it's not going to be ok....,

Alternet | The daily bleeding of thousands of jobs will soon turn our economic crisis into a political crisis. The street protests, strikes and riots that have rattled France, Turkey, Greece, Ukraine, Russia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria and Iceland will descend on us. It is only a matter of time. And not much time. When things start to go sour, when Barack Obama is exposed as a mortal waving a sword at a tidal wave, the United States could plunge into a long period of precarious social instability.

At no period in American history has our democracy been in such peril or has the possibility of totalitarianism been as real. Our way of life is over. Our profligate consumption is finished. Our children will never have the standard of living we had. And poverty and despair will sweep across the landscape like a plague. This is the bleak future. There is nothing President Obama can do to stop it. It has been decades in the making. It cannot be undone with a trillion or two trillion dollars in bailout money. Our empire is dying. Our economy has collapsed.

How will we cope with our decline? Will we cling to the absurd dreams of a superpower and a glorious tomorrow or will we responsibly face our stark new limitations? Will we heed those who are sober and rational, those who speak of a new simplicity and humility, or will we follow the demagogues and charlatans who rise up out of the slime in moments of crisis to offer fantastic visions? Will we radically transform our system to one that protects the ordinary citizen and fosters the common good, that defies the corporate state, or will we employ the brutality and technology of our internal security and surveillance apparatus to crush all dissent? We won’t have to wait long to find out.

Lovelock on Climate Change

Rolling Stone | At the age of eighty-eight, after four children and a long and respected career as one of the twentieth century's most influential scientists, James Lovelock has come to an unsettling conclusion: The human race is doomed. "I wish I could be more hopeful," he tells me one sunny morning as we walk through a park in Oslo, where he is giving a talk at a university. Lovelock is a small man, unfailingly polite, with white hair and round, owlish glasses. His step is jaunty, his mind lively, his manner anything but gloomy. In fact, the coming of the Four Horsemen -- war, famine, pestilence and death -- seems to perk him up. "It will be a dark time," Lovelock admits. "But for those who survive, I suspect it will be rather exciting."

In Lovelock's view, the scale of the catastrophe that awaits us will soon become obvious. By 2020, droughts and other extreme weather will be commonplace. By 2040, the Sahara will be moving into Europe, and Berlin will be as hot as Baghdad. Atlanta will end up a kudzu jungle. Phoenix will become uninhabitable, as will parts of Beijing (desert), Miami (rising seas) and London (floods). Food shortages will drive millions of people north, raising political tensions. "The Chinese have nowhere to go but up into Siberia," Lovelock says. "How will the Russians feel about that? I fear that war between Russia and China is probably inevitable." With hardship and mass migrations will come epidemics, which are likely to kill millions. By 2100, Lovelock believes, the Earth's population will be culled from today's 6.6 billion to as few as 500 million, with most of the survivors living in the far latitudes -- Canada, Iceland, Scandinavia, the Arctic Basin.

By the end of the century, according to Lovelock, global warming will cause temperate zones like North America and Europe to heat up by fourteen degrees Fahrenheit, nearly double the likeliest predictions of the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations-sanctioned body that includes the world's top scientists. "Our future," Lovelock writes, "is like that of the passengers on a small pleasure boat sailing quietly above the Niagara Falls, not knowing that the engines are about to fail." And switching to energy-efficient light bulbs won't save us. To Lovelock, cutting greenhouse-gas pollution won't make much difference at this point, and much of what passes for sustainable development is little more than a scam to profit off disaster. "Green," he tells me, only half-joking, "is the color of mold and corruption."

the dark side of dubai

Independent | Dubai was meant to be a Middle-Eastern Shangri-La, a glittering monument to Arab enterprise and western capitalism. But as hard times arrive in the city state that rose from the desert sands, an uglier story is emerging.

The wide, smiling face of Sheikh Mohammed – the absolute ruler of Dubai – beams down on his creation. His image is displayed on every other building, sandwiched between the more familiar corporate rictuses of Ronald McDonald and Colonel Sanders. This man has sold Dubai to the world as the city of One Thousand and One Arabian Lights, a Shangri-La in the Middle East insulated from the dust-storms blasting across the region. He dominates the Manhattan-manqué skyline, beaming out from row after row of glass pyramids and hotels smelted into the shape of piles of golden coins. And there he stands on the tallest building in the world – a skinny spike, jabbing farther into the sky than any other human construction in history.

But something has flickered in Sheikh Mohammed's smile. The ubiquitous cranes have paused on the skyline, as if stuck in time. There are countless buildings half-finished, seemingly abandoned. In the swankiest new constructions – like the vast Atlantis hotel, a giant pink castle built in 1,000 days for $1.5bn on its own artificial island – where rainwater is leaking from the ceilings and the tiles are falling off the roof. This Neverland was built on the Never-Never – and now the cracks are beginning to show. Suddenly it looks less like Manhattan in the sun than Iceland in the desert.

