[Majorityrights News] KP interview with James Gilmore, former diplomat and insider from first Trump administration Posted by Guessedworker on Sunday, 05 January 2025 00:35.
[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.
DOHA, QATAR—Though her words were powerful, it was what Nobel Peace Prize winner Nadia Murad didn’t say that echoed with a pall long after the standing ovation she received by the audience at the Doha Forum Sunday in Qatar.
She did not utter the words “United States” once in the painful 45-minute interview this morning, but we all knew it was the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 that created the conditions for the near obliteration of Yazidi villages—including her home of Kocho—from the Iraqi map. It was here in this mountainous region in the north of the country that her people had settled and farmed the land for thousands of years and co-existed as an ethnic and religious minority. Today, she described Sinjar, occupied first by ISIS and then by various militias since 2014, as “completely destroyed, the buildings and schools empty, like ghost villages.”
Now, five years after the ISIS massacres that left over 3,000 Yazidis dead (most executed and buried alive) and over 6,000 kidnapped and sold into sexual slavery or brought into ISIS indoctrination camps, most of the population of 500,000 remain displaced, many in refugee camps. Some 4,000 people are camped out at the top of Mount Sinjar with no running water or electricity, feeling very much forgotten by the rest of the world.
Meanwhile, as Yazidi women and girls are slowly rescued by non-government entities from their captors across Syria and Iraq (there are still an estimated 3,200 still in the hands Daesh, says Murad), they are getting much needed care and longer-term treatment in Germany, Canada, Australia and France. Missing from that list is the United States. Washington’s help came early and were brief: airstrikes on ISIS militants in Sinjar during the massacre in August 2014 and dropping aid to the Yazidis who fled to the mountaintop in the chaos. Determined to keep America’s re-entry into Iraq to a minimum, President Obama sent no further armed assistance to help stop the ensuing occupation, killings or abductions.
There are 550 Yazidi refugees in the U.S. today.
Murad, 25, is strikingly youthful in appearance but for her eyes, which are world weary, and sad. For good reason: six of her brothers were killed when Daesh raided her village in August 2014. Her mother was also killed, along with the older women and elderly. She was taken then, with the younger females of her family, and held as a sex slave in an ISIS-held home in Mosul. After repeated rapes and beatings, she escaped within months, and was living in a container in a refugee camp when she told the world her story in February 2015.
Posted by DanielS on Sunday, 16 December 2018 13:39.
Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is part of a group of Congress members pushing for a Green New Deal. (Charles Krupa / AP Photo)
TruthDig.Com, “This Radical Plan to Fund the ‘Green New Deal’ Just Might Work”, 16 Nov 2018:
With what author and activist Naomi Klein calls “galloping momentum,” the “Green New Deal” promoted by Representative-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., appears to be forging a political pathway for solving all of the ills of society and the planet in one fell swoop. Her plan would give a House select committee “a mandate that connects the dots” between energy, transportation, housing, health care, living wages, a jobs guarantee and more. But even to critics on the left, it is merely political theater, because “everyone knows” a program of that scope cannot be funded without a massive redistribution of wealth and slashing of other programs (notably the military), which is not politically feasible.
That may be the case, but Ocasio-Cortez and the 22 representatives joining her in calling for a select committee also are proposing a novel way to fund the program, one that could actually work. The resolution says funding will come primarily from the federal government, “using a combination of the Federal Reserve, a new public bank or system of regional and specialized public banks, public venture funds and such other vehicles or structures that the select committee deems appropriate, in order to ensure that interest and other investment returns generated from public investments made in connection with the Plan will be returned to the treasury, reduce taxpayer burden and allow for more investment.”
A network of public banks could fund the Green New Deal in the same way President Franklin Roosevelt funded the original New Deal. At a time when the banks were bankrupt, he used the publicly owned Reconstruction Finance Corporation as a public infrastructure bank. The Federal Reserve could also fund any program Congress wanted, if mandated to do so. Congress wrote the Federal Reserve Act and can amend it. Or the Treasury itself could do it, without the need to even change any laws. The Constitution authorizes Congress to “coin money” and “regulate the value thereof,” and that power has been delegated to the Treasury. It could mint a few trillion-dollar platinum coins, put them in its bank account and start writing checks against them. What stops legislators from exercising those constitutional powers is simply that “everyone knows” Zimbabwe-style hyperinflation will result. But will it? Compelling historical precedent shows that this need not be the case.
Michael Hudson, professor of economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, has studied the hyperinflation question extensively. He writes that disasters such as Zimbabwe’s fiscal troubles were not due to the government printing money to stimulate the economy. Rather, “Every hyperinflation in history has been caused by foreign debt service collapsing the exchange rate. The problem almost always has resulted from wartime foreign currency strains, not domestic spending.”
