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Frank Meyer, father of (((Paleocons))), grandfather of “The Alternative Right.”

With the attack on Syria and the confirmation of Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, The Trump administration’s (((paleocon agenda))) has come to explicit fruition - any pretenses to wear its new wardrobe lent by the Alternative Right in their disingenuous/naive trendy support has been thrown off - cucks: they’ve been used. The denial of having been used as paleocons takes the form of saying “Trump has gone neocon”, when in fact, he hasn’t changed - he has just come out in the open with the paleoconservatism that’s always been behind the Alternative Right.

This turn of events should serve to illustrate why the terms we have to defend and negotiate our way in ethnonationalism are crucial to navigate our proper course. The terms to organize and understand our defense are not jargon, they are not complicated but they are very important.

If they were not important, Jewish interests would not have been so intent upon getting White advocates to identify their enemy as “the left” and to divert them into “the Alternative Right” big tent, which is just (((paleoconservatism))), revised with trendy terms, memes and a few more provisional adjunct circles to ease the entryism of Jews and sufficiently didactic right wingers (Captainchaos, take note) - largely a millennial generation internet bubble circle jerk; wherein they tell themselves that they are “rebelling” against boomer generation (((neoconservatism))), so that they can blame that instead of taking responsibility for having been hoodwinked in the garbed up (((paleoconservatism))) which had them as millennial fogies, getting behind Trump: “The Alternative Right” has aided, abetted, deepened entanglement and embrace of Whites with Jewish/Zionist interests.

While not naming the neocons explicitly, (((John K. Press)))‘s “culturalism” - published at Alternative Right - is definitively paleoconservative by contrast to neoconservatism.

With Trump’s coming out into the open in his paleocon agenda, Alt Righters are quickly encouraged to divert blame to the “neocons.”

(((Edmund Oslan))), who identifies as Alt Right and contributes to Alternative Right.org as well, cites Trump as having gone “Neocon” - Savage Hippie Episode 41 – Did Trump Go Neocon, or Is He a Crackhead?

Matt Heimbach and Sven Longshanks follow suit, blaming boomer generation neoconservatism for Trump’s actions in Syria.

MacDonald with Red Ice blames Trump for succumbing to neocon influence: Neocons to Remove Assad, Trump Buys the MSM Lie.

It goes without saying that the flagship of the AlternativeRight - viz Alt Right - would toe the Alternative Right/Paleocon line: Neocon Puppet Donald Trump Announces His Unilateral Attack On Syria.

Counter-Currents depicts their rightist contrast to Trump’s Syrian venture “neoconservatism” as well, not seeing the culpability which its rightism shares with all of the above for playing a part in support of Trump, not having extricated themselves from paleoconservatism.

All the while, the paleocon jargon that entangles would-be White advocacy with Jewish interests under the rubric of the alternative right is protected and defended against clarification and correction.

Concerns for balkanization of the US are in order but not mutually exclusive to other ethnonationalist concerns - they occur in hermeneutic process, attended to as relevant - for those in The US, perhaps a predominantly regular concern.

...he gets the wrong answer, of course. Garbage in means garbage out:

Emile Bruneau recently invited Muslim students and staff at the University of Pennsylvania to help him figure out one of the most pressing questions of our time: How can we stop despising each other?

Bruneau wanted to know more about what kind of arguments effectively combat common prejudices: that Muslims are terrorists, that they don’t want to assimilate, that they are intolerant and hate American freedom. Liberals often believe that Muslim women are oppressed. He enlisted members of the Muslim Students Association to look for videos they thought might prove persuasive. He thought firsthand experience with discrimination might be helpful. (He’s also working with former white nationalists.) He was looking, he told them, for “individualized psychological medicine.”

What worked best was a “very cerebral” video from Al Jazeera in which a Muslim woman said blaming all Muslims for terrorism was like blaming all Christians for the actions of Westboro Baptist Church or the KKK.

The question to ask is not, “how can we bridge our divides and induce Abrahamic religions and peoples to accept one another?”

