Majorityrights News > Category: Economics & Finance

Econintersect.com, “How China’s Mobile Ecosystems Are Making Banks Obsolete”, 24 Aug 2018:

by Ellen Brown, Web of Debt

Giant Chinese tech companies have bypassed credit cards and banks to create their own low-cost digital payment systems.

The US credit card system siphons off excessive amounts of money from merchants, who must raise their prices to cover this charge. In a typical $100 credit card purchase, only $97.25 goes to the seller. The rest goes to banks and processors. But who can compete with Visa and MasterCard?

It seems China’s new mobile payment ecosystems can. According to a May 2018 article in Bloomberg titled “Why China’s Payment Apps Give U.S. Bankers Nightmares”:

The future of consumer payments may not be designed in New York or London but in China. There, money flows mainly through a pair of digital ecosystems that blend social media, commerce and banking - all run by two of the world’s most valuable companies. That contrasts with the U.S., where numerous firms feast on fees from handling and processing payments. Western bankers and credit-card executives who travel to China keep returning with the same anxiety: Payments can happen cheaply and easily without them.

The nightmare for the US financial industry is that a major technology company - whether one from China or a US giant such as Amazon or Facebook - might replicate the success of the Chinese mobile payment systems, cutting banks out.

According to John Engen, writing in American Banker in May 2018, China processed a whopping $12.8 trillion in mobile payments in the first ten months of 2017. Today even China’s street merchants don’t want cash. Payment for everything is with a phone and a QR code (a type of barcode). More than 90 percent of Chinese mobile payments are run through Alipay and WeChat Pay, rival platforms backed by the country’s two largest internet conglomerates, Alibaba and Tencent Holdings. Alibaba is the Amazon of China, while Tencent Holdings is the owner of WeChat, a messaging and social-media app with more than a billion users.

Alibaba created Alipay in 2004 to let millions of potential customers who lacked credit and debit cards shop on its giant online marketplace. Alipay is free for smaller users of its platform. As total monthly transactions rise, so does the charge; but even at its maximum, it’s less than half what PayPal charges - around 1.2 percent. Tencent Holdings similarly introduced its payments function in 2005 in order to keep users inside its messaging system longer. The American equivalent would be Amazon and Facebook serving as the major conduits for US payments.

WeChat and Alibaba have grown into full-blown digital ecosystems - around-the-clock hubs for managing the details of daily life. WeChat users can schedule doctor appointments, order food, hail rides and much more through “mini-apps” on the core app. Alipay calls itself a “global lifestyle super-app” and has similar functions. Both have flourished by making mobile payments cheap and easy to use. Consumers can pay for everything with their mobile apps and can make person-to-person payments. Everyone has a unique QR code, and transfers are free. Users don’t need to sign into a bank or payments app when transacting. They simply press the “pay” button on the ecosystem’s main app and their unique QR code appears for the merchant to scan. Engen writes:

A growing number of retailers, including McDonald’s and Starbucks, have self-scanning devices near the cash register to read QR codes. The process takes seconds, moving customers along so quickly that anyone using cash gets eye-rolls for slowing things down.

Merchants that lack a point-of-sale device can simply post a piece of paper with their QR code near the register for customers to point their phones’ cameras at and execute payments in reverse.

A system built on QR codes might not be as secure as the near-field communication technology used by ApplePay and other apps in the U.S. market. But it’s cheaper for merchants, who don’t have to buy a piece of technology to accept a payment.

The mobile payment systems are a boon to merchants and their customers, but local bankers complain that they are slowly being driven out of business. Alipay and WeChat have become a duopoly that is impossible to fight. Engen writes that banks are often reduced to “dumb pipes” - silent funders whose accounts are used to top up customers’ digital wallets. The bank bears the compliance and other account-related expenses, and it does not get the fees and branding opportunities typical of cards and other bank-run options. The bank is seen as a place to deposit money and link it to WeChat or Alipay. Bankers are being “disintermediated” - cut out of the loop as middlemen.