Once the manic burst of building has stopped and the whirlwind has slowed, the secrets of Dubai are slowly seeping out. This is a city built from nothing in just a few wild decades on credit and ecocide, suppression and slavery. Dubai is a living metal metaphor for the neo-liberal globalised world that may be crashing – at last – into history.

we're number one!

Yes | From President Obama to Sarah Palin, our politicians are constantly invoking America’s superiority and exceptionalism or exhorting us to be Number 1. Yet from health care to education to environmental performance, we’re more often found at the bottom of the list of developed countries. It’s a good idea to set aside the rhetoric of national greatness and ask ourselves how we dropped to the basement on so many important issues—and what we should do to climb out.

To see where America stands not so proud, consider the advanced, well-to-do democracies of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the rich countries’ club. To focus on America’s peers, I am excluding the former Soviet bloc countries as well as Mexico, Turkey, Korea, Iceland, Luxembourg, and Greece. In the remaining group of 20 affluent countries, America is, indeed, Number 1 or close to it in a number of categories: the 26 indicators of poor performance listed below.

It’s a good idea to set aside the rhetoric of national greatness and ask ourselves how we dropped to the basement on so many important issues—and what we should do to climb out.

To our great shame, America now has:

• The highest poverty rate, both generally and for children;
• The greatest inequality of incomes;
• The lowest government spending as a percentage of GDP on social programs for the disadvantaged
• The lowest number of paid holiday, annual and maternity leaves;
• The lowest score on the UN’s index of “material well-being of children”;
• The worst score on the UN’s gender inequality index;
• The lowest social mobility;
• The highest public and private expenditure on health care as a portion of GDP, 
yet accompanied by the highest:

o Infant mortality rate
o Prevalence of mental health problems
o Obesity rate
o Portion of people going without health care due to cost
o Low birth weight children per capita (except for Japan)
o Consumption of anti-depressants per capita

• The shortest life expectancy at birth (except for Denmark and Portugal);
• The highest carbon dioxide emissions and water consumption per capita;
• The lowest score on the World Economic Forum’s Environmental Performance 
Index (except for Belgium), and the largest Ecological Footprint per capita 
(except for Belgium and Denmark)
• The highest rate of failing to ratify international agreements;
• The lowest spending on international development and humanitarian 
assistance as a percentage of GDP;
• The highest military spending as a portion of GDP;
• The largest international arms sales;
• The most negative balance of payments (except New Zealand, Spain and 
Portugal);
• The lowest scores for student performance in math (except for Portugal and Italy) (and far down from the top in both science and reading);
• The highest high school drop out rate (except for Spain);
  

This is exceptionalism we don’t need. Thankfully, America is also Number 1 or near the top in a number of positive indicators, including in the overall Human Development Index. But we are also far down the rankings, though not (yet) at the bottom, on others also not listed here. For example, the U.S. ranks only 13th on The Economist’s Democracy Index, right below the Czech Republic.

why the "body of 'stupid conservatives" is a problem for every u.s. citizen and every nation around the globe

truthdig |  Although the United States, in the words of columnist Nicholas Kristof, is “the most powerful colossus in the history of the world,” it lags significantly in quality of life for its citizens. In the Social Progress Index 2015 the U.S. does not make the top 10, or even top 15. The global study measured “basic human needs,” “foundations of wellbeing” and opportunity. 

Overall, the U.S comes in at 16th, and some indices are particularly startling.

As Kristof writes in The New York Times: “The index ranks the United States 30th in life expectancy, 38th in saving children’s lives, and a humiliating 55th in women surviving childbirth. O.K., we know that we have a high homicide rate, but we’re at risk in other ways as well. We have higher traffic fatality rates than 37 other countries, and higher suicide rates than 80. We also rank 32nd in preventing early marriage, 38th in the equality of our education system, 49th in high school enrollment rates and 87th in cellphone use.”

The top countries in the study are Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Iceland, New Zealand and Canada. Of the 133 countries rated, Central African Republic comes in last, right after Chad and Afghanistan.

“One way of looking at the index,” says Kristof, “is to learn from countries that outperform by having social indicators better than their income levels. By that standard, the biggest stars are Costa Rica and Uruguay, with New Zealand and Rwanda also outperforming.” 

In a time of ever-greater economic inequality, it’s worth remembering that everything isn’t just dandy if some Americans are doing extremely well. What counts is how we are doing as a people.

Europe on the brink of currency crisis meltdown

UK Telegraph | The financial crisis spreading like wildfire across the former Soviet bloc threatens to set off a second and more dangerous banking crisis in Western Europe, tipping the whole Continent into a fully-fledged economic slump.