It is rather to ask, “how can we disabuse people of Abrahamic religion and its universal imperialism in order to defend ethno-nationalism and human ecology against it; and failing completion of that task, contain its extant effects on people; keep our sane interests from being affected by its intransigent elements and lingering influences?”

Communicology is a fascinating and eminently useful discipline that we will be applying here at MR - correctly, unlike this effort from the Annenberg school. Nevertheless, there are some interesting take-away propositions here - notably, that Americans are low information decision makers, therefore equipping them with particularly helpful analogies for them to rationalize their coming to a position we like for them (in our case, we would want them to come to a natural and healthy ethnonationalist position for them and their people) is liable to work better than emotional appeals, despite a commonly ascribed-to school of thought which holds emotions to be the effective means to that end. 

Philly.com, “Penn professor uses science to bridge the political divide”, 2 April 2017:

Emile Bruneau studies conflict between groups and how to combat prejudice at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communication.

Emile Bruneau recently invited Muslim students and staff at the University of Pennsylvania to help him figure out one of the most pressing questions of our time: How can we stop despising each other?

Muslims and Christians may have been the groups he had in mind that day, but Bruneau, a child of California hippies who took an unusual route to Penn’s Annenberg School for Communication, ultimately has broader goals in mind.  What if there is a psychological key that could defuse the animosity between hate-filled groups around the globe? That includes U.S. Republicans and Democrats, who, his research has found, are almost as alienated from one another as Palestinians and Israelis. The only difference, he said, “is that we’re not actually killing each other.”

Most of us think the antidote to hate and close-mindedness is emotional. But, so far, Bruneau’s research shows that the way to the mind is not necessarily through the heart. In fact, he believes, the way to the heart is through the mind.

Bruneau wanted to know more about what kind of arguments effectively combat common prejudices: that Muslims are terrorists, that they don’t want to assimilate, that they are intolerant and hate American freedom. Liberals often believe that Muslim women are oppressed. He enlisted members of the Muslim Students Association to look for videos they thought might prove persuasive. He thought firsthand experience with discrimination might be helpful. (He’s also working with former white nationalists.) He was looking, he told them, for “individualized psychological medicine.”

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It’s a pop-cultural reference.

Introduction

‘Bold and Brash Intelligence’ is a feature that I’m inaugurating today, in which I’ll just give a very quick opinion about an event as it is unfolding, interpreting the facts on the ground to draw conclusions about the operational efficacy of a particular political tactic or strategy.

For the mechanics of the election in the Netherlands, the parties that contested it, and the way that the coalition politics of the Netherlands works, mainstream news organisations everywhere have already adequately described that, so I won’t repeat what is already understood by everyone.

I’ll just dive straight in to some points that I’d want to highlight, which I think are relevant to our readers here from an ethno-nationalist perspective.

The assumption I’m proceeding forward with in this article is that the objective of those who profess support or allegiance to the PVV is that they are concerned about the problem of mass migration of people from Muslim-majority countries into the Netherlands and they subjectively perceive that the PVV is a way to somehow counteract that threat.

If we accept that assumption as true, the central question then becomes, why does the PVV consistently fail to accomplish that, and how did it fail again last night, despite the fact that the conditions – for example the rise of the migrant crisis, the conspiratorial relationship between Rutte and Merkel, the secret deal with Turkey, and so on – could be seen as ripe issues for them to build significant gains atop? How did the PVV go from having 40% support, to having only 20% support in a year, despite the fact that all of these apparently terrifying events were occurring which they ought to have been able to politically capitalise on?

I will suggest some reasons.

1. The VVD moved slightly to the right in rhetoric so as to sap PVV’s base

Mark Rutte’s VVD moved to the right in terms of rhetoric, and was able to take away a significant amount of the PVV’s support. 34% of the people who said that they voted for VVD, say that Rutte’s little battle against Turkish ministers influenced their vote. Clearly the optics of that fight, although lacking in any substance, helped Rutte. Given that the media environment in the Netherlands is one in which the PVV is portrayed as ‘extremist’, it means that for those who like to be risk-averse, it may be the case that they would rationalise making the ‘safe’ centre-right choice.

