independent | Today’s shock leak of the text of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership
(TTIP) marks the beginning of the end for the hated EU-US trade deal,
and a key moment in the Brexit debate. The unelected negotiators have
kept the talks going until now by means of a fanatical level of secrecy,
with threats of criminal prosecution for anyone divulging the treaty’s
contents.
Now, for the first time, the people of Europe can see for themselves
what the European Commission has been doing under cover of darkness -
and it is not pretty.
The leaked TTIP documents, published by Greenpeace this morning, run
to 248 pages and cover 13 of the 17 chapters where the final agreement
has begun to take shape. The texts include highly controversial subjects
such as EU food safety standards, already known to be at risk from
TTIP, as well as details of specific threats such as the US plan to end
Europe’s ban on genetically modified foods.
The documents show that US corporations will be granted unprecedented
powers over any new public health or safety regulations to be
introduced in future. If any European government does dare to bring in
laws to raise social or environmental standards, TTIP will grant US
investors the right to sue for loss of profits in their own corporate
court system that is unavailable to domestic firms, governments or
anyone else.
For all those who said that we were scaremongering and that the EU
would never allow this to happen, we were right and you were wrong.
theguardian |Two
Caribbean islands are at a crossroads in their relationship with the
US. One is plagued by corruption and debt, and dotted with crumbling
homes, abandoned by families for the imperial power nearby. The other is
Cuba.
Who won the cold war again?
Within 24 hours on Sunday, Puerto Rico’s governor, Alejandro García Padilla, announced that the American territory would default on nearly $370m
of debt, after years of failure to put the island’s finances – or its
relationship with the US – in order. The next morning a cruise ship full
of tourists set sail for Havana,
bringing American dreams, dollars and capitalist sense into Cuba’s
future. Once seen as parallel case studies in cold war politics, the
islands have seemingly switched roles.
For half a century, the US dominated Puerto Rico and Cuba after
wrenching them away from Spain, but by the 1950s the islands parted
ways. Cubans threw off a US-backed dictator, found new patrons in the
Soviet Union and embraced communism. What nationalist fervor Puerto Rico
had was quashed, and the colony stayed bound to US-controlled
capitalism as a “free associated state”.
“When the cold war was going on they were like showcases for the
world to see which system actually works,” said Harry Franqui-Rivera, a
researcher at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College. “A
successful Cuba made the United States look bad and if Puerto Rico failed it would make the United States look worse.”
Twenty-five years after the fall of the Soviet Union, US textbooks usually say capitalism won and communism lost, and on a historic mission to Cuba last month Barack Obama said as much: “I have come here to bury the last remnant of the cold war in the Americas.”
But experts and activists say the cold war had a murky end, at least
in the Caribbean, and that the future for Puerto Rico and Cuba remains
far from certain. The day of Obama’s keynote speech in Havana, the mayor of San Juan tweeted:
“Obama spoke of opening bonds of collaboration with the neighboring
island of Cuba while he makes bonds of repression and control in Puerto
Rico.”
panampost | Despair and violence is taking over Venezuela. The economic crisis sweeping the nation means people have to withstand widespread shortages of staple products, medicine, and food.
So when the Maduro administration began rationing electricity this week, leaving entire cities in the dark for up to4 hours every day,discontent gave way to social unrest.
On April 26, people took to the streets in three Venezuelan states, looting stores to find food.
Maracaibo, in the western state of Zulia, is the epicenter of thefts: on Tuesday alone, Venezuelans raided pharmacies, shopping malls, supermarkets, and even trucks with food in seven different areas of the city.
Although at least nine people were arrested, and 2,000 security officers were deployed in the state, Zulia’s Secretary of Government Giovanny Villalobos asked citizens not to leave their homes. “There are violent people out there that can harm you,” he warned.
In Caracas, the Venezuelan capital, citizens reported looting in at least three areas of the city. Twitter users reported that thefts occurred throughout the night in the industrial zone of La California, Campo Rico, and Buena Vista.
They assured that several locals were robbed and that there were people on the street shouting “we are hungry!”
The same happened in Carabobo, a state in central Venezuela. Through Twitter, a journalist from Valencia reported the looting of a deli.
The crime took place on Tuesday evening amid a wave of protests against prolonged power rationing and outages in multiple parts of the country.
Food for 15 Days
Supermarkets employees from Valencia told the PanAm Post that besides no longer receiving the same amount of food as before, they must deal with angry Venezuelans who come to the stores only to find out there’s little to buy.
Purchases in supermarkets are rationed through a fingerprint system that does not allow Venezuelans to acquire the same regulated food for two weeks.
miamiherald | A recent International Monetary Fund report that Venezuela will reach a 720 percent inflation rate this year — the highest in the world — has drawn a lot of media attention, but what I heard from a senior IMF economist this week was even more dramatic.
Robert K. Rennhack, deputy director of the IMF’s Western Hemisphere department, told me in an interview that Venezuela is on a path to hyperinflation — the stage where the economy reaches total chaos — and could reach a “total collapse of the economic system” in 12 to 18 months if there are no changes in economic policies.
“Inflation in Venezuela probably entered on a hyperinflationary path in 2015,” Rennhack says. He told me that he expects Venezuela’s inflation to reach 2.200 percent in 2017, and could balloon very fast to 13,000 a year, the stage that most academics define as full-blown hyper-inflation.
Although he didn’t get into that, no Latin American government in recent memory has been able to survive a hyper-inflationary crisis. When you reach five-digit inflation rates, governments either make a dramatic political u-turn, or they fall.
“Hyper-inflation means that the currency has lost its value, people have to go to the stores with bags full of money, and prices rise almost by the hour,” Rennhack said. “What we saw in previous cases of hyperinflation in Latin America is that there was a political consensus that policies had to change.”
Asked how he reached his 12-18 month projection for hyper-inflation in Venezuela, Rennhack said his team of economists looked at previous episodes of hyper-inflation in Bolivia (1982-1984,) Argentina (1989-1990) and Brazil (1989-1990.) From those experiences, they concluded that Venezuela is on a similar path as these countries were between 12 and 18 months before their hyper-inflationary crises.
