Majorityrights News > Category: Law

Reuters, “Ex-FBI chief Comey tells U.S. senators Trump pressured him on Russia probe”, 7 June 2017:

Former FBI Director James Comey said on Wednesday that U.S. President Donald Trump asked him to drop an investigation of former national security adviser Michael Flynn as part of a probe into Russia’s alleged meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

In written testimony released the day before he appears before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Comey said Trump told him at a meeting in the White House in February: “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go.”

The testimony puts more pressure on Trump, a Republican, whose presidency has been overshadowed by allegations that Moscow helped him win last year’s election.

Some legal experts said Comey’s testimony could strengthen any impeachment case built on obstruction of justice, but U.S. markets shrugged off the news from the testimony for lack of any major disclosures.

To build a criminal obstruction of justice case, federal law requires prosecutors to show that a person acted with “corrupt” intent. It does not matter whether the person succeeds in impeding an investigation.

While a sitting president is very unlikely to face criminal prosecution, obstruction of justice could form the basis for impeachment.

NPR, 7 June 2017: Full text of Comey’s opening statement.

The Intercept, “Top-Secret NSA Report Details Russian Hacking Effort Days Before 2016 Election”, 5 June 2017:

Russian military intelligence executed a cyberattack on at least one U.S. voting software supplier and sent spear-phishing emails to more than 100 local election officials just days before last November’s presidential election, according to a highly classified intelligence report obtained by The Intercept.

The top-secret National Security Agency document, which was provided anonymously to The Intercept and independently authenticated, analyzes intelligence very recently acquired by the agency about a months-long Russian intelligence cyber effort against elements of the U.S. election and voting infrastructure. The report, dated May 5, 2017, is the most detailed U.S. government account of Russian interference in the election that has yet come to light.

While the document provides a rare window into the NSA’s understanding of the mechanics of Russian hacking, it does not show the underlying “raw” intelligence on which the analysis is based. A U.S. intelligence officer who declined to be identified cautioned against drawing too big a conclusion from the document because a single analysis is not necessarily definitive.

       

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Diversity Macht Frei, 23 May 2017, Request complied-with by police to investigate Katie Hopkins for inciting racial hatred over tweet:

Hugh Muir thinks she is a peddler of hate and should be subject to laws against it -

Classical liberals make a two-paragraph declaration of obsolescence

No one ever thought that classical liberals would ever get around to actually acknowledging that they are fine with getting you and your family killed by roving bands of Islamic ‘migrants’ who are permanently conducting hijra for the past 1400 years and are always looking for a new location to park their reactionary socio-economic caravan of rampant misogyny, homophobia, mestizaje and genocide, but here it is:

Charles Johnson / FEE.org, ‘Why Free Immigration is a Right’, 30 Mar 2017:

Well good God, of course it is morally wrong for nations to pursue their “self-interest” in anything, and especially in border control policies. People have self-interests that matter, morally; nations do not. Nations are toxic hellholes of false identity and purveyors of monstrous political violence.

Nations are not rational people; they are not free associations or contractual agreements; they are unchosen, coercively assembled collectives, whose interests are typically an abortion of, if not an outright war against, the moral interests of individual people which actually deserve to be cultivated, practiced and respected. For anyone committed to individual liberty, a nations’ “interests” deserve no notice at all except to trample them underfoot.

So, there is that. That happened. A classical liberal man actually wrote those paragraphs, and he was not intoxicated when he wrote them.

That excerpt really is basically a two-paragraph declaration of ideological obsolescence on the part of classical liberalism.

Apparently if you pre-emptively use force so as to prevent your enemies from pillaging your lands and killing your family, that makes you ‘a bad person’ or something. Crucially though, it also happens to make you a winner, which I think is the most important thing.

Separately, Charles Johnson is indeed correct when he says that nations are ‘coercively assembled collectives’ which wage ‘outright war’ against ‘the moral interests of individual people’. The process of state formation is indeed an inherently violent array of actions from which all other actions of the state cannot be extricated, and the law itself is essentially an opinion with guns and detention facilities behind it. That is completely true.

With that said, though. Does anyone actually care?

Literally nobody even cares, so whatever

When asked to choose between the ‘liberty’ to have some individuals make moral choices in complete chaos and uncertainty, versus the ‘monstrous political violence’ of the state which creates stability and guarantees the safe existence of the people from which actual prosperity flows, the people should always choose the state.

