[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.
As you may recall, the timeline of the 2008 financial collapse got serious in March 2008, when the Wall Street firm of Bear Stearns started to go under due to mortgage-based securities. The New York Fed tried to bail Bear Stearns out, but it still became insolvent anyway. Then in September 2008, Lehman Brothers started to drown as well. Thinking that the lesson of Bear Stearns was to not throw good money after bad, the authorities let Lehman go under, which then set off global panic.
Interestingly, Jeffrey Epstein may have personally initiated the dominos falling that eventuated in the collapse of Bear Stearns by asking, on April 18, 2007, for his $57 million back from a hyper-leveraged Bear Stearns hedge fund investing in mortgage-based financial gimcrackery.
Oddly, this might be one of the few actions I’ve heard about Epstein that isn’t obviously shady. He probably got the $57 million in the first place in a crooked manner, but he had the right to try to retrieve what was left of his money.
From the New York Times financial section in 2007:
It was just about a year ago that Jeffrey Epstein, the reclusive financier, was being charged with soliciting prostitutes in Palm Beach, Fla. He may now have another image problem on his hands.
BusinessWeek reports that Mr. Epstein’s Virgin Islands-based money-management firm, Financial Trust Company, is listed in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission as a stakeholder in Bear Stearns‘s High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Enhanced Leverage Fund, which became much easier to refer to in recent weeks as “Bear Stearns’ collapsing hedge fund.”
It is a tantalizing nugget of information about someone who rarely discloses anything about his business or his billionaire clients. Despite his penchant for privacy, Mr. Epstein runs in prominent circles: he once flew former President Bill Clinton on his 727.
Regulatory filings show that Mr. Epstein’s firm had voting power over 10 percent of the equity in the Bear Stearns fund, which, aided by loans from some of Wall Street’s biggest banks, bet heavily on the securities linked to the market for subprime mortgages, or those to homeowners with weak credit histories.
As the subprime mortgage market has been rocked by a rise in defaults, many of those bets have gone bad. As of the end of April, the Bear fund was down 23 percent for the year.
Mr. Epstein did not respond to BusinessWeek’s calls, and his lawyer had no comment.
We now know that Epstein had invested $57 million in this Bear Stearns fund run by Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin, two of very few Wall Street executives ever put on criminal trial over The Crash. (They beat the rap.)
After 40 months of positive returns, the sudden and sharp decline in the two hedge funds was new territory for Cioffi and Tannin. They struggled mightily to figure out what to do. On April 18, one of Cioffi’s investors, who had $57 million invested, informed him that he was considering redeeming his money.
The unnamed investor wanting his money back was very likely Jeffrey Epstein.
Cioffi told the investor that the portfolio managers had $8 million of their own money invested, one-third of their liquid net worth. He neglected to tell the investor that he had taken $2 million of his own money out and invested it in his other hedge fund. …
Epstein appears to have been one day ahead of Cioffi and Tannin in figuring out the end was nigh:
[Tannin] went on to wonder whether the funds should be closed or significantly restructured. The argument for closing the funds was based on the market and on a complex internal April 19, CDO report, which was a new analysis that Tannin had recently perused. “If we believe the [new CDO report] is ANYWHERE CLOSE to accurate, I think we should close the funds now. The reason for this is that if [the CDO report] is correct, then the entire subprime market is toast,” wrote Tannin. “If AAA bonds are systematically downgraded, then there is simply no way for us to make money – ever.”