President Nicolas Maduro’s term ends in 2019, although the opposition MUD coalition is considering launching a referendum to demand early elections.
Many Venezuelans believe the country will explode much sooner than in 12 to 18 months. Prices go up daily, supermarket shelves are near empty, there are growing electricity shortages — Maduro has declared every Friday in April and May a non-working holiday in order to save energy — and crime statistics are skyrocketing.
ourfiniteworld | There are many who believe that the use of energy is critical to the
growth of the economy. In fact, I am among these people. The thing that
is not as apparent is that growth in energy consumption is dependent on the growth of debt.
Both energy and debt have characteristics that are close to “magic,”
with respect to the growth of the economy. Economic growth can only take
place when growing debt (or a very close substitute, such as company
stock) is available to enable the use of energy products.
The reason why debt is important is because energy products enable
the creation of many kinds of capital goods, and these goods are often
bought with debt. Commercial examples would include metal tools,
factories, refineries, pipelines, electricity generation plants,
electricity transmission lines, schools, hospitals, roads, gold coins,
and commercial vehicles. Consumers also benefit because energy products
allow the production of houses and apartments, automobiles, busses, and
passenger trains. In a sense, the creation of these capital goods is one
form of “energy profit” that is obtained from the consumption of
energy.
The reason debt is needed is because while energy products can indeed
produce a large “energy profit,” this energy profit is spread over many
years in the future. In order to actually be able to obtain the
benefit of this energy profit in a timeframe where the economy can use
it, the financial system needs to “bring forward some or all of the
energy profit to an earlier timeframe. It is only when businesses can do
this, that they have money to pay workers. This time shifting
also allows businesses to earn a financial profit themselves.
Governments indirectly benefit as well, because they can then tax the
higher wages of workers and businesses, so that governmental services
can be provided, including paved roads and good schools.
utopiathecollapse | Puerto Rico’s debt crisis moved into a
more perilous phase for residents, lawmakers and bondholders Monday
after the Government Development Bank failed to repay almost $400
million. The missed principal payment, the largest so far by the island,
is widely viewed on Wall Street as foreshadowing additional defaults
this summer, when more than $2 billion in bills are due.
Together with the spread of the Zika
virus, the risk of cascading defaults is putting new urgency on
bipartisan negotiations in Washington over legislation granting the U.S.
territory new powers to restructure more than $70 billion in debt. The
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported last week the first
U.S. death related to the mosquito-borne Zika virus—a Puerto Rican man
in his 70s who died in late February.
In a letter to Congress, Treasury
Secretary Jacob Lew warned on Monday that a U.S. “taxpayer-funded
bailout may become the only legislative course available” if the
proposed restructuring legislation isn’t approved. The island’s debt is
held by mutual funds, hedge funds, bond insurers and individual
investors, who were attracted in part by tax benefits and high yields.
The default Monday casts serious doubt on the commonwealth’s ability to
make other future payments, which “means that other defaults are very
likely on other Puerto Rico credits,” said Paul Mansour, head of the
municipal credit research group at investment management firm Conning.
Monday’s developments are the latest
sign that a long-running economic crisis has reached an acute stage,
embroiling financial markets and Congress. Benchmark Puerto Rican bond
prices fell to near record lows Monday, with some investors paying less
than 65 cents on the dollar for general obligation bonds maturing in
2035, an unusually low price.
WaPo |Marijuana’s strict scheduling emerges
from the cultural and racial apathy felt by Richard Nixon, the activist
president who signed the Controlled Substances Act into law. Nixon’s
aides suggested the war on marijuana was racially motivated, and Oval Office tapes highlight his contempt for the counterculture movement as well as racial minorities.
The
tapes also make it clear that Nixon wanted to link marijuana use and
its negative effects to two groups who he held in contempt: African
Americans and hippies. Nixon even appointed a commission to look into
the ills of marijuana — the Shafer Commission. When the group issued its report entitled, “Marihuana: A Signal of Misunderstanding,” which explained that marijuana was not as dangerous or addictive as it had widely been perceived, Nixon called his handpicked chairman, former Republican Pennsylvania governor Ray Shafer, into the Oval Office to be chastised.
So,
while marijuana’s placement in Schedule I was not a result of deep
scientific expertise, that does not mean that the CSA is to blame for
the continuing policy problems. The CSA has avenues to correct error or
compensate for new information or data. Rescheduling is one such remedy.
Under administrative rescheduling, the attorney general asks the Drug
Enforcement Administration and the Food and Drug Administration to
examine whether a substance is properly scheduled. The attorney general
takes those recommendations and ultimately makes a determination. If a
substance is determined to be improperly scheduled, a rulemaking process
commences that ultimately reschedules the substance.
That
the rescheduling process exists means that the architects of the CSA
understood the need for legal flexibility and thought that avenues for
revision should be built into the law. However, due to cultural biases
and stigma that have been cemented into society, science and
bureaucracy, those avenues have largely failed marijuana. The nearly
century-long institutional effort by the U.S. government to paint
marijuana as anathema to society, in all forms and under all
circumstances, has been devastatingly successful.
The federal government set up a DEA-mandated monopoly through the National Institutes on Drug Abuse
for the growth of research grade marijuana — not for all Schedule I
drugs, just marijuana. For decades, the supply from that monopoly was
often insufficient to meet clinical researchers’ needs. Until recently,
all marijuana research proposals needed to go through an additional,
unique review by the Public Health Service that added a bureaucratic
layer, hindering research.
WaPo |Congress and President Obama are
under pressure to reschedule marijuana. While rescheduling makes sense,
it doesn’t solve the state/federal conflict over marijuana (de-scheduling would be better).
But more important, it wouldn’t fix the broken scheduling system.
Ideally, marijuana reform should be part of a broader bill rewriting the
Controlled Substances Act.