If Amazon, Facebook or one of their Chinese counterparts duplicated the success of China’s mobile ecosystems in the US, they could take $43 billion in merchant fees from credit card companies, processors and banks, along with about $3 billion in bank fees for checking accounts. In addition, there is the potential loss of money market deposits, which are also migrating to the mobile ecosystem duopoly in China. In 2017, Alipay’s affiliate Yu’e Bao surpassed JPMorgan Chase’s government market fund as the world’s largest money market fund, with more than $200 billion in assets. Engen quotes one financial services leader who observes, “The speed of migration to their wealth-management and money-market funds has been tremendous. That’s bad news for traditional banks, where deposits are the foundation of the business.”

An Amazon-style mobile ecosystem could challenge not only the payments system but the lending business of banks. Amazon is already making small-business loans, finding ways to cut into banks’ swipe-fee revenue and competing against prepaid card issuers; and it evidently has broader ambitions. Checking accounts, small business credit cards and even mortgages appear to be in the company’s sites.

In an October 2017 article titled “The Future of Banks Is Probably Not Banks,” tech innovator Andy O’Sullivan observed that Amazon has a relatively new service called “Amazon Cash,” where consumers can use a barcode to load cash into their Amazon accounts through physical retailers. The service is intended for consumers who don’t have bankcards, but O’Sullivan notes that it raises some interesting possibilities. Amazon could do a deal with retailers to allow consumers to use their Amazon accounts in stores, or it could offer credit to buy particular items. No bank would be involved, just a tech giant that already has a relationship with the consumer offering him additional services. Phone payment systems are already training customers not to need bankcards, which means not to need banks.

Taking those concepts even further, Amazon (or eBay or Craigslist) could set up a digital credit system that bypassed bank-created money altogether. Users could sell goods and services online for credits, which they could then spend online for other goods and services. The credits of this online ecosystem would constitute its own user-generated currency. Credits could trade in a digital credit clearing system similar to the digital community currencies used worldwide, systems in which “money” is effectively generated by users themselves.

Like community currencies, an Amazon-style credit clearing system would be independent of both banks and government; but Amazon itself is a private for-profit megalithic system. Like its Wall Street counterparts, it has a shady reputation, having been variously charged with worker exploitation, unfair trade practices, environmental degradation, and extracting outsized profits from trades. However, both President Trump for the Republicans and Senator Elizabeth Warren for the Democrats are now threatening to turn Amazon, Facebook and other tech giants into public utilities. This opens some interesting theoretical possibilities. We could one day have a national non-profit digital ecosystem operated as a cooperative, a public utility in which profits returned to the users in the form of reduced prices. Users could create their own money by “monetizing” their own credit, in a community currency system in which the “community” is the nation or even the world.

Lew Rockwell.com, “Punishing Iran Will Cost A Fortune”, 11 August 2018:

President Trump keeps vowing to create more jobs in America.  But his actions often speak differently.  The most egregious example was Trump’s cancellation of the multi-national Iran nuclear treaty that had been welcomed by the world as a major step to Mideast denuclearization.

In abrogating the international treaty signed by the US, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China, the US humiliated its allies and rivals who were strongly in favor of the accord.  Iran had already handed 97% of its enriched uranium to Russia, shut down reactors and centrifuges, and allowed UN inspectors to run all over its nuclear facilities when Trump tore up the deal that had been under negotiation since 2015.

Iran has been under a harsh US-led trade embargo since its 1979 revolution that was designed to cripple its economy and military and drive the people to rebel against their government.  Washington used the same tactics – without success – against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Fidel Castro’s Cuba.

So intense is the Trump administration’s hatred for Islamic Iran that it decided to scrap the multinational nuclear deal that would have meant opening Iran to western commerce and a bonanza for US and European companies.  The key element of the deal was to have been the sale of some 210 commercial jet airliners to Iran by the US and the European Union, a deal worth some $40-50 billion, not counting future sales of spare parts.