The VVD may also have either sought to emulate or been given help in emulating a strategy used by Angela Merkel in Germany several years prior. Casting oneself as a supporter of a ‘responsible and steady’ centre-right statesman who is willing to ‘resist populism’, is – paradoxically – psychologically rewarding to the kind of people who individually believe, either correctly or incorrectly, that the concept of ‘basic-bitch average civilian’ includes everyone except their own esteemed selves.

The nativist populist rhetoric which has become ubiquitous online and can be seen in loud campaign slogans and vague policies, paradoxically repels the very kind of people who are needed to make nativism successful. The politically-savvy cohort who is desperately needed by nativists and yet is absent everywhere, is the kind of person who is just above-average enough to see politics as being more than a public stage on which to have a moralistic battle of sentiments, but is unfortunately also not above-average enough to be willing to entertain a certain amount of deliberate stupidity or obfuscation for the sake of courting the below-average cohort which must also be secured in order to fully lock-in a victory.

Now, some people may be thinking, “But didn’t Trump show that it can work in the United States? He managed to get lots of people to vote for him by basically talking complete nonsense in a very loud voice, all day long, and people voted for it!” Yes, but the United States is populated by low-information voters who are moved by animal-spirits, with an electoral college that grants a large amount of weight to the opinions of a voting bloc of actual political retards who have been subjected to a kind of Pavlovian meme-conditioning for 40 years, so it’s a completely different environment there. There is no parallel to that in Europe. It is not possible to simply meme one’s way to victory through padding-out your vote with political ‘potatoes’ in Europe, no matter what party you are representing.

The other thing about ‘potatoes’ is that they are notoriously unreliable, even if you can find them and secure them in Europe. Because they tend to vote on appearance over substance, they are just as likely to vote for you, as they are to vote for a guy who comes out cosplaying as you in the week prior to the election. The PVV lost significant support to the VVD precisely due to that phenomenon. Having locked down the limited number of ‘potatoes’ that did exist, it couldn’t even hold them. Why even bother?

By way of an agricultural comparison, one which the Irish are surely familiar with, you could very well say that monocropping is the worst possible strategy. In other words: Live by the potato, die by the potato.

2. All substantive debates in the Netherlands are conducted behind a technocratic layer of abstraction, in which the PVV cohort does not participate

The Dutch people really like their technocratic TV debates and their statistics which they drag into every comments section and all over social media. In that sense they actually resemble the British voting profile, and that is not a bad thing.

The PVV of course failed to tap the breadth of issues that Dutch people have been discussing throughout the election, because the PVV is widely perceived as a single-issue party and acts exactly like a single-issue party.

Geert Wilders’ views on immigration, the refugee crisis, and the European Union are a key part of the national debate in the Netherlands, but the polls and a basic survey of the media shows that the biggest issues in the minds of voters are healthcare and social care for the elderly. Other issues of interest to them are law and order, social service provisioning, and so on.

Crucially, 81% of the Dutch people who voted for VVD say that they did so because they liked Rutte’s views on the economy.

If the PVV is seen as having either no economic platform, or alternately, a bad economic platform, is anyone really surprised that it’s also a party that cannot win?

3. The PVV attempts to publicly re-litigate the past 70 years of immigration policy and the majority are not responsive to it

Rather than focussing on one explicit part of the immigration situation – the issue of the actual threat posed by Europe’s lack of coherent external borders – as a fulcrum around which many other issues implicitly rotate, the PVV and other parties and groups similar to it, tend to have a habit of trying to re-litigate the entire history of immigration policy in Western Europe over the past 70 years. In one election.

Obviously this cannot work as part of electoral rhetoric, as it opens a wide flank for public debate and criticism which would otherwise not occur. Why bother talking about the overall immigration policy from years gone by, when you could instead – for example – just talk about the Bataclan attack and the security situation which led up to it?

It remains a mystery as to why political parties with nativist intentions do not yet understand how to strategically dress all their concerns up as security issues which – in reality – those concerns in fact are.