The
Controlled Substances Act created a five-category scheduling system for
most legal and illegal drugs (although alcohol and tobacco were notably
omitted). Depending on what category a drug is in, the drug is either
subject to varying degrees of regulation and control (Schedules II
through V) — or completely prohibited, otherwise unregulated and left to
criminals to manufacture and distribute (Schedule I). The scheduling
of various drugs was decided largely by Congress and absent a scientific
process — with some strange results.
For
instance, while methamphetamine and cocaine are Schedule II drugs,
making them available for medical use, marijuana is scheduled alongside
PCP and heroin as a Schedule I drug, which prohibits any medical use.
Making matters worse, the CSA gives law enforcement — not scientists or
health officials — the final say on how new drugs should be scheduled
and whether or not old drugs should be rescheduled. Unsurprisingly, law
enforcement blocks reform.
Starting in 1972, the Drug Enforcement Administration obstructed a formal request to reschedule marijuana for 16 years. After being forced by the courts to make a decision, the agency held two years of hearings. The DEA chief administrative law judge
who held the hearings and considered the issue concluded that marijuana
in its natural form is “one of the safest therapeutically active
substances known to man” and should be made available for medical use.
Similar hearings on MDMA, a.k.a. ecstasy, concluded that it also has
important medical uses. In both cases, the DEA overruled its
administrative law judge and kept the drugs in Schedule I, unavailable
for medical use.
WaPo |Bertha Madras is a professor of
psychobiology at McLean Hospital and Harvard Medical School, with a
research focus on how drugs affect the brain. She is former deputy
director for demand reduction in the White House Office of National Drug
Control Policy.
Data from 2015 indicate that 30 percent of current cannabis users harbor a use disorder — more Americans are dependent on cannabis
than on any other illicit drug. Yet marijuana advocates have
relentlessly pressured the federal government to shift marijuana from
Schedule I — the most restrictive category of drug — to another schedule
or to de-schedule it completely. Their rationale? “States have already
approved medical marijuana”; “rescheduling will open the floodgates for
research”; and “many people claim that marijuana alone alleviates their
symptoms.”
Yet unlike
drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration, “dispensary
marijuana” has no quality control, no standardized composition or dosage
for specific medical conditions. It has no prescribing information or
no high-quality studies of effectiveness or long-term safety. While the
FDA is not averse to approving cannabinoids as medicines and has
approved two cannabinoid medications, the decision to keep marijuana in
Schedule I was reaffirmed in a 2015 federal court ruling. That ruling was correct.
NYTimes | It should come as no surprise that the vast majority of heroin users
have used marijuana (and many other drugs) not only long before they
used heroin but while they are using heroin. Like nearly all people with
substance abuse problems, most heroin users initiated their drug use
early in their teens, usually beginning with alcohol and marijuana. There is ample evidence that early initiation of drug use primes the brain
for enhanced later responses to other drugs. These facts underscore the
need for effective prevention to reduce adolescent use of alcohol,
tobacco and marijuana in order to turn back the heroin and opioid
epidemic and to reduce burdens addiction in this country.
Marijuana use is positively correlated with alcohol use and cigarette
use, as well as illegal drugs like cocaine and methamphetamine. This
does not mean that everyone who uses marijuana will transition to using
heroin or other drugs, but it does mean that people who use marijuana
also consume more, not less, legal and illegal drugs than do people who do not use marijuana.
The legalization of marijuana increases availability of the drug and
acceptability of its use. This is bad for public health and safety not
only because marijuana use increases the risk of heroin use.
A better drug policy is one that actively discourages marijuana use
as well as other recreational drug use, especially for youth.
foreignpolicy | To evangelists of asteroid mining, the heavens are not just a
frontier but a vast and resource-rich place teeming with opportunity.
According to NASA, there are potentially 100,000 near-Earth objects —
including asteroids and comets — in the neighborhood of our planet. Some
of these NEOs, as they’re called, are small. Others are substantial and
potentially packed full of water and various important minerals, such
as nickel, cobalt, and iron. One day, advocates believe, those objects
will be tapped by variations on the equipment used in the coal mines of
Kentucky or in the diamond mines of Africa. And for immense gain:
According to industry experts, the contents of a single asteroid could
be worth trillions of dollars.
Kfir pitched me on the long-term plan. First, a fleet of satellites
will be dispatched to outer space, fitted with probes that can measure
the quality and quantity of water and minerals in nearby asteroids and
comets. Later, armed with that information, mining companies like DSI
will send out vessels to mechanically remove and refine the material
extracted. In some cases, the take will be returned to Earth. But most
of the time, it will be processed in space — for instance, to produce
rocket fuel — and stored in container vessels that will serve as the
equivalent of gas stations for outbound spacecraft.
This possibility isn’t so unrealistic, Kfir said. Consider the recent
and seismic growth of the space industry, he suggested, as we climbed
the stairs to DSI’s second-floor suite. Every year, the private
spaceflight sector grows larger, and every year the goals become
grander. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and the space exploration company
Blue Origin, has spoken of the day “when millions of people are living
and working in space”; Elon Musk’s SpaceX is expected to reveal a Mars
colonization plan this year.
“But how are they going to sustain this new space
economy?” Kfir asked rhetorically. He nudged open DSI’s office door.
“Easy: by mining asteroids.” Bezos, Musk, and the other billionaires who
plan to be cruising around space in the near future won’t be able to do
so without celestial pit stops.
In his book, Asteroid Mining 101: Wealth for the New Space Economy,
John S. Lewis, professor emeritus of Cosmochemistry and Planetary
Atmospheres at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary
Laboratory and DSI’s chief scientist, envisions a future where “ever
more remote and ever more massive reservoirs of resources” take
astronauts farther and farther from our planet. “First to the Near Earth
Asteroids and the moons of Mars, then to the asteroid belt, then
to…[the] Trojan asteroids and the outer moons of Jupiter, then to the
Saturn system and the Centaurs,” and so on, to infinity.
thebulletin |Director of National Intelligence
James R. Clapper sent shock waves through the national security and
biotechnology communities with his assertion, in his Worldwide Threat Assessment testimony
to the Senate Armed Services Committee in February, that genome editing
had become a global danger. He went so far as to include it in the
report’s weapons of mass destruction section, alongside threats from
North Korea, China’s nuclear modernization, and chemical weapons in
Syria and Iraq. The new technology, he said, could open the door to
“potentially harmful biological agents or products,” with “far-reaching
economic and national security implications.”