Wikipedia now synthesizes the bits and pieces that have appeared here and there over the years:
In August 2006, Epstein, a month after the federal investigation of him began,[56] invested $57 million in the Bear Stearns High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Enhanced Leverage hedge fund.[55][59] This fund was highly leveraged in mortgage-backed collateralized debt obligations (CDOs).[59] On April 18, 2007, an investor in the fund, who had $57 million invested, discussed redeeming his investment.[60] At this time, the fund had a leverage ratio of 17:1, which meant for every dollar invested there were seventeen dollars of borrowed funds; therefore, the redemption of this investment would have been equivalent to removing $1 billion from the thinly traded CDO market.[61] The selling of CDO assets to meet the redemptions that month began a repricing process and general freeze in the CDO market. The repricing of the CDO assets caused the collapse of the fund three months later in July, and the eventual collapse of Bear Stearns in March 2008. It is likely Epstein lost most of this investment, but it is not known how much was his.[60][59]
By the time that the Bear Stearns fund began to fail in May 2007, Epstein had begun to negotiate a plea deal with the U.S. Attorney’s Office concerning imminent charges for sex with minors.[55][56] In August 2007, a month after the fund collapsed, the U.S. attorney in Miami, Alexander Acosta, entered into direct discussions about the plea agreement.[56] Acosta brokered a lenient deal, according to him, because he had been ordered by higher government officials, who told him that Epstein was an individual of importance to the government.[40] As part of the negotiations, according to the Miami Herald, Epstein provided “unspecified information” to the Florida federal prosecutors for a more lenient sentence and was supposedly an unnamed key witness for the New York federal prosecutors in their unsuccessful June 2008 criminal case against the two managers of the failed Bear Stearns hedge fund. Alan Dershowitz, one of Epstein’s Florida attorneys on the case, told FOX Business “We would have been touting that if he had [cooperated]. The idea that Epstein helped in any prosecution is news to me.”[55][6][62]
Hollywood millionaire Richard Gere has called upon the Italian government to assist migrants who have been stranded on a Spanish charity boat in the Mediterranean for more than a week.
The Italian government needed to stop “demonizing people”, the actor said.
Gere boarded the vessel, which has been blocked from entering Italian waters, on Friday.
Gere, who visited the Open Arms ship in a show of support, also joined a news conference on the Italian island of Lampedusa calling for the migrants to be allowed to dock.
He made comparisons between Salvini, who has made repeated efforts to block migrant ships from docking in Italy, and US President Donald Trump, who has faced widespread criticism for his immigration policies.
“We have our problems with refugees coming from Honduras, Salvador, Nicaragua, Mexico… It’s very similar to what you are going through here”, he said, accusing both politicians of demonizing migrants.
“This has to stop everywhere on this planet now. And it will stop if we say stop”, he added.
It didn’t take Salvini long to respond.
“Given this generous millionaire is voicing concern for the fate of the Open Arms migrants, we thank him: he can take back to Hollywood, on his private plane, all the people aboard and support them in his villas. Thank you Richard!”, he said in a statement. Over the course of a career spanning more than 40 years, Gere, 69, has starred in films including Pretty Woman, American Gigolo and An Officer and a Gentleman.
A campaigner for environmental causes and AIDS awareness, he is also a Buddhist who pays regular visits to Dharamshala, the headquarters of the Tibetan government-in-exile.
Richard Gere is worth an estimated £100million according to the website celebritynetworth.com.
Salvini, whose party made sweeping gains in last year’s Italian general election, has pledged to deport 500,000 migrants by 2023. Earlier this week he tabled a motion of no confidence in his own government, in a bid to force through a snap election and take control from his coalition partners Five Star Movement.
Posted by DanielS on Sunday, 11 August 2019 21:23.
Blacks as a biological weapon of the right
Threat, intimidation, shock and awe, extortion:
Just because public money in the form of Welfare, Foodstamps, Medcaid, Social Security, Government Programs, Scholarships and so on, is not considered “private”, i.e., “their per capita income”, does not mean that black woman have a disadvantaged economic basis, one which is in important ways more secure, not exactly at a disadvantage, in crucial life matters such as the capacity to have children - quite the opposite: they do not have to work and can just take their time and headspace to have children at everyone’s expense, who then register as more “blacks” come black women who have “five dollars a year net worth.”
Ridiculous.
There is also a factor of money that might funnel to them through crime - which might be spun by liberals into an expression of victimization. But if they get away with that additional income, it is not as if their only other recourse was welfare.
Blacks have an advantage when it comes to education through school or college of any kind, public or private.
After their educational advantage, educated black women make more money than White women.
If they do not choose to go to college, or trade school, blacks have a tremendous advantage with government jobs, such as the US Post Office or Public Transit or universities - which offer excellent benefits and retirement plans - if they do care to work. Actually, they have advantage with private business and corporations as well! In a word, what the hell are you talking about when you expect me to feel sorry for these people?