The US embargo of Iran since 1979 has made it unable to modernize its commercial airline fleet.  Iran was denied modern aircraft, spare parts, engines and instruments, leaving it with decaying aircraft from the 1970’s.

The grim result of the US-imposed embargo has been 17 crashes of Iranian civilian aircraft with 1500 deaths.

Most of Iran’s commercial aircraft – a grab bag of old, mostly 25-year old Boeing, Airbus, Chinese and Soviet aircraft – are flying coffins.  Iran’s maintenance, training and air traffic control are substandard.  Flying over and around Iran’s lofty mountains is a challenge for the best of pilots, even for a handful of newer ATR turboprop aircraft.

Washington’s denial to Iran of Boeing Aircraft (and Airbus planes because they contain US-made parts), means the loss of tens of thousands of highly-paid jobs in the US and Europe.  Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, claims he talked Trump into canceling the Iran nuclear deal and the Boeing orders.

It’s hard to validate Netanyahu’s claim but it is clear that America’s ever more powerful Israel lobby and its ally fundamentalist Christian Zionists played a key role in thwarting the Iran nuclear deal and sale of commercial aircraft.

We don’t yet know the full cost of lost American jobs and business to help keep Iran isolated.  But one could argue that part of the $20 billion lost should be counted as part of annual US aid to Israel.

Russia and China’s aircraft industries will soon be able to deliver modern passenger aircraft to Iran and accept payment in oil.  China’s C919 and ARJ21 are now nearing service. Russia’s Sukhoi Superjet 100 will be ready soon.  Trump could be cutting off his nose to spite his face.

Trump and his allies are trying to push Iran into a corner and provoke it to lash out at US forces that are poised around it.  A navel clash in the Gulf is the obvious pretext for war.

While the US goes after Iran, it has opened a new anti-Muslim front against old ally Turkey by imposing heavy duties on Ankara’s exports to the US and attacking the always vulnerable Turkish lira.  This, in turn, has set off a financial crisis across Europe, notably among EU banks that have large, soft loans made to Turkey.

Trump & Co. are trying to force Turkey to bend the knee and support US-Israeli-Saudi policy goals.  Turkey and Iran remain the last significant supporters in the region of the Palestinians.  Trump and the New York City real estate developers, and the money men who surround him, are determined to show the independent-minded Iranians and Turks who is the big boss.

By Eric Margolis

In a stagnant economy, a universal basic income can create the demand needed to clear the shelves of unsold products and drive new productivity. (Photo: Pixabay)

Truthout.org, “How to Fund a Universal Basic Income Without Increasing Taxes or Inflation”, Ellen Brown, The Web of Debt Blog

The policy of guaranteeing every citizen a universal basic income is gaining support around the world, as automation increasingly makes jobs obsolete. But can it be funded without raising taxes or triggering hyperinflation? In a panel I was on at the NexusEarth cryptocurrency conference in Aspen September 21-23rd, most participants said no. This is my rebuttal.

In May 2017, a team of researchers at the University of Oxford published the results of a survey of the world’s best artificial intelligence experts, who predicted that there was a 50 percent chance of AI outperforming humans in all tasks within 45 years. All human jobs were expected to be automated in 120 years, with Asian respondents expecting these dates much sooner than North Americans. In theory, that means we could all retire and enjoy the promised age of universal leisure. But the immediate concern for most people is that they will be losing their jobs to machines.

That helps explain the recent interest in a universal basic income (UBI) — a sum of money distributed equally to everyone. A UBI has been proposed in Switzerland, trials are beginning in Finland, and there is a successful pilot ongoing in Brazil. The cities of Ontario in Canada, Oakland in California, and Utrecht in the Netherlands are planning trials; two local authorities in Scotland have announced such plans; and politicians across Europe, including UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, have spoken in favor of the concept. Advocates in the US range from Robert Reich to Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Luther King, Thomas Paine, Charles Murray, Elon Musk, Dan Savage, Keith Ellison and Paul Samuelson. A new economic study found that a UBI of $1000/month to all adults would add $2.5 trillion to the US economy in eight years.

