from the sinking feeling, that, right about now, the myth is probably about as true as Snow White being rescued by Prince Charming, which is to say, not very.

Have you looked at the stronghold of capitalism, the United States, recently? It’s not exactly bubbling over with prosperity, whether it’s called happiness, sanity, wealth, democracy, or wisdom. If capitalism didn’t save America, the most capitalist society in human history — how could it have saved anyone else? The myth falls apart the very instant we think about it, instead of recite it. So what happens if we go on questioning the fairy tale that capitalism is the Prince Charming of human progress, or, if you like, the magical perpetual motion machine of neoliberalism? What might we discover?

(The first thing we’d probably think is that no one in their right mind should be proclaiming “progress!!” in a summer when ruinous heatwaves due to climate change are sweeping the globe, and so are pulsating waves of fascism — both catastrophic depletions of natural and civic capital. The true story of capitalism, in other words, is as much about catastrophic hidden costs, or “externalities”, as much as “benefits” . Those costs are obvious, though, if we care to look. Centuries of slavery. Segregation. Colonialism. Speculative frenzies which lead to depressions, which cause world wars. No accounting of capitalism is complete with any of those — but for that precise reason, because it’s the logic of capitalism, “accounting” isn’t the way we should think of human progress at all.)

#YouToo: Capitalism is Socialist Rape-Culture

eand |  Capitalism is produced by socialism. It socializes losses. It privatizes gains. It needs social investment and support to keep doing both, in fact. Why? And why do we let it? Why does capitalism always seem to need capital from society to plow on, and losses to socialize right back — which also means that a noble laissez faire state of capitalist nature is an old wives’ tale? Whether it’s armies to enforce slaves, bailouts for banks, or loans for the American Dream (no blacks allowed, please)?

“Capitalism” is really just a way to say that “governments support private ownership of things.” Sometimes, those things are factories, sometimes they’re bonds, and sometimes, quite terribly, they’re even other people. But note the wrinkle. The job of a “government”, as far as “capitalism” is concerned, is to keep privately owned things running, going, operating — and yet that alone says that capital can’t really exist by itself. Who’ll do the work of quelling the slave rebellion? Of funding the frontier? Of bailing out the hedge funds? Who’ll pipe that house and pave those roads? Yet without those, capitalism would have ceased to function in the blink of an eye, time after time. Without social investment and support, capitalism would stop overnight — even in America. Imagine if the skies turned black, or the phone lines went down, or the internet became gobbledygook, or the trees attacked us, instead of stood there pleasantly, giving us air to breathe.

That means that “capitalism” is a system of a very specific kind. One where those who have the least capital are always subsidizing those who already have the most of it — and hoping for a little bit in return. And that means that those already who have the most capital will always win. Imagine that you have a hundred times more money than me. Won’t you have the power to demand all kinds of concessions from me? Imagine you have a hundred times more social capital than me. Won’t that make your power over me even greater? And so on. And yet here I am, not just begging you for a job — but subsidizing you while I’m doing it, paying for that bailout, paying back that extortionate interest, paying for the democracy which keep your contracts worth a dime while you wreck it, and so forth.

The problem, then, is a kind of paradox. “Capitalism” means the job of a government is that society supports and nurtures, protects and subsidizes, the capitalist, not vice versa. But the capitalist is the one who already owns the most, by definition. He has the least to lose. He has the most information. He can buy up all your alternatives. So this idea of governance itself means the capitalist always wins — because the government is enforcing his rule now: those who have the most capital receive the most capital, and those who have none receive none.

That is why the history of capitalism seem always to be those who already have the most capital amassing the most, and those who have the least amassing the least. Not any specific individual — but certainly amongst social groups. It’s not a coincidence that American billionaires are mostly white men — and white men were slaveowners, not slaves. Whites amassed so much capital thanks to slavery that they still hold ten times more, on average, than blacks. So of course it’s vastly more likely that whites will be billionaires, or even millionaires. Capitalism is a construction of socialism — a system in which society subsidizes those who own the most, not vice versa.