Having the entire debate through the lens of ‘culture’ and ‘civilisation’ ends up giving social services professionals, third sector organisations and charities, and political dilettantes the ability to talk their way out of recognising reality with increasingly complex verbiage and appeals to emotion.

There is however no appeal to emotion and no language construct which can be leveraged against the hard reality of bombs, bullets, armed police response times, economic disruption, and emergency services personnel putting out fires and carrying away body bags. It is a reality which everyone is forced to acknowledge simply by watching television.

‘Defence of your city from bombs and roving bands of armed ISIL-affiliated men’, sounds much more concrete to the average voter than ‘defence of Western Civilisation from Islamisation.’

‘Defence of your city’, is an angle which does not require the voter to accept any fact other than the simple fact that the Bataclan attack happened and that security services have accurately described how that attack took place.

The ‘Western Civilisation’ argument, however, requires that the voter must accept someone’s particular view on what that civilisation should look like or what it used to look like, and requires significant time and effort to articulate. This doesn’t mean people shouldn’t articulate such a view, but it shouldn’t be done as part of electoral messaging when you have a limited amount of time and space to make a point to people who have a limited attention-span. Yet, in a move that can only be seen as a mysterious herculean effort to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, almost all nativist groups would rather wax lyrical about ‘Western Civilisation’ than actually just exploit the really-existing feelings of terror which have manifested as a result of the absolutely exploitable series of terrorist attacks which have occurred in Europe since 2014.

4. The PVV embodies and vectors a pro-Zionist narrative-hijack and diminishes its own electability as a party in the process

This is the foundational point that underscores all the others, as I believe it is the fundamental root of the problem. The PVV is basically a party of Zionist-imperialism which is committed to socially-legitimating the State of Israel through the propagation of a ‘Clash of Civilisations’ narrative which conveniently – for Israeli communications operations commanders – posits that the State of Israel should be understood by Europeans to be the most important and most brittle line of defence against an allegedly monolithic ‘global Islam’.

It’s such a transparent narrative-hijack that one almost has to stand back in wonderment and stupefaction at how gullible a person would need to be to fall for it.

The PVV and the so-called ‘counter-jihad movement’ propagates messages of social-legitimation for Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank by transforming every Islamist attack that takes place on European soil, into part of their ongoing narrative which usually contains the nonsensical words “this is what Israel has been fighting against all along.”

Nothing could be more absurd.

It is the foreign policy pursued by the State of Israel and vectored though the halls of American power, which has been one of key factors in sustaining the civil war in Syria from which the migration crisis arose, and furthermore, Israel is the same country which also – with no concern for the migration crisis – had one of its top think tanks advance the concept that it would be a ‘good’ idea for the West to deliberately let ISIL continue to exist. The State of Israel is a country whose strategic command has rationalised that since “Assad is now Iran” it would be better for Israel if “Al-Qaeda” or “one of those groups” were to be left running Syria in the aftermath of the war.

To posit that Israel could ever be a real ally of Europe on the issue of radical Islamic terror and the migrant crisis, is an absurdity. Yet it is an absurdly which is continually repeated by the likes of PVV politicians and allies, Geert Wilders himself, and the so-called ‘counter-jihad movement’.

The only way to explain that in the context of the Netherlands is to look at the ethno-racial identity of Geert Wilders himself, as his personality has a strong influence over the essential character and policy direction of the PVV. It is after all a party that was created by him.

Geert Wilders has volunteered at a Kibbutz during his youth, and has lived in Israel. Wilders’ paternal grandmother Johanna Meijer was a Dutch Jew who lived in the Dutch East Indies. Wilders’ family fled the Dutch East Indies during the Second World War shortly after Japanese occupation began, for reasons which probably need no explanation. Wilders has asserted that his father was Jewish. Additionally, Wilders is married to a Jewish-Hungarian diplomat.

Given that Jewishness clearly is a core part of Wilders’ identity and his talks and speeches on the matter only serve to bring that into sharper relief, no one should be surprised that things have turned out the way that they have as a consequence of having allowed Wilders to rise to a leadership position in Dutch the nationalist scene.