Liberty has to be properly understood as not ‘freedom from’, but rather ‘freedom to’. The task of the state is to steer a course that allows for the flourishing of prosperity without undermining the social-economic position of the dominant class which creates and reproduces state power, and without significantly undermining the ethnic composition of the people within the jurisdiction of the state’s territory, as genes are a productive force and as such are a factor in the creation of the prosperity atop which the state subsists.

Talking to the invaders is useless

If someone virtue-signalled to Arabs through enacting lax border policies and then framed it as an act of kindness in the social media domain in the hopes that this would somehow smooth integration (still a stupid idea, of course, as integration is a stupid idea), it would actually be just liberals signalling to other liberals in a de facto echo chamber, because Arabs actually barely find time to read their own Arabic print media much less finding time to read English language in the social media domain. This is a fact that is known among most security consultants and among almost anyone who has ever been involved in Information Operations in Mesopotamia after 2003. ‘The Arab man in the street’ does not read. The Arab guy in the street has a political understanding gleaned from the oral pronouncements of his local Imam, a surface level understanding of current events from Arab language television, and a tangle of mutually contradictory conspiracy theories shared orally or across social media. In the case where social media is used, engagement-rates among Arabs are low, which is to say, they do not actually click links.

Almost 100% of the hearts and minds ‘messaging’ that classical liberal thinktanks who are trying to ‘defend values’ have engaged in, has actually been sent into an echo chamber of Europeans and Americans congratulating each other for crafting increasingly sophisticated narratives which all point toward strategically stupid conclusions which undermine European security.

Meanwhile, the mostly male Arab Muslim migrant wave has been ignoring it all while sitting in an ideological trash dumpster of misogyny and homophobia, as they despise all the progressive gains that have been made in regions of the world other than theirs. They have no respect for any other ethnic group and they believe that it is their mission to demographically infest the whole planet.

Safe beneath the watchful eyes

Without security there can be no real freedom. Most people know this almost instinctively, and that is for example why the United Kingdom’s referendum on membership of the European Union delivered up a ‘Leave’ result.

The British people have displayed a revealed preference for the untrammelled full spectrum dominance of the British security state led by Theresa May and Amber Rudd, rather than a European Union which has fallen under the de facto control of Angela Merkel.

We can conclude from this that the British people enjoy actually winning at counter-terrorism more than they enjoy virtue-signalling to a foaming tide of Arab Muslim ‘migrants’ who can barely find time to read their own Arabic print media much less reading English in the social media domain.

The British people don’t actually believe in classical liberalism. They believe in being real people. And that is a reason for optimism.

Classical liberal ‘freedom’ supposes that individuals can be abstracted from their origins, their environment, the context in which they live and where they exercise their choices, that is to say, abstracted from everything that makes them who they are specifically, and not someone else. It supposes that the individual is always prior to her ends. However, there is nothing that can prove that the individual can apprehend herself as a subject completely free of any allegiance, free of any form of determinism. There is no reason why she would prefer that form of ‘freedom’ over any other social good. Such a conception ignores commitments and attachments to clans or spiritual sects, bonds of blood and soil, long-term economic class interests, and the fact that nations are the deepest and most enduring source of political experience. Classical liberal ‘freedom’ is a purely formal conception, which is completely incapable of capturing the rich tapestry of what a real person is.

The real person seeks ‘love’ and ‘eternity’. ‘Love’ is the wish that someone or something should continue to flourish forever, or at least, that they should ‘get the last word’ in the world before the story of humanity ends. In that sense, love is a desire to pursue victory and create a meaning where there was originally none. When standing alone, the individual is always defeated and approaching death alone is the most final of all defeats. But while death is a threshold which must be crossed and can only be crossed alone, it does not have to be approached alone. If the individual can pool her identity with the group, so that she becomes one with the will of the group as it solves the historical tasks which have been placed before it, then she is all-seeing and all-knowing forever and ever—capable of knowing what she is, and what she can become. She is really free and has attained ‘eternity’. 

Victory becomes attainable. We become the gendarmes who protect the actualisation of eternal love so that others can become part of it. We never die because this empire never dies, as it is constructed not only in the physical domain, but is also fortified in the domain of the mind. As such, we are expected to fight eternally for it. 

We are not afraid of the conflicts that lie ahead and we are not sorry about anything. 

