[Majorityrights News] Trump will ‘arm Ukraine to the teeth’ if Putin won’t negotiate ceasefire Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 12 November 2024 16:20.
[Majorityrights News] Alex Navalny, born 4th June, 1976; died at Yamalo-Nenets penitentiary 16th February, 2024 Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 16 February 2024 23:43.
[Majorityrights Central] A couple of exchanges on the nature and meaning of Christianity’s origin Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 25 July 2023 22:19.
[Majorityrights News] Is the Ukrainian counter-offensive for Bakhmut the counter-offensive for Ukraine? Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 18 May 2023 18:55.
“I just want to give you a sense for what liberalism is. The United States is a thoroughly liberal country. It is a liberal democracy. Both Republicans, who we sometimes refer to as conservatives, are liberals and Democrats are liberals. I’m using the term liberal in the John Lockean sense of the term.
The Unites States was born as a liberal democracy. The Declaration of Independence, The Constitution, The Bill of Rights, these are thoroughly liberal documents.”
We are a liberal people, okay? But what exactly does that mean? It’s very important that you understand it, because you have to understand what liberalism is to understand liberal hegemony and what went wrong. Then, it’s very important to understand what nationalism is.
John’s argument is very simple here.
Nationalism is the most powerful ideology on the planet.
And in a contest between liberalism and nationalism, nationalism wins every time.
And what I want to do is explain to you what liberalism is, what nationalism is, and why nationalism defeats liberalism. Then what I want to do is talk about what liberal hegemony is. What does it mean to say that The Unites States is interested in remaking the world in its own image? So, I’ll describe that. Then I want to talk about why we pursued liberal hegemony.
...of course I tipped you off by telling you that The United States is a thoroughly liberal country, but there’s more to the story.
Then I want to tell you what our track record is. I want to describe our failures ...in the Middle-East, with regard to NATO expansion, and Russia, and with regard to engagement in China. Lets talk about the evidence that we goofed.
Then I want to talk about why liberal hegemony fails, and this, again, is basically as story about nationalism and realism trumping liberalism. And then I want to make the case for restraint, what I think is a wise foreign policy, okay?
Let me start with what is liberalism…
There are two bedrock assumptions that underpin liberalism:
One is, that it is individualistic at its core.
And number two is that there are real limits to what we can do with our critical faculties.
...to reach agreements about first principles or questions about the good life.
And what exactly am I saying?
You have to decide, when you think about politics, whether you think human beings are first and foremost individuals who form social contracts or if you think that human beings are fundamentally social animals, who carve-out room for their individualism.
Right? This is very very important to think about alright?
Liberalism is all about individualism. Liberal theorists are known as social contract theorists because they believe that individuals come together and form social contracts, so the focus is on the individual.
The assumption underpinning liberalism is not that human beings are social animals from the get-go.
That’s the first point.
The second point is that liberalism assumes that we cannot use our critical faculties - we cannot use reason to come up with truth about first principles (think about issues like abortion, affirmative action - you cannot get universal agreement on those issues, right?). And I’ll talk about this more as we go along.
But the roots of liberalism are traced-back, in my opinion, to the liberal wars of Britain between Catholics and Protestants. And the fact is that you cannot use your critical faculties to determine whether Catholicism is a superior religion to Protestantism or vice a versa, or whether atheism is superior to both of them ..or Judaism or Islam is superior to Catholicism and Protestantism, Who knows? Right? You just can’t reach agreement. You just can’t reach agreement. There are real limits to what we can do with our critical faculties, okay?
So these are the two bedrock assumptions: One, you focus on the individual, and number two, you accept the fact that you can’t reach universal agreement.
Now, central question - how should politics be arranged to deal with this potential for violence?
And you say to yourself, what does he mean, potential for violence?
The fact is that Catholics and Protestants were killing each other in huge numbers, not only in Britain, but all over Europe. People today, Shias and Sunnis, kill each other, because they can’t agree on whether Shi ism or Sunnism is the correct interpretation of Islam ..or communists versus liberals, people can’t agree on first principles. And when they can’t agree on first principles, if they feel really strongly about them, there is potential for violence.
So, when you have all these individuals running around, who, don’t agree, they may agree in some cases but don’t universally agree, there’s tremendous potential for violence.
So, liberalism is basically an ideology that’s based on conflict, and the question is, how do you solve that conflict?
There’s a three part solution:
And this should be dear to all of your hearts.
The first is, you focus on individual rights. Remember, the importance of the individual. You know The Declaration of Independence, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” - those are natural rights, those are inalienable rights.
This means that every person on the planet has a particular set of rights, sometimes defined as freedoms. This is to say, you, if you want to be a Protestant, have the right to practice that religion, and if I want to be a Catholic, I have the freedom, I have the right to be a Catholic.