So what has warranted this warning, and what can be done to mitigate the threat?
Other
editing techniques have been around for more than a decade but they are
laborious, less accurate, and quite expensive. Before that, previous
traditional methods required generations to see results. While some
techniques can recognize longer DNA sequences and have better specificity than Crispr, they are costly ($5,000 for each order versus $30 for Crispr) and difficult to engineer, sometimes requiring several tries to identify a sequence that works. Hence the rise of Crispr, which, along with Crispr associated proteins (Cas), provides a precise way
to target, snip, and insert exact pieces of a genome. (The Crispr-Cas9
protein has received the most attention in this recent discussion, yet
other enzymatic proteins such as the Crispr-Cpf1 use a different type of “scissors” and might be just as effective.)
The
benefits of such technology are obvious. Because preferred traits can
rapidly enter a species, test animals like mice can be designed more
efficiently for biomedical experiments, mosquitoes can be engineered so
they cannot reproduce (and therefore cannot spread malaria), plants can
be developed for drought resistance and higher yields, and diseases can
be eliminated by deactivating the responsible genes in a given host. The
bioengineer and author Robert Carlson notes that genome editing shows great promise for next-generation plastics, agricultural products, bioremediation organisms, carbon-neutral fuels, novel enzymes, and better vaccines.
scientificamerican | It happens hundreds of times a day: We press snooze on the alarm
clock, we pick a shirt out of the closet, we reach for a beer in the
fridge. In each case, we conceive of ourselves as free agents,
consciously guiding our bodies in purposeful ways. But what does science
have to say about the true source of this experience?
In a classic paper published almost 20 years ago,
the psychologists Dan Wegner and Thalia Wheatley made a revolutionary
proposal: The experience of intentionally willing an action, they
suggested, is often nothing more than a post hoc causal inference that
our thoughts caused some behavior. The feeling itself, however, plays no
causal role in producing that behavior. This could sometimes lead us to
think we made a choice when we actually didn’t or think we made a different choice than we actually did.
But there’s a mystery here. Suppose, as Wegner and Wheatley propose,
that we observe ourselves (unconsciously) perform some action, like
picking out a box of cereal in the grocery store, and then only
afterwards come to infer that we did this intentionally. If this is the
true sequence of events, how could we be deceived into believing that we
had intentionally made our choice before the consequences of
this action were observed? This explanation for how we think of our
agency would seem to require supernatural backwards causation, with our
experience of conscious will being both a product and an apparent cause
of behavior.
In a study just published in Psychological Science, Paul Bloom
and I explore a radical—but non-magical—solution to this puzzle.
Perhaps in the very moments that we experience a choice, our minds are
rewriting history, fooling us into thinking that this choice—that was
actually completed after its consequences were subconsciously
perceived—was a choice that we had made all along.
wsj | The human brain is a living word cloud, turning spoken language into
intricate neural patterns of meaning that we all appear to share, new
research suggests.
In research reported Wednesday in Nature,
neuroscientists at the University of California at Berkeley created a
comprehensive atlas of these patterns, showing how shades of meaning in
natural speech stir the brain.
To make it, the researchers
employed an imaging method known as functional MRI to identify places
throughout the brain stirred by the meaning of words in stories told
aloud. In the pulsed patterns of neural blood flow monitored by the
imaging device, they found a tapestry of responses with narrative
threads reaching into more than 100 areas in the cerebral cortex. This
crinkled outer layer of the brain, containing about 20 billion neurons,
plays a key role in memory, perception and awareness.
“These are maps of the meaning in language, not the words themselves,” said UC Berkeley neuroscientist Jack Gallant,
a senior researcher in the study. “The brain somehow represents the
concepts in this smooth gradient distributed across the brain.”
patternsofmeaning | Your mind is being controlled by distant strangers who don’t have
your best interests at heart. If that sounds like a paranoid fantasy,
brace yourself and read on. These are the findings of a series of
scientific studies that show how a few dominant institutions have the
power to affect how you feel, how you act, and even how you vote –
without you ever knowing about it.
Deliberate mind manipulation of the masses is, by itself, nothing
new. Nearly a hundred years ago, our global mania for consumption was
unleashed by the malevolent brilliance of Edward Bernays, known as the
“father of public relations.” Bernays was Sigmund Freud’s nephew and
used his uncle’s insights into the subconscious to develop his new
methods of mind control, designed to create the modern American consumer.
“We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture,” declared
Bernays’ business partner, Paul Mazur. “People must be trained to
desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely
consumed. We must shape a new mentality. Man’s desires must overshadow
his needs.” In 1928, Bernays proudly described how his techniques for
mental manipulation had permitted a small elite to control the minds of
the American population:
[T]he conscious and intelligent
manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an
important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this
unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government that is
the true ruling power of this country. We are governed, our minds
molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have
never heard of… In almost every act of our daily lives… we are dominated
by the relatively small number of persons … who pull the wires which
control the public mind.[1]
Bernays set in motion what we have all come to know as an essential
part of our capitalist ecosystem: the use of mass media to promote
roles, desires and status symbols that rake in profits for corporations.
The chilling words of Wayne Chilicki, chief executive of General Mills,
show how faithfully Bernays’ vision has been followed: “When it comes
to targeting kid consumers, we at General Mills follow the Procter &
Gamble model of ‘cradle to grave.’ We believe in getting them early and
having them for life.” [2]
thearchdruidreport | The conflict between the wage class and the investment class—determines the distribution of wealth and privilege in society. In the former, by contrast, it makes more economic sense to offshore the production of goods and services to other countries, and to use the profits of global exploitation rather than domestic savings to provide capital for industry; thus the wage class and the investment class both suffer, while the salary class—the class of managers, marketers, bankers, bureaucrats, and corporate flunkies, all those professions that make their livings by manipulating the wealth produced by others—prospers as never before.