Welfare can encourage laziness, because benefits go down as earned income goes up. But studies have shown that a UBI distributed equally regardless of income does not have that result. In 1968, President Richard Nixon initiated a successful trial showing that the money had little impact on the recipients’ working hours. People who did reduce the time they worked engaged in other socially valuable pursuits, and young people who were not working spent more time getting an education. Analysis of a similar Canadian trial found that employment rates among young adults did not change, high-school completion rates increased, and hospitalization rates dropped by 8.5 percent. Larger experiments in India have reached similar results.

Studies have also shown that it would actually be cheaper to distribute funds to the entire population than to run the welfare services governments engage in now. It has been calculated that if the UK’s welfare budget were split among the country’s 50 million adults, each of them would get £5,160 a year.

But that is not enough to cover basic survival needs in a modern economy. Taxes would need to be raised, additional debt incurred, or other programs slashed; and these are solutions on which governments are generally unwilling to embark. The other option is “qualitative easing,” a form of central bank quantitative easing in which the money flows directly into the real economy rather than simply into banks. In Europe, politicians are taking another look at this once-derided “helicopter money.” A UBI is being proposed as monetary policy that would stimulate productivity without increasing taxes. As Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, former senior vice president of the World Bank, explains:

. . . [W]hen the government spends more and invests in the economy, that money circulates, and recirculates again and again. So not only does it create jobs once: the investment creates jobs multiple times.

The result of that is that the economy grows by a multiple of the initial spending, and public finances turn out to be stronger: as the economy grows, fiscal revenues increase, and demands for the government to pay unemployment benefits, or fund social programmes to help the poor and needy, go down. As tax revenues go up as a result of growth, and as these expenditures decrease, the government’s fiscal position strengthens.

Why “QE for the People” Need Not Be Inflationary

The objection to any sort of quantitative easing in which new money gets into the real economy is that when the money supply grows too large and consumer prices shoot up, the process cannot be reversed. If the money is spent on a national dividend, infrastructure, or the government’s budget, it will be out circulating in the economy and will not be retrievable by the central bank.

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Nation Revisited # 142 August 2018:

Enoch Powell

Fifty years after Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, immigrants are still coming to the UK. The latest ONS figures show that last year there were 101,000 migrants from the EU and 227,000 from outside the EU.

Enoch Powell was opposed to the EU and immigration but he was not anti-European and he refused an invitation to stand for the National Front in 1974. At a speech which he delivered in French in Lyon in 1971 he stated:

“From boyhood, I have been devoted to the study of that Greek and Roman inheritance, which in varying measure is common to all that is Europe, and not only ‘Europe’ of the six or eight or ten but Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals – and beyond. I also claim that reverent enthusiasm for the history of my own country which commands an equal reverence for the past that has formed everything else which is European. The truest European, in my opinion, is the man who is most humbly conscious of the vast demands which comprehension of, even a little part of this Europe imposes upon those who seek it; for the deeper we penetrate, the more the marvellous differentiation of human society within this single continent evokes our wonder. The very use of the word ‘Europe’ in expressions like ‘European unity’, ‘going into Europe’, ‘Europe’s role in the world’ is a solecism which grates upon the ear of all true Europeans: only Americans can be excused for using it.”

Uber-nationalist parties are wrong to claim Enoch Powell as one of their own. They want to spend more on defence and the National Health Service but he resigned from Harold Macmillan’s government in 1958 over plans to increase public spending. They are nostalgic about the British Empire but he was in favour of Indian independence and critical of our mistreatment of Kenyan detainees during the Mau Mau Emergency. They despise foreigners but he was a classical scholar who spoke several languages.

The working men who marched in support of Enoch Powell lost interest when ‘The Sun’ and ‘The Daily Mail’ turned against him. But the influx of refugees from Africa and the Middle East is finally challenging the liberal consensus. Populist parties are now in government in Italy, Austria and Hungary, and powerful in France, Germany, Sweden and Poland.