Whenever European nationalists engage in political bargains with Zionists, the Zionists will tend to inappropriately utilise the European nationalist organisations as a public relations show-piece whose mission is to divert all revenue streams toward projects which serve to socially-legitimate Israel’s foreign policy preferences among right-wing voters and will function as an aggressive public relations interface for Israel. That interface is then used by them to neutralise existing anti-Zionist sentiment on the right, or to forestall any imminent development of it there.

Combating anti-Zionist sentiment is basically the only thing that the PVV ever concretely accomplishes, which is why the PVV is in fact worse than useless.

Additionally, the PVV would probably have a wider appeal if it were not a Zionist party. Yet, for the operators of the party, the maintenance of the PVV as a ridiculous Zionist outfit is more important to them than actually winning at anything. Even when taken alone, that simple fact should speak volumes about the priorities of the so-called ‘activists’ who represent that party.

This whole assessment is simply a results-orientated approach to politics, devoid of any emotional bias. Even from the most cynical perspective, bartering with Zionists makes no sense.

Empirically speaking, have Europeans who bartered with Zionists ever been known to emerge with a good result for European nationalists? Scientifically speaking, has bartering with Zionists ever been known to work? 

The answer to that question is: Basically no.

Verdict: Into the trash

Some people like to claim that Geert Wilders and the PVV are bold and brash. In reality, Geert Wilders and the PVV are in fact worse than useless, and they belong in the trash.

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.

An interesting story appeared at ASPI today, regular people have now become aware of the existence of the ‘left of launch’ strategy. Which you can read about at the links included in the Cyber wrap 154 which I’ve reproduced in full below.

The utility of having people know about the ‘left of launch’ strategy is that it even further reduces the credibility of any of Donald Trump’s feigned hyperventilating about the alleged (and in fact non-existent) ‘threat’ of Iran ever attaining a nuclear weapon, much less having the ability to use such a weapon against anyone.

Armed with this information, it is possible for people to go out into the world and make the case that even if one were to entertain the idea that Iran were willing to create some improbable doomsday scenario, there is no need for anyone to send a single American aircraft, tank, or armoured patrol vehicle anywhere near Iran in order to avert such a scenario.

If Donald Trump and his supporters continue to behave like Iran is a ‘major nuclear threat’ despite the existence of the ‘left of launch’ strategy in public view, there is only one place that such a ridiculous narrative can be actually originating from, and that place is Israel. That is the case which should be made over and over again, until it becomes a kind of mantra.

Here’s ASPI’s Cyber wrap:

ASPI - The Strategist, ‘Cyber wrap 154’, 08 Mar 2017 (emphasis added):

Welcome back to your weekly fix of cyber news, analysis and research.

The New York Times reported last Saturday that, back in 2013, President Barack Obama ordered cyber sabotage operations against Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program. The persistently high failure rate of the US’s kinetic antimissile weapons, despite significant investment, reportedly prompted Obama to consider a cyber supplement. The project to pre-emptively undermine missiles in their development stages, known as a ‘left of launch’ strategy, receives dedicated resources at the Pentagon and is now President Trump’s to play with. However, experts are concerned that this kind of cyber offensive approach sets a dangerous precedent for Beijing and Moscow, particularly if they believe that US cyber operations could successfully undermine their nuclear deterrence capability.

Staying stateside, the future of the NSA’s spying powers are   under scrutiny this week as elements of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) approach sunset. Section 702 of the Act forms the basis for the NSA’s monitoring of foreign nationals’ communications around the globe in the interests of national security. It was under this FISA authority that the US’s infamous “big brother” program PRISM—revealed in the Snowden disclosures of 2013—was established.

While the legislation is designed for foreign targets, there have long been concerns it could be used to surveil US citizens through their contact with foreigners. Human rights advocates such as the American Civil Liberties Union are protesting the renewal of this legislation in defence of international privacy. The issue also has the trans-Atlantic data-sharing agreement on thin ice, especially given that EU Justice Commissioner Vera Jourova has made it clear that she ‘will not hesitate’ to suspend the painstakingly crafted arrangement should the US fail to uphold its stringent privacy requirements.