Because love will emerge victorious over terror.

Reveal News, “White nationalist gets his money from cotton fields – and the government”, By Lance Williams 17 March 2017:

Topics: Accountability

Two weeks after last year’s presidential election, white nationalist Richard Spencer held forth on a cable news show about how white people built America.

“White people ultimately don’t need other races in order to succeed,” he told the audience of the black-oriented program, “NewsOne Now.”

The exchange grew heated as host Roland Martin questioned Spencer’s rhetoric: Didn’t slaves help build America? Wasn’t the nation’s 19th-century economic boom propelled by the slave labor that produced the world’s cotton on Southern plantations?

America’s rise was “not through black people” and “has nothing to do with slavery,” Spencer retorted. “White people could have figured out another way to pick cotton,” he said. “We do it now.”

He is in a position to know. Spencer, along with his mother and sister, are absentee landlords of 5,200 acres of cotton and corn fields in an impoverished, largely African American region of Louisiana, according to records examined by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting. The farms, controlled by multiple family-owned businesses, are worth millions: A 1,600-acre parcel sold for $4.3 million in 2012.

The Spencer family’s farms also are subsidized heavily by the federal government. From 2008 through 2015, the Spencers received $2 million in U.S. farm subsidy payments, according to federal data.

USDA farm subsidy payments to Spencer family companies, 2008-2015

Farm Payments

Dickenhorst Farms $1,014,558
Spencer Farms $524,655
Dickenhorst Trust $201,460
Sher-Di-Je Land $165,029
Poor Richard Partnership $98,878
A-Renee Partnership $78,016
Total $2,082,596

Source: U.S. Department of Agriculture data compiled by the Environmental Working Group

Although Spencer has attracted extensive media attention as a leader of the so-called alt-right movement – particularly after he drew Nazi salutes at an event celebrating Donald Trump’s election – he never has explained publicly how he supports himself while actively promoting his agenda via conferences and media appearances. The finances of his nonprofit think tank, the National Policy Institute, are a mystery; the organization hasn’t filed a public report since 2013. On Monday, the Los Angeles Times reported that the IRS revoked the institute’s tax-exempt status.

Spencer, 38, is a dropout from a Duke University Ph.D. history program who emerged during the Trump campaign as one of the nation’s most visible white separatist agitators. In his writing, speeches and interviews, he has given an intellectualized explanation for how he came to advocate creating a whites-only “ethno state” in North America. While in graduate school, he has said, he was compelled by critiques of multiculturalism and political correctness and by demographic data indicating that whites are en route to minority status in the United States.

But the Spencer family’s business interests and geographic history suggest a different possible lineage for Richard Spencer’s racist politics. The family’s farm holdings are a legacy of its ties to the Jim Crow South, passed down by Spencer’s grandfather, who built the business during the turbulent civil rights era.

Spencer family land holdings in Louisiana
Farming company Parish Acreage
Dickenhorst Farms Tensas 1,888
Dickenhorst Farms East Carroll 967
Sher-Di-Je Land Tensas 1,186
A-Renee Partners Madison 753
Poor Richard Partnership Franklin 400
Spencer, Sherry Madison 90
Total   5,284

Sources: Louisiana Tax Commission parish tax rolls; parish assessment records

Spencer declined in an interview this week to discuss how much money he personally receives from cotton farming and government subsidies and whether that income funds his political activities.

“I’m not involved in any direct day-to-day running of the business,” he said, later adding: “I’m going to navigate the world as it is, and I’m not going to be a pauper.”

One Spencer family farming company, which holds title to 400 acres of land, is called the Poor Richard Partnership.

In the interview, Spencer also downplayed his family’s influence on his political views, saying, “My parents are very mainstream Episcopalian Republicans in Dallas.”

Although Spencer grew up in an affluent neighborhood of Dallas and now splits his time between Montana and Washington, D.C., his family lived in the South for generations. Records show his mother attended segregated schools as a girl in the small northeast Louisiana city of Monroe. Later, Spencer’s mother inherited farms in northeast Louisiana from her late father. Today, her two children are her business partners.

Spencer’s mother did not respond to an email and voicemails seeking comment for this story. In the past, she has said she does not share her son’s views. In an open letter sent to their local newspaper in December, Spencer’s parents, Sherry and Rand, said that while they love their son, “we are not racists. We have never been racists. We do not endorse the idea of white nationalism.”