At present, there is no solidarity on the issue. There’s no point in Germany sending Africans back to Italy or Greece because they landed there, or sharing them out amongst the nations of Europe. We need a common European migration and asylum policy and a combined Naval force to patrol the Mediterranean. Not long ago such a policy would have been unthinkable but since Angela Merkel took in a million refugees attitudes have hardened and deportation is firmly on the agenda.

The supporters of multi-culturalism got away with their mischief because global capitalism made most of us richer. We were too busy earning a living to worry about immigration, but its social consequences have had a profound effect on public opinion. Rising crime and terrorism are forcing Europe to get its act together; just as the UK is preparing to leave.

Plutocracy

Our system of government dates back to the days of stage coaches, three-cornered hats, and universal ignorance. Only the upper classes had the vote and bribery was the norm. Today, everybody can vote and they have all got smartphones in their pockets to inform them on any topic. It shouldn’t be so easy for charlatans to get elected but they still manage it.

We now have the technology to consult the electorate without calling a general election. Online referendums could be used to inform the government. This would make Parliament obsolete together with 650 MPs and over 800 members of The House of Lords. Those parliamentarians over retiring age could be pensioned off and the younger ones redeployed as traffic wardens.

Of course, no such reforms will be introduced. We will keep our ancient institutions with their obsolete rituals and carry on wasting millions of pounds. Our MPs will continue to shuffle into lobbies to be counted like sheep and our noble Lords will still frustrate their knavish tricks.

The big businessmen who really run this country are not impressed by public opinion and they see no reason to interfere with tradition. Somebody said that the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. But that’s exactly what we do at every general election when we chose a government from the same assortment of nonentities as before.

The alternative to this madness is not a dictatorship but representative government. We should replace Parliament with a secure computerised system that couldn’t be got at by plutocrats.

The top ten British companies are amongst the most powerful in the world. They are; Royal Dutch Shell, HSBC Holdings, British American Tobacco, BP, Glaxo Smith Kline, Diageo, Astra Zeneca, Vodaphone, Unilever, and Glencoe. British businesses paid £43 billion in corporation tax in 2014-15 and contributed an unknown amount in ‘donations’ to political parties. We are not governed by elected MPs but by the appointed executives of major corporations who put profits before people.

It’s the duty of big business to make money for their shareholders but it’s the duty of government to protect workers’ rights and provide decent health care and social security. There are some excellent firms that look after their workers but most of them are only interested in making money. Karl Marx predicted that global capitalism would eventually turn into socialism but we haven’t got there yet. 

Fashions in Thinking

Without even realising it we all follow fashion to some extent. Short hair is currently in fashion for men but not so long ago long hair was the norm. We may not keep up with the latest styles but we find ourselves slowly adapting to them. Have a look at some old photographs of your friends and family and you will notice collar-length hairstyles, flared trousers, and floral shirts that you would not wear today.

Conformity starts in the playground and continues into old age. Women of a certain age try to be fashionable by wearing short skirts that would look better on a teenager. And it’s the same with social attitudes. Years ago black dogs and cats were often called ‘Nigger’, and black people usually appeared in films as servants. The original housekeeper in the Tom & Jerry cartoons was a black mammy but she eventually became Irish.

When John Tyndall launched ‘Spearhead’ magazine n 1964 he used his front page to described Africans as ‘sub-human’, but a year later the Race Relations Act was passed and AK Chesterton warned:

“The man who thinks that this war can be won by mouthing slogans about ‘dirty Jews and filthy niggers’ is a maniac whose place should not be in the National Front but in a mental hospital.”

Whatever our thoughts were in the Sixties, it’s likely that we have changed our minds. Not many people want to go back to the days when the glamorous model Ruth Ellis (pictured) was hanged for shooting dead her brutal lover, or when the brilliant codebreaker Alan Turing was hounded to his death by the authorities. Times have changed and most of us have changed with them.

This is often blamed on the Frankfurt School, a group of Marxist scholars who set out to change public attitudes. But most of these reforms can be traced to the French Revolution, or even further back to the Sermon on The Mount. The Marxists did not invent social justice they just adopted it as a strategy.