The transition from an economy focused on domestic production to an economy focused on global exploitation takes plenty of time. In the case of the United States, it took a hundred years, from the first wave of American imperial expansion in 1898 to the temporary triumph of globalization in the 1980s. The transition the other way, though, happens a good deal more quickly, as a faltering hegemon generally gets shoved aside by rising powers rather than being allowed to decay slowly in peace. The aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse is a good working model here: once the Soviet system imploded, Russia suddenly had to do without the large subsidies it received from the rest of the Eastern bloc, and most of a decade of raw economic chaos followed as the Russian economy struggled to adapt to the task of meeting its own needs domestically. Soviet Russia, it bears noting, was much less dependent on overseas imports for goods and services than today’s America, so the post-Soviet experience should be considered a lower bound for what we’re in for.
The other pillar has similar implications. An economy based on the breakneck consumption of natural resources tends to concentrate influence in the hands of those who control resource flows directly or indirectly, and in today’s America, once again, these tend to be disproportionately members of the salary class. An economy based on the conservation of natural resources tends to concentrate influence instead in the hands of those who own sustainable resources such as land, or those who work directly with those resources; again, the conflict between owners and laborers determines the distribution of wealth and privilege in such societies. Transitioning from a conserver economy to a consumer economy takes plenty of time—in the case of the United States, the better part of two hundred years—while the transition the other way tends, once more, to be much more rapid once the resources run short.
It’s in this context, finally, that we can understand the unexpected revolt of the wage class that’s having so dramatic a role in shaping this years US presidential race. Hillary Clinton, like her already-forgotten Republican equivalents, is a perfect salary class candidate; she speaks for the privileged, and her entire campaign consists of waving around sound bites that signal to the privileged that they don’t need to worry about significant change if she moves into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Donald Trump, and to a lesser extent Bernie Sanders, are appealing instead to the wage class. I doubt either one expected to get anything like as far as he has, but both seem perfectly willing to ride the wave of popular discontent just as far as it will take them—and in Trump’s case, it seems likely to take him straight to the White House this autumn.
That is to say, what was supposed to be an ordinary contest among the champions of the affluent has suddenly taken on a very different shape. To shift metaphors a bit, the affluent are beginning to notice that their jockeying for position resembles nothing so much as bickering over the arrangement of deck chairs aboard theTitanic. The revolt of the wage class shows that the structure of power and privilege in today’s America is already beginning to shift, and two weeks from now we’ll take a hard look at some of the ways that shift is unfolding and some of the factors that are driving it.
npr | Zhongjin is one of three Chinese financial firms to collapse in the
past year. In February, Ezubao, a peer-to-peer lending company, was
exposed as a $7 billion Ponzi scheme. Police took over the headquarters
of the Fanya Metal Exchange, a trading platform for nonferrous metals,
late in 2015 and are investigating an alleged multibillion dollar Ponzi
scheme involving more than 200,000 investors.
Wealth management
firms like Zhongjin emerged in China in the mid-2000s to provide more
financing to private businesses and better returns for Chinese investors
frustrated by low interest rates at government banks. But as China's
economy has weakened in recent years, lending has continued to boom.
Logan Wright, who oversees China markets research for the Rhodium Group in New York, says that's a recipe for trouble.
"You have a slowing real economy, growing financial services sector
and as a result, there's an increasing use of speculative strategies and
riskier and riskier instruments and in some cases, outright Ponzi"
schemes, Wright says.
Shanghai now has more than 100,000 wealth
management companies and the country has more than a million, says Iris
Pang, a senior economist for greater China with Natixis, a French investment bank. She says China's government hasn't been able to keep up with the explosion in the number of firms.
"The wealth management sector is very new in China," she says. "The regulations are loose and not very well defined."
Customers
say they invested in Zhongjin because there weren't better options,
given last year's collapse of China's stock markets, a real estate
property bubble and capital controls that severely limit how much money
Chinese can move overseas.
Zhongjin's investors say police have
told them that only 10 percent of their deposits remain. The company's
collapse has wrought havoc on families who benefited from China's three
decades of extraordinary growth, but now are at risk of losing most of
their savings.
One investor, who asked not to be named, said
her family is furious with her for persuading them to invest. She has
since offered to divorce her husband. She has no money and is down to
eating one meal a day.
"I have a family problem, a financial
problem and survival problem," she says, weeping. "Every time I take a
bite of food, I feel very guilty. I feel I am wasting money."
reuters | China's
securities regulator on Friday urged commodity futures exchanges to curb
excessive speculation following a surge in prices that has sparked
fears markets were heading for a dangerous boom-and-bust cycle.
The
China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) said it would not allow
the futures market to become a "hot-bed" for speculators.
The
CSRC comments confirmed a Reuters story earlier on Friday that the
regulator had asked commodity futures exchanges in Dalian, Shanghai and
Zhengzhou to bring speculative trading activity under control.
Investors,
including hedge funds and retail investors, have placed big bets on
Chinese commodities futures this year, driving up contracts including in
iron ore, rebar, cotton and even eggs. The rally has prompted many
analysts to warn of similarities with a boom in the country's stock
markets, which reversed into a sharp crash last summer.
The
futures market should stick to its fundamental purpose of serving the
real economy, and regulators will "adamantly prevent the futures market
from becoming a hotbed for short-term speculators," the CSRC said in a
statement on its official microblog.
"We
will continue to guide the exchanges to take appropriate actions
against excessive speculation and illegal behaviors," the regulator
said.
Three people with direct
knowledge of the situation said the CSRC had issued its order to the
exchanges to bring speculative trading under control on Monday.
In
response, the exchanges ordered major institutional investors that lack
a commodities background to rein in their trading, the people said.