As long as workers and materials are available and the money is added in a way that reaches consumers, adding money will create the demand necessary to prompt producers to create more supply. Supply and demand will rise together and prices will remain stable. The reverse is also true. If demand (money) is not increased, supply and gross domestic product (GDP) will not go up. New demand needs to precede new supply.
The Public Bank Option: The Precedent of Roosevelt’s New Deal
Infrastructure projects of the sort proposed in the Green New Deal are “self-funding,” generating resources and fees that can repay the loans. For these loans, advancing funds through a network of publicly owned banks would not require taxpayer money and could actually generate a profit for the government. That was how the original New Deal rebuilt the country in the 1930s at a time when the economy was desperately short of money.
The publicly owned Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) was a remarkable publicly owned credit machine that allowed the government to finance the New Deal and World War II without turning to Congress or the taxpayers for appropriations. First instituted in 1932 by President Herbert Hoover, the RFC was not called an infrastructure bank and was not even a bank, but it served the same basic functions. It was continually enlarged and modified by Roosevelt to meet the crisis of the times, until it became America’s largest corporation and the world’s largest financial organization. Its semi-independent status let it work quickly, allowing New Deal agencies to be financed as the need arose.
The Reconstruction Finance Corporation Act of 1932 provided the financial organization with capital stock of $500 million and the authority to extend credit up to $1.5 billion (subsequently increased several times). The initial capital came from a stock sale to the U.S. Treasury. With those resources, from 1932 to 1957 the RFC loaned or invested more than $40 billion. A small part of this came from its initial capitalization. The rest was borrowed, chiefly from the government itself. Bonds were sold to the Treasury, some of which were then sold to the public, although most were held by the Treasury. All in all, the RFC ended up borrowing a total of $51.3 billion from the Treasury and $3.1 billion from the public.
In this arrangement, the Treasury was therefore the lender, not the borrower. As the self-funding loans were repaid, so were the bonds that were sold to the Treasury, leaving the RFC with a net profit. The financial organization was the lender for thousands of infrastructure and small-business projects that revitalized the economy, and these loans produced a total net income of $690,017,232 on the RFC’s “normal” lending functions (omitting such things as extraordinary grants for wartime). The RFC financed roads, bridges, dams, post offices, universities, electrical power, mortgages, farms and much more, and it funded all this while generating income for the government.
The Central Bank Option: How Japan Is Funding Abenomics with Quantitative Easing
The Federal Reserve is another Green New Deal funding option. The Fed showed what it can do with “quantitative easing” when it created the funds to buy $2.46 trillion in federal debt and $1.77 trillion in mortgage-backed securities, all without inflating consumer prices. The Fed could use the same tool to buy bonds earmarked for a Green New Deal, and because it returns its profits to the Treasury after deducting its costs, the bonds would be nearly interest-free. If they were rolled over from year to year, the government, in effect, would be issuing new money.
This is not just theory. Japan is actually doing it, without creating even the modest 2 percent inflation the government is aiming for. “Abenomics,” the economic agenda of Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, combines central bank quantitative easing with fiscal stimulus (large-scale increases in government spending). Since Abe came into power in 2012, Japan has seen steady economic growth, and its unemployment rate has fallen by nearly half, yet inflation remains very low, at 0.7 percent. Social Security-related expenses accounted for 55 percent of general expenditure in Japan’s 2018 federal budget, and a universal health care insurance system is maintained for all citizens. Nominal GDP is up 11 percent since the end of the first quarter of 2013, a much better record than during the prior two decades of Japanese stagnation, and the Nikkei stock market is at levels not seen since the early 1990s, driven by improved company earnings. Growth remains below targeted levels, but according to Financial Times, this is because fiscal stimulus has actually been too small. While spending with the left hand, the government has been taking the money back with the right, increasing the sales tax from 5 to 8 percent.
Abenomics has been declared a success even by the once-critical International Monetary Fund. After Abe crushed his opponents in 2017, Noah Smith wrote in Bloomberg, “Japan’s long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party has figured out a novel and interesting way to stay in power—govern pragmatically, focus on the economy and give people what they want.” Smith said everyone who wanted a job had one, small and midsize businesses were doing well; and the Bank of Japan’s unprecedented program of monetary easing had provided easy credit for corporate restructuring without generating inflation. Abe had also vowed to make both preschool and college free.
Not that all is idyllic in Japan. Forty percent of Japanese workers lack secure full-time employment and adequate pensions. But the point underscored here is that large-scale digital money-printing by the central bank to buy back the government’s debt, combined with fiscal stimulus by the government (spending on “what the people want”), has not inflated Japanese prices, the alleged concern preventing other countries from doing the same.