That task may be even more difficult after WikiLeaks’ overnight release of a dossier, dubbed ‘Vault 7’, detailing the CIA’s cyber espionage tools and techniques. WikiLeaks released over 8,000 documents it claims were taken from a CIA computer network in the agency’s Center for Cyber Intelligence. The documents detail the agency’s expansive and sophisticated cyber espionage capability, including compromising the security common devices and apps including Apple iPhones, Google’s Android software and Samsung televisions to collect intelligence.

China’s Foreign Ministry and the Cyberspace Administration of China this week launched the country’s first International Strategy of Cooperation on Cyberspace. The Strategy outlines China’s basic principles for cyber diplomacy and its strategic goals in cyberspace. Encouragingly, the Foreign Ministry’s Coordinator for Cyberspace Affairs Long Zhao stated that ‘enhancing deterrence, pursuing absolute security and engaging in a cyber arms race…is a road to nowhere’. Unsurprisingly, the Strategy offers strong support for the concept of cyber sovereignty, stating that ‘countries should respect each other’s right to choose their own path of cyber development’, and emphasises the importance of avoiding cyberspace becoming ‘a new battlefield’. You can read a full English language version of the Strategy here.

The revelation that the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) was temporarily forced to rely on diesel generators during last month’s heat wave has prompted the government to significantly upgrade to the agency’s infrastructure. The Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for Cyber Security told Parliament on Wednesday that it was recommended by ActewAGL and the NSW Department of Environment that ASD switch to back up power on 10 February as part of state-wide load shedding to protect power supplies. The new $75 million project, funded by the Defence Integrated Investment Program, is intended to bolster the intelligence agency’s resilience.

Several cyber incidents have kept the internet on its toes this week. The Amazon Simple Storage Service cloud hosting service went down last week, knocking hundreds of thousands of popular websites and apps offline. The disruptive incident, originally described by the company as ‘increased error rates’, was actually not the result of cyber criminals or hacktivists, but that of an employee’s fat fingers entering a command incorrectly—whoops! Yahoo is in the doghouse (again) with the awkward announcement in its annual report to the Security and Exchange Commission that 32 million customer accounts are thought to have been compromised through forged cookies. This isn’t to be confused with the entirely separate and very embarrassing loss of 1 billion accounts in a 2013 breach, which recently cost the company $350 million in its acquisition deal with Verizon and CEO Marissa Mayer her annual cash bonus. And if you’ve been tracking the #cloudbleed saga, catch up with some post-mortems here, here and here.

Finally we’ve got you covered for your weekly cyber research reads. A new Intel report, written by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, examines the discrepancies in cyberspace that put defenders at a disadvantage. Titled Tilting the Playing Field: How Misaligned Incentives Work Against Cybersecurity, the report reveals the gaps between attackers vs. defenders, strategy vs. implementation and executives vs. implementers, offering recommendations to overcome such obstacles. And get your fix of statistics from PwC’s annual Digital IQ assessment based on a survey of more than 2,000 executives from across the world. The research reveals that only 52% of companies consider their corporate Digital IQ to be ‘strong,’ a considerable drop from 67% last year.

At “Killer Culture” Peter Quiggins (Tierney) has put together this very caring and painstaking compilation of native Britons killed by migrant peoples, murders which have not received a fraction of the attention that the rare instance of a murder of a black, Steve Lawrence, by native Britons, has received. It is a quibble compared to this travesty that Quiggins addresses, but something to note nevertheless, that entitling the piece “Diversity Kills!” is a bit of mistake. Just like arguing “against equality” is bad tact, arguing against “diversity” is a trick that the YKW have set up deliberately because by default, under the powers that be, you are arguing for integration - the last thing that we’d want. Diversity should not be argued against at this point, the circumstances being what they are, with massive immigrant populations among, or in close proximity to ours not going away any time soon; in some cases, never - and all the more reason to take the cause of diversity for ourselves. However, his subtitle is quite fine stand alone: Britons murdered in Britain since the death of Stephen Lawrence:

Stephen Lawrence has been mentioned over 2,000 times in Parliament.

