[Majorityrights News] Trump will ‘arm Ukraine to the teeth’ if Putin won’t negotiate ceasefire Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 12 November 2024 16:20.
[Majorityrights News] Alex Navalny, born 4th June, 1976; died at Yamalo-Nenets penitentiary 16th February, 2024 Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 16 February 2024 23:43.
[Majorityrights Central] A couple of exchanges on the nature and meaning of Christianity’s origin Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 25 July 2023 22:19.
[Majorityrights News] Is the Ukrainian counter-offensive for Bakhmut the counter-offensive for Ukraine? Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 18 May 2023 18:55.
Xi urged Trump to ease North Korea sanctions in ‘timely’ fashion
Chinese President Xi Jinping urged US President Donald Trump to “show flexibility” towards North Korea, including the “timely” easing of sanctions, at the G20 summit last week, China’s foreign minister said Tuesday.
Xi visited North Korea prior to meeting Trump at the G20 in Japan on Saturday, and analysts had said the Chinese leader could use the trip as leverage in his trade war talks with the US leader.
Trump met North Korean leader Kim Jong Un the next day at the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) dividing North and South Korea.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told reporters on Tuesday that Xi “pushed for the US to show flexibility and meet the DPRK (North Korea) halfway, including the timely easing of sanctions against the DPRK and finding a solution to each other’s concerns through dialogue”.
China and North Korea have worked to improve relations in the past year after they deteriorated as Beijing backed a series of UN sanctions against its Cold War-era ally over its nuclear activities. But Beijing has sought to keep Pyongyang within its sphere of influence and Kim met Xi four times in China in the past four years.
A week before the G20 summit in Osaka, Xi became the first Chinese leader to visit North Korea in 14 years in a trip analysts said was meant to showcase China’s influence over the North prior to trade talks with the US.
- ‘Astounding imagination’ -
Trump became the first US president to step on North Korean soil after he and Kim shook hands during their impromptu meeting over the weekend.
Wang said China welcomes the meeting and said the situation on the peninsula now has a “rare opportunity for peace”.
“We hope that the political will of the leaders of the two countries can be translated into substantive progress in dialogue and negotiation as soon as possible,” he said.
In Seoul, South Korean President Moon Jae-in hailed as the result of “astounding imagination”.
It was a “de-facto declaration of an end to hostile relations and the beginning of a full-fledged era of peace”, said Moon, who has long promoted engagement with Pyongyang.
The South Korean leader was instrumental in brokering the landmark summit between Trump and Kim in Singapore last year which produced only a vaguely worded pledge about denuclearisation.
After their latest meeting, Trump said he and Kim agreed to start working-level talks on a denuclearisation deal, ending a standstill in place since the two leaders’ second summit, in Hanoi in late February, ended without an agreement.
Talks in Vietnam had collapsed after the pair failed to reach an accord over sanctions relief and what the North was willing to give in return.
Since then, contact between the two sides had been minimal—with Pyongyang issuing frequent criticisms of the US position—but the two leaders exchanged a series of letters before Trump issued his offer to meet at the DMZ.
Upon his return from the Korean Peninsula, Trump has faced attacked from critics in the US, who said the US leader was normalising a nuclear-armed Pyongyang.
While the eternal Kraut snubs Majorityrights for not promoting Hitler, while it tries to gaslight and smear me with anything it can for that, it can’t help itself with its mechanistic rule following ad absurdem, whether Hitler or Merkel, whether the final solution to the J.Q. that somehow includes wiping-out half of Europe, including Germany as well, or raising a million Euro with its Jewish friends for a sister ship of its NGO’s to haul genetic replacement into Europe….
Cooperation with the DNA Nations to preserve our species? No, we wouldn’t do that. You don’t love Hitler and Jesus. You are not some scientistic rule following dolt.
But help like this? Sure: The NGO Racket…
Carola Rackete was arrested in Lampedusa on Saturday after forcing her way into port. Photograph: Guglielmo Mangiapane/Reuters
More than €1m raised for rescue ship captain detained in Italy
Two online campaigns to help the German captain of a rescue ship under house arrest in Italy have between them raised more than €1m.
Carola Rackete’s arrest on Saturday, after she forced her way into port in Lampedusa carrying migrants and refugees she had rescued off Libya, prompted a fundraising appeal by two prominent German TV stars that by Tuesday morning had raised €917,195 from more than 33,000 donors.
A second campaign, started by an Italian anti-fascist group on Facebook, had raised a further €433,993 by Tuesday, well over the page’s stated goal of €349,000, bringing the total raised in support of Rackete to more than €1.3m.
“The wave of solidarity is wonderful,” Ruben Neugebauer, a spokesman for Rackete’s migrant rescue NGO Sea-Watch, told Spiegel Online. “We certainly also need the money.”
The funds will go towards paying Rackete’s legal fees if charges are brought against her. Otherwise, Neugebauer said, the NGO would need about €1m to buy and equip a new ship if Rackete’s vessel, Sea-Watch-3, remained out of action.
The German and French governments have ramped up their criticism of Italy over its handling of the case. France accused Italy on Tuesday of acting hysterically over immigration and failing to live up to its duties.