Abe’s novel economic program has done more than just stimulate growth. By selling its debt to its own central bank, which returns the interest to the government, the Japanese government has, in effect, been canceling its debt. Until recently, it was doing this at a whopping rate of $720 billion per year. According to fund manager Eric Lonergan in a February 2017 article:
The Bank of Japan is in the process of owning most of the outstanding government debt of Japan (it currently owns around 40%). BOJ holdings are part of the consolidated government balance sheet. So its holdings are in fact the accounting equivalent of a debt cancellation. If I buy back my own mortgage, I don’t have a mortgage.
If the Federal Reserve followed suit and bought 40 percent of the U.S. national debt, it would be holding $8 trillion in federal securities, three times its current holdings from its quantitative easing programs. Yet liquidating a full 40 percent of Japan’s government debt has not triggered price inflation.
Posted by DanielS on Saturday, 15 December 2018 18:21.
Voice of Europe, “Macron accused of treason by French generals for signing UN Migration Pact”, 14 Dec 2018:
General Antoine Martinez has written the letter signed by ten other generals, an admiral and colonel, and also includes former French Minister of Defense Charles Millon.
They’ve given strong warning that Macron’s signing the U.N. Global Migration Pact strips France of even more sovereignty providing an additional reason for “an already battered people” to “revolt”.
The highly decorated military co-signees assert that the beleaguered Macron is “guilty of a denial of democracy or treason against the nation” for signing the migration pact without putting it to the people.
“The French state is late in coming to realize the impossibility of integrating too many people, in addition to totally different cultures, who have regrouped in the last forty years in areas that no longer submit to the laws of the Republic,” the letter advises, also saying that mass immigration is erasing France’s “civilizational landmarks”.
The pact, which has been protested in the Yellow Vest demonstrations in five countries, was signed by 164 nations, most against the will of the citizens as stated in dozens of country specific petitions, on Monday in Marrakech.
The immensely opposed and disastrous document declares unlimited migration to be treated as a human right and criticism of mass migration to be treated as hate speech.
Posted by DanielS on Tuesday, 04 December 2018 14:53.
Nato Foreign Ministers meet (Photo: Bogdan Danescu/Reuters)
Foreign Brief, “NATO foreign ministers to discuss Russia-Ukraine confrontation over Kerch Strait”, 4 Dec 2018:
Foreign ministers from the member states of NATO will convene in Brussels today to discuss the recent flare in tensions between Russia and Ukraine over access to the Sea of Azov.
Kiev has been invited to participate. It will likely reiterate its request for heightened NATO patrols in the Black Sea and increased naval assistance in the waters surrounding Crimea. While representatives are expected to unanimously condemn Russia’s act of aggression towards Ukrainian vessels, it is unlikely that they will consent to an increased deployment to the region, with heavyweights Germany and France having ruled out a military solution.
The Sea of Azov incident, as well as any potential NATO response, is also likely to undermine efforts to quell rising violence in Eastern Ukraine. Germany has pushed strongly in recent weeks for more frequent contact between the ‘Normandy Four’ group of nations committed to a peaceful solution for Ukraine’s conflict. However, Russia’s involvement is likely to pressure NATO to tread carefully in its response to avoid undermining tentative mediation efforts. NATO is expected to endorse the possibility of further sanctions against Moscow.
Posted by DanielS on Thursday, 29 November 2018 19:38.
Stasi-Minded Experiments in human pan-mixia
Voice of Europe, “Is Angela Merkel behind the UN Migration Pact? New document sheds light”, 29 Nov 2018:
Germany’s Deception: Internal documents from Germany’s Federal Foreign Office divulge that Angela Merkel’s government has been the main mastermind behind the controversial UN migrant pact.
The document, described by MP Petr Bystron of the populist Alternative for Germany (AfD), reveals that the Federal Foreign Office taking credit for the disastrous UN Migrant Pact, claiming they’ve been working on the agreement since 2016.
The deception runs deep, the Foreign Office having stated that the German government has been behind the Global Compact on Refugees and the Global Compact on Migration, saying that though they are not legally binding, they were both designed to be “politically binding”.
Belgian International Law professor Pierre d’Argent, has explained that the agreement sets up a “legal framework” that can be used by lawyers in interpreting the meaning of the law. “…one can imagine that in some cases before international jurisdictions, lawyers use this pact as a reference tool to try to guide them,” d’Argent said.
Alexander Gauland, Co-leader of Germany’s populist AfD party told Breitbart London:
“It’s becoming glaringly obvious that the German government was trying to deceive the public, and still is. They are trying to retroactively legalise Merkel’s illegal opening of the borders since 2015. If the AfD had not raised the topic of the Global Compact, no one would ever have known about it until it was too late.”
“Now we are discovering that this contract has been in the works for a long time, and on German initiative, no less. However, those responsible never bothered to mention it. For good reason. We will do everything we can to avert this disaster in the making,” he said further.
The US, Austria, Hungary, Poland, Israel, Australia, The Czech Republic, Italy, Slovakia and more have backed out and will not sign the pact.