The name of the game is to recognize that everybody has these freedoms to choose. This makes perfect sense when you think about Catholics killing Protestants, right? Or Jews killing Muslims or whatever group you want, atheists killing believers, communists killing whatever, right?
The point is, you want to focus on the individual and let the individual choose for him or herself what kind of life they want to lead. You want to let them lead, as much as possible, their version of the good life. And, very important, every person on the planet has that right, and let me get ahead of myself here, just put this seed in your brain.
If you focus on individualism and inalienable rights, you go almost automatically from an individualistic ideology to a universalistic ideology, right? Because again, you’re focusing on the individual, you’re saying every individual has a set of rights, every individual on the planet. And that individualistic ideology becomes a universalistic ideology. But we’re talking about the individual here.
The second is, you purvey the norm of tolerance. We talk about tolerance all the time. Universities are really big on tolerance. We’re supposed to tolerate opinions that we don’t like. You bring in speakers, or you allow speakers to come in who say things that you find reprehensible, right? Tolerance really matters.
But the fact is that tolerance only takes you so far. because you’re dealing with people who sometimes are so committed to their beliefs. Somebody who believes that abortion is murder is willing to murder a doctor who practices abortion, alright?
So, you need a state, that’s the third element of the equation.
You need a state that’s effectively a night watchman. That makes sure that those people over there who want to live as Protestants don’t attack those people who want to live as Catholics and vice versa.
This is the liberal solution.
This is what America is all about.
Individualism - we talk about it all the time. We talk about rights, everybody has rights. My kids, over the years, have always reminded me when I tell them that they have to do X, Y and Z that they have rights and I cannot interfere with their rights, right? It’s the way we’re educated from the get go and of course, we’re a remarkably tolerant people as societies go. Not completely, but that’s, of course, why we have a state, right?
You’ve got to have a police force, you’ve got to have a system of courts, right?
So, that’s what liberalism is all about, right? Liberalism focuses on the individual, purveys the norm of tolerance and accepts the fact that you need a nightwatchman state.
Now, let’s talk about nationalism. Different animal…
Nationalism is based on the assumption that human beings are social animals.
We are born and heavily socialized into tribes.
We are not born in the state of nature.
We are not individuals, born and left alone in the woods.
We are born into groups. We are very tribal.
So, you see in terms of starting assumptions, or bedrock assumptions, what underpins nationalism, what underpins liberalism, very very different.
And individualism takes a back seat to group loyalty, right?
Somebody around the world kills an American, ISIS kills an American, it’s fundamentally different than killing a Saudi, or killing a Brit, because you’re killing one of us. This is the tribe, right? You’re an American. Americans look out for other Americans.
We are social animals from the get-go.
And aside from the family, the most important group, remember I said that you are born into and heavily socialized into particular groups ...tutting aside the family, the most important group in today’s world, is the nation (I’ll say more about that in a second).
What’s nationalism?
Here’s my simple definition:
It’s a set of political beliefs which holds that a nation, a nation, a body of individuals with characteristics that purportedly distinguish them from other groups, should have their own state. Think of the word nation-state.
Nation-state. Nation-state embodies what nationalism is all about. It says the world is divided up into all these tribes called nations and each each one of them wants its own state.
If you think about the world today, just look at a map of the world today, it is completely covered with nation-states. Nothing but nation-states.
If you went back to 1450 and looked at a map of Europe, there isn’t even a single state on that map. Over time, the growth of the state, and then the growth of the nation-state, you move to a world that is filled with nothing but nation-states. Look at the Palestinians and Israelis. The Jews who believe in Zionism, what is Zionism all about? It’s all about having your own Jewish state. Theodore Herzel, who is the father of Zionism, his most famous book is called, The Jewish State, Jewish nation-state.
What do the Palestinians want? Two state solution? Palestinians want their own state. Palestinians as a nation, want their own state.
The planet is filled with nations, many of which have their own state, almost all of which want their own state, nation-state, right?
That’s what nationalism is all about.
Take it a step further. Nations place a enormous importance on sovereignty, or self-determination, which is why they want their own state.
The Palestinians don’t want the Israelis deciding what their politics should look like. Palestinians want their own state. Jews want their own state.
Germans want their own state.
Americans want their own state.
..because they believe in sovereignty.
[...]
Liberal hegemony is based on intolerance. It says that everybody has to be liberal…
[...]
Mearsheimer argues against trying to impose liberal democracy, as it is necessarily a failed foreign policy against staunch nationalism, but he defends “liberal democracy” as a good way of life for The US.
However, he does not observe that The U.S. has failed democratic principle in important ways - notably in the open border/ opening of group boundaries policies in exploit of the “civic nationalist” concept that his YKW people have perpetrated through power niches in cahoots with liberals/right wingers to overturn democratic will (for closed borders) ..open borders and boundaries, weakening The United States nationhood and putting The U.S. effectively, on a trajectory of non-nationhood.