Currency pegs are being tested to destruction on the fringes of Europe’s monetary union in a traumatic upheaval that recalls the collapse of the Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992.

“This is the biggest currency crisis the world has ever seen,” said Neil Mellor, a strategist at Bank of New York Mellon.

Experts fear the mayhem may soon trigger a chain reaction within the eurozone itself. The risk is a surge in capital flight from Austria – the country, as it happens, that set off the global banking collapse of May 1931 when Credit-Anstalt went down – and from a string of Club Med countries that rely on foreign funding to cover huge current account deficits.

The latest data from the Bank for International Settlements shows that Western European banks hold almost all the exposure to the emerging market bubble, now busting with spectacular effect.

They account for three-quarters of the total $4.7 trillion £2.96 trillion) in cross-border bank loans to Eastern Europe, Latin America and emerging Asia extended during the global credit boom – a sum that vastly exceeds the scale of both the US sub-prime and Alt-A debacles.

Europe has already had its first foretaste of what this may mean. Iceland’s demise has left them nursing likely losses of $74bn (£47bn). The Germans have lost $22bn.

Stephen Jen, currency chief at Morgan Stanley, says the emerging market crash is a vastly underestimated risk. It threatens to become “the second epicentre of the global financial crisis”, this time unfolding in Europe rather than America.

the greece fire never did go out..,

Market-Ticker | The debt crisis in Greece has taken on a dramatic new twist. Sources with information about the government's actions have informed SPIEGEL ONLINE that Athens is considering withdrawing from the euro zone. The common currency area's finance ministers and representatives of the European Commission are holding a secret crisis meeting in Luxembourg on Friday night.

Several European ministers tried to deny this, but there are now confirmations leaking out.

Folks, there's no way for Greece to "voluntarily" restructure that makes sense. Their only hope is to do what Iceland did, which is to tell the banksters to blow it out their asses and leave the currency union.

Yes, this will thrash foreign banks - especially German ones - and the ECB. It damn well should.

The fact of the matter is that buying someone's debt on the premise that they will be bailed out (not because you think it's a good investment) is idiotic and if you do that you deserve to lose every penny you put in.

Well, now that may happen. And given how government bonds have a habit of becoming the tools of leverage, the impact of this action is likely to be extraordinarily severe.

For Merkel, Trichet and the Banksters, here 'ya go:

what are the panama papers?

theatlantic |  News organizations from around the world have published investigations based on a massive trove of leaked documents they say reveal corruption and questionable business dealings of world leaders, politicians, sports stars, and others.

The German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung said Sunday it received encrypted internal documents from Mossack Fonseca, a Panama-based company that sells offshore shell companies around the world, from an anonymous source more than a year ago. The leak amounts to approximately 11.5 million documents—or 2.6 terabytes’ worth of data—on 214,000 shell companies spanning a period between the 1970s and 2016.

The documents, which have been dubbed the “Panama Papers,” contain mostly emails, PDF files, and photo files belonging to Mossack Fonseca, one of the largest providers of offshore financial services. They may represent the world’s biggest-ever leak of classified information.

“The data provides rare insights into a world that can only exist in the shadows,”Süddeutsche Zeitung said in its report. “It proves how a global industry led by major banks, legal firms, and asset management companies secretly manages the estates of the world’s rich and famous.”

Süddeutsche Zeitung shared the information with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and more than 100 news outlets in nearly 80 countries. Almost 400 journalists have combed through the documents over the past year.

Some of the products of that research were published Sunday. The BBC reportedthe leak reveals information about 72 current or former heads of state, including Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad, Egypt’s former president Hosni Mubarak, and Libya’s former leader Muammar Gaddafi. 

It reported Icelandic Prime Minister Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson stored millions of dollars of investments in Iceland’s major banks in an offshore company. The Guardian reported that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s associates secretly moved as much as $2 billion through offshore accounts. Sueddeutsche Zeitung reported Juan Pedro Damiani, the Uruguayan lawyer who is president of the country’s most popular soccer team and a FIFA ethics expert, managed companies through which FIFA members may have received bribes.

bric challenges u.s. role in imf

NYTimes | Barely six months ago, the International Monetary Fund emerged from years of declining relevance, hurriedly cobbling together emergency loans for countries from Iceland to Pakistan, as the first wave of the financial crisis hit.

Now, with world leaders gathering this week in London to plot a response to the gravest global economic downturn since World War II, the fund is becoming a chip in a contest to reshape the postcrisis landscape.

The Obama administration has made fortifying the I.M.F. one of its primary goals for the meeting of the Group of 20, which includes leading industrial and developing countries and the European Union. But China, India and other rising powers seem to believe that the made-in-America crisis has curtailed the ability of the United States to set the agenda. They view the Western-dominated fund as a place to begin staking their claim to a greater voice in global economic affairs.

