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Financial Times ft

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no merri

less punked than a willing tool? well, actually bit better than others

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an 4 26

The Financial Times reported Friday morning that the big banks that Wall Street is betting on are failing in private credit markets. It's something that New Republic writer Logan McMillen is sounding the alarm about because it is the same thing that happened in the 2007 and 2008 global economic collapse.

This week, the Federal Reserve likely freaked out economic experts when it demanded the largest banks "detail their exposure to the opaque, multitrillion-dollar private credit market," said McMillen. "Then, almost simultaneously, word broke that some of those same banks are imminently launching a credit default swap index with S&P Global, targeting that same market."

McMillen cautioned that the U.S.'s macroeconomic program is quickly falling apart under the stress of President Donald Trump's war against Iran, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the rise in inflation.

It comes as the "U.S. Treasury is now desperately trying to finance a $1.9 trillion deficit without a large pool of captive foreign buyers. Trump "failed to prepare" for the crisis. A former Trump strategist told CNN last month that the president thought Iran would be just as easy as Venezuela was.

Nate Swanson, a former Trump staffer and current senior fellow and director of the Iran Strategy Project at The Atlantic Council, assumes that Trump thought the whole operation would be easy and he'd be successful

Trump was coming off a "win" from his June strikes and from capturing Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro. In the past, Trump was able to kill Iranian military officer Qasem Soleimani "with virtually no repercussions," said Swanson.

Trump has done nothing to prepare for the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and worse, he's done nothing to protect the U.S. economy from the ensuing disaster after the bombing began.

"China is dumping U.S. Treasuries at a rate not seen since the Global Financial Crisis, while stalwart buyers like Japan are seeing their bond yield rates creep up to their highest levels in 27 years," said McMillen, explaining it isn't healthy for the macroeconomy.

What happens this weekend might mark a shift that will be felt for at least a year or more "in the form of a liquidity crisis."

"The Fed’s request that major banks detail their exposure to the private credit market should terrify risk assessors. When macroeconomists picked through the rubble of 2008, many landed on the conclusion that there had been a catastrophic mispricing of risk," McMillen said.

Credit rating agencies continued to claim that toxic subprime mortgages were somehow AAA-rated. Regulators in 2008 at the very least knew where the underlying assests were, McMillen explained. That isn't happening with the $2 trillion private credit market. It's a black box hidden in "regulatory shadows to facilitate high-risk corporate loans that traditional banks were forced to abandon after the passage of Dodd-Frank."

A major indicator of danger comes from a March Politicoreport revealing that investors are pulling their money after a "string of blow-ups." At the same time, the world of artificial intelligence has posed a risk to some software companies. So, investors are growing so worried that they're pulling their money out to such an extreme that they hit withdrawal limits.

Those limits on withdrawals "from many of these private funds tell us there’s a bank run taking place behind the velvet ropes, in the VIP section," cautioned McMillen.

So, Wall Street is offering a product for another possible crash. In 2008, credit default swaps" played a significant role in the collapse of the housing market. Now they're being introduced into the $2 trillion market at a time when there is a "liquidity crisis." It's also happening as the Federal Reserve admits it doesn't understand what's going on and has asked banks to detail their exposure to the private credit market. McMillen described it as a kind of "mirror maze of transactions for regulators to navigate."

For about 12 to 18 months in 2007, a small handful of mortgage defaults proved capable of triggering a cascade of multibillion-dollar payouts across the globe." These were after the ABX index (Asset-Backed Securities Index) was created. It was a kind of "synthetic collateralized debt obligation market" that ultimately reached $5 trillion in value. It was just one kind of "credit-default swaps.) Investors were then able to make bets on those investments"without ever owning the underlying asset."

It ultimately led to "a small handful of mortgage defaults ... triggering a cascade of multibillion-dollar payouts across the globe," said McMillen.

Now, the same thing might happen again, only with the private credit market that handles $2 trillion in corporate debt.

"Wall Street is once again seeding flammable barrels of fictitious capital in the financial sector, virtually guaranteeing that if the underlying loans bomb, the blast radius will be much larger than the asset class itself," wrote McMillen.

In 2008, "there was still an 'adult' in the room," he explained. Now, the U.S. is a mess fiscally, and when it comes to foreign relationships, the president isn't winning a lot of friends. Back then, McMillen said that the U.S. had a "clean-enough balance sheet" to navigate the losses and keep things moving.