Isn’t that what’s happened in America today? Late on your bills? We’ll hunt you down. Bad credit? Kiss a home goodbye. Can’t afford your deductible? Too bad, I guess the cancer’s going to get you. The government is enforcing the capitalist’s rule — whomever has the most capital receives most, and whomever has the least loses the most, or at best, wins the least.

Father Of Synthetic Genomics Better Be Careful Tampering With Whydte Folks Money....,

Genomeweb |  Human Longevity (HLI) is suing the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) and a number of unknown defendants over the misappropriation and use of trade secrets passed along by Craig Venter, the founder of both the company and the institute that bears his name.

In a complaint filed last Friday with the US District Court for the Southern District of California, Human Longevity alleges that upon his termination from HLI on May 24, Venter took a company-owned laptop with trade secrets and passed on protected information to the Venter Institute, of which he is chairman and CEO. HLI also claims that the institute is working on a product that will compete with its own business.

According to the complaint, Venter was CEO of Human Longevity from 2014 until January 2017, when he became the firm's executive chairman and signed a "proprietary information and inventions" agreement. He assumed the role of interim CEO in November of 2017 until his employment was terminated in May of this year. During his time at HLI, Venter used a company-owned laptop computer, the contents of which were backed up in the cloud, and consistently used his JCVI email address rather than his HLI email to conduct company business, the complaint states.

In the spring of this year, Venter "withheld critical information from the board and the HLI investors regarding the conduct of an HLI key executive which would likely result in termination," the complaint says. Further, in May, Venter had an HLI-paid counsel "draft a Venter-favorable employment contract" and appointed a new interim president without conferring with the HLI board first.

On May 24, the HLI board "considered a rushed investor deal which Venter presented to them only less than two weeks earlier," the terms of which the board considered one-sided. The deal would have provided financial incentives to Venter and offered the new investor rights that had already been granted to another party, according to the complaint. "At that point, the HLI board voted to terminate Venter from HLI," it states.

Following his termination, Venter left the HLI offices with the company-owned laptop and "immediately began using the HLI computer and server to communicate to the public, solicit HLI investors and employees," the complaint says. In a Twitter message on May 24, Venter said that he was retiring from HLI and returning to JCVI.

His access to the HLI server and HLI emails was disabled the next day, but the company alleges that "even after his HLI termination, Venter used the HLI computer, accessed and sent HLI proprietary information and trade secrets," including communications involving Series C and Asia JV Series A documents.

Not Even Valodya Is Allowed To Directly Criticize Those Who Rule...,

thejewishvoice |  Speaking to a group of US ambassadors, Putin referred to a group of “powerful” people who can “force-feed people their stories that would be hard to digest”,

“We see that there are forces in the United States that put their own group and narrow partisan interests above the national ones,” Mr. Putin said. “Our renowned satirists once wrote very well about such people: ‘Pathetic, paltry people.’ But this is not so in this particular case: These people are not pathetic and not paltry. On the contrary, they are quite powerful and strong if they can, excuse my crudeness, force-feed millions of their people various stories that are hard to digest in normal logic.”

Going off script and speaking personally, I’d like to say a few words,” the Russian president said. “We see that there are forces in the US which are prepared at the drop of a hat to sacrifice Russian-American relations for the sake of their internal political ambitions in America,” he said.

“They are prepared to sacrifice the interests of their own businesses” and “the interests of their allies in Europe and the Middle East,” as well as “their own national security,”

Putin said. Putin suggested that decades old issues can not be solved with one short Summit between the US and Russia ansd that is was important step for him to talk to Trump directly. “The path to positive changes has all the same begun,” Putin said, according to Reuters. “It’s important that a full-scale meeting has finally taken place allowing us to talk directly.”

Trump also tweeted similar sentiments.