MR carries great articles regarding the Stephen Lawrence case: A Nation Rejoices at last! - by Dan Dare; More Saint Stephenism on the way - by Guessedworker; The Crusade Against Discrimination in Britain - by Guessedworker; No Native Voices - by Guessedworker

(Britons murdered in Britain since the death of Stephen Lawrence)

Adam W. Purinton: It’s too late to instruct him on Schmittian lines of proper friend/enemy distinction.

Denver Post, “He yelled ‘Get out of my country,’ witnesses say, and then shot 2 men from India, killing one”, 24 Feb 2017:

A 51-year-old man faces first-degree murder charges after shooting three men in an Olathe, Kan., bar Wednesday night, police say, reportedly telling two of them, local Garmin engineers from India, to “get out of my country.”

One of the Indian men, Srinivas Kuchibhotla, 32, died in the hospital later from his gunshot wounds.

Authorities would not classify the shooting as a hate crime, but federal law enforcement officials said Thursday they are investigating with local police to determine if it was “bias motivated.”

Adam W. Purinton, 51, of Olathe, was also charged with two counts of attempted first-degree murder for shooting two other patrons at Austin’s Bar and Grill: Alok Madasani, 32, of Overland Park, Kan. and 24-year-old Ian Grillot, who tried to intervene.

Madasani had been released from a hospital Thursday and Grillot continued to recover.

Witnesses told the Kansas City Star and The Washington Post that Purinton was thought to have been kicked out the bar Wednesday night before the shooting took place.

“He seemed kind of distraught,” Garret Bohnen, a regular at Austin’s who was there that night told The Post in an interview. “He started drinking pretty fast.”

Denver Post, “Some witnesses say Kansas shooting was racially motivated”, 24 Feb 2017:

A bartender at Austins Bar and Grill in Olathe, Kansas, said that Adam Purinton used “racial slurs” before he started shooting on Wednesday night as patrons were watching the University of Kansas-TCU basketball game on television.

Srinivas Kuchibhotla, 32, died at an area hospital, police said. Alok Madasani, 32, and Ian Grillot, 24, were hospitalized and are in stable condition, they said. The Linkedin accounts for Kuchibhotla and Madasani say that they were engineers working at GPS-maker Garmin and had studied in India.

A whole bar in cuck attendance to the coddled black American basketball player but Adam W. Purinton decides to take his final stand to try to kill two or three people he thought were Middle Eastern - “terrorists hanging out in the bar? routing for the wrong team of black athletes?” or, was Purington “drawing the line”, and saying “damn it! I’m not having those sand-Negroes supporting Negro ball too!” Not likely. Nor is it likely that Purinton was taking the H1B Visa angle into account, since his rage was directed toward people he took to be Middle Eastern and for their Middle Easternness and its imposed displacement of White Americans; not for any alleged affirmative action or salary undercutting importation of Indians whose nepotism would further exacerbate the displacement of White IT specialists.

This serves to illustrate that not only do many would-be White Nationalists need to learn to sublimate their grievances better, but need to do that in line with becoming MUCH more articulate about friend / enemy distinctions - who is who and what is what.

The crusade against racial discrimination and categorization of peoples is much to blame in keeping people inarticulate about proper friend / enemy distinctions. The only “consolation” in this instance is that one White guy used the “non-discrimination” principle to try to come to the aid of two people, Indians, who should be in the friend category.

Ibid, Denver Post, “He yelled ‘Get out of my country!”, February 24, 2017:

He reportedly came back into the bar and hurled racial slurs at the two Indian men, including comments that suggested he thought they were of Middle Eastern descent. When he started firing shots, Grillot, a regular at the bar whom Bohnen called “everyone’s friend,” intervened.