And all many of us White people want to do with them is nothing. We are repulsed from joining these public situations with them knowing that it will lead to straight out lineal extinction, a harrowing nightmare for what White children do survive for a time or Mulatto grandchildren, ultimately.
There is also a factor now of above board wealth among blacks that is not being factored into these statistics parceled out discreetly as ‘black woman poverty’ (which frankly is not my concern anyway).
In addition, there are the intangibles - black solidarity, the taboo and danger of criticizing and discriminating against them - “racism!” - to go along with their warrior gene, high testosterone hyper assertiveness and lack of impulse control that makes them a great weapon of fecundity, disingenuous self righteousness - along with the ever present threat of violence and riot to extort the system - and when you look like many of them do and cannot rise to wealth through protracted intellectual effort, what do you have to lose? - now even seeking reparations for slavery on top of the trillions they’ve already received in a program of White r-p-a-c-m-nt (a word forbidden to be used by us “privileged people”), on behalf of those who would wallpaper over the decency and expense of those offering the coordination of White Left ethnonationalism.
Do you seriously expect me to care about these people who are so destructive to ordinary and working class Whites? These blacks, who Right Wingers brought to bear against us, to the destruction of millions of our loving brothers and sisters, would-be sons and daughters? Whites who are not even allowed to organize in group defense? Not to mention the Caribbean and other Native American Indians.
Blacks know the ropes of the American system and work it much better than other groups, for example, some White peoples who are often more recently immigrated and not powerfully supported as a group by YKW language games.
While right wingers and lucky liberals intermarry with the YKW and continue this pig game…
This is how marginalized White men are made into cows along with the rest of the working/labor surplus world, to pay to make these fat asses even fatter (some now hidden beneath a burka) and more fecund to the detriment of all…to supply their feral sons and their feral black fathers with veritable harems as they go on to impregnate naive Hispanic, Indio and White women..and yes, Asian women too, in order to mix away the would-be left ethnonationalist unions/coalition in favor of one ruler, Abrahams’ favorite sons and daughters.
Stop wallpapering Whites, depicting all White men as powerful, privileged elite. Stop characterizing White right wingers, elite traitors that they are, taking the payoff with “fellow Whites” YKW - the truly organized oppressors - as if they represent us - they do not.
Stop using black biopower, its ugly violent element with nothing to lose, against us to destroy our marginals- who would otherwise begin to help manifest the union bounds that could form coalitions to hold right wing perfidy, betrayal and exploitation to account.
Just like Muslims, many blacks are well suited to be biological weapons of the right wing by nature, and those who seek to bring them to bear against other solidarities/unions, in the name of pity and self righteousness are perpetrating atrocity. Those women who bring them to bear and exploit against other peoples, pretending that it is out of sensitivity and compassion ought rather go and live with them in the societies that stem from their nature.
There has been a ramped-up effort since 2008 to identify White activism with “the right” and to join forces, even to the point of amalgam with YKW against “the left”....but if Non-White left ethnonationalists join forces with the Jewish, anti-White program - that Whites are responsible for the world’s problems - all of them! - to the point of wallpapering over White left ethnonationalism, it will be at the loss of one of their greatest potential allies in staving off their becoming a part of an ongoing disaster of Brazilification, for all its human and other ecological disaster - while these people who you rightfully hate get away with it.
The Russian Prime Minister paid a visit to one of the four Russian-held islands which lie off Japan’s most northern region. Known as Iturup in Russian and Etorofu in Japanese, the island was occupied by the Soviet Union after World War 2. It has been a source of dispute between Moscow and Tokyo for the last three-quarters of a century – and Mr Medvedev’s visit threatens to put relations between Russia and Japan under strain.
Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs pulled no punches with a strongly worded statement aimed at the Kremlin.
Officials said that Mr Medvedev’s visit was incompatible with the Japanese people’s view on the Russian-held islands.
The statement added: “We strongly urge the Russian side to take constructive measures to further advance Japan-Russia relations, including the issue of the conclusion of the peace treaty.”
Iturup is one of four islands involved in the so-called Kuril Islands dispute, also known as the Northern Territories altercation.