They didn't define what was meant by a lack of background in
commodities.
"Many local media and
researchers mentioned the huge volume and volatility," said one of the
people. "The regulator felt nervous. They hope to keep stability."
A spokesman at the
Dalian Commodity Exchange declined to comment on the CSRC order, but
said the exchange would further improve its mechanism for controlling
risks.
The Shanghai Futures
Exchange did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The
Zhengzhou Commodity Exchange could not be reached for comment.
The
sources said the latest measures were partly aimed at cracking down on
high-frequency trading, although they did not provide further details.
thebulletin |Nucleardoctrinal change with conventional implications.The policy of ensuring a survivable strategic nuclear threat allows for the continued militarization of the Chinese state and for its expansion of influence in the Pacific. This expanded influence is made further possible by a post-Cold War, casualty-averse environment in which even the largest of nuclear arsenals can be deterred by a truly“lean and effective”force. Ballistic missile submarines are the realization of China’s dream of a nuclear force that protects China not only from nuclear exchange, but also from conventional coercion: Finally, a true minimum deterrence will be reached—the quality and quantity of Chinese nuclear weapons will be enough to deter its adversaries from initiating a first strike. It is a level of deterrence that is recognized not only by the rest of the world but also by China itself. Some Chinese nuclear developments—such as the continued modernization of the DF-5 A and B missiles, whose silo locations are widely known and would not survive a first strike—are questionable on strategic ground, but the deployment of ballistic missile submarines on deterrent patrols is nothing but a logical progression for a nuclear armed state.
Unfortunately,the threat from below has repercussions that are larger and more tangible than its implications for "No First Use."China is refusing to separate its nuclear forces from its growing conventional forces—not only continuing to obscure the nature of China’s nuclear arsenal, but also guaranteeing the utility of its conventional weapons. China’s 260 nuclear warheads should now be looked upon as having a real military function, rather than dismissed as a small force developed for political purposes only.
fortune |Legendary investor George Soros recently delivered new warnings on China,
saying that the world’s second largest economy is facing a financial
crisis similar to the U.S. in 2008. His remarks double down on his
earlier comment that a hard landing for China is inevitable. Soros
definitely has a point, but China’s economy is not as doomed as he suggests.
Let me acknowledge that my views are not entirely unbiased because as someone who lives in China I am aboard what some, like Soros, say is a sinking ship; if the ship goes down I will definitely be hurt. The statistics Soros recently gave
are undeniable facts. China’s new credit increased by more than
expected last month. The overall debt level has reached historic highs.
GDP growth is slowing down. And yes, there is a serious overcapacity
issue for certain industries. However, I do not agree with Soros’ gloomy
prediction of a hard landing for China’s economy in the near future or
the debt being comparable to what happened in the U.S. in 2008.
First, China’s credit-to-GDP ratio is about 240%, only slightly higher than the 233% level in the U.S. That’s still far lower than Japan’s 400% and the U.K.’s 252% levels. If we break down China’s 240% credit-to-GDP ratio, government, households, and non-financial corporations respectively contribute 56%, 40%, and 144%. China’s non-financial corporations’ high leverage ratio indicates that the country is relying on indirect rather than direct financing due to its under-developed stock and bond markets, which have only been around for the last 30 years.
Meanwhile, the leverage level for government and households is much lower than that in the U.S. As we have learned, the 2008 financial crisis was largely triggered
by the over-leveraging of the average American household. Today, China
remains the country with the world’s highest saving rate at 50%, compared to 16% in the U.S.The country has accumulated more than 120 trillion renminbi of financial assets. Of that amount, 55 trillion renminbi is in bank deposits, which is relatively easy to convert into cash.
So the average Chinese household’s balance sheet is much healthier than
that in the U.S. It provides enough reserves and confidence to weather
an economic storm.
Soros, and many others who are bearish on China, often point to an increase in investors’ capital leaving China as signs of the country’s impending doom. What’s important to note, however, is that the outflow of capital accelerated on investors’ expectations that the value of China’s currency would weaken. Investors’ outlook changed when the U.S. Federal Reserve did not announce interest rate hikes after meetings in January and March. China
has recently seen net capital inflow. The foreign reserve is still at
very high levels, $3.3 trillion, which does not include the sovereign
fund of $0.85 trillion. At the same time, there is still a surplus in
the current account. And despite the non-performing loan ratio recently increasing to 2%, it still looks trivial compared to the 25% China had in 1997. The share of non-performing loans relative to GDP ranges between 7% to 14%, compared to 35% to 40% in 1997. The current capital adequacy ratio is 13.5%. And the required reserve rate (RRR) is 17.5%. Therefore, China’s banking sector is much healthier than it was in 1997.
reason | The House voted unanimously, 419-0, this afternoon to update old tech federal technology laws to provide better privacy protections for Americans' old emails from unwarranted government searches.
The Email Privacy Act,HB 699, updates the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act to correct a significant gap in Fourth Amendment protections of citizens' communications. The old law determined that emails or stored communications held by a third-party provider (like Google) were no longer subject to warrants in order for authorities to access their contents after 180 days. Law enforcement or investigatory agencies could just get subpoenas and go directly to the third-party storage systems to demand copies of the contents.
The legislation that passed today closes that loophole and requires actual warrants, but it's still not going to be quite the same as when a law enforcement agency runs out to get a warrant to search your house. HB 699 gives law enforcement agencies 10 days (and other government entities three days) to inform the person whose e-mails or communications they had collected that they had done so. And authorities may request even further delays. So, when the police come and search your house, you know it right then. When they serve a warrant to a third-party email service, you might not find out for a few days. This was a carve-out in response to law enforcement and government agency fears that suspects would delete emails when the warrant was administered. It does also permit authorities, for a limited time, to gag the third-party providers from telling anybody (like the suspect) about the warrant.
LF: Let’s start with going back
100 years; I was sort of entranced to read your descriptions of Mrs.
Winslow’s Syrup, and the situation with respect to drugs before
Prohibition.