The region that is home to the Spencers’ farms has a history of slavery and racism. Through the civil rights era, the Klan targeted black residents there with lynchings, cross burnings and other violence. In Tensas Parish, where the Spencers own 3,000 acres of farmland, blacks didn’t win the right to vote until 1964, according to Elvadus Fields Jr., mayor of the town of St. Joseph.

White supremacist views typically run in the family, said writer and race relations expert Cleo Scott Brown. Feelings of racial superiority often are passed “from generation to generation, because that’s what they believe,” said Brown, whose father – a civil rights leader in East Carroll Parish, where the Spencers own 900 acres of farmland – was shot and wounded during a 1962 voter registration drive, allegedly by a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

Agribusiness in the region today is heavily mechanized and provides few jobs. In 2013, CNN reported that East Carroll Parish suffers from the worst income inequality in the nation: The richest 5 percent of residents earned an average of $611,000 per year, 90 times what the poorest 20 percent earned. The parish’s population is 67 percent black.

Ownership of Spencer family farming companies

Farming company

Owners
Dickenhorst Farms Sherry Spencer, Richard Spencer and sister
Dickenhorst Trust Dickenhorst Farms (Sherry Spencer, Richard Spencer and sister)
Sher-Di-Je Land Dickenhorst Farms (Sherry Spencer, Richard Spencer and sister)
Spencer Farms Sherry Spencer
Poor Richard Partnership Sherry Spencer*
A-Renee Partners Sherry Spencer and daughter

*Records show that Richard Spencer has received subsidy income from the partnership but don’t identify him as an owner.

Sources: U.S. Department of Agriculture data compiled by the Environmental Working Group; Louisiana secretary of state filings

Race relations have improved significantly in recent decades. But after Trump’s election, some white residents celebrated by draping their pickup trucks with Confederate flags and driving through the region’s towns, according to the Rev. Roosevelt Grant, head of the NAACP branch in Winnsboro, Franklin Parish, near another of the Spencers’ farms.

The Trump presidency, he said, “has caused people to pray more.”

Spencer’s maternal grandfather, Dr. R.W. Dickenhorst, established the family farming business. He was a radiologist who started a medical practice in Monroe in 1952 and became wealthy and socially prominent, according to local newspaper obituaries.

Racial segregation was a given in Monroe then. Blacks were barred from housing, schools and public facilities used by whites. White superiority “was the way of life; that was the way it was, and anyone challenging it was challenging God’s will,” said the Rev. Roosevelt Wright Jr., a local historian in Monroe.

Dickenhorst’s daughter, Sherry, who would grow up to be Richard Spencer’s mother, enrolled in all-white Neville High School in 1962, according to district records. In 1964, at the start of her junior year, integration of the school began, with a single African American student enrolling.

As Dickenhorst’s medical practice prospered, he bought farmland in northeast Louisiana on the Mississippi River’s west bank. He died decades later, in 2002, and his wife died the following year. By then, their only daughter was the wife of a wealthy Dallas eye surgeon and the mother of two grown children: Richard Spencer and his sister, who did not respond to an email and phone calls seeking comment.

Today, through Dickenhorst Farms and several related companies, Sherry Spencer, 68, and her two children jointly own most of the family farmland, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data compiled by the nonprofit Environmental Working Group. Sherry Spencer is general partner of Dickenhorst Farms, and Richard Spencer and his sister are part owners, according to state and federal records. The family contracts out crop production to local farmers, a common practice in a region where corporations and absentee owners control much of the land.

The Spencer family’s farms are headquartered at a $3 million home in the ski town of Whitefish, Montana, where Sherry Spencer now lives. Also headquartered there: Richard Spencer’s think tank, his AltRight.com website and other white nationalist-related enterprises he controls, including a book publisher and web design outfit. Spencer also has lived in Whitefish in recent years ­– sometimes in his mother’s home, sometimes in a condominium she owns, according to documents and interviews.

The Spencers have received payments from two federal farm programs. One is the commodity subsidy program, intended to guarantee income for farmers who are helping to maintain supplies of certain crops deemed important by the government. The other is the conservation reserve program, which pays farmers for environmentally sound farming practices. Most of the $2 million paid to the Spencers has been in commodity subsidy payments for growing cotton.