The Yalta agreement – a post World War 2 deal signed by the US, Britain and the Soviet Union – stated that “the Kuril Islands shall be handed over to the Soviet Union” after the conclusion of the war.
It was supported by the Cairo Declaration of 1943, which stated that Japan must be expelled from all territories which have been taken by violence.
Japan originally took control of the island in 1875 after Russia reportedly agreed to give up all the rights for the Kuril Islands.
The Russo-Japanese war 30 years later yielded more territory to Tokyo and became the backdrop of simmering tensions between the two nations.
Diplomatic progress has stalled in the past 20 years over the dispute.
In 2005, to Moscow’s dismay, the European Parliament recommended Russia return the islands to Japan.
Recently, Discovery of Oil and Natural Gas in Sakhalin have given Russia a Milking cow in the region. Which was earlier used as Gulags.
2011 saw the installation of weapons on the island to, according to Mr Medvedev, “ensure the security of the islands as an integral part of Russia”.
Mr Medvedev’s latest visit came just two weeks after Moscow outright refused to discuss the potential handover of two of the contested islands to Japan.
That and the following article are not really all you need to know, as oil and natural gas supplies - which Japan is in desperate need for - have been located in Sakhalin Island, a natural extension of Japan’s historical and genetic ethnostate and an affect of the Russian Federation’s cleptocratic aggrandizement.
The decades-old dispute has prevented the two countries from concluding a peace treaty to formally end World War II.
Called the Kurils by Russia and the Northern Territories by Japan, a string of volcanic islands are at the heart of a feud between the two countries that has prevented them signing a formal World War II peace treaty. Talks stalled for decades due to Japan‘s claim to the four strategic islands seized by the Soviet army in the final days of the war.
Russia and Japan’s leaders meet for talks in Moscow on Tuesday over the disputed island chain.
As Russian President Vladimir Putin and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe are set to meet in Moscow on Tuesday for talks expected to be dominated by the territorial dispute, here are some key facts about the Kuril islands:
Location
The disputed islands of Iturup (Etorofu in Japanese), Kunashir (Kunashiri), Shikotan and Habomai lie at their closest point just a few kilometres off the north coast of Hokkaido in Japan.
They are the southernmost islands in a volcanic chain that separates the Sea of Okhotsk and the Pacific Ocean.
Indigenous people of Sakhalin Island
They are located to the southeast of the Russian island of Sakhalin and are administratively part of the same region, although Tokyo considers them part of its Hokkaido prefecture and “illegally occupied by Russia”.
Treaties
Russian Empress Catherine the Great claimed sovereignty over the Kuril islands in 1786 after her government declared they were discovered by “Russian explorers” and therefore “undoubtedly must belong to Russia”.
In the first treaty between tsarist Russia and Japan in 1855, the frontier between the two countries was drawn just north of the four islands closest to Japan.
Twenty years later in 1875, a new treaty handed Tokyo the entire chain, in exchange for Russia gaining full control of the island of Sakhalin. Japan seized back control of the southern half of Sakhalin after its crushing defeat of Moscow in the 1905 Russo-Japanese War.
Soviet takeover
The Kuril islands have been back at the centre of a dispute between Moscow and Tokyo since Soviet troops invaded them in the final days of World War II.
The USSR only entered into war with Japan on August 9, 1945, just after the United States had dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
The Soviet troops completed the takeover of the islands after Japan’s general surrendered later that month.
Russia argues that then-US President Franklin Roosevelt promised Soviet leader Joseph Stalin he could take back the Kurils in exchange for joining the war against Japan when they met at the Yalta conference in February 1945 at which the Allied leaders divided up the post-war world.
The Soviet capture of the islands has since prevented Moscow and Tokyo from signing a formal peace treaty to end the war, despite repeated attempts over the past 70 years to reach an agreement.
In 1956, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev first offered to give Japan the two smallest islands, Shikotan and Habomai, in exchange for signing a peace treaty but dropped the idea after Tokyo struck a military alliance with Washington.