JH: It’s fascinating. Drugs were legal in the
United States, in Britain, everywhere in the world. If you wanted to buy
opiates, you go to a local store, the equivalent to CVS; it was mostly
sold in the form of something called Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup,
which was a kind of cough mixture. You could buy cocaine-based teas; you
could buy cocaine-based drinks; and it’s important to understand there
were some problems related to that. There was of course some addiction
just like we have addiction to alcohol; it was not that big a deal. The
vast majority of addicts had jobs; they were no more likely to be poor
than anyone else; and really what you see, I tell it through the story
of this extraordinary doctor in California at the birth of the Drug War
called Henry Smith Williams, who really saw that as soon as drugs were
banned all sorts of problems started to metastasize.
They’re transferred from pharmacies to armed, criminal gangs who
suddenly have to be terrifying; they start having fights; suddenly the
price goes massively up so addicts are driven into everything from
prostitution to property crime. You suddenly see this huge outbreak of
all sorts of crime that wasn’t there when they were legal.
LF: Now, Dr. Williams was up
against quite an opponent, that’s this Harry Anslinger guy. Can you tell
us, what can you tell us about him, and why was he so obsessed with
Billie Holiday?JH: Harry Anslinger I think is the most
influential person who almost no one’s ever heard of. He’s the inventor
of the modern War on Drugs. He takes over the Department of Prohibition
just as alcohol prohibition is ending; so he’s got this huge department
with basically nothing to do, and he wants to find a purpose, and he’s
always been driven all his life by two really strong hatreds: One is of
addicts, and the other is of African Americans.
He was regarded as a racist in the 1930s by racists, to give a
sense of how extreme he was, and he really became fixated on Billie
Holiday, as I learned from his archives and from interviewing Billie
Holiday’s surviving friends; and, you know, 1939, Billie Holiday stands
on stage and sings “Strange Fruit,” a song against lynching, and that
night the Federal Bureau of Narcotics tells her to stop, and she
refuses. Billie Holiday was a tough person. She had promised herself,
when she was growing up in the slums of Baltimore, she would never bow
her head to any white man; and she told them to basically go screw
themselves, and that’s when the stalking of her began.
He first of all sends this guy called Jimmy Fletcher to kind of
stalk her, and the first agent that he sends falls in love with her
because she was so amazing. He sends her to prison; she said at the
trial, you know, it was called “the United States versus Billie
Holiday,” and that’s how it felt. She gets out, she can’t perform
anywhere because you needed a license to perform, and you know the thing
she loved is taken away from her, but still Anslinger is not finished
with her.
reddit | In case anyone is wondering (from the article)alternative work
arrangements – defined as temporary help agency workers, on-call workers, contract workers,
and independent contractors or freelancers.
The point is, companies are not hiring employees. They are filling roles
with subcontractors from temp agencies (which have been exploding in
size). These temporary workers have no job security, often no benefits
(having to buy health insurance out of their pay for example), no way in
hell they are getting stuff like stock options. And on average they get
paid substantially less than the employees they replace.
So the employment rate of 65+ group has gone from 14.31% in 2006 to 17.29% in 2014.
The old people's 'no-option-but-have-to-continue-working' rate has
gone up by 3% from 2006 to 2014. Maybe people are finding it more
difficult to retire in this hard-to-save economy and maybe this will
only worsen as we move more away from the baby-boomer generation and
move further deep into this bubble economy.
EDIT relevant data - life expectancy in 2006 was 77.9 and peaked at 78.8 in 2012.
thenation |At first, she used Facebook in that
cute, ho-hum way that most people do: selfies vamping new hairstyles,
jocular shots with her sisters and mom—nothing special. Not until just
after Christmas of 2014, and the debut of Selma. Within weeks
of seeing that electrifying portrayal of the civil-rights era, she
transformed her Facebook page. “I’m here to change history,” she
declaimed in a smartphone video posted in January 2015.
She apologized that she was about to go to bed. In a T-shirt and with
her hair pinned in rollers, she could not have seemed more
unself-conscious. Her face glowed with the smile that everyone who knew
her loved, and her voice was rich and friendly. “It’s time for me to do
God’s work,” she said. She called her new project #SandySpeaks.
In the next few months, she would post over two dozen videos.
Typically, they began with that smile and the greeting “Good morning, my
beautiful kings and queens!” Her links took readers to articles about
black history. (“No, this is American history!” she corrected.) She
posted about the economic crisis burdening young African Americans. She
suggested that white people get black friends and that blacks befriend
whites. That might be hard for African Americans to do, she said, but
God was testing their ability “to show love to somebody who can hate you
for no very reason.”
In the days after she died, #SandySpeaks went viral. Her videos
made her the first black casualty of police brutality whom the world
could know and deeply love postmortem. She’s been gone now for almost a
year, and we are still asking: #WhatHappenedtoSandraBland? Too often,
that question has been merely a call to conspiracy theory: about
monstrous jail guards murdering her, perfectly hiding the evidence, even
taping her eyes open after death to take a convincing mug shot. The
obsession over what transpired during three days at the end of her life
has left little room for considering the 28 years before. Black lives
matter—and hers was one of them, in its length, complication, and black
pain.
cbpp | Across the country, food banks and other organizations that serve the
needy are preparing for long lines as childless adults begin losing
SNAP (formerly food stamps) benefits due to the return in over 20 states
of a three-month time limit for able-bodied adults. Federal law limits
adults aged 18-49 who aren’t raising minor children to three months of
SNAP out of every three years unless they’re working at least 20 hours a
week or participating in a job training program at least 20 hours a
week. More than half a million people will lose SNAP over the course of the year due to the time limit.
The time limit is “going to increase hunger among some of the most vulnerable Mississippians,” says
Matt Williams of the Mississippi Center for Justice. “I think it will
further stress service providers who are already trying to fill a gap in
the available food assistance programs, and I think we will see their
resources stretched to the max with increased demand.” In Mississippi
alone, 50,000 people may lose benefits this year due to the time limit,
the state estimates.