The Fake News Media wants so badly to see a major confrontation with Russia, even a confrontation that could lead to war. They are pushing so recklessly hard and hate the fact that I’ll probably have a good relationship with Putin. We are doing MUCH better than any other country!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 19, 2018

Putin goes ‘off-script,’ slams US ‘forces’ undermining Russian-American relations pic.twitter.com/VInqUSlZhR

— Ruptly (@Ruptly) July 19, 2018

Meanwhile, Profit-Seeking Bankster Parasites Busy Eyeballing What Sustainably Remains....,

eurasiareview |  Indigenous Peoples have ownership, use and management rights over at least a quarter of the world’s land surface according to a new study published this week in the journal Nature Sustainability.

The 38 million square kilometers (14.6 million square miles) are spread across 87 countries or politically distinct areas and overlap with about 40 percent of all terrestrial protected areas.

The results of the study provides strong evidence that recognizing the rights of Indigenous Peoples to their traditional lands and waters is not only an ethical obligation it is essential to meeting local and global conservation goals. The authors say that more collaborative partnerships between Indigenous Peoples and governments would yield significant benefits for conservation of ecologically valuable landscapes, ecosystems, and genetic diversity for future generations.

“Understanding the extent of lands over which Indigenous Peoples retain traditional connection is critical for several conservation and climate agreements,” said Professor Stephen Garnett from Charles Darwin University in Australia who led the international consortium that developed the maps. “Not until we pulled together the best available published information on Indigenous lands did we really appreciate the extraordinary scale of Indigenous Peoples’ ongoing influence,” he said.

There are at least 370 million people who define themselves as Indigenous, are descended from populations who inhabited a country before the time of conquest or colonization, and who retain at least some of their own social, economic, cultural and political practices. The proportion of countries with indigenous people is highest in Africa and lowest in Europe-West Asia.

Optimizing the Human Supply Chain

nakedcapitalism |  No, though this is about as good — and as neoliberal — as it gets (even though the phrase “human supply chain” is not used). I don’t agree that “The key to any market correctly operating is information.” For one thing, “correctly” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. For another, the key to the way markets operate is not information, but power. I mean, does Prepscius really believe that “reputational enhancement…, risk mitigation[,] and workforce retention” pose “significant business value” when put beside profit?

All of which brings me to the single, solitary on-point source I was able to find: Fordham’s Jennifer Gordon’s “Regulating the Human Supply Chain,” 446 Iowa Law Review, Vol. 102:445-503 (pdf)[5]. I highly recommend that anybody who has read this far give Gordon a look. From the abstract:

In 2015, the number of migrant workers entering the United States on visas was nearly double that of undocumented arrivals—almost the inverse of just 10 years earlier. Yet notice of this dramatic shift, and examination of its implications for U.S. law and the regulation of employment in particular, has been absent from legal scholarship.

This Article fills that gap, arguing that employers’ recruitment of would-be migrants from other countries, unlike their use of undocumented workers already in the United States, creates
a transnational network of labor intermediaries—the “human supply chain”—whose operation undermines the rule of law in the workplace, benefitting U.S. companies by reducing labor costs while creating distributional harms for U.S. workers, and placing temporary migrant workers in situations of severe subordination. It identifies the human supply chain as a key structure of the global economy, a close analog to the more familiar product supply chains through which U.S. companies manufacture products abroad. The Article highlights a stark governance deficit with regard to human supply chains, analyzing the causes and harmful effects of an effectively unregulated world market for human labor.

That’s the stuff to give the troops! And here is a worked example, from page 472 et seq. I apologize for the length, but it’s lovely because all of the links in the chain are displayed:

B. WHERE HUMAN AND PRODUCT SUPPLY CHAINS MEET: AN EXAMPLE
B. WHERE HUMAN AND PRODUCT SUPPLY CHAINS MEET: AN EXAMPLE
Apple Fresh is a (fictitious) apple cider maker in Washington State…. Like all employers, Apple Fresh is responsible for ensuring that its employees’ wages, benefits, and working conditions comport with legal and contractual minimums. It must also pay social-security premiums on its employees’ behalf and cover their unemployment and workers’ compensation insurance. … As part of its effort to meet those demands, Apple Fresh decides to outsource its apple pressing to one of several food processors in the market, Presser Inc., which can produce the cider more cheaply and efficiently. Once it signs a contract with Presser, Apple Fresh is released from responsibility for the social insurance and many of the working conditions of the workers who press its apples, because it is no longer their employer. Presser now bears those obligations. …
In year two of the contract, Presser decides to try to decrease turnover and increase its profit margin by using temporary migrant workers to staff its plant. Its owner had been contacted not long before by the U.S. agent of a labor-recruitment firm in Mexico City…

Oooh, lookie. Rent-seeking intermediaries!