"Today, U.S. government debt is equal to 122 percent–124 percent of annual gross domestic product," he cautioned. "In the past, this was manageable because the petrodollar paradigm forced the rest of the world to buy U.S. Treasuries. But with the Carter Doctrine scuppered, the Strait of Hormuz closed, and the State Department weaponizing the SWIFT system through sanctions, those once-captive buyers are finally beginning to abandon the U.S. dollar."

It means the U.S. "will be backed into a corner with only a few viable exits." It means the banks would have to be bailed out for the second time in 20 years to prevent a global collapse. The American dollar and credit outlook would be the casualty while everyday people are forced into an "austerity crisis."

"When the domestic economy faced the last crisis of this magnitude, in the late 1970s, Fed Chairman Paul Volcker hiked interest rates, intentionally triggering a recession that broke the back of organized labor. The “Volcker shock” served as the founding act of the bipartisan neoliberal consensus, establishing a macroeconomic and foreign policy paradigm where the U.S. offshored its industrial base and policed maritime shipping lanes in exchange for cheap imports," explained McMillen.

In March, AlterNet wrote about one of Trump's big plans: opening these risky investment markets to anyone who wants to participate using their retirement funds. Now there is a fear that doing so could push markets teetering on the brink over the cliff.

"The Labor Department is planning to roll out a long-awaited proposal that would offer workers invested in retirement products like 401(k)s access to the so-called private markets — a class of highly coveted but risky investments that have historically been walled off from the masses," Politico explained last month.

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comm dr an 5 25

Monday reporting from the Financial Times that U.S. President Donald Trump's family media company "plans to raise $3 billion to buy cryptocurrencies" sparked a fresh wave of alarm over his administration's policies and potential corruption.

After winning a second term last year, the Republican president transferred his stake in Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG)—which is behind the Truth Social platform—to a revocable trust overseen by his son Donald Trump Jr.

Citing six unnamed sources, FT reported that TMTG "aims to raise $2 billion in fresh equity and another $1 billion via a convertible bond," and "also plans to launch an exchange-traded fund focused on cryptocurrency."

According to the newspaper:

TMTG said in a statement that "apparently the Financial Times has dumb writers listening to even dumber sources" but did not comment further. Representatives for Donald Trump Jr. did not respond to requests for comment. A White House spokesperson declined to comment.

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After Reuters also requested comment on the reporting, the news agency noted, TMTG called both Reuters and FT "fake news."

Responding on social media, Elizabeth Sheppard Sellam, director of the politics and international relations program at the University of Tours in France, said that "the most shocking thing is not the project itself, it is who benefits from it: those close to the president, through an opaque structure, and at the heart of the administration."

"The Trump administration has a very strong pro-crypto policy: favorable taxation, favorable regulation, promotion of investments. And meanwhile, his own family is preparing to raise $3 billion to go all-in on bitcoin," she wrote, highlighting Donald Trump Jr.'s role at TMTG.

Sheppard Sellam also noted that both he and the president's second-eldest son, Eric Trump, are set to speak at the Bitcoin 2025 conference, scheduled to start Tuesday in Las Vegas, Nevada. Other planned speakers include Vice President JD Vance, Trump's "Crypto Czar" David Sacks, and various Republicans in Congress.

"Where does politics end and business begin?" the professor asked. "He is a sitting head of state whose immediate entourage is organizing massive financial operations, with a direct effect on the markets... and on their wallets."

Florian Hollenbach, an economist at the Copenhagen Business School in Denmark, simply said, "So much corruption and all out in the open."

The FT reporting came just days after the president dined with the top investors in his meme coin at his Virginia golf club—an event that drew protesters whose chants included: "America's not for sale," "Lock him up," and "Trump is a traitor."

Since returning to the White House in January, Trump has also generated alarm with his crypto executive order. His administration faced further criticism last month for disbanding a U.S. Department of Justice unit tasked with investigating criminal actors in the digital asset space—a decision laid out in a memo authored by the president's former personal defense attorney.

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Financial Times, Reuters Pull Saudi Aramco-sponsored Climate Content  - DeSmog

5 24

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an 1 24

MSNBC's Morning Joe hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski spoke with Financial Times National US Editor Edward Luce Sunday morning about Donald Trump and the Republican Party's commitment to "worship" and model the leadership of autocrat and Hungary Prime Minster Viktor Orbán.