In New York State, Erica Santiago of the Food Bank for Westchester predicts,
“We're not going to run out of food, but it may mean that people get
three days’ worth instead of seven days’ worth. . . . This will also
impact people who aren't losing their benefits — there's a trickle down
effect.”
Under the time limit, people can lose benefits even if they are
looking for and can’t find work, or if no spots are available in a job
training program. The time limit “was based on the assumption that
there are work programs to help these people and there are no programs.
They cost too much,” Lucy Potter of Greater Hartford Legal Aid in
Connecticut says.
The time limit is especially difficult for people with barriers to work,
such as limited education and skills. Most childless adults aren’t
eligible for other forms of government assistance, and their incomes
while receiving SNAP average less than one-third of the poverty line.
WaPo | McRaven retired from the Navy in 2014 and now serves as chancellor of
the University of Texas system. He and others in the Navy saw Losey’s
case very differently than the Senate and seethed at the intervention by
lawmakers. In his op-ed, McRaven dismissed the whistleblowers as lazy
employees who abused the inspector-general system to seek revenge on
Losey. He also ripped the inspector general as an agency run amok,
calling it “apparently accountable to no one, dismissing the
recommendations of the services and ruining officer’s careers.”
Had
he stopped there, McRaven’s comments probably would not have attracted
much public attention. Instead, he went on to slam lawmakers and
question whether a fundamental underpinning of the American system of
government — civilian control of the military — was frayed or at risk.
“The
greater concern for America is the continued attack on leadership in
the military,” he wrote.
“During my past several years in uniform, I
watched in disbelief how lawmakers treated the chairman, the service
chiefs, the combatant commanders and other senior officers during
Congressional testimony. These officers were men of incredible
integrity, and yet some lawmakers showed no respect for their decades of
service.”
While it is not uncommon for retired military brass to
exercise their First Amendment rights, what was remarkable about
McRaven’s comments was how he apparently had the backing and
encouragement of active-duty Navy leaders to sound off in public.
McRaven
showed his column to senior Navy brass before publication. It prompted
an effusive public statement from Adm. John M. Richardson, the chief of
naval operations and the highest ranking officer in the Navy.
“Brian
Losey is an outstanding officer who has sacrificed much for our Navy
and nation,” Richardson said. “I read Admiral McRaven’s piece with great
interest; he raises a number of important issues that deserve
additional consideration, and I welcome that conversation.”
McRaven’s
attack on federal whistleblower-protection laws and the Pentagon’s
inspector general didn’t mention how rare it actually is for officers
such as Losey to get into trouble for violating them.
In
comparison with other federal employees, whistleblowers working in the
military or national security agencies must meet a higher burden of
proof to win their cases. Of the more than 1,000 whistleblower
complaints that are filed each year with the Pentagon’s inspector
general, about 97 percent are dismissed, or categorized as
“unsubstantiated,” records show. For three separate complaints to be
upheld against a single officer is almost unheard of.
paulcraigroberts | Have you noticed that it is not only the presstitute media and the
two establishment political parties that are beating up on Bernie
Sanders and Donald Trump but also the progressive left? Sometimes the
messages overlap so much that the progressive left sounds like the One
Percent. But mainly the progressive left is down on Sanders because he
is “not pure,” and they don’t like Trump because he hurts people’s
feelings and doesn’t apologize.
This is astounding. Here we are faced with the corrupt media and the
corrupt party establishments determined to put in the Oval Office a
tried and proven agent of the One Percent, and the progressive left is
beating up on the only two alternatives!
I doubt that Sanders or Trump would be able to achieve much for the
American people except to reduce the flow of official lies that the
presstitutes turn into truths by constant repetition. The Oligarchy is
too strong. It was more than a half century ago that President
Eisenhower warned us of the threat to American democracy from the
military-security complex. That complex is much stronger today, and, in
addition, we have Wall Street and the mega-banks that control the US
Treasury and Federal Reserve, the Israel Lobby that has the US Congress
wrapped around its little finger, the extractive industries (energy,
mining, timber) that prevails over the environment and preservation, and
agribusiness that poisons our food, exterminates honey bees and
butterflies and produces chemical fertilizer runoff into waters that
result in massive fish kills from algea. None of these powerful
interests will permit the welfare of the American people to get in the
way of their agendas and profits.
Nevertheless, the election of Sanders or Trump is important, because
it demonstrates that American citizens are emerging from The Matrix and
have no confidence in the two corrupt political parties that betrayed
them. The message would go out to the world as well that the American
people have no confidence in the Washington Establishment. These
messages are very important and can only have beneficial effects.
So why is the progressive left helping the One Percent keep the lid
on the rest of us? Has the progressive left sold out or is the
progressive left putting its emotional needs above the general welfare?
charleshughsmith | Our status quo is not only failing to solve humanity’s six core problems-- it has become the problem.
To explain why this is so, I wrote Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform, a new book that's focused (90 pages) and affordable, i.e. the cost of a latte ($3.95 Kindle ebook, $8.95 print edition).
Why can’t our status quo be reformed? There are two primary reasons:
1) Those benefiting from the current arrangement will resist any reforms
that threaten their share of the pie--and meaningful reforms will
necessarily threaten everyone’s slice of the pie.
2) Reforms that actually address the structural flaws will bring the
system down, as the status quo can only continue if its engine
(permanent expansion of debt and consumption) is running at full speed.
Once the engine stalls or even slows, the system collapses.
This is unwelcome news not just to privileged insiders--and the harsh reality is that our status quo exists to protect the privileges of the few at the expense of the many--but to everyone who hopes to benefit in some way from our status quo's cornucopia of promises.
So
we cling to the dangerous hope that all the promises can be met by some
future magic, and cocoon ourselves in an equally dangerous denial that
collapse is inevitable. We don't just want to avoid the decay and
collapse of all the happy promises--we want to avoid the responsibility
of taking part in shaping the replacement system.
Rejuvenation Pills
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Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