Of course, people are influenced by propaganda. Smoking and drinking and driving are two positive examples of ‘social engineering’. The latest campaign pairs black and white couples in almost every TV commercial. This is not a government initiative but the latest fashion in thinking. Keen young account executives are persuading their clients that diversity sells products. The message to women seems to be, if you want a comfortable bed or a new kitchen, marry a black man.

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“Slavery by debt has continued to this day, and it is particularly evident in the plight of students.” (Photo: Michael Fleshman/cc)

Common Dreams:

“Student Debt Slavery: Bankrolling Financiers On The Backs Of The Young”, by Ellen Brown

Higher education has been financialized, transformed from a public service into a lucrative cash cow for private investors.

The advantages of slavery by debt over “chattel” slavery – ownership of humans as a property right – were set out in an infamous document called the Hazard Circular, reportedly circulated by British banking interests among their American banking counterparts during the American Civil War. It read in part:

Slavery is likely to be abolished by the war power and chattel slavery destroyed. This, I and my European friends are glad of, for slavery is but the owning of labor and carries with it the care of the laborers, while the European plan, led by England, is that capital shall control labor by controlling wages.

Slaves had to be housed, fed and cared for. “Free” men housed and fed themselves. For the more dangerous jobs, such as mining, Irish immigrants were used rather than black slaves, because the Irish were expendable. Free men could be kept enslaved by debt, by paying them wages that were insufficient to meet their costs of living. On how to control wages, the Hazard Circular went on:

This can be done by controlling the money. The great debt that capitalists will see to it is made out of the war, must be used as a means to control the volume of money. . . . It will not do to allow the greenback, as it is called, to circulate as money any length of time, as we cannot control that.

The government, too, had to be enslaved by debt. It could not be allowed to simply issue the money it needed to meet its budget, as Lincoln’s government did with its greenbacks (government-issued US Notes). The greenback program was terminated after the war, forcing the government to borrow from banks – banks that created the money themselves, just as the government had been doing. Only about 10% of the “banknotes” then issued by banks were actually backed by gold. The rest were effectively counterfeit. The difference between government-created and bank-created money was that the government issued it and spent it on the federal budget, creating demand and stimulating the economy. Banks issued money and lent it, at interest. More had to be paid back than was lent, keeping the supply of money tight and keeping both workers and the government in debt.

Student Debt Peonage

Slavery by debt has continued to this day, and it is particularly evident in the plight of students. Graduates leave college with a diploma and a massive debt on their backs, averaging over $37,000 in 2016. The government’s student loan portfolio now totals $1.37 trillion, making it the second highest consumer debt category behind only mortgage debt. Student debt has risen nearly 164% in 25 years, while median wages have increased only 1.6%.

Unlike mortgage debt, student debt must be paid. Students cannot just turn in their diplomas and walk away, as homeowners can with their keys. Wages, unemployment benefits, tax refunds and even Social Security checks can be tapped to ensure repayment. In 1998, Sallie Mae (the Student Loan Marketing Association) was privatized, and Congress removed the dischargeabilility of federal student debt in bankruptcy, absent exceptional circumstances. In 2005, this lender protection was extended to private student loans. Because lenders know that their debts cannot be discharged, they have little incentive to consider a student borrower’s ability to repay. Most students are granted a nearly unlimited line of credit. This, in turn, has led to skyrocketing tuition rates, since universities know the money is available to pay them; and that has created the need for students to borrow even more.

Students take on a huge debt load with the promise that their degrees will be the doorway to jobs allowing them to pay it back, but for many the jobs are not there or not sufficient to meet expenses. Today nearly one-third of borrowers have made no headway in paying down their loans five years after leaving school, although many of these borrowers are not in default. They make payments month after month consisting only of interest, while they continue to owe the full amount they borrowed. This can mean a lifetime of tribute to the lenders, while the loan is never paid off, a classic form of debt peonage to the lender class.