:{:{"This is a guy — Donald Trump — who has promised to terminate the Constitution," Scarborough emphasized. "He said he was going to ban TV networks that he didn't like. He said he was going to execute generals that were insufficiently loyal to him for quote, 'treason', which by the way sounds like the French resolution with a guillotine. They accused everyone of treason and cut their heads off. And then, he talked about a couple weeks ago, how he could kill his political opponents with Seal Team 6, and be immune from all things.}:

... Talks about Viktor Orbán — you understand that a lot of people, maybe on wall street understand what that means — Viktor Orbán has shut down the free press. Viktor Orbán has crushed all political parts. Viktor Orbán is an autocrat who hates western democracy and freedom. and free markets, the way that Wall Street claims to like free markets. You can't make a deal with the devil. You lose every time."}:

Luce replied, "People around Orban, including the local gas man in his village, the guy who does gas connections, have grown rich beyond their wildest fantasies —the billionaires. Those who are in with him get rewarded, and that is how strong men operate. They don't operate according to free market capitalist rules."

Scarborough continued, "And then on the other side of that, people that owned media empires — people that control newspapers, and control TV stations, that were opposed to him — they got charged with crimes, that literally, the value of the company went to zero, and Orbán said I'll buy it from you, you can leave the country, or go to jail. So yeah, the local gas man got rich. People running the free press got thrown in jail. Politicians get run out of country. This is what America faces under a second Donald Trump administration who brags that Orbán is a strong man that he loves, that he is going to be like."

:{:{Luce said, "CPAC [Conservative Political Action Conference], I mean the conservative movement openly adulate Orbán as the model for Trump. This isn't just paying a compliment to an ideological fellow traveler across The Atlantic. It's a much, much more conscious desire to imitate Orban. Orban is what Trump wants to be, punishing business critics, rewarding business friends, a crony system, a patronage based system, in which if you are a friend of Trump, it could become a monopolist.}:

And so I think business leaders — I don't think that [Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of JPMorgan Chase], Jamie Dimon, is a Trumpian. He is actually a registered Democrat, I believe. But I think his ultimate loyalty is to JP Morgan's bottom line. And he knows that if JP Morgan gets out of line under a second Trump administration, which will be far more serious than the first one, then it will get punished. Trump will have no compunction about using the paths of the presidency to award and punish with favors and fines."}:

:{:{Scarborough concluded, "You know, it's amazing, Mika, that the party that I was in, always has talked about personal freedom, personal liberties, talked about small government, take as much money power and authority out of Washington as possible. Get it into local governments. Get it into classrooms. Get it into local police districts. Here you have a Republican party — CPAC — what a joke! Let's not even get started with CPAC. And the Heritage Foundation, what a joke.}:

The RNC [Republican National Committee]. These institutions that used to praise personal liberty, personal freedoms, small government, are all now — as Ed said — they have readjusted, and now they are in support of autocracy. They are in support of a strong man leader. They are in support, the same people who will b**ch and moan about how, 'Oh, the western cannon, and western values are being destroyed, western civilization is at risk!' Those people, now worship — as does Donald Trump — leader of a failed country, who has said that he hates western democracy. says western democracy is dead. He says, 'I'm an illiberal Democrat.' And that's where they've gone.'"}:

Brzezinski added, "Yeah, and if you get what you want, you're not gonna like it."

READ MORE:Trump’s attacks on prosecutors and judges is 'authoritarianism in service of narcissism': legal experts

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CITES ft:

COP 28 12 23

12 23

Biden Pledges $3 Billion To Neocolonialist ‘Green Climate Fund’ (https://thefederalist.com/2023/12/05/biden-administration-pledges-3-billion-to-the-uns-neocolonialist-green-climate-fund/)

pix of poor afr kids]

vice President Kamala Harris announced that the United States will send $3 billion to the “Green Climate Fund,” an organization financed by rich countries committed to keeping underdeveloped countries poor and vulnerable. The announcement was made this week at the United Nations (UN) COP28 climate summit in Dubai. This $3 billion comes in addition to the $2 billion (https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/02/politics/kamala-harris-cop28-saturday/index.html) the U.S. has already contributed to the fund.

The Green Climate Fund (GCF) is a UN organization that claims to promote (https://www.greenclimate.fund/) “climate action in developing countries.” The GCF collects billions of dollars from developed nations and supposedly invests said funds into green energy projects in poor nations. The organization is known for its lack (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.18815) of public transparency, and its higher-ups have been accused (https://www.ft.com/content/d04de053-9b73-4010-b9a5-adcfe12e70ee) of victimizing employees via abuse of power, racism, sexism, harassment, and inappropriate relationships.