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, who once worked at the fund, has called for its financial resources to be expanded by $500 billion, effectively tripling its lending capacity to distressed countries and cementing its status as the lender of last resort for much of the world.

Japan and the European Union have each pledged $100 billion; the United States has signaled it will contribute a similar sum, though its money will take longer to arrive because of the need for Congressional approval. China, with its mammoth foreign exchange reserves, is the next obvious donor.

Yet officials of China and other developing countries have served notice that they are reluctant to make comparable pledges without getting a greater say in the operations of the fund, which is run by a Frenchman, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and is heavily influenced by the United States and Western Europe.

have you discovered then the beginning that you look for the end?

Epigenetics | One of the world’s smallest organisms may hold clues about how the cell nucleus evolved. Nanoarchaeum equitans is a species of tiny microbe, discovered in 2002 in a hydrothermal vent off the coast of Iceland. It grows in temperatures close to boiling ontop of another single-celled creature called Ignicoccus hospitalis, which provides it with essential nutrients.

Many such members of the Archaea domain live in extreme environments. However, they’ve also been found in less extreme contexts: soils, marshland and oceans. In fact, they may be one of the most abundant groups of organisms on the planet. Scientists believe they play an important role in both the carbon and nitrogen cycles, so understanding how they work is of considerable benefit.

One of the consequences of the DNA sequencing revolution involved a revision of the tree of life. It became clear that even though certain organisms look like each other, their DNA could be quite different. So Carl Woese proposed that life be organised into 3 domains (Bacteria, Archaea and Eukarya) rather than the traditional 5-kingdom model.

The five kingdoms were generally grouped into Eukarya or Prokarya. Eukaryotes (animals, plants, protists and fungi) are defined by their possession of a cell nucleus. The cells of prokaryotes (principally bacteria) on the other hand, lack this nuclear membrane. Archaea seem to be a half-way house: superficially they look like bacteria, but their DNA is more similar to that of eukaryotes.

Despite having the smallest non-viral genome ever sequenced, N. equitans has proteins that are strikingly similar to the histone proteins within eukaryotic cells. Scientists at the University of Regensburg in Germany have been studying one such protein in this parasitic microbe. It is most similar to histone H3: one of the five kinds of histone protein involved in the structure of chromatin in eukaryotic cells.

trade in services agreement

wikileaks |  Today, WikiLeaks released the secret draft text for the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) Financial Services Annex, which covers 50 countries and 68.2%¹ of world trade in services. The US and the EU are the main proponents of the agreement, and the authors of most joint changes, which also covers cross-border data flow. In a significant anti-transparency manoeuvre by the parties, the draft has been classified to keep it secret not just during the negotiations but for five years after the TISA enters into force.

Despite the failures in financial regulation evident during the 2007-2008 Global Financial Crisis and calls for improvement of relevant regulatory structures², proponents of TISA aim to further deregulate global financial services markets. The draft Financial Services Annex sets rules which would assist the expansion of financial multi-nationals – mainly headquartered in New York, London, Paris and Frankfurt – into other nations by preventing regulatory barriers. The leaked draft also shows that the US is particularly keen on boosting cross-border data flow, which would allow uninhibited exchange of personal and financial data.

TISA negotiations are currently taking place outside of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) framework. However, the Agreement is being crafted to be compatible with GATS so that a critical mass of participants will be able to pressure remaining WTO members to sign on in the future. Conspicuously absent from the 50 countries covered by the negotiations are the BRICS countries of Brazil, Russia, India and China. The exclusive nature of TISA will weaken their position in future services negotiations. 

The draft text comes from the April 2014 negotiation round - the sixth round since the first held in April 2013. The next round of negotiations will take place on 23-27 June in Geneva, Switzerland.

Current WTO parties negotiating TISA are: Australia, Canada, Chile, Chinese Taipei (Taiwan), Colombia, Costa Rica, Hong Kong, Iceland, Israel, Japan, Liechtenstein, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Pakistan, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, South Korea, Switzerland, Turkey, the United States, and the European Union, which includes its 28 member states Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.

China and Uruguay have expressed interest in joining the negotiations but so far are not included.

[1] Swiss National Center for Competence in Research: A Plurilateral Agenda for Services?: Assessing the Case for a Trade in Services Agreement, Working Paper No. 2013/29, May 2013, p. 10.

[2] For example, in June 2012 Ecuador tabled a discussion on re-thinking regulation and GATS rules; in September 2009 the Commission of Experts on Reforms of the International Monetary and Financial System, convened by the President of the United Nations and chaired by Joseph Stiglitz, released its final report, stating that "All trade agreements need to be reviewed to ensure that they are consistent with the need for an inclusive and comprehensive international regulatory framework which is conducive to crisis prevention and management, counter-cyclical and prudential safeguards, development, and inclusive finance."