All of this has made student debt a very attractive asset for investors. Student loans are pooled and repackaged into student loan asset-backed securities (SLABS), similar to the notorious mortgage-backed securities through which home buyers were caught in a massive debt trap in 2008-09. The nameless, faceless investors want their payments when due, and the strict terms of the loans make it more profitable to force a default than to negotiate terms the borrower can actually meet. About 80% of SLABS are backed by government-insured loans, guaranteeing that the investors will get paid even if the borrower defaults. The onerous federal bankruptcy laws also make SLABS particularly safe and desirable investments.

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Representing the largest part of the economy, real estate is followed by goverment and then the financial industry proper.
(((Frame Games))) narrates a history culminating in the 2008 financial crisis/real estate melt-down: beginning with the riots of the 1960’s by which blacks effectively extorted property owners; followed by the 1968 Rumford Fair Housing Act which prohibited discrimination with regard to whom one rents or sells ...to a bomb being set with ‘The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977”; then Clinton’s lighting the fuse on these race based programs, which forced banks to make risky loans to blacks (a capacity compounded by taking down the Glass-Steagall Act); to objectivist Greenspan’s instigation of the housing bubble, including with “creative investment mediums”; and finally the 2008 melt down - the biggest theft in American and possibly all known history.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Nbvd3FOLUA

While John Ziegler is a darling of (((the neo-cons))) in their criticism of Trump and his (((paleocon))) agenda, Ziegler’s criticisms of Trump remain informative nevertheless. In this podcast he criticizes Trump’s deal making preparation for meeting Kim Jong-un:

John Ziegler: “There are so many elements of this that are just mind-blowing. I can’t believe that he’s even meeting without any agreement being made to begin with. If you remember, when this whole thing started, the story was that he would meet IF North Korea would gave-up unilaterally their nuclear program. That was going to be a precondition for meeting. That’s gone! This is just an equal-footing get-together - giving-up what ever is left of the prestige of The Presidency of The United States, elevating this evil dictator, this horrible piece of crap - I mean Kim Jong-un is a horrible human being! who tortures people, tortures his own people, has threatened this country with nuclear war, and we’re elevating him! Trump has already called him ‘a very honorable person.’

Can you imagine if Obama or Hillary Clinton had decided to meet with Kim Jong-un with no precondition, with no agreement on his part - Kim doesn’t have to give up anything in order to meet with Obama or Hillary? Can you imagine the heads of Sean Hannity, Mark Levin and Rush Limbaugh exploding into fourth of July fireworks? over even the suggestion of this?

But instead, this is now praised as a great idea, and I think it’s a horrible idea. One of the more baffling takes I’ve heard on this is that ‘well, you need to give Trump credit for meeting.’

Why? What? Credit for meeting? The meeting does us no good. The meeting of itself only does Kim Jong-un good. We’re being brought down to their level, he’s being brought up to our level for nothing! He’s giving up nothing in return; and that’s just the best case scenario…

All Trump cares about is the headline of the day, ‘Trump Makes Historic Deal’, doesn’t matter that the deal might suck, and we get noting in return or that it creates further dangers down the road - Trump doesn’t care about anybody but himself - that is a double whammy when it comes to negotiating nuclear deals with deranged dictators. It’s effectively like he’s got the world’s credit-card and he’s having a big party for himself, and he’s not going to be around when we have to pay the bill.

And, by the way, the fact that comes out of the G7 meeting makes this even more vulnerable to a bad deal. Why? Because Trump had this bizarre temper-tantrum and we’re now - this is not an exaggeration folks, and its mind blowing to even contemplate, but - based upon the statements of our President in the last few days, Russia and North Korea are our allies, they’re the ‘good guys’ and Canada, Germany, Great Britain and France - they’re ‘the bad guys.’

And that’s the other part of this. There are people who think, bizarrely, that Trump knows what he’s doing!