Note Mearsheimer’s use of the pejorative word “purportedly” when discussing nationalist claims to distinguish their people in ways (e.g., important biological differences) requiring a nation-state to protect their differences; i.e., that they are only “purportedly” different from other people in significant ways which require national boundaries/borders to protect them.
Nevertheless, in places, Mearsheimer makes the point, quite eloquently, that people are social, very profoundly social, from the start; thus making nationalism as it protects their sociality something they care about more deeply than liberal democracy. They will defend more ardently the security, social order and stability that provides for general fairness and just recourse against the secondary priorities, bullying ‘prerogatives’ of individual liberal choice over the security of group interests. Noting our deep social nature (including Europeans) from the start is correct, and is the point of correction that Whites need to understand and prioritize as opposed to right wing reaction (itself a species of liberalism) reaction to Jewish didacticism.
Posted by DanielS on Thursday, 29 August 2019 05:04.
When this tweet speaks of “the socialist party” it is speaking of a party that would not delimit social accountability to native interests first and foremost.
The sane management of pervasive ecology has been dealt yet another serious blow as a central element, the management of human ecology through the accountability that ethnonationalism provides, has been pushed aside - at least temporarily - by liberal internationalist interests.
Matteo Salvini’s crucially necessary nativist, ethnonationalist anti-immigration platform has been sidelined by a coalition of the 5-Star Party, which is in cahoots with foreign interests and the corporate internationalist sell-out, Giuseppe Conte, reinstalling him as Prime Minister; allowing him to continue his border liberalization policies which are destroying Italy, Italians and European peoples broadly.
Italy’s corrupt Five-Star Movement announced Wednesday that it had made a deal with the Liberal Party to form a coalition government — keeping Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte in place while avoiding elections and ousting the ethnonationalist League led by Matteo Salvini.
Conte’s position was strengthened this week when President Trump, who pretends to share a similar vision on immigration to Salvini, tweeted his support of Conte – calling him a “very talented man who will hopefully remain Prime Minister!”
Showing his true colors form the start, Trump shunned a meeting with Salvini, who was prepared to endorse him as Trump campaigned for the Presidency.
While Salvini was able to gain popular support by broadening his party’s platform from Lega Nord, to one that represents all of Italy, he sought to gain elite support along with the 5-Stars and Conte’s party by joining the ass-kissing of the Kremlin, the Knesset and the Trumpstein agenda.
Salvini might have added Trumpstein, Putin and Netanyahu to the list of people not to trust with native European interests.
And with friends like that, highly practiced in the art of treachery, the message is: lay down with dogs and wake up with fleas.
Rather, wake up sidelined by the truly corrupt - corrupt enough to push aside your crucially necessary anti-immigration, nativist position and sell out your people and their ancient birthright.
Dr. Jörg D. Valentin@drjdvalentin
#RT
@EchoPRN: RT
@BasedPoland: It’s official.
The #FiveStarMovement & the [liberal] party have reached an agreement to form government
Ibid: #Salvini will be out of government until 2023 (unless snap elections at some point).
As fires ravage massive areas of the Amazon, the vital rainforest is nearing a “tipping point” in which a third of its ecosystem could be irreversibly decimated, experts have warned.
The loss of such huge areas of the forest would result in the eradication of species, many of which are yet to be studied, but would also unleash vast amounts of stored carbon.
Such devastation could spell catastrophe for the planet due to the implications for climate change.
Thousands of fires are racing through the Amazon, with Brazil recording more than 75,000 individual forest fires in the first eight months of the year.
In July, the rate of deforestation equated to roughly an area the size of Manhattan every day, or the size of Greater London every three weeks.
Professor Thomas Lovejoy of George Mason University, who has studied the Amazon since 1965, told The Independent there are signs it is on course for further extensive deforestation which will soon stretch beyond human control.
The previous research of his colleague Carlos Nobre indicates further razing could break the Amazon’s hydrological cycle, whereby it generates half its own rainfall. If a critical amount of trees are felled, the ecosystem will degrade to the point of being unable to support the rainforest.
But speaking to The Independent on Friday, Professor Lovejoy said things have since become much worse.
“When we were first worried about it, the amount of deforestation was small,” he said. “But then these other things started to interact – the impact of deforestation and the effects of climate change became apparent, and the extent of the use of fire [for clearing land] became apparent.
“The reason we believe the tipping point is so close is because we’re seeing historic droughts in 2005, 2010, and 2016. And satellite images in the north central Amazon also show forests remote from everything are beginning to convert into grassland. That’s yet another symptom.
“These are not little droughts – boats cannot get up some of the river’s tributaries, because they’re so dry.”
Professor Lovejoy said such a conversion from rainforest to savannah and scrubland would be the wider effect if a tipping point is reached.