But it isn’t just secrecy and alleged workplace harassment that should worry the American taxpayers who are bankrolling and expanding the GCF. Indeed, the GCF is part of a neocolonialist movement to prevent developing countries from using the life-saving fossil fuels the Western world obtained decades ago.

Contrary to what UN climate cultists would have us believe, green energy is unreliable and insufficient (https://thefederalist.com/2022/02/07/how-green-energy-fantasies-have-put-the-world-at-the-brink-of-war/). Additionally, fossil fuels (https://nypost.com/2022/04/30/deaths-in-climate-disasters-declined-99-from-a-century-ago/) improve the lives of billions of people by providing them with heating, air conditioning, weather warning systems, mass irrigation, and durable buildings. It is largely thanks to fossil fuels that climate-related disaster deaths have reduced by 99 percent compared to 100 years ago.

In his 2018 book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change, climatedepot.com (https://www.climatedepot.com/) founder Marc Morano included a speech delivered by South African development activist Leon Louw at the 2011 UN Climate Conference. During his speech, Louw explained how the GCF is hurting the citizens of poor nations. “Government to government aid is a reward for being better than anyone else at causing poverty,” stated Louw. “It enriches the people who cause poverty. … The UN is saying to poor countries: ‘Those of you who adopt more anti-prosperity, anti-jobs, and anti-growth policies—under the pretense of environmentalism—we will enrich you.’”

According to Louw, crooked leaders in Third World countries, who are supposed to be investing in green energy projects, instead often spend the funds “on themselves, meaning various government projects, creating bigger departments—bigger bureaucracies, it’s called big bureaucratic capture. They build empires, they build conference centers, and they buy political support. They go and distribute the money to communities where they want support and votes.”

“Climate policies have a cost, and these predominantly hurt the poor,” explained Danish political scientist and statistician Bjørn Lomborg in Morano’s book. “So in choosing to spend that $10 billion on renewables, we deliberately end up choosing to leave more than 70 million people in darkness and poverty.”

The UN doesn’t just promote pointless green energy projects and corrupt politicians. Western nations, including the U.S., collectively and purposely conspire to squash fossil fuel energy projects in developing nations. For instance, during the UN’s COP26 (https://unfccc.int/news/end-of-coal-in-sight-at-cop26) conference, 25 wealthy nations pledged (https://theconversation.com/why-banning-financing-for-fossil-fuel-projects-in-africa-isnt-a-climate-solution-169220) to either stop or radically limit financial support for international fossil fuel projects.

Eco-Imperialists Say ‘Let Them Eat Cake’

In his book, Morano recounted how, at the 2002 UN Earth Summit, he asked then-Democratic California governor Jerry Brown if he thought citizens from poor nations did not want to develop economically. Brown responded, “Many do, but it’s not viable … the developed model cannot work without another five planets.”

Likewise, in 2013, then-President Barack Obama told (https://nypost.com/2013/07/03/africa-boiling-over/) a group of young African leaders during a town hall in South Africa that “If everybody is raising living standards to the point where everybody has got a car and everybody has got air conditioning, and everybody has got a big house, well, the planet will boil over — unless we find new ways of producing energy.”

In other words, rich, eco-imperialist countries, like the U.S., have decided poor nations are not allowed to increase their quality of life. “The developed world is denying a ​​billion people of color in the developing world—Asia, Africa, South America—the coal, natural gas, and other carbon-based energy that they need to pull themselves up out of dire poverty, as the wealthy Western world has already done,” wrote Morano. “There is an unmistakable racial component to this: black and brown people are essentially being told they can never be allowed to have the same standard of living [] the predominantly white Western world has enjoyed since the industrial revolution.”

The consequences of green colonialism are dire. “Only one in three Africans has access to electricity,” reports the World Bank (https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/712791468194329656/pdf/769910WP0SDS0Energy0Box374393B00PUBLIC0.pdf), and the limited available electricity tends to be unreliable. In Sub-Saharan Africa, “31 out of 49 countries experience daily power outages.” Meanwhile, the life expectancy in Africa is generally around a decade shorter (https://www.statista.com/statistics/274511/life-expectancy-in-africa/) than in the rest of the world. “No number of solar panels on top of huts made of animal dung is a long-term solution for grinding poverty,” Morano pointed out. “A simple fact needs to be recognized: carbon-based energy has been one of the greatest liberators of mankind.”