Strategic value
Strategically, control of the islands ensures Russia has year-round access to the Pacific Ocean for its Pacific Fleet of warships and submarines based in Vladivostok, as the strait between Kunashir and Iturup does not freeze over in winter.
Russia has military bases on the archipelago and has deployed missile systems on the islands.
The islands’ current population is around 20,000 people.
After numerous meetings over the past few years between Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Russian President Vladimir Putin, they have launched various economic projects on the islands in areas such as the farming of fish and shellfish, wind-generated energy, and tourism, though Moscow says investment is still meagre.
Since 2017, the two countries have also agreed on charter flights for Japanese former inhabitants to visit family graves there.
The islands are rich in hot springs and minerals and rare metals such as rhenium, which is used in the production of supersonic aircraft.
That’s not really all you need to know, as oil and natural gas supplies - which Japan is in desperate need for - have been located in Sakhalin Island, a natural extension of Japan’s historical and genetic ethnostate and an affect of the Russian Federation’s cleptocratic aggrandizement.
‘England, My Country’ was an independent A5 magazine edited by Robert Baggs in support of English Nationalism.
The four nations of the United Kingdom have been together for hundreds of years but they have never lost their national characteristics.
I was born in London in the last days of the British Empire. We were proud to be British but less sure of our Anglo-Saxon identity. We knew about Alfred the Great who fought the Danes and burned the cakes, and poor King Harold who perished at the Battle of Hastings. And we sang William Blake’s stirring anthem “Jerusalem the Golden.” But with the rise of Sinn Fein, the Scottish Nationalist Party, and Plaid Cymru, an English response was inevitable.
Preserving the ancient traditions of England is a worthy task but we must remember that the British Empire was a joint venture.
Vic Sarson posted the following piece to his mailing list.
I am no fan of Corbyn, I have been hostile to him for decades. I have also been hostile to political parties believing them to be a corrupting influence on the politics of the nation. I have also consistently argued that employment in the civil or other government service at any level should preclude membership of political parties or engagement in partisan political activity.
The current mischievous campaign to undermine Corbyn by rumour I think gives force to my arguments.
The overwhelming majority of people employed within the civil service are Labour Party members and many are political activists whether Blairites or Corbynites and often abuse their positions whenever possible.
Civil servants are releasing political propaganda to influence the accepted political processes to a political direction of their preference: in this case it is Blairites. It was Blair who corrupted the Civil Service..
International Finance
The great international banks came to grief in 2008 by trading in worthless mortgages but their national governments came to the rescue.They are now restrained from gambling but high street banking makes very little money compared with the casino side of the business. Last year, money on deposit returned half of one percent interest but the leading investment funds made 25%.
The banks are only part of a worldwide movement of money that includes insurance, reinsurance, fund management, and construction and property speculation. The United Kingdom is a top nation for inward investment. The figures are staggering. £351 bn from the US, £744 bn from Europe, £128 from Asia. These are not loans, they are investments in British companies.
But we are still living beyond our means..Last year we borrowed £48 bn and paid £42 bn in interest on existing loans.
We exported and imported goods and services worth imported goods worth £5610 Billion
Money is sent home by immigrants working in the UK and by Brits working abroad. Nobody know the real figures but the World Bank estimates that £8 billion is sent abroad, mainly to Pakistan and Somalia.
When Oswald Mosley attacked The Money Power he was aiming at the rootless cosmopolitans that dominated international finance in the Thirties. Today, the market is totally global and the big players are likely to be Chinese and Korean. Far removed from the cartoon images of rich Jewish bankers that appeared in the Nazi newspapers.
The only way to control globalism is to divide the world into manageable economic areas, such as North America, South America, China, the Russian Federation, and the European Union, Brexit is a temporary aberration that will soon be forgotten. The great realignment is well under way.
. Interesting Times
Attempts to label political parties according to the layout of the French Parliament are not very accurate. Those on the Left are supposed to be libertarians but all too often they are authoritarians. And those on the Right are meant to be royalists and supporters of the ancient regime, but there was nothing more revolutionary than a republican fascist. The manifesto of the Italian Social Republic (RSI) was entirely progressive but, unfortunately, it was too late
Political theories are ten a penny but running a modern economy takes skill and patience. It doesn’t matter if the government is Left, Right or Centre, It still has to collect enough money to pay for the services that we demand. We knew what to expect from the Old Gang, but we now have four parties competing for power; Labour; Tory; Lib-Dem, and the Brexit Party. Nobody knows what to expect.