Read the Secret Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) - Financial Services Annex

Read the Analysis Article - Secret Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) - Financial Services Annex

Recommended reading

• On the Wrong Side of Globalization, by Joseph E. Stiglitz, March 15, 2014.
• U.S. Foreign Trade in Services: Trends and Policy Challenges, by the Congressional Research Service, May 15, 2014.
• TISA versus Public Services, a Public Services International study by Scott Sinclair and Hadrian Mertins-Kirkwood, April 28, 2014.
• Public Citizen's Finance Regulation Factsheet
• Our World is Not for Sale Factsheet on TISA

british youths the most unpleasant and violent in the world?

Video - PM Cameron promises action against protesters

DailyMail | British youths have been branded as 'the most unpleasant and potentially violent young people in the world' by a renowned doctor-writer.

Anthony Daniels, a retired prison doctor and psychiatrist who has worked in some of the hardest-hit areas on the planet, said the British were now in great fear of their own arrogant, knife-wielding children.

The author said Britain's young had a 'sense of entitlement' and were unwilling to change their ways for anyone else - with the only difference between the rich and the poor being that the former had the money to buy what they wanted, whereas the poor had to 'wheedle, cajole, swindle and steal it'.

Writing for the New York Daily News in a comment piece on the riots, he said: 'Of course it is true that not all young Britons are unattractive in appearance and conduct, only a far higher proportion of them than of the young of any other nation.

'It requires but an overnight stay on a Friday or Saturday in any British city to prove it. Even Russians are appalled by what they witness.

'The rioting is only the extreme end of the spectrum of bad behaviour by British youth and young adults.'

Mr Daniels, who often writes for The Spectator under the pseudonym Theodore Dalrymple, said the riots 'did not emerge from a cultural vacuum' but was rather 'the British way of life'.

He claimed many American visitors to the UK were astounded at how quickly Britons became angry over trifling matters.

And he revealed that it was now 'quite literally' difficult to 'distinguish the sound of people enjoying themselves from that of someone being murdered.'

He said: 'Recently in Manchester, I woke at 1 on a Wednesday morning in my hotel to hear drunken screaming and shouting down below on one of the city's main streets, the sound of which continued until 4.30.

'Lo and behold, when I left the hotel at 8 in the morning, I discovered that a man had been savagely beaten nearly to death at about 2 am and was still in a coma - but the drunken revelling had continued nonetheless, uninterrupted by the police.

'So the sheer viciousness and destructiveness of the riots certainly do not surprise me.'

He ended his piece by saying that the only thing that will stop the 'not well-educated' rioters is 'boredom or exhaustion'.

Mr Daniels' piece, which will be consumed by a worldwide audience, heaps further embarrassment on the UK, which has today again made headline news across the world.

Newspapers from Ireland, Iceland and even Iran have used the sickening images of the looting on their front pages.

In the U.S. the popular Washington Post, New York Daily News and New York Times all dedicated extensive coverage to the events.

Even regional newspapers, such as the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, which covers Little Rock in Arkansas, led on the riots with the headline 'British add 10,000 police as rioting starts a 4th

The financial daily Handelsblatt said: 'The riots reveal fundamental societal problems that extend far beyond London and England.

'They are too deep for the short-term austerity measures to have had much influence. There wasn't just looting in troubled areas, but also in the affluent district of Notting Hill and among the middle class in trendy Clapham.

'The riots reveal the decay of society at its edges, brought on by deeply cemented inequality, the erosion of social norms, great frustration and a lack of opportunity for the lower class.'

The Financial Times Deutschland added: 'The British elite has systematically compromised itself in recent years. They claimed to be a role model, or at least trustworthy.

'In the economic crisis the financial establishment declared bankruptcy, and British politicians became mired in the expenses scandal of 2009. Then this year the media and politicians have been damaged by the Murdoch scandal.

'When the country's elites don't take the law seriously, why should we? No question is more dangerous for a society.'

Left-leaning Berliner Zeitung said: 'The country has lost faith in every authority: the banks, politicians, the media, the police. The corruption has reached even the smallest unit - the family. There is a generation growing up without values of any kind.'

Finally, the conservative Die Welt commented: 'The unrest in London is a form of hooliganism by losers who are living in a society which no longer has anything left to offer losers. Among the arsonists are people who no longer possess any values.

Why Are "Our" Strains Of Coronavirus Different From Asian Strains Of Coronavirus?

spectator |  One of the great mysteries of coronavirus is how the epidemic has become much more severe in Europe and North America than in the Far East. A disease which appeared to be on the wane in China, South Korea and elsewhere in mid-February suddenly erupted with a vengeance in Europe in March, with death tolls quickly surpassing those in Wuhan. Various explanations have been offered: from the Chinese lying about the extent of cases and deaths to the difficulties of enforcing lockdowns and launching intrusive tracking and tracing strategies in western democracies.