“I think that basically the Italian government has not been up to the task,” a government spokeswoman, Sibeth Ndiaye, told France’s BFM-TV. “Mr Matteo Salvini’s behaviour has not been acceptable as far as I am concerned. This is a painful subject, a complex subject which the EU and France have previously been in solidarity with Italy over.”
Salvini, who heads the ... League party, Italy’s largest political force, responded: “My behaviour regarding immigration is unacceptable? The French government should stop with these insults and open its ports.”
German politicians have also criticised Italy’s treatment of Rackete, in the first signs of a public pushback against Italy’s criminalisation of migrant rescue vessels in the Mediterranean.
“Italy isn’t any old nation,” said Germany’s president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in an unusually candid interview with the broadcaster ZDF aired on Sunday evening. “Italy is in the middle of the European Union, a founding state of the European Union. And therefore we should be able to expect a nation such as Italy to deal with a case like this in a different way.”
The foreign minister, Heiko Maas, went a step further, demanding that the Italian authorities set Rackete free. “From our perspective, only the release of Carola Rackete can come at the end of a procedure based on the rule of law,” Maas tweeted on Monday. “I will make that clear to Italy once again.”
Germany has said it will keep up diplomatic pressure on Italy over the case.
Facebook May Pose a Greater Danger Than Wall Street
Payments can happen cheaply and easily without banks or credit card companies, as has already been demonstrated—not in the United States but in China. Unlike in the U.S., where numerous firms feast on fees from handling and processing payments, in China most money flows through mobile phones nearly for free. In 2018 these cashless payments totaled a whopping $41.5 trillion; and 90% were through Alipay and WeChat Pay, a pair of digital ecosystems that blend social media, commerce and banking. According to a 2018 article in Bloomberg titled “Why China’s Payment Apps Give U.S. Bankers Nightmares”:
The nightmare for the U.S. financial industry is that a technology company—whether from China or a homegrown juggernaut such as Amazon.com Inc. or Facebook Inc.—replicates the success of Alipay and WeChat in America. The stakes are enormous, potentially carving away billions of dollars in annual revenue from major banks and other firms.
That threat may now be materializing. On June 18, Facebook unveiled a white paper outlining ambitious plans to create a new global cryptocurrency called Libra, to be launched in 2020. Facebook reportedly has high hopes that Libra will become the foundation for a new financial system free of control by Wall Street power brokers and central banks.
But apparently Libra will not be competing with Visa or Mastercard. In fact, the Libra Association lists those two giants among its 28 soon-to-be founding members. Others include Paypal, Stripe, Uber, Lyft and eBay. Facebook has reportedly courted dozens of financial institutions and other tech companies to join the Libra Association, an independent foundation that will contribute capital and help govern the digital currency. Entry barriers are high, with each founding member paying a minimum of $10 million to join. This gives them one vote (or 1% of the total vote, whichever is larger) in the Libra Association council. Members are also entitled to a share proportionate to their investment of the dividends earned from interest on the Libra reserve—the money that users will pay to acquire the Libra currency.
Nouriel Roubini
✔
@Nouriel
It will start as a private, permissioned, not-trustless, centralized oligopolistic members-only club. So much for calling it “blockchain”. Like all “enterprise DLT” it is blockchain in name only and an monopoly to extract massive seignorage from billions of users. A monopoly scam https://twitter.com/coindesk/status/1140620454262124545 …
CoinDesk
✔
@coindesk
Noted economist Nouriel Roubini (@Nouriel) has said Facebook’s soon-to-be unveiled cryptocurrency is not really crypto or blockchain. http://ow.ly/Srmc50uG7Yk
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12:36 AM - Jun 18, 2019
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Another Zero Hedge writer calls Libra “The Dollar’s Killer App,” which threatens “not only the power of central banks but also the government’s money monopoly itself.”
From Frying Pan to Fire?
To the crypto-anarchist community, usurping the power of central banks and governments may sound like a good thing. But handing global power to the corporate-controlled Libra Association could be a greater nightmare. So argues Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, who writes in The Financial Times:
This currency would insert a powerful new corporate layer of monetary control between central banks and individuals. Inevitably, these companies will put their private interests — profits and influence — ahead of public ones. …
The Libra Association’s goals specifically say that [they] will encourage “decentralised forms of governance.” In other words, Libra will disrupt and weaken nation states by enabling people to move out of unstable local currencies and into a currency denominated in dollars and euros and managed by corporations. …
What Libra backers are calling ‘decentralisation’ is in truth a shift of power from developing world central banks toward multinational corporations and the US Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank.
Power will shift to the Fed and ECB because the dollar and the euro will squeeze out weaker currencies in developing countries. As seen recently in Greece, the result will be to cause their governments to lose control of their currencies and their economies.