The Labour Party is trying to be all things to all men. But there’s a limit to how many factions can be accommodated. They have always boasted of being a broad church but it would take a very broad church to incorporate its bitterly hostile factions.
The Tories have had their civil war and the hard Right has seized power. The One Nation Tories will be confined to the back benches fot daring to support the EU.
The Brexit Party is a one trick pony with massive support in the depressed areas. Nobody knows what they stand for but health and social security are not thought to be amongst their priorities.They probably stand for the usual reactionary causes; bring back hanging, bring back conscription, and lock up all “Nancy Boys.”
It’s almost impossible to predict the result of the coming general election. We can only hope that the public sees through Boris “Fuck Business"Johnson.
He is riding high at the moment but he should hope that history doesn’t repeat itself. His great grandfather was a prominent Turkish journalist and politician, Ali Kamal Bey, who was lynched by an angry mob in 1922.
Prosperity
My local supermarket is being redeveloped and just before it closed, some of the shelves were empty. A Russian man once told me that one of the worst things about the old Soviet Union was the sight of empty shelves at the supermarket. It was, he said, a sign of desperation.
We have come to expect prosperity, almost as a right. Food used to be seasonal but now everything is available throughout the year, and what used to be considered exotic is now common.
In the Old Days we would be greeted by a grocer, served by a shop assistant and handed over to a cashier. Nowadays, we have to help ourselves to the goods and even operate the check out. Times change but so long as the supermarket shelves are full most of us will be alright.
Of course, some poor souls can’t afford to go shopping. We spend millions of pounds on social security but some people slip through the net. It’s a disgrace for an advanced country like Britain to have food banks to help the poor. Some of them have contributed to their situation by spending their money on drink or drugs, but most of them are victims of an efficient but uncaring capitalist system.
The main reason for poverty is the high cost of rents and mortgages. The average rental value for new tenancies in London is £1,611 a month, but the average salary is only £2,964. If the Government ever sorts out the Brexit fiasco it should prioritize the elimination of poverty.
Nation Revisited
This blog seeks reform by legal means. All articles are by Bill Baillie unless otherwise stated. The opinions of guest writers are entirely their own. We are protected by the UN Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19: “We all have the right to make up our own minds, to think what we like, to say what we think, and to share ideas with other people.”
Comments
Use the facility at the end of this blog to leave your comments and read what others have to say.
Our flag was designed by John Bean in 1957 for his National Labour Party. It is used by Nation Revisited with his blessing.The cross represents our nation and the radiant star represents Socialism.
New UK PM Boris Johnson paves the way for an amnesty for 500,000 illegal immigrants – insists the Government will “look at it”
Speaking in the Commons, Boris Johnson said he had raised the idea of an amnesty when he served under Theresa May, “and it did not receive an overwhelming endorsement”.
He said the Windrush scandal had shown the difficulties that can be caused by a mass expulsion of people who “may have been living and working here for many, many years without being involved in any criminal activity at all”.
In the Windrush scandal it emerged that 161,000 asylum seekers – part of a huge backlog of almost half a million cases discovered in Home Office files – had been allowed to stay in the UK because they had been in the country so long it “would breach their right to a family life to remove them”.
“We should look at it”, Johnson said. “And the truth is the law already basically allows them an effective amnesty.”
He separately confirmed that Theresa May’s net migration target of 100,000 a year would go.
The PM’s official spokesman said he “wasn’t interested in a numbers game”.
Campaigners immediately warned an amnesty could fuel an explosion in migrants crossing the Channel from France in a desperate bid to reach the UK.
Alp Mehmet, chairman of the Migration Watch think tank, said: “The idea of an amnesty for illegal immigrants is a non-starter”. “Such a scheme will reward people with no right to be here, encourage future illegality and will be costly.” “It is absurd to link this with the Windrush debacle which was about a Home Office cock-up that led to people with every right to be in the UK being wrongly targeted.”