“You’d have extensive parts of the southern and eastern Amazon and parts of the central converting to savannah, and maybe to even drier conditions.”
As well as the catastrophic loss of the rainforest as a massive carbon sink, Professor Lovejoy said losing swathes of the Amazon would result in a huge loss in the planet’s biodiversity.
“People don’t really grasp that the biodiversity in one part of the Amazon is very different to that in other parts,” he said.
A [right winger] is burning the Amazon – but Macron is complicit too
PM’s minister ‘cosying up’ to far-right Brazilian government.
Macron says France will block trade deal with Brazil over Amazon fires
Meat eaters are helping to fuel the Amazon forest fires
“So if you have regional loss, you’ve having actual total loss of that biodiversity. It’s the largest terrestrial repository of biodiversity on the planet, so all that will impact the future of Brazil, the economy, for the future of the world, vanishes.
“We tend to live in the delusion we don’t depend on the biology of the planet, but we do. Agriculture, forestry, medicine, all of that has a major biological base. Scientists are revealing new potential all the time. But you can’t do that if the species isn’t there to study. It’s like book burning on a very grand scale.”
He added: “The standing forest is absorbing carbon on an annual basis, but its even greater importance is in the total amount of carbon stored in the forest itself. Tropical rainforests store more carbon per unit area than basically any other kind of habitat. So it’s folly in the end.”
Asked if he thought Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro was a threat to the future of life on our planet, Professor Lovejoy said: “He certainly is, and he’s also a threat to Brazilian agriculture.”
But he said judging by the amount of public concern in Brazil, he believes things can change, despite Mr Bolsonaro’s policies.
“When there’s so much smoke in Sao Paolo, the street lamps come on at three in the afternoon, it’s clear there’s a problem.
“The world doesn’t expect Brazil to manage this all completely on its own, the world would like to help. And we hope we will be welcomed into some kind of partnership.”
This article was originally published on Kurier.plus.
European Union – On July 22, French President Emmanuel Macron announced at a press conference in Paris that an agreement had been reached by 14 countries of the European Union on a temporary and voluntary redistribution mechanism for migrants taken on board European ships in the Mediterranean. Macron then once again threatened those countries that refused to take part in this “voluntary” scheme that France would no longer approve their receipt of EU structural funds. Although no specific country was named,the French media had no doubt that Macron was thinking of the Visegrád Four, and Hungary and Poland in particular. “As far as solidarity is concerned”, the French president said, “Europe is not ‘à la carte’. You cannot have countries saying ‘I don’t want your Europe when it is about sharing the burden, but I want it when it is about receiving structural funds’.”
A new Franco-German redistribution plan with similarities to the old compulsory relocation scheme
According to French sources, the temporary agreement reached in Paris is meant to avoid the endless squabbles over who should take charge of how many migrants each time an NGO ship conducts a new operation near the coast of Libya. It is based on the plan proposed earlier by German foreign minister Heiko Maas when he called for a “coalition of the willing” to replace the failed EU compulsory relocation mechanism. “We must now move forward with those member states that are ready to receive refugees – all others remain invited to participate,”Maas had said. On July 18, at an informal meeting of interior and justice ministers in Helsinki, Maas’s plan was proposed by Germany’s interior minister Horst Seehofer and supported by his French counterpart Christophe Castaner. France then organised the July 22 informal meeting in Paris with foreign and interior ministers from the “coalition of the willing”, as well as officials from the European Commission, the United Nations’ refugee agency and the International Organization for Migration (IOM). Maas’s proposal was by then being presented as a joint Franco-German initiative.
However, only eight countries were actually named and said to have agreed to “actively” take part in such a voluntary redistribution mechanism. These are France, Germany, Finland, Luxembourg, Portugal, Lithuania, Croatia and Ireland. Macron said that “in principle, 14 member states, at this stage, have expressed their agreement with the Franco-German document”, but the other six countries who are supposed to have expressed their agreement have not been named and were nowhere to be found in subsequent media reports.
One thing is for sure: Italy was not among them. And this is good news for the Visegrád Group, as Macron’s statement about EU structural funds clearly shows that, in the minds of some European leaders, this so-called “coalition of the willing”, when it is further discussed at European level in September as planned by Paris and Berlin, is meant to become a new version of the former compulsory EU relocation scheme.As soon as Germany’s foreign minister made known his proposal for a “coalition of the willing”, it was dismissed by former Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz. His centre-right ÖVP party being the front-runner to win the election in September, Kurz will probably soon become chancellor again. “The distribution of migrants in Europe has failed,” Kurz said on July 13, “we are once again discussing ideas from 2015 that have long proved impractical.” And he went on to explain that “the order of the day is rather to remove the business case for unscrupulous smugglers and return people after sea rescues to their home or transit countries, as well as creating initiatives for stability and economic development in Africa”, which is exactly what the Visegrád countries have been advocating since the beginning of the current migrant crisis.