“We are only responsible to our Austrian population as government officials. Austrian sovereignty has top priority for us, this must be preserved and protected,” Austrian Vice Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache said about pulling out of the pact.
Hitler and Nazism were Not White Nationalism, Part 3
Thus we have established a first principle of this discourse, a positive tautology that the World Wars are history, the people of today are not to blame and should not be subject to the collective punishment of losing their peoplehood and corresponding nations.
There is a second principle that we will invoke at this point, one which the internet has provided for in spades, but which White Nationalists have not utilized to anything like its full potential.
That is correctability, the correctability of ideas and understanding through interactive participation, whether through comments or speaking directly to people and engaging correction.
To date, what has been imposed as if correction, has largely been World War II revisionism - which tends to be dishonest excuses and apologetics for Nazi imperialism where not outright recitation of Nazi propaganda that could be falsified rather easily if they cared to do it.
Misrepresentation and omissions of important facts can remain if would-be interlocutors are not of good faith, don’t really want to pursue the truth, though Nazi apologetics usually claim the truth as their mission.
On the other hand, taking interactive correctability for granted and expecting the voices of correction to chime-in has left me susceptible to allow oversights to linger, because many would-be WN, who’ve accepted the rightist identity and its own political correctness will not say “boo” and alert me to oversights, especially when calling attention to these matters will call negative attention and shoot holes in their pro-Hitler/Nazi position.
Graudenz, Kulm, Thorn and Bromberg, a would-be occlusive salient. To the south of those cities, Poznan and Gniezno are the cradle of Polish nationhood.
There is a third and ancillary tautology to be invoked which is that for whatever grievances that either side had of the times, they were more than made up for.
We will apply this as a third tautological principle then, after ‘it’s history and nobody had anything to do with it’, and after correctability, that is, the tautology that for whatever complaints of the time, “they more than made up for it in retaliation.”
We will take a critical perspective on grievances and injustices alleged by the Nazi apologists, such as allegations made against Polish nationals and partisans, since those allegations have tended to go uncorrected within the philoNazistic PC of so called White Nationalism.
But we need to circle back to our second principle at this point, which is interactive correctability and the fact that so called WN has not been acting in good faith to call matters to attention, especially when they would reflect badly on Nazi Germany.
In previous discussions of Hitler’s complaints over where Versailles borders were drawn, I have made the claim that there were really only three cities of significance lost by Germany - Poznan, Bromberg and Thorn and one made neutral, Danzig (made neutral, not Polish, as in something the Poles could unilaterally return to Germany as misinformed Hitler apologists often claim they should have); and there were some village areas in the corridor and near the Versailles established border where Germans were caught in Polish territory, and we must add that there were Poles caught in German territory. But though Danzig was at the time occupied by Germans, it was a historically disputed city and a strategic city for all concerned, thus justifiably deemed neutral by Versailles. Cities to the south of the corridor, such as Poznan, Gniezno and Leszno, should not have been considered anything remotely but Polish.
While it is true that in previous discussions of this issue I had neglected to mention two cities of significance in the Polish corridor which were inhabited by Germans, Graudenz and Kulm , known in Polish as Grudziądz and Chelmno, it does not change the thesis.
First of all, circling to principle three (mis-spoke; it is “principle two”, correctability that is invoked here) again, that the comment section has been open and feedback of good will is expected to correct oversights such as that.
More fundamentally, these cities being under German political jurisdiction would only extend the salient that would be formed by Bromberg and Torun to obstruct and potentially occlude crucial strategic and economic sea access for Poland.
In addition, Graudenz and Klum were formed of brutal Teutonic and Prussian imperialism on cities that were originally Polish.
Finally, it is a history that only provides more examples of the enormous toll that the Nazis took against impositions of Polish patriotism in these areas; invoking principle three, that they more than made up for it.
Thus, it is no wonder that the Hitler redemptionists didn’t particularly care to take me up on my open offer to correct whatever prior oversights of mine…
No, the Hitler redemptionists, in their claim to be after the truth of history, tend to begin history at or about World War I. And of course, Germany was a sheer victim of the rest of the world, from the Schiff’s backing of the Trotskies, to the Balfour Declaration to the Treaty of Versailles. But really, to do enthnonationalism justice, we need to go further back in history…
Posted by DanielS on Thursday, 08 November 2018 06:01.
...some maimed beyond recognition in the massacre.
Erasing the Liberty.
The genesis of terror and war by deception following Israel’s illegal land-grab.
The story of Israel’s sustained massacre of the U.S.S. Liberty and its crew in a false flag event staged to blame Egypt in the initiative to direct America’s foreign policy.
An interview with one of the survivors of the USS Liberty, a US research ship which was attacked in 1967 by Israel. Dave Gahary and survivor of the U.S.S. Liberty, Phil Tourney, take us through this often overlooked historical event.