AFF, “Breaking News, 1 Dead, Three Shot, Including Marine”, 24 Feb 2017:

       
Srinivas Kuchibhotla (center), 32, died at a hospital, while 32-year-old Alok Madasani (left) and 24-year-old Ian Grillot (right) are hospitalized in stable condition, police said.

According to Local News KCTV 5.

Grillot said in an interview from his hospital bed that when the gunfire started, he hid until nine shots had been fired and he thought the suspect’s gun magazine was empty.

“I got up and proceeded to chase him down, try to subdue him,” Grillot said in a video from the University of Kansas Health System. “I got behind him and he turned around and fired a round at me.”

Grillot said that the bullet went through his hand and into his chest, just missing a major artery.

       

“It’s not about where (the victim) was from or his ethnicity,” Grillot said. “We’re all humans, so I just did what was right to do.”

Together back in the 80s, when Carl Icahn was showing Donald Trump the ropes of “corporate-take-over”, such as his plunder of TWA.

The Carl Icahn episode that pilfered the corporate culture of the once bustling American town—Lancaster, Ohio—is highly instructive of itself. It provides a lesson in its farther implications, however, as it set in motion transformations of that corporate culture which effected a perverse irony of its residents becoming Trump voters, seeking a return to their corporate culture as it had been - implicitly White - oblivious to the fact that they are hoping to do this through Trump, whose appointed gate-keeper is Carl Icahn - the very man who plundered Lancaster’s corporate culture and set in motion its transformative demise, with devastating impact upon the now rust-belt town and its people (nearly all White).
 
(((NPR))) doesn’t provide a transcript of portions which refer to Carl Icahn, e.g.

NPR, Glass House’ Chronicles The Sharp Decline Of An All-American Factory Town, 6 Feb 2017:

13:10: Dave Davies: “When did outside financial interests first pose a challenge to the management of Anchor Hocking, this giant of a company?

Brian Alexander: The first time was Carl Icahn.

It is meaningful that the relatively brief episode of Carl Icahn’s corporate raid on Anchor-Hocking did not merely lead to a limited financial downturn following the large (what amounts to) bribe that he levied against the company in order to get rid of him, but it had implicative force which transformed even the subsequent non-Jewish corporate culture, creating a new corporate culture - a new context, if you will. That is the kind of thing that the serious ethno-nationalist will want to examine further.

Ibid:

Brian Alexander: It’s the 1980’s, Carl Icahn has just begun his career of what became known at the time as “green mailing.”

Dave Davies: “Corporate raiding”, “corporate take-overs.”

Alexander: “Corporate raiding”, saying now I’ve just bought 5% of your stock. I want a seat on the board. You’re running your company in a lousy way; and so I’m going to come and make all sorts of trouble for you, but you know, if you want to buy me out, at a profit, at a premium, well maybe I’ll go away; and so that’s exactly what happened with Carl Icahn.

Carl Icahn bought over 5% of the stock of Anchor Hocking, agitated the board, saying you need to make some different decisions, you could be returning more share-holder value and was eventually bought off at what I calculate to be about a three million dollar profit to Carl Icahn.

That episode did not last long, but I argue that it changed Anchor Hocking forever, from then on.

Dave Davies: In what way?

Brian Alexander: It scared people…

........................................................................

NPR, Glass House’ Chronicles The Sharp Decline Of An All-American Factory Town, 6 Feb 2017:

NPR host Dave Davies: We heard a lot in the presidential campaign about anger and frustration among working class voters in America’s heartland. Today we’re going to focus on one factory town in central Ohio that was once a bustling center of industry and employment, but is now beset by low wages, unemployment and social decay.

Lancaster, Ohio isn’t just a research subject for our guest Brian Alexander, it’s his hometown.

His new book tells the story of the company that was once Lancaster’s largest employer - Anchor-Hocking Glass Company was a Fortune 500 company with its headquarters in the town. The company provided jobs, civic leadership and community pride. It’s decline Alexander argues isn’t just a product of increased competition and changing markets, he says the firm was undone by Wall Street investors who had little knowledge of the company and little interest in anything besides short-term profit.

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