Yet, Spencer has been bitterly critical of America and its government.

“This is a sick, disgusting society,” he declared in his speech at an alt-right gathering in Washington after the election, “run by the corrupt, defended by hysterics, drunk on self-hatred and degeneracy.”

Note: I have no necessary qualms with Spencer’s wealth (though ultimately, something like Bowery’s/ William Jennings Bryan’s progressive land taxation based on site value might be in order) nor do I have anything against his family’s alleged history of wanting to live separately from blacks. - DanielS

ASPI - The Strategist, ‘Would a US–China trade war pay dividends to Australia?’, 09 Mar 2017:

Among many other colourful characters, Donald Trump’s cabinet appointments include two protectionist and anti-China hardliners, Robert Lighthizer and Peter Navarro, who sit at the helm of US trade and industry policy. That decision confirms a belligerent change of tack in Sino­–American economic relations. But what are the implications for Australia?

A number of monetary economists, including Saul Eslake, have warned that a potential escalation to a full-blown China–US trade war poses the single biggest economic threat to Australia. That position argues that the already struggling global economy can’t face a superpower trade war, likely to be triggered by the Trump administration at the monetary level, when the RMB/USD exchange rate will reach the unprecedented level of 7 to 1 (it’s currently sitting at around 6.9). Furthermore, a falling Chinese currency combined with protectionist measures in the US will dampen the Chinese economy by way of reduced volumes of exports and higher interest rates that will spread across the Asia–Pacific. According to such reasoning, that could have negative impacts for Australia’s economy; prices for iron ore, coal and natural gas could possibly drop—we’ll know by the middle of the year.

However, it’s questionable that such crisis would be detrimental to Australia. In fact, focusing on monetary dynamics alone fails to capture the role of industrial production and regulatory arrangements in the global supply chain.

On the contrary, after triangulating the trade and industrial data of the US, China and Australia and considering the current trade regulatory framework, there are substantial reasons to argue that Australia is well placed to fill the gaps left by a wrecked US–China trade relationship at the best of its industrial capacity. Australia is indeed one of a handful of countries to have solid free trade agreements in place with both the US and China.

As it currently stands, the annual US–China trade balance is worth over US$600 billion—around the yearly value of Australia’s overall trade volumes.

Australia’s rocks and crops economy—in particular the growing productivity potential of its agricultural and mining sectors—is strong enough to rise above global monetary tensions and falling commodity prices, thanks to rising export volumes to both the US and China. It appears that the harder the two superpowers use their trade relations as leverage in their strategic competition, the harder they’ll need to look for other sources to sustain their industrial production levels and corporate supply chain.

In a trade war scenario, the possible initial hiccups in the global supply chain will likely be short-lived. In fact, let’s consider that about half of US imports are estimated to be made of intra-firm trade, and that protectionist measures from abroad tend to have insignificant effects on the production input of Chinese State-owned firms. Thus, multinational corporations are proven to be particularly adept at   quickly replacing the flows of their industrial production and distribution, as is shown by history.

In other words, in the event of a Sino–American crisis, the major trading actors in both countries will be able and willing to promptly move their business somewhere else.

Thanks to the existing spaghetti bowl of international economic partnerships, Australia is in prime position to be this “somewhere else” for both countries. In fact, Australia is the second largest economy and Sino–American trading partner of the only six countries that have in place free trade agreements with both the US and China, including South Korea, Singapore, Chile, Peru and Costa Rica.

The liquefied natural gas (LNG) trade is a significant case study for Australia in this instance. Australia is the world’s second largest LNG exporter, and is set to become the first by 2020. It exports more than $16 billion a year of LNG and by 2020 the LNG industry is expected to contribute $65 billion to the Australian economy, equating to 3.5% of its GDP. 2016 saw the start of LNG exports from the US and an unprecedented boost of Chinese imports. In a trade war scenario, the US would be locked out of China’s thriving market and thus LNG prices would rise even higher than they already have. With sharply rising production capacity, Australia needs to expand and diversify its customer base to keep the lion’s share of the global LNG market. China’s response to Trump’s trade policy is set to dampen the rise of a   strong emerging competitor of Australia’s highly lucrative LNG industry, and thus open up new commercial frontiers.

The LNG example clearly shows that Australia’s economy would benefit from a contained US–China trade crisis. Nevertheless, should that trade crisis escalate beyond the economy, Australia’s luck may run out.