Mammy's Little Baby Loves Quesadillas...,

nakedcapitalism |  In our last post on “illegals,” we looked at the odd refusal, by the press, to call the capitalist employers of illegal migrants “illegals.” Today, I want to work out a similar kink in the discourse by looking at the nannies who are employed by the professional class on up (that is, by the 0.1% and the 9.9%). The supply chain and labor market for migrants, illegal or not, is insanely complicated, and so I’m only going to look at nannies, and not at yard men, construction workers, restaurant workers, factory workers, etc. The complexity also makes solid numbers hard to come by. But there are generalizations that we can make, as we shall see. After making those generalizations, we’ll conclude with some telling anecdotes.

“Nannies” were first weaponized in political discourse during the Clinton administration (as retrospectively we might expect, since Clinton represented and embodied the then fresh ascendancy of the professional classes (the 9.9%) in the Democrat Party). “NannyGate” derailed Clinton’s nominations of corporate lawyer Zoë Baird and Federal Judge Kimba Wood for Attorney General, Baird because she employed an illegal migrant after it was illegal to employ them and didn’t pay the nanny’s taxes, Wood because she employed an illegal migrant even though when she did it was legal to do so. “The Nannygate matter caused wealthy Americans to ask each other if they too had a ‘Zoë Baird problem’, as the hiring of illegal aliens and the paying of household help off the books were both commonplace.” And so — speculating freely — we have solved that potential optics problem with the ubiquituous nanny brokers (“agencies”) of today, chat boards that share tips for explain the risks of hiring nannies, all of which are filled with “I don’t, but I have heard that others do” comments. 

As far as the class angle goes, the median hourly wage for all nannies in the United States is $14.59 an hour (in New York, $17.63). The median hourly wage (pause for toothgrinding calculation) for all occupations is $18.12. Taking income as a proxy for class, and assuming that being a nanny is a full time job, it seems reasonable to conclude that the working class (the 90%) isn’t hiring nannies (except perhaps for labor aristocrats)[1]. That means that the labor market for nannies is made by the 9.9% and the 0.1%; they are the ones doing the hiring.

So let’s take a look at that labor market. It would not be fair to say that all, or even most, nannies are illegal migrants. (The illegality comes in at another angle, which I’ll get to.) From GTM Payroll Services in 2015, and taking “maids and housekeepers” as a proxy for nannies:

According to a Pew Research Center study published last year, there were 8.1 million unauthorized immigrants either working or looking for work in 2012. The study also shows that the largest number of unauthorized immigrant workers are found in service occupations, which include maids, cooks, or groundskeepers. In fact, maids and housekeepers account for 25% of undocumented workers within those occupations. These employees make up a critical part of our economy.

We have no numbers for nannies hired illegally by the 0.1%, but we do have telling anecdotes, as of this from Hollywood actress and producer Amber Heard. (The median yearly salary for a Hollywood produder is “just $66,121.”) From TMZ:

The actress took to Twitter just after midnight on Tuesday and said, “Just heard there’s an ICE checkpoint in [H]ollywood, a few blocks from where I live. Everyone better give their housekeepers, nannies and landscapers a ride home tonight.”

“Everyone,” eh? Some in the 0.1% (those who don’t hire elite nannies) might actually prefer hiring nannies illegally, since that gives them more leverage. Reading between the lines:

Ate El Salvadoran Twice This Past Weekend - Oh My Gawd....,

Counterpunch |  U.S. pundits and politicians just discovered, it seems, that Washington’s decisions harm Central American families. For the New York Times, “separating families…is something new and malicious,” reflecting Trump’s “heartlessness” and violating “fundamental American values.” “This, apparently, is how you turn off the idea of America,” Alex Wagner (The Atlantic) added. The Los Angeles Times thinks “the administration’s cold-hearted approach to enforcement has crossed the line into abject inhumanity,” departing– so we’re to believe– from past practice.