In fact, not only would such a scheme take immigration out of the control of participating member states, but the discussions on the subject are sending a new signal to would-be emigrants in Africa and the Middle-East, and also to people smugglers in North Africa, that Europe’s gates are being opened wide once again, thus reinforcing the pull factor created by lenient policies in many European countries – not least in France and Germany, which allow most immigrants to stay and move freely around the Schengen area even after their requests for asylum have been rejected (see here for the figures as of 2018). At a press conference in Helsinki, French interior minister Christophe Castaner himself had to acknowledge that several EU countries fear the proposed voluntary redistribution mechanism will generate a new massive influx of migrants. This impression created by the likes of Maas, Seehofer, Castaner and Macron is further reinforced by the fact that NGO ships are now back in the Mediterranean, trying to force Salvini to reopen Italy’s ports to illegal immigrants, while France and Germany have also been making repeated calls for Italian ports to open up to boats transporting rescued migrants. The Franco-German mechanism which was agreed on in Paris on July 22 is still based on having rescued migrants disembarked in Italian ports and thereafter redistributed among participating countries. Similarly to the now defunct compulsory relocation scheme, the redistribution of migrants would only concern those asylum seekers who are likely to gain refugee status, and who are in fact a small minority of all illegal immigrants trying to cross the Mediterranean. According to the Franco-German plan, the remaining migrants would have to be kept in Italian centres until they could be deported. From the Italian point of view, there is nothing new in that proposal, and such a scheme will probably only increase the pressure on Libyan shores and increase the number of illegal immigrants making it to Europe, as well as the death toll by drowning in the Central Mediterranean.
Italy and Malta came to the summit in Helsinki on July 17–18 with a different proposal. A day after Heiko Maas had first presented his own plan to the German RND media group, namely on July 14, Italy’s foreign minister Esteri Moavero Milanesi described his alternative plan in an interview with Corriere della Sera. What Rome and Valletta proposed was to give people the possibility of applying for refugee status as close as possible to their countries of departure, so that asylum requests could be considered before migrants illegally tried to cross the EU’s external borders. Charter flights would then be organised to safely take to Europe those who really deserved refugee status, thereby weakening the smugglers’ business model and avoiding unnecessary deaths at sea. Since the number of people reaching Europe in such a manner would be smaller and better controlled, a distribution scheme could be more easily agreed among EU member states. For those who nonetheless try to reach Europe illegally by sea, the joint Maltese–Italian plan requires the creation of controlled centres (“hotspots”) in all countries of the EU-28 and common policies to force the countries of departure to take their citizens back. It rejects the idea of having all migrants on the Central Mediterranean route landing in Italy before their relocation to other countries. It also calls for NGO vessels to be kept out of the search & rescue zones of Libya and other third countries.
Salvini to Macron: “Italy will not be France’s refugee camp”
This plan was rejected at Helsinki, as both Germany and France supported Seehofer’s plan. The League’s leader, Matteo Salvini, confirmed in a statement released on the day after a meeting in Helsinki on July 17 between ministers from France, Germany, Italy and Malta that the Franco-German proposal was unacceptable to Italy, as “simply redistributing refugees will leave hard-to-expel illegal immigrants in the first country of arrival”. And while Malta’s Prime Minister Joseph Muscat announced preparations for a new meeting between interior ministers of all four countries in Malta in September, France’s Christophe Castaner announced that he was inviting ministers from the “coalition of the willing” to Paris on July 22 in order to go ahead with the Franco-German scheme.This infuriated Italy’s Matteo Salvini, who refused to take part in the Paris meeting, choosing instead to send a “technical” delegation to block any new joint declaration. On July 19, Salvini wrote his French counterpart a letter in which he expressed his surprise at the fact that only the Franco-German proposal was to be discussed in Paris,pointing out that the Maltese–Italian proposal had “gathered broad support” among EU countries. In that letter, the League’s leader insisted again on the need to review the rules on search and rescue operations in order to put an end to behaviours which encourage illegal and uncontrolled immigration, and to make NGOs comply with both international and national laws. According to Salvini, many at the Justice and Home Affairs Council held in Helsinki had “positions very close to the one expressed by Italy, in particular as regards a strict commitment to a migration policy based on the protection of the EU’s and the Schengen Area’s external borders”.
After the announcement by President Macron of an agreement reached under his auspices and supported by 14 countries (of which only eight, including France, were named and said to be ready to participate “actively”), Italy’s interior minister published a video on his Facebook profile with his own virulent reaction, mocking French leaders and saying directly to Macron, whom he called by his first name, that if he wanted ports open to migrants he should open France’s own ports in Marseilles, Corsica and elsewhere. He added that Italy would not take orders from France and would not be France’s refugee camp, as it is not a French colony.