But then have we really been fighting the same disease? A pre-publication paper from a team at the University of Sheffield and the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico suggests one reason that Europe and North America might have suffered much more than East Asia from Covid-19 is that we have been fighting a mutation of the virus which causes it, SARS-CoV-2. The team have analysed the ‘spike protein’ in the virus and found 14 different mutations, but one in particular has caused them concern. 

Early in the outbreak – and this was true in Europe as well as in Asia – samples of the virus contained a version of the protein known as D614. But a different version, G614, began to emerge in samples from both Europe and China. In Italy and Switzerland, from early on, it was found to be the dominant version. Elsewhere in Europe, too, G614 rapidly displaced D614 – and seems to have a competitive advantage over it. Germany had a small outbreak of D614 followed by a second eruption of cases of G614. In Britain G614 quickly took over from D614. The same happened in North America – although the pattern is different across the country. In New York, samples have been almost entirely G614 whereas in Washington state – which has won praise for its handling of the epidemic – D614 has been more prevalent. The authors have been unable to track the evolution of D614 and G614 in China after 1 March owing to a lack of samples, but in Japan and Taiwan, early samples were all D614, with the G614 becoming more prevalent after 1 March.

The good news is that the G614 version of the virus does not seem to result in a greater risk of hospitalisation – indicating that it doesn’t cause a more serious form of the disease. However, that does leave open the possibility that the G614 version is much more easily transmissible –perhaps explaining why this disease has proved so much harder to contain in some places than others.

Other mutations were found to be of lesser importance, though do show some interesting patterns. One mutation was found only in Iceland – a country which has been praised for its low number of infections and deaths, in spite of not imposing a full lockdown – and another uniquely in Belgium, the country with the highest death rate in the world.

how financial oligarchy replaces democracy

MichaelHudson | When Greece exchanged its drachma for the euro in 2000, most voters were all for joining the Eurozone. Their hope was that it would ensure stability, and that this would promote rising wages and living standards. Few saw that the stumbling point was tax policy. Greece was excluded from the eurozone the previous year as a result of failing to meet the 1992 Maastricht criteria for EU membership, limiting budget deficits to 3 percent of GDP, and government debt to 60 percent.

The euro also had other serious fiscal and monetary problems at the outset. There is little thought of wealthier EU economies helping bring less productive ones up to par, e.g. as the United States does with its depressed areas (as in the rescue of the auto industry in 2010) or when the federal government does declares a state of emergency for floods, tornados or other disruptions.

As with the United States and indeed nearly all countries, EU “aid” is largely self-serving – a combination of export promotion and bailouts for debtor economies to pay banks in Europe’s main creditor nations: Germany, France and the Netherlands. The EU charter banned the European Central Bank (ECB) from financing government deficits, and prevents (indeed, “saves”) members from having to pay for the “fiscal irresponsibility” of countries running budget deficits. This “hard” tax policy was the price that lower-income countries had to sign onto when they joined the European Union.

Also unlike the United States (or almost any nation), Europe’s parliament was merely ceremonial. It had no power to set and administer EU-wide taxes. Politically, the continent remains a loose federation. Every member is expected to pay its own way. The central bank does not monetize deficits, and there is minimal federal sharing with member states. Public spending deficits – even for capital investment in infrastructure – must be financed by running into debt, at rising interest rates as countries running deficits become more risky.

This means that spending on transportation, power and other basic infrastructure that was publicly financed in North America and the leading European economies must be privatized. Prices for these services must be set high enough to cover interest and other financing charges, high salaries and bonuses, and be run for profit – indeed, for rent extraction as public regulatory authority is disabled.

This makes countries going this route less competitive. It also means they will run into debt to Germany, France and the Netherlands, causing the financial strains that now are leading to showdowns with democratically elected governments. At issue is whether Europe should succumb to centralized planning – on the right wing of the political spectrum, under the banner of “free markets” defined as economies free from public price regulation and oversight, free from consumer protection, and free from taxes on the rich.

The crisis for Greece – as for Iceland, Ireland and debt-plagued economies capped by the United States – is occurring as bank lobbyists demand that “taxpayers” pay for the bailouts of bad speculations and government debts stemming largely from tax cuts for the rich and for real estate, shifting the fiscal burden as well as the debt burden onto labor and industry. The financial sector’s growing power to achieve this tax favoritism is crippling economies, driving them further into reliance on yet more debt financing to remain solvent. Aid is conditional upon recipient countries reducing their wage levels (“internal devaluation”) and selling off public enterprises.