These are half-accurate charges: Trump’s policy is malicious, heartless, cold-hearted. But it isn’t new. Both in Central America and along its Mexican border, Washington has helped rip apart families for decades, forcing children to endure a world without their parents, mothers to cope with their children’s sickening ends. Abject inhumanity, in other words, is a U.S. foreign policy hallmark.

Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras– review their histories. You’ll be crushed by evidence revealing which values shape Washington’s conduct, which norms govern its behavior in a region where it enjoys immense influence. And you’ll begin to understand why many had to flee these countries. Start with Guatemala. Ríos Montt, the dictator the U.S. funded, armed, and encouraged, oversaw the Mayan genocide there. In one episode, on April 3, 1982, the Guatemalan army overran the village of Chel, slaughtering its residents and orphaning Pedro Pacheco Bop, whose great-grandfather, parents, and five siblings (aged two to 14) were all murdered, their blood draining into the Chel River where the troops hurled the dead. Tomas Chávez Brito was two years old when the army fell upon his village, Sajsibán, seven months later, torching his home with his mother, sisters, and other family members inside. In the mountains, where Tomas hid for the following year eating plants to survive, one can only imagine how the idea of orphanhood, his new reality, settled in his mind. Margarita Rivera Ceto de Guzmán’s family separation was quicker. Soldiers knifed her in the stomach, killing her unborn child.

Egla Martínez Salazar, addressing this genocide, explains that assaults on Maya households conveyed “the message that Mayas did not live in ‘real’ families, but rather in ‘living arrangements’ that constituted breeding spaces for ‘international communist indoctrination.’” Erasing these spaces required “the mass murder of children,” plus “the forced transfer of surviving Maya children to military and paramilitary families,” tactics Salvadoran forces also adopted in the 1980s. Apart from killing most of the 75,000 slain there from 1980-1992– the stretch when Carter, Reagan, and Bush I funneled $6 billion into the country– “soldiers [also] abducted children in what an international court says was a ‘systematic pattern of forced disappearances.’” 

Failure Migration

unz  |  The victory of Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) in the recent Mexican presidential election likely means an increase in immigration to the United States. AMLO has called immigration a “human right that we will defend” and will probably continue the Mexican government’s meddling in American affairs. AMLO has also reportedly promised to demand “respect” from President Trump and the United States, which probably means less cooperation in stopping Central American migrants from moving through the country. [Mexican populist Lopez Obrador triumphs in presidential race, by Sabrina Rodriguez, Politico, July 1, 2018] If Mexico continues its decline into lawlessness or goes into recession, immigration from Mexico itself will sharply increase.

The ironic result of all this: the worse Mexico performs, the more powerful that nation becomes. Many nominal American citizens believe their first loyalty is with Mexico. Though they don’t want to live there, they don’t want to surrender their identity. [Not a country, not even a team, by Gregory Hood, American Renaissance, June 26, 2018] Exporting its underclass to the U.S. spares Mexico and other Latin American countries the need for internal reform. As Tucker Carlson recently put it: “America is now Mexico’s social safety net, and that’s a very good deal for the Mexican ruling class”. [Mexican presidential candidate calls mass migration to US a “human right,” by Dominic Mancini, Daily Caller, June 22, 2018]

Furthermore, Mexico and other Latin American countries continue to benefit from the endless flow of remittances from the U.S. America is literally paying welfare benefits to illegal aliens (if only for their anchor babies), some portion of which they then proceed to send home [Cutting welfare to illegal aliens would pay for Trump’s wall, by Paul Sperry, New York Post, March 10, 2018].

This phenomenon should be termed “Failure Migration.” The lower a people’s level of civilizational accomplishment, the more that people is able to expand its influence.