Italy under pressure from France and Germany to take back illegal immigrants as per the Dublin Regulation
Salvini’s tone was no surprise to observers, who have been witnessing deteriorating relations between France and Italy since those whom the French president contemptuously calls “populists” and “nationalists” formed a coalition government in Rome over a year ago. Salvini’s mockery and verbal attacks have mostly come in response to Macron’s own highly arrogant and undiplomatic criticism of Italy’s leaders, particularly Matteo Salvini, which resembles some of the language he has used against the leaders of Poland and Hungary, as when he publicly asked last autumn in Bratislava: “What are these leaders doing with these crazy minds and lying to their people?”. Salvini’s anger is further fueled by the fact that, while French leaders call for Italy to open its ports to migrants for humanitarian reasons,the French authorities have been enforcing border controls for years between Ventimiglia and Menton on the Mediterranean coast, and they send back illegal immigrants to Italy, including, according to some media reports, when those immigrants are caught at some distance from the Italian border, in which case such ‘hot returns’ are in breach of European rules. The Italians have also accused Germany of breaking the rules when returning migrants to Italy as per the Dublin Regulation (the so-called “Dubliners”). Apart from being asked by Germany and France to reopen its ports to illegal immigrants, as the first country of arrival Italy is under great pressure from other EU member states to take back some 46,000 immigrants. As a consequence of the mass disembarkation which took place under the auspices of Matteo Renzi’s government, the number of asylum seekers sent back to Italy has tripled in just five years, with most of the 188,000 requests for transfer made since 2013 coming from Germany, Switzerland, France and Austria.
To make things worse, on the eve of the Paris meeting of July 22, SOS Méditerranée, an NGO based in the French city of Marseilles, announced the launch of a new joint search and rescue operation together with the Franco-Swiss NGO Doctors Without Borders (MSF), using a new boat said to be larger and faster than the Aquarius, which has remained blocked at the request of Italian prosecutors. The Ocean Viking left the Polish port of Szczecin flying the Norwegian flag and heading towards Libyan shores. SOS Méditerranée and MSF estimate the cost of this operation at around €14,000 per day. In a press release published on July 12, the city of Paris had announced that it would contribute €100,000 to this expensive operation. The grant made by the French capital was announced at the same time as the award of a medal to Carola Rackete and Pia Klemp, two German NGO vessel captains who are facing serious charges in Italy for allegedly aiding illegal immigration, including – in the case of Klemp – through active collusion with smugglers.
France’s responsibility for the situation in Libya
As you may recall, the timeline of the 2008 financial collapse got serious in March 2008, when the Wall Street firm of Bear Stearns started to go under due to mortgage-based securities. The New York Fed tried to bail Bear Stearns out, but it still became insolvent anyway. Then in September 2008, Lehman Brothers started to drown as well. Thinking that the lesson of Bear Stearns was to not throw good money after bad, the authorities let Lehman go under, which then set off global panic.
Interestingly, Jeffrey Epstein may have personally initiated the dominos falling that eventuated in the collapse of Bear Stearns by asking, on April 18, 2007, for his $57 million back from a hyper-leveraged Bear Stearns hedge fund investing in mortgage-based financial gimcrackery.
Oddly, this might be one of the few actions I’ve heard about Epstein that isn’t obviously shady. He probably got the $57 million in the first place in a crooked manner, but he had the right to try to retrieve what was left of his money.
From the New York Times financial section in 2007:
It was just about a year ago that Jeffrey Epstein, the reclusive financier, was being charged with soliciting prostitutes in Palm Beach, Fla. He may now have another image problem on his hands.
BusinessWeek reports that Mr. Epstein’s Virgin Islands-based money-management firm, Financial Trust Company, is listed in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission as a stakeholder in Bear Stearns‘s High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Enhanced Leverage Fund, which became much easier to refer to in recent weeks as “Bear Stearns’ collapsing hedge fund.”
It is a tantalizing nugget of information about someone who rarely discloses anything about his business or his billionaire clients. Despite his penchant for privacy, Mr. Epstein runs in prominent circles: he once flew former President Bill Clinton on his 727.
Regulatory filings show that Mr. Epstein’s firm had voting power over 10 percent of the equity in the Bear Stearns fund, which, aided by loans from some of Wall Street’s biggest banks, bet heavily on the securities linked to the market for subprime mortgages, or those to homeowners with weak credit histories.
As the subprime mortgage market has been rocked by a rise in defaults, many of those bets have gone bad. As of the end of April, the Bear fund was down 23 percent for the year.
Mr. Epstein did not respond to BusinessWeek’s calls, and his lawyer had no comment.
We now know that Epstein had invested $57 million in this Bear Stearns fund run by Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin, two of very few Wall Street executives ever put on criminal trial over The Crash. (They beat the rap.)