The Chinese leadership doesn’t hide the fact that promoting international economic integration outside of the US control serves the purpose of carving greater geopolitical autonomy and flexibility in the global decision-making processes. Beside Trump’s trade policy, Xi Jinping’s diplomatic strategy may also speed up the end of the US­–China detente initiated by Nixon and Kissinger in the 1970s. It remains to be seen whether China will also pursue hard-line policies to push the US outside of the Asia–Pacific. In that instance, Australia would be caught between a rock and a hard place.

If the US­–China trade war were to escalate to the geopolitical level, the American order in the Asia–Pacific would enter uncharted waters. For one thing, such an unsavoury development may compel Australia to make a clear choice between trading with China and preserving America’s security patronage.

Giovanni Di Lieto lectures International Trade Law at Monash University.

One of the most interesting things about all this is that while Australia is going to be compelled to make that choice, the choice has essentially already been made through the pattern of trade relationships which Australian politicians have chosen to cultivate.

The only way that Australia would choose the United States in that scenario, would be if Australians decided that they would like to deliberately take a massive economic dive so that they can ‘Make America Great Again’ even though that is not their country, and so that they can avoid being called ‘anti-White’ by the legions of anonymous Alt-Right trolls roaming around on Twitter using Robert Whitacker’s ‘mantra’ on anyone who won’t support the geostrategic and geoeconomic intertests of the United States, the Russian Federation, and Exxonmobil specifically. 

Given that we know that Australians don’t care about America or Russia more than they care about the economic prosperity of their own country, the outcome is already baked into the cake. AFR carried an article last year which can be used to forecast what is likely to happen, and I’ll quote it in full here now:

AFR.com, ‘How our free trade deals are helping Australian companies right now’, 17 Nov 2016 (emphasis added):

Free trade should be embraced, not feared.

It has lifted living standards, grown Australia’s economy and created thousands of jobs.

While it is becoming more popular to denounce globalisation and flirt with protectionism, we cannot turn our back on free trade.

Australia’s economy has withstood global challenges and recorded 25 years of continuous growth because we’re open to the world.   Since Australia’s trade barriers came down, we’ve reaped the rewards.

Trade liberalisation has lifted the income of households by around $4500 a year and boosted the country’s gross domestic product by 2.5 per cent to 3.5 per cent, creating thousands of jobs.

One in five jobs now involve trade-related activities. This will grow as liberalised trade gives our producers, manufacturers and services providers better access to billions of consumers across the globe, not just the 24 million who call Australia home.

However, not everyone sees the value of free trade. Some see it, and the forces of globalisation, as a threat to their standard of living, rather than an opportunity to improve it.

When it comes to free trade, we often hear about the bad but not the good.

The nature of news means the factory closing gets more coverage than the one opening.

Chances are you heard about the Ford plant closing, but not the $800 million Boeing has invested in Australia and the 1200 people who work at their Port Melbourne facility.

You may have heard about Cubbie Station, but not heard that its purchase staved off bankruptcy, and has since seen millions of dollars invested in upgrades of water-saving infrastructure, a doubling of contractors, more workers, and of course, money put into the local economy supporting jobs and local businesses.

Key to attracting investment, jobs

The free trade agreements the Coalition concluded with the North Asian powerhouse economies of China, Japan and Korea are key to attracting investment and creating more local jobs.

The Weilong Grape Wine Company has said the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement is the reason it’s planning to build a new plant in Mildura.

This is a story being played out across the country.

Businesses large and small, rural and urban, are taking advantage of the preferential market access the FTAs offer Aussie businesses into the giant, growing markets of North Asia.

Australian Honey Products is building a new factory in Tasmania to meet the demand the trifecta of FTAs has created.

Owner Lindsay Bourke says the free trade agreements have been “wonderful” for  his business. “We know that we are going to grow and it’s enabled us to employ more people, more local people,”  he said.

It is the same story for NSW skincare manufacturer Cherub Rubs, who will have to double the size of their factory. “The free trade agreements with China and Korea really mean an expansion, which means new Australian jobs manufacturing high-quality products,” said Cherub CEO John Lamont.

It is easy to see why the three North Asian FTAs are forecast to create 7,900 jobs this year, according to modelling conducted by the Centre for International Economics.