The tunnel vision that guides these policies is self-reinforcing. Europe, America and Japan draw their economic managers from the ranks of professionals sliding back and forth between the banks and finance ministries – what the Japanese call “descent from heaven” to the private sector where worldly rewards are greatest. It is not merely delayed payment for past service. Their government experience and contacts helps them influence the remaining public bureaucracy and lobby their equally opportunistic replacements to promote pro-financial fiscal and monetary policies – that is, to handcuff government and deter regulation and taxation of the financial sector and its real estate and monopoly clients, and to use the government’s taxing and money-creating power to provide bailouts when the inevitable financial collapse occurs as the economy shrinks below break-even levels into negative equity territory.

Regressive tax policies – shifting taxes off the rich and off property onto labor – cause budget deficits financed by public debt. When bondholders pull the plug, the resulting debt pressure forces governments to pay off debts by selling land and other public assets to private buyers (unless governments repudiate the debt or recover by restoring progressive taxation). Most such sales are done on credit. This benefits the banks by creating a loan market for the buyouts. Meanwhile, interest absorbs the earnings, depriving the government of tax revenue it formerly could have received as user fees.

The tax gift to financiers is based on the bad policy of treating debt financing as a necessary cost of doing business, not as a policy choice – one that indeed is induced by the tax distortion of making interest payments tax-deductible.

Buyers borrow credit to appropriate “the commons” in the same way they bid for commercial real estate. The winner is whoever raises the largest buyout loan – by pledging the most revenue to pay the bank as interest. So the financial sector ends up with the revenue hitherto paid to governments as taxes or user fees. This is euphemized as a free market.

Promoting the financial sector at the economy’s expense

The resulting debt leveraging is not a solvable problem. It is a quandary from which economies can escape only by focusing on production and consumption rather than merely subsidizing the financial system to enable players to make money from money by inflating asset prices on free electronic keyboard credit. Austerity causes unemployment, which lowers wages and prevents labor from sharing in the surplus. It enables companies to force their employees to work overtime and harder in order to get or keep a job, but does not really raise productivity and living standards in the way envisioned a century ago. Increasing housing prices on credit – requiring larger debts for access to home ownership – is not real prosperity.

To contrast the “real” economy from the financial sector requires distinctions to be drawn between productive and unproductive credit and investment. One needs the concept of economic rent as an institutional and political return to privilege without a corresponding cost of production. Classical political economy was all about distinguishing earned from unearned income, cost-value from market price. But pro-financial lobbyists deny that any income or rentier wealth is unearned or parasitic. The national income and product accounts (NIPA) do not draw any such distinction. This blind spot is not accidental. It is the essence of post-classical economics. And it explains why Europe is so crippled.

The way in which the euro was created in 1999 reflects this shallow vision. The Maastricht fiscal and financial rules maximize the commercial loan market by preventing central banks from supplying governments (and hence, the economy) with credit to grow. Commercial banks are to be the sole source of financing budget deficits – defined to include infrastructure investment in transportation, communication, power and water. Privatization of these basic services blocks governments from supplying them at subsidized rates or freely. So roads are turned into toll roads, charging access fees that are readily monopolized. Economies are turned into sets of tollbooths, paying out their access charges as interest to creditors. These extractive rents make privatized economies high-cost. But to the financial sector that is “wealth creation.” It is enhanced by untaxing interest payments to banks and bondholders – aggravating fiscal deficits in the process.

the cypress crisis isn't what it seems...,

johngaltfla | the truth behind what is happening in Cyprus is not the minute amount of Euros the hedge funds of the European and Federal Reserve banksters are poised to lose, but control of the Eastern Mediterranean natural resources without dependency on the Russian Bear or the insanity of the “Arab Spring.” At this moment, one has to visualize the reality of the situation as displayed in the map below:

The fields from the Eastern Med are projected to have over 1 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and well over 20 billion barrels of oil according to independent estimates. The question is who would object to a cheap supply of petroleum products to the Southern European debtor economies (the proverbial PIIGS) who need cheap energy the most? Try this list on for size:

• Russia – Losing its monopoly and ability to manipulate political events in Europe and the Middle East
• OPEC – The Arab nations fear losing their influence on Europe and the ability to manage prices and deprive Israel of not just energy independence but financial freedom from Europe and the United States; it is quite possible that the Arabs are pressuring Russia to threaten the European Union to prevent completion of this pipeline complex in favor of their supply via Turkish territory
• The Fed/ECB banking cartel – Without the ability to control natural resources and the independence of economies in North America and Europe, regardless of size, their ability to profit from advances or misery within the economies disappears and the independence which results weakens their geopolitical influence

The results of this week’s abandonment of the deposit tax which was a blatant attempt to remove sovereignty from the Greek Cypriot population has now shifted with the news tonight from the Cyprus Times:

Last hope now appears to lie with Russia

Russia appears more than willing to bail out the Cypriot banking system in exchange for an obscene raping of their control of the natural resources within their grasp and being developed now. 