After 40 months of positive returns, the sudden and sharp decline in the two hedge funds was new territory for Cioffi and Tannin. They struggled mightily to figure out what to do. On April 18, one of Cioffi’s investors, who had $57 million invested, informed him that he was considering redeeming his money.
The unnamed investor wanting his money back was very likely Jeffrey Epstein.
Cioffi told the investor that the portfolio managers had $8 million of their own money invested, one-third of their liquid net worth. He neglected to tell the investor that he had taken $2 million of his own money out and invested it in his other hedge fund. …
Epstein appears to have been one day ahead of Cioffi and Tannin in figuring out the end was nigh:
[Tannin] went on to wonder whether the funds should be closed or significantly restructured. The argument for closing the funds was based on the market and on a complex internal April 19, CDO report, which was a new analysis that Tannin had recently perused. “If we believe the [new CDO report] is ANYWHERE CLOSE to accurate, I think we should close the funds now. The reason for this is that if [the CDO report] is correct, then the entire subprime market is toast,” wrote Tannin. “If AAA bonds are systematically downgraded, then there is simply no way for us to make money – ever.”
Wikipedia now synthesizes the bits and pieces that have appeared here and there over the years:
In August 2006, Epstein, a month after the federal investigation of him began,[56] invested $57 million in the Bear Stearns High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Enhanced Leverage hedge fund.[55][59] This fund was highly leveraged in mortgage-backed collateralized debt obligations (CDOs).[59] On April 18, 2007, an investor in the fund, who had $57 million invested, discussed redeeming his investment.[60] At this time, the fund had a leverage ratio of 17:1, which meant for every dollar invested there were seventeen dollars of borrowed funds; therefore, the redemption of this investment would have been equivalent to removing $1 billion from the thinly traded CDO market.[61] The selling of CDO assets to meet the redemptions that month began a repricing process and general freeze in the CDO market. The repricing of the CDO assets caused the collapse of the fund three months later in July, and the eventual collapse of Bear Stearns in March 2008. It is likely Epstein lost most of this investment, but it is not known how much was his.[60][59]
By the time that the Bear Stearns fund began to fail in May 2007, Epstein had begun to negotiate a plea deal with the U.S. Attorney’s Office concerning imminent charges for sex with minors.[55][56] In August 2007, a month after the fund collapsed, the U.S. attorney in Miami, Alexander Acosta, entered into direct discussions about the plea agreement.[56] Acosta brokered a lenient deal, according to him, because he had been ordered by higher government officials, who told him that Epstein was an individual of importance to the government.[40] As part of the negotiations, according to the Miami Herald, Epstein provided “unspecified information” to the Florida federal prosecutors for a more lenient sentence and was supposedly an unnamed key witness for the New York federal prosecutors in their unsuccessful June 2008 criminal case against the two managers of the failed Bear Stearns hedge fund. Alan Dershowitz, one of Epstein’s Florida attorneys on the case, told FOX Business “We would have been touting that if he had [cooperated]. The idea that Epstein helped in any prosecution is news to me.”[55][6][62]
Hollywood millionaire Richard Gere has called upon the Italian government to assist migrants who have been stranded on a Spanish charity boat in the Mediterranean for more than a week.
The Italian government needed to stop “demonizing people”, the actor said.
Gere boarded the vessel, which has been blocked from entering Italian waters, on Friday.
Gere, who visited the Open Arms ship in a show of support, also joined a news conference on the Italian island of Lampedusa calling for the migrants to be allowed to dock.
He made comparisons between Salvini, who has made repeated efforts to block migrant ships from docking in Italy, and US President Donald Trump, who has faced widespread criticism for his immigration policies.
“We have our problems with refugees coming from Honduras, Salvador, Nicaragua, Mexico… It’s very similar to what you are going through here”, he said, accusing both politicians of demonizing migrants.
“This has to stop everywhere on this planet now. And it will stop if we say stop”, he added.
It didn’t take Salvini long to respond.
“Given this generous millionaire is voicing concern for the fate of the Open Arms migrants, we thank him: he can take back to Hollywood, on his private plane, all the people aboard and support them in his villas. Thank you Richard!”, he said in a statement. Over the course of a career spanning more than 40 years, Gere, 69, has starred in films including Pretty Woman, American Gigolo and An Officer and a Gentleman.
A campaigner for environmental causes and AIDS awareness, he is also a Buddhist who pays regular visits to Dharamshala, the headquarters of the Tibetan government-in-exile.
Richard Gere is worth an estimated £100million according to the website celebritynetworth.com.
Salvini, whose party made sweeping gains in last year’s Italian general election, has pledged to deport 500,000 migrants by 2023. Earlier this week he tabled a motion of no confidence in his own government, in a bid to force through a snap election and take control from his coalition partners Five Star Movement.
Posted by DanielS on Sunday, 11 August 2019 21:23.