Australia has a good story when it comes to free trade. In the past three years, net exports accounted for more than half of Australia’s GDP growth.

Exports remain central to sustaining growth and economic prosperity. Last year exports delivered $316 billion to our economy, representing around 19 per cent of GDP.

This underscores the importance of free trade and why it is a key element of the Turnbull Government’s national economic plan.

The Coalition is pursuing an ambitious trade agenda, and more free trade agreements, to ensure our economy keeps growing and creating new jobs.

On Friday I arrive in Peru for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Ministerial Meeting.

Free trade will be at front of everyone’s mind.

With the future of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) looking grim, my ministerial counterparts and I will work to conclude a study on the Free Trade Area of the Asia-Pacific (FTAAP), which sets out agreed actions towards a future free trade zone.

We will also work to finalise a services road map, which will help grow Australian services exports in key markets including education, finance and logistics.

More to be done

The Coalition has achieved a lot when it comes to free trade, but there is more to do.

Momentum is building for concluding a free trade agreement with Indonesia, work towards launching free trade agreement negotiations with the European Union continues, we’ve established a working group with the United Kingdom that will scope out the parameters of a future ambitious and comprehensive Australia-UK FTA and we’re continuing to negotiate the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), which brings together 16 countries that account for almost half of the world’s population.

The Turnbull government will continue to pursue an ambitious free trade agenda to keep our economy growing and creating more jobs.

Meanwhile Opposition Leader Bill Shorten continues to build the case for Labor’s embrace of more protectionist policies, claiming he will learn the lessons of the US election where it featured heavily.

What Labor doesn’t say though is that by adopting a closed economy mindset, they will close off the investment and jobs flowing from free trade. They’re saying no to Boeing’s $800 million investment in Australia and the Cubbie Station improvements; they’re saying no to businesses like Cherub Rubs and Australian Honey Products building new factories and the many local jobs they will create.

Steven Ciobo is the Minister for Trade, Tourism and Investment

What’s not to love about all this?

I really think I love Anglo-Saxons. This is going to be fun, isn’t it? 

When Mr. Ciobo spoke of ‘a working group with the United Kingdom that will scope out the parameters of a future ambitious and comprehensive Australia-UK FTA’, he was not joking. That is happening and it is likely going to be another window that the UK will have into the formation of both RCEP and FTAAP, even though technically the UK is not physically in the Indo-Asian region.

I wrote an article several days ago called ‘A view of Brexit from Asia: Britain as a Pacific trading power in the 21st century.’ I chose at that time not to mention the Australian or New Zealand interface at all, but that article’s main point should be viewed as being reinforced by the point I’ve presented in here now.

I have also written an article today called, ‘US Government to build American competitiveness atop socio-economic retrogression and misery.’ It’s crucial to understand that time is of the essence, since the Americans are at the present moment in relative disarray compared to the rest of us. The Americans have not yet tamed and pacified the various economic actors in their own country, they are still working on that, and they also have yet to form a coherent internationalist counter-narrative to the one that is being enunciated by the governments of Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, China, and so on.

Some of you may be mystified by that statement. What do I mean that the Americans don’t have a coherent ‘internationalist counter-narrative’? I mean that while they are capable of explaining and rationalising their own position as a narrowly ‘America first’ position in a way that is pleasing to Americans, they are not able to export that view to regular people anywhere else in a way that would induce any other European-demography country to comply with America’s geoeconomic interests.

After all, if the Alt-Right people are going to careen all over the internet essentially screaming, “put America first ahead of your own country’s interests or be accused of White genocide”, and alternately equally absurdly, “you’re an evil Russophobe who supports White genocide if you invested in BP instead of Exxon”, then they should not expect that they are going to win the sympathy of anyone who is neither American nor Russian.

I want to say to British people, to Australians, to New Zealanders, to Canadians, Commonwealth citizens in general, that you know, it’s been a long time since you’ve taken your own side. This coming phase is going to be a time when it will become possible to do precisely that.

The time is fast approaching when it will be possible to choose neither America nor Russia. You’ll be able to finally choose yourselves and your own geoeconomic interests, and you’ll be able to choose to trade and associate with whoever else in the world you want to trade and associate with.