There are two things I’m positive about - I’m not a foreign policy expert (but neither is Donald Trump) - there are two things that I’m positive about - if he was doing exactly the same things, and his name was Obama, or Hillary Clinton The Right would be going bananas! That is a hundred percent factual. And number two, there is absolutely no evidence, what-so-ever, that Donald Trump is playing some amazing eight-dimensional chess and knows what the hell he’s doing. He has no idea what he’s doing - none!

And more importantly, his goals are completely at odds with what is good for the world and good for the country because he wants the headline and he wants the history - and he needs it even more now that he took a dump at the G7. This dump at the G7 wasn’t just a little stinky-one. This was a massive dump.

....when Donald Trump said, on the eve of the G7, that Russia should be let back-in, there is no other way to interpret that but that they’ve got something on him!

...the key wasn’t the statement that Russia should be allowed back in the G7 - that got a lot of play - but what is most interesting was that he prefaced it with, ‘I have been Russia’s worst nightmare’ - that’s classic Trump; why is that classic Trump? Because Trump knows his own weaknesses. And Trump lies the biggest to cover those weaknesses. It’s been part of his M.O. for ever. So whenever he makes a declarative statement, for instance, ‘nobody reads the bible more than I do’, you know that’s bullshit - that means he never reads the bible. So when he says, ‘I have been Russia’s worst nightmare’, if you put that through the Trump translation machine, that means Putin has something on him. That’s the way Trump operates, he believes in the big lie theory - you cover your weakness with a massive lie because you know nobody will call you on it.”

Protesters attend a demonstration against alleged slavery in Libya, at Sergels torg in Stockholm, Sweden, 25 November 2017. [Claudio Bresciani/EPA/EFE]/ Euractiv

Voice of Europe, “Asylum seekers cost Sweden 347 billion euros during their lifetimes”, 6 June 2018:

Svenska Dagbladet journalist, Per Gudmundsson, writes that the net costs of the average refugee are higher than expected. Gudmondsson bases his opinion on a financial report that was published by Sweden’s ESO research institution earlier this week.

Gudmundsson says some immigrant groups are even more costly due to integration failures and labour costs. Therefore, the costs of a refugee or asylum seeker are higher than the previously thought, 291,000 euros (3 million crowns) during their lifetimes.

“The actual costs are higher because no direct costs have been calculated, for example, the cost of subsidised employment,” he says.

Sweden’s migrant population has grown from 690,000 in 2015 to 830,000 in 2017. The ESO report states that “Refugees who immigrate today, are expected to live 58.3 years in Sweden on average”.

During these years, an asylum seeker with an average integration potential is expected to represent a net cost to Sweden’s public finances of 7,184 euros on average per year.”

If you multiply 7,184 euros per refugee x 58.3 (average lifetime) the costs per refugee will be 418,827 euros during their lifetime in Sweden.

By multiplying this with the total number of refugees, we get the total costs for all refugees during their lifetimes:

418,827 x 830,000 = 347 billion euros or 3,580 billion Swedish crowns.

According to the report, The 58.3 years, is about the group that immigrated recently, it is unclear if this varies considerably.

Gudmundsson says this is an inefficient use of funds, which could have had a greater impact in homelands of the refugees.

Related:

Voice of Europe, “Hundreds of thousands of Swedish pensioners live in poverty, according to recent report”, 5 June 2018:

A new report published by the Swedish Pensions Agency shows that as many as 245,000 people of over the age of 65 are below the poverty threshold.

In comparison with the rest of the Nordic countries, Sweden has the highest proportion of poor pensioners (or as the Pension Agency calls it, pensioners with a “relatively low financial standard”).

In the press release, the agency wrote that “the main reason why older people do not reach the upper limit of a relatively low economic standard is that they do not have, or are not entitled to, maximum housing allowance and/or elderly support”.

Of the 245,000 people who were below the limit of relatively low economic standard in 2017, 162,000 were women.

“Women, single individuals, and the oldest in the age group over 65 are those that are at the greatest risk of falling below the income threshold for relatively low economic standards. The main reason for this is a combination of low income-based pensions and low housing costs,” says chief Pensions Agency analyst, Ole Stettergren.