Blacks as a biological weapon of the right
Threat, intimidation, shock and awe, extortion:
Just because public money in the form of Welfare, Foodstamps, Medcaid, Social Security, Government Programs, Scholarships and so on, is not considered “private”, i.e., “their per capita income”, does not mean that black woman have a disadvantaged economic basis, one which is in important ways more secure, not exactly at a disadvantage, in crucial life matters such as the capacity to have children - quite the opposite: they do not have to work and can just take their time and headspace to have children at everyone’s expense, who then register as more “blacks” come black women who have “five dollars a year net worth.”
Ridiculous.
There is also a factor of money that might funnel to them through crime - which might be spun by liberals into an expression of victimization. But if they get away with that additional income, it is not as if their only other recourse was welfare.
Blacks have an advantage when it comes to education through school or college of any kind, public or private.
After their educational advantage, educated black women make more money than White women.
If they do not choose to go to college, or trade school, blacks have a tremendous advantage with government jobs, such as the US Post Office or Public Transit or universities - which offer excellent benefits and retirement plans - if they do care to work. Actually, they have advantage with private business and corporations as well! In a word, what the hell are you talking about when you expect me to feel sorry for these people?
And all many of us White people want to do with them is nothing. We are repulsed from joining these public situations with them knowing that it will lead to straight out lineal extinction, a harrowing nightmare for what White children do survive for a time or Mulatto grandchildren, ultimately.
There is also a factor now of above board wealth among blacks that is not being factored into these statistics parceled out discreetly as ‘black woman poverty’ (which frankly is not my concern anyway).
In addition, there are the intangibles - black solidarity, the taboo and danger of criticizing and discriminating against them - “racism!” - to go along with their warrior gene, high testosterone hyper assertiveness and lack of impulse control that makes them a great weapon of fecundity, disingenuous self righteousness - along with the ever present threat of violence and riot to extort the system - and when you look like many of them do and cannot rise to wealth through protracted intellectual effort, what do you have to lose? - now even seeking reparations for slavery on top of the trillions they’ve already received in a program of White r-p-a-c-m-nt (a word forbidden to be used by us “privileged people”), on behalf of those who would wallpaper over the decency and expense of those offering the coordination of White Left ethnonationalism.
Do you seriously expect me to care about these people who are so destructive to ordinary and working class Whites? These blacks, who Right Wingers brought to bear against us, to the destruction of millions of our loving brothers and sisters, would-be sons and daughters? Whites who are not even allowed to organize in group defense? Not to mention the Caribbean and other Native American Indians.
Blacks know the ropes of the American system and work it much better than other groups, for example, some White peoples who are often more recently immigrated and not powerfully supported as a group by YKW language games.
While right wingers and lucky liberals intermarry with the YKW and continue this pig game…
This is how marginalized White men are made into cows along with the rest of the working/labor surplus world, to pay to make these fat asses even fatter (some now hidden beneath a burka) and more fecund to the detriment of all…to supply their feral sons and their feral black fathers with veritable harems as they go on to impregnate naive Hispanic, Indio and White women..and yes, Asian women too, in order to mix away the would-be left ethnonationalist unions/coalition in favor of one ruler, Abrahams’ favorite sons and daughters.
Stop wallpapering Whites, depicting all White men as powerful, privileged elite. Stop characterizing White right wingers, elite traitors that they are, taking the payoff with “fellow Whites” YKW - the truly organized oppressors - as if they represent us - they do not.
Stop using black biopower, its ugly violent element with nothing to lose, against us to destroy our marginals- who would otherwise begin to help manifest the union bounds that could form coalitions to hold right wing perfidy, betrayal and exploitation to account.
Just like Muslims, many blacks are well suited to be biological weapons of the right wing by nature, and those who seek to bring them to bear against other solidarities/unions, in the name of pity and self righteousness are perpetrating atrocity. Those women who bring them to bear and exploit against other peoples, pretending that it is out of sensitivity and compassion ought rather go and live with them in the societies that stem from their nature.
There has been a ramped-up effort since 2008 to identify White activism with “the right” and to join forces, even to the point of amalgam with YKW against “the left”....but if Non-White left ethnonationalists join forces with the Jewish, anti-White program - that Whites are responsible for the world’s problems - all of them! - to the point of wallpapering over White left ethnonationalism, it will be at the loss of one of their greatest potential allies in staving off their becoming a part of an ongoing disaster of Brazilification, for all its human and other ecological disaster - while these people who you rightfully hate get away with it.
When this tweet speaks of “the socialist party” it is speaking of a party that would not delimit social accountability to native interests first and foremost.
Salvini might have added Trumpstein, Putin and Netanyahu to the list of people not to trust with native European interests.
Related: indigenous tribes of Amazon suited to preserve the forest as they are evolved in harmony.