I may have sold Gauguin short in terms of his ethnographic conscientiousness. I’d been citing him as an example of the “artistic genius” who wasn’t worth it for his moral failing. There is still a good measure of truth to that, but he may not have been quite as heinous and without effort to be considerate as I had thought in terms of concern for what is important to other people - at least those of Tahiti and their culture. My line had been that as an artist he is as satisfying as any to me, nevertheless as a man who infected who knows how many native girls with syphilis, he was a killer. His art, no matter how good, not worth that behavior.

         
                Gauguin in Tahiti: Search for Paradise (1967)

Even so, as I watch this biography, a couple of mitigating facts are revealed. True, he still would have infected at least one native girl with syphilis. However, he married her and apparently did not know that he had the disease when he infected her. Still bad, of course, as there was no effective treatment for the disease even with French civilization settled there.  Add to that his knowledge of the risks of his own promiscuity beforehand along with his ultimate abandonment of his first wife, French wife and kids back in France.

However, the biography reveals that before he fell ill, he was really concerned to find and help preserve the authentic Tahitian people and culture. With that, he was dismayed by the impact of French civilization and missionaries, how they’d already by his time begun to destroy the native culture. He was particularly bothered by the imposition of Christian schooling upon the native children that had by then caused them to lose their native religion. He would actually go to the children and their parents with a French law book - reading them their rights so that they would know that they did not have to go to the missionary school. Finally, he went so far as to try to recreate their native religious stories in writing and in his paintings…

Stare in amazement

Christians and pro-lifers in general are so stupid that quite honestly I have to say that the Eastern mind boggles at the sheer scale of cascading stupid decisions that Christians choose to make.

Here’s the Breitbart article on it:

Breitbart, ‘Rep. Steve King Files Federal Pro-Life Heartbeat Bill: ‘If a Heartbeat Is Detected, the Baby Is Protected’’, 24 Jan 2017:

Pro-life congressmen stood in front of the Capitol — along with Janet Porter, the Ohio woman who led the fight for passage of that state’s “heartbeat bill” — all in support of Rep. Steve A. King (R.-Iowa) and his Heartbeat Protection Act of 2017, H.R. 490, which restores legal protection to unborn children once their pulse is detected.

“It is a profound religious and moral understanding that every human person has the right to life,” said King, who was joined by Rep. Louie Gohmert (R.-Texas), Rep. Trent Franks (R.-Ariz.), Rep. Scott G. Perry (R.-Pa.), and Rep.Don Bacon R.-Neb.), along with other prolife supporters of the bill.

“The question that has hung before the courts, since 1973 is: ‘When does life begin?’–we all know when that is,” the congressman said.

“We stand here and assert that it has to be a distinctive moment. You can’t guess a thing called viability. You can’t say 22 weeks versus 20 weeks. You have to say it is at a specific instant. The most precise instant that we can describe and that we can identify by science is the moment that that heartbeat begins,” he said.

“The core tenet is this: If a heartbeat can be detected, the baby is protected,” he said.

White America will now die by its own hand. White America will die because these comprehensive restrictions on abortion which are being tabled will have an effect of increasing the birth-rates of those minority populations which traditionally utilise abortion services more.

Where next?

Restrictions on abortion will hasten the decline of the overall White American population which already only comprises 47% of children under age 18.

The 2010 census shows where those effects would be grouped:

Is it going to be extremely inconvenient for minority groups to have a sharply reduced access to abortion services? Yes. No woman wants to have to be perpetually worrying about what her family planning options are as restrictions are tightening over and over again. But perhaps the inconvenience would be ironically ‘embraced’, particularly among Hispanics who could just go with the flow and have a Hispanic baby-boom. Hispanics can wait these laws out and reverse them in about half a generation, when demographics will dictate elections and identity politics will be entrenched in different ways in different zones within the United States.

Outcomes

The Northeast and Midwest of the United States will experience a ballooning African-American population next to White Americans. The Southwest will continue merrily along its way into becoming a Hispanic outpost, and the Southeast will be a mixture of all those things happening simultaneously.

Technically, ‘White America’ as a geographically contiguous concept has been pushed further upwards on the age-pyramid for quite a while now. The incoming administration is now taking moves that—unintentionally—will guarantee that the concept will be brought to an end.

The United States will have one of two futures to choose from:

• Ethnic balkanisation within two generations.
• Turning itself into Brazil.

Of course, Americans will probably manage to muddle around and inadvertently choose both options simultaneously, so that they can experience the worst aspects of both scenarios. Because why? Because it’s America of course.