Pros and Cons
Caitlin Long, co-founder of the Wyoming Blockchain Coalition, recently agreed that Libra was a Trojan horse but predicted it would have some beneficial effects. For one, she thought it would impose discipline on the U.S. banking system by leading to populist calls to repeal its corporate subsidies. The Fed is now paying its member banks 2.35% in risk-free interest on their excess reserves, which this year is projected to total $36 billion of corporate welfare to U.S. banks—about half the sum spent on the U.S. food stamp program. If Facebook parks its entire U.S. dollar balance at the Federal Reserve through one of its bank partners, it could earn the same rate. But Long predicted that Facebook would have to pay interest to Libra users to avoid a chorus of critics, who would loudly publicize how much money Facebook and its partners were pocketing from the interest on the money users traded for their Libra currency.
But that was before the Libra white paper came out. It reveals the profits will indeed be divvied among Facebook’s Libra partners rather than shared with users. At one time, we earned interest on our deposits in government-insured banks. With Libra, we will get no interest on our money, which will be entrusted to uninsured crypto exchanges, which are coming under increasing regulatory pressure due to lack of transparency and operational irregularities.
United Kingdom economics professor Alistair Milne points to another problem with the Libra cryptocurrency: Unlike Bitcoin, it will be a “stablecoin,” whose value will be tied to a basket of fiat currencies and short-term government securities. That means it will need the backing of real money to maintain its fixed price. If reserves do not cover withdrawals, who will be responsible for compensating Libra holders? Ideally, Milne writes, reserves would be held with the central bank; but central banks will be reluctant to support a private currency.
Long also predicts that Facebook’s cryptocurrency will be a huge honeypot of data for government officials, since every transaction will be traceable. But other reviewers see this as Libra’s most fatal flaw. Facebook has been called Big Brother, the ultimate government surveillance tool. Conspiracy theorists link it to the CIA and the U.S. Department of Defense. Facebook has already demonstrated that it is an untrustworthy manager of personal data. How then can we trust it with our money?
Why Use a Cryptocurrency at All?
Why has Facebook chosen to use a cryptocurrency rather than following WeChat and AliPay in doing a global payments network in the traditional way? Yan Meng, vice president of the Chinese Software Developer Network, says Facebook’s fragmented user base across the world leaves it with no better choice than to borrow ideas from blockchain and cryptocurrency.
“Facebook just can’t do a global payments network via traditional methods, which require applying for a license and preparing foreign exchange reserves with local banking, one market after another,” Meng said. “The advantage of WeChat and AliPay is they have already gained a significant number of users from just one giant economy that accounts for 20 percent of the world’s population.” They have no need to establish their own digital currencies, which they still regard as too risky.
Meng suspects that Facebook’s long-term ambition is to become a stateless central bank that uses Libra as a base currency. He writes, “With sufficient incentives, nodes of Facebook’s Libra network would represent Facebook to push for utility in various countries for its 2.7 billion users in business, investment, trade and financial services,” which “would help complete a full digital economy empire.”
The question is whether regulators will allow that sort of competition with the central banking system. Immediately after Facebook released its Libra cryptocurrency plan, financial regulators in Europe voiced concerns over the potential danger of Facebook running a “shadow bank.” Maxine Waters, who heads the Financial Services Committee for the U.S. House of Representatives, asked Facebook to halt its development of Libra until hearings could be held. She said:
In the upper echelons of the Trump administration, hawkish voices on Iran predominate—most notably Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Adviser John Bolton. But as tensions between the U.S. and Iran have escalated over the last few weeks, there’s been another, far different voice in the president’s ear: that of Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
A source familiar with the conversations told The Daily Beast that, in recent weeks, the Fox News host has privately advised Trump against taking military action against Iran. And a senior administration official said that during the president’s recent conversations with the Fox primetime host, Carlson has bashed the more “hawkish members” of his administration.
While some Fox News hosts have argued that a conflict with Iran would be justified, Carlson has consistently criticized U.S. military intervention abroad, particularly in the Middle East. In recent weeks, he has questioned whether war with Iran would be “in anyone’s interest.” Last month, he publicly chided Bolton, saying he was intentionally escalating tensions, and that a potential conflict would “be like Christmas, Thanksgiving, his birthday wrapped into one.”
Posted by DanielS on Thursday, 06 June 2019 08:04.
Ignore Lana’s idiotic use of the YKW supplied “enemy term”, i.e., “Leftists”, and replace it with the correct term, “Liberals” and it is otherwise a good critique of Lauren Southern’s ((())) “Borderless.”
Lana’s inclination to get suckered into a right wing position is probably a significant reason why Red Ice has been spared the recent Youtube purge so far.
(((Lauren Southern))) equipped with gas mask, helmet and protective eye goggles, ready for the “surprise attack” from anti-fa.
And as far as Lauren Southern (Simonsen) goes, Majorityrights has long seen her game as kosher.
(((Lauren Southern))) equipped with gas mask, helmet and protective eye goggles, ready for the “surprise attack” from anti-fa.
Donald Trump met North Korean leader Kim Jong Un at the Demilitarized Zone dividing North and South Korea (AFP Photo/Brendan Smialowski)
Carola Rackete was arrested in Lampedusa on Saturday after forcing her way into port. Photograph: Guglielmo Mangiapane/Reuters
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (Mike Deeroski/Flickr)(CC BY 2.0)
The right is infamous for getting people swept-up and lured into mistakes.