“Windrushers were not illegal immigrants.”
Boris Johnson called for an “earned amnesty” for as many as 400,000 illegal immigrants when he was Mayor of London.
He said that anyone who had been living in the capital for more than five years could show their “commitment to this society” and be given the right to stay – so they could then pay taxes.
Announcing the controversial move in 2008, he agreed it would be better if illegal immigrants were “taken and sent back to their place of origin” but added “it is just not going to happen”.
Hungary has reached an agreement with Poland and Estonia to establish a warning mechanism against the UN Global Compact on Migration which would enable the countries to “move against such pro-migration proposals in their early phases, whether they are drawn up in the UN or in Brussels”.
Peter Szijarto, Hungary’s Foreign Minister, confirmed to Hungary’s MTI that the agreement had been reached with his Polish and Estonian counterparts, About Hungary reports.
On Monday, Szijarto said, “It has once again been made clear that pro-migration forces want to make the United Nations’ global migration compact, the world’s most dangerous migration document, mandatory.”
Last December, at the UN General Assembly, 152 countries voted in favor of the Global Migration Compact while five voted against it, 13 countries abstained, and 57 didn’t vote at all.
Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, the United States, and Israel – who all rejected the document last December – were also joined by Estonia in the most recent vote. Not one of the Visegrád countries backed the compact, with Slovakia choosing not to vote in the most recent vote.
Szijarto argued that anything approved by the United Nations essentially becomes part of international law and judicial practice. He also emphasized the need to fight “pro-migration proposals.”
The Visegrád (V4) countries have recently asserted their political will in ways that they haven’t in the past. As an example, the Head of the Hungarian Prime Minister’s Office said last Thursday that Germany’s Ursula von der Leven couldn’t have been nominated as European Commission President without the support of the Visegrád countries.
Planting billions of trees across the world is by far the cheapest and most efficient way to tackle the climate crisis. So states a Guardian article, citing a new analysis published in the journal Science. The author explains:
As trees grow, they absorb and store the carbon dioxide emissions that are driving global heating. New research estimates that a worldwide planting programme could remove two-thirds of all the emissions that have been pumped into the atmosphere by human activities, a figure the scientists describe as “mind-blowing”.
For skeptics who reject the global warming thesis, reforestation also addresses the critical problems of mass species extinction and environmental pollution, which are well-documented. A 2012 study from the University of Michigan found that loss of biodiversity impacts ecosystems as much as does climate change and pollution. Forests shelter plant and animal life in their diverse forms, and trees remove air pollution by the interception of particulate matter on plant surfaces and the absorption of gaseous pollutants through the leaves.
The July analytical review in Science calculated how many additional trees could be planted globally without encroaching on crop land or urban areas. It found that there are 1.7 billion hectares (4.2 billion acres) of treeless land on which 1.2 trillion native tree saplings would naturally grow. Using the most efficient methods, 1 trillion trees could be restored for as little as $300 billion—less than 2% of the lower estimates for the Green New Deal introduced by progressive Democrats in February.
The Guardian quoted Professor Tom Crowther at the Swiss university ETH Zürich, who said, “What blows my mind is the scale. I thought restoration would be in the top 10, but it is overwhelmingly more powerful than all of the other climate change solutions proposed.” He said it was also by far the cheapest solution that has ever been proposed. The chief drawback of reforestation as a solution to the climate crisis, as The Guardian piece points out, is that trees grow slowly. The projected restoration could take 50 to 100 years to reach its full carbon sequestering potential.
A Faster, More Efficient Solution
Fortunately, as of December 2018, there is now a cheaper, faster and more efficient alternative—one that was suppressed for nearly a century but was legalized on a national scale when President Trump signed the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018. This is the widespread cultivation of industrial hemp, the nonintoxicating form of cannabis grown for fiber, cloth, oil, food and other purposes. Hemp grows to 13 feet in 100 days, making it one of the fastest carbon dioxide-to-biomass conversion tools available. Industrial hemp has been proved to absorb more CO2 per hectare than any forest or commercial crop, making it the ideal carbon sink. It can be grown on a wide scale on nutrient-poor soils with very small amounts of water and no fertilizers.