In other words, the wealthy and average persons are guaranteed financial security if they surrender their natural resources, or control thereof, to the Russian Bear instead of the ever reliable British Petroleum, Royal Dutch Shell, Total Fina, etc. which are working with the ECB banking cartel. This trade off is reflected by the fury of the IMF and ECB in the actions of the Cypriot parliament yet the rest of the world is under the perception that the banking crisis in Cyprus is self-inflicted. Sadly, it is much more than it seems. The Greek and Cypriot banks which are in trouble acted as fronts for the European banking cartel’s hedge funds which speculate in Cypriot real estate which eventually led to this crisis. The bankers have demanded, much like within the United States, that the citizens of Cyprus absorb losses for overseas investors and bypass the democratic processes to protect their principle.

If the people of Cyprus are wise, they will absorb a period of short term financial and economic misery where they remove themselves from the European Union and central banking cartel and re-introduce the Cypriot Pound at a 10:1 or 100:1 ratio to the Euro. As the Israeli-Cypriot-Southern European pipeline realizes production and viability in the next three years, total economic independence would be realize and the ability to repay its Euro denominated debts concluded in a very short time period, unlike the true default of Iceland. The people of Cyprus are not in the midst of an economic crisis but a geopolitical one, which could decide if national sovereignty is more important than the globalist economic system.

Let us hope the people of that island nation are brave enough to endure the firestorm that is on their doorstep and make the right choices in the weeks to come.

Unvaccinated Looking Smarter Every Week

americanthinker |  There is a massive propaganda push against those choosing not to vaccinate against COVID-19 with the experimental mRNA vaccines. Mainstream media, the big tech corporations, and our government have combined efforts to reward compliance and to shame and marginalize non-compliance. Their mantra says that this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated. Persons who choose not to vaccinate are characterized as unintelligent, selfish, paranoid people who don’t read much and live in a trailer park in Florida (or Alabama, or Texas, or name your state). Never has there been such an effort to cajole, manipulate through fear, and penalize people to take an experimental medical treatment.

However, as time has passed with this pandemic and more data accumulates about the virus and the vaccine, the unvaccinated are looking smarter and smarter with each passing week. It has been shown now that the vaccinated equally catch and spread the virus. Vaccine side effect data continues to accumulate that make the risk of taking the vaccine prohibitive as the pandemic wanes. Oral and IV medications (flccc.net) that work early in the treatment of COVID-19 are much more attractive to take now as the vaccine risks are becoming known, especially because the vaccinated will need endless boosters every six months.

First, let’s address the intelligence of the unvaccinated. Vaccine hesitancy is multi-factorial and has little to do with level of education or intelligence. Carnegie Mellon University did a study assessing vaccine hesitancy across educational levels. According to the study, what’s the educational level with the most vaccine hesitancy? Ph.D. level! Those can't all have been awarded to liberal arts majors. Clearly, scientists who can read the data and assess risk are among the least likely to take the mRNA vaccines.

The claim that there’s a pandemic of the unvaccinated is, therefore, patently untrue. As a retired nurse from California recently asked, “Why do the protected need to be protected from the unprotected by forcing the unprotected to use the protection that did not protect the protected in the first place?” If the vaccine works to prevent infection, then the vaccinated have nothing to worry about. If the vaccine does not prevent infection, then the vaccinated remain at some risk, and the unvaccinated would be less likely to choose a vaccine that does not work well.

The mRNA vaccine efficacy is very narrow and focused on the original alpha strain of COVID-19. By targeting one antigen group on the spike protein, it does help for the original alpha strain, but it is clear now it does not protect against Delta strain and is likely not protective against any future strains that might circulate. It also appears that the efficacy wanes in 4-6 months, leading to discussions about boosters.

Several authors have pointed out that vaccinating with a “leaky” vaccine during a pandemic is driving the virus to escape by creating variants. If the booster is just another iteration of the same vaccine, it likely won’t help against the new strain but will, instead, produce evolutionary pressure on the virus to produce even more variants and expose us to more side effects. Why, then, is this booster strategy for everyone being pursued?

This vast Phase 3 clinical trial of mRNA vaccines in which Americans are participating mostly out of fear is not going well. It is abundantly clear for anyone advocating for public health that the vaccination program should be stopped. Iceland has just stopped giving the Moderna vaccine to anyone which is a good step in the right direction. Sweden, Denmark, and Finland have banned the Moderna vaccine for anyone under the age of 30.

VAERS, our vaccine adverse effect reporting system, showed at the beginning of this week 16,000 deaths, 23,000 disabilities, 10,000 MI/myocarditis, 87,000 urgent care visits, 75,000 hospital stays, and 775,000 total adverse events. The VAERS system is widely known to under-report events, with an estimated 90 to 99% of events going unreported there.