Alex Epstein, author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuelsand Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas – Not Less, has spent his career explaining how fossil fuels are largely responsible (https://clips.cato.org/sites/default/files/EpsteinWUWTFossilFuels.pdf) for the developed world’s lower poverty rates, longer life expectancies, and lower infant mortality rates. As Epstein wrote in his book, thanks to fossil fuels, “We don’t take a safe environment and make it dangerous; we take a dangerous environment and make it far safer.”

Not only do COP28 attendees not care about the inhabitants of poor nations, but they also clearly do not care about the environment. By promoting poverty in poor countries, the UN is actively harming (https://thefederalist.com/2022/11/29/marc-morano-the-un-climate-summit-was-actually-the-china-empowerment-summit/) the earth because wealthier nations are proven to have cleaner environments and put less strain on natural resources. Moreover, the world’s wealthiest (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/20/richest-1-account-for-more-carbon-emissions-than-poorest-66-report-says) 1 percent account for more carbon emissions than the poorest 66 percent. So, if Kamala Harris and everyone at COP28 actually cared about the planet, they would show it by amending their own behavior. (Perhaps they begin by canceling all future UN climate summits, which attendees travel to every year on private jets (https://reason.com/2023/12/04/private-jets-to-the-climate-conference/)).

“This is an administration that brags about equity,” Morano told The Federalist, pointing out the hypocrisy of the “equitable” Biden administration preventing poor countries from benefiting off the fossil fuel energy production we enjoy here in the U.S. “What these poor nations need is free markets, innovation, economic growth, and infrastructure,” Morano added. “They don’t need handouts from people who say, ‘Hey, don’t make the ‘mistakes’ we did as we live our lavish lifestyle.’”

Evita Duffy-Alfonso is a staff writer to The Federalist and the co-founder of the Chicago Thinker. She loves the Midwest, lumberjack sports, writing, and her family. Follow her on Twitter at @evitaduffy_1 or contact her at evita@thefederalist.com.

arctic heating #X fast?! disrupts strato --> eu heat wave?

https://www.alternet.org/2022/07/greenland-lost-ice-three-days/

FT 7 22 how is the jet stream connected to simultaneous heatwaves across the globe?

Scientists are racing to understand the changing shape of the air currents

FT 7 22 grab

deadly heatwaves that have fuelled blazes and caused transport disruptions in Europe, the US and China this month have one thing in common: a peculiar shape in the jet stream dubbed “wavenumber 5”.

Scientists are racing to understand whether the band of fast-moving air that controls weather in the mid-latitudes is changing in a way that makes heatwaves more frequent and persistent.

“The jet stream is the leading driver of our weather,” explains Paul Williams, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Reading. “The jet stream is like a conveyor belt, delivering storms to us one after the other.”

It can also generate heatwaves when it forms into a U-bend shape, called an “omega block” because it resembles the shape of the Greek letter omega.

Right now, a global pattern of five big waves is circling the world, leading to simultaneous heatwaves across continents. This pattern, known as wavenumber 5, can persist for weeks, causing hot areas to stay hot for a long time.

In China, more than 900m people are experiencing heatwaves, and more than 70 weather stations have broken records this month. In the US, Texas and Oklahoma are experiencing record-high daily temperatures, and more than 20 states have issued heat warnings.

The UK also recorded its highest-ever temperature this week — 40.3C — while France and Spain have been battling wildfires after an extreme heatwave that has lasted for weeks and set temperature records.

“As often happens in the atmosphere, it is connected: if we see an extreme event in one place, it can be connected to extreme events in another,” says Stephen Belcher, chief scientist at the UK Met Office. “The Met Office forecasters are looking very, very closely at this wavenumber 5 pattern to see how long it persists,” he added.

Belcher says three factors contributed to the heatwave over Europe: the wavenumber 5 pattern in the jet stream; the increase in global average temperatures; and the dry soils, particularly around the Mediterranean, resulting from prolonged hot weather.

Dim Coumou, a climate scientist at VU Amsterdam, says there are two important patterns in the jet stream in summer — with five waves, or with seven waves — that tend to remain in the same place when they form. “If such wave patterns become stagnant and persist over longer periods, then we typically see simultaneous heatwaves.”

A growing body of research is trying to answer the question of how exactly the jet stream is being changed by global warming and what this means for future weather patterns. Temperatures have already risen by about 1.1C since pre-industrial times due to human activity.

The jet stream itself appears to be changing its behaviour over the long term and slowing down in summer — which can make the “omega block” pattern more likely.

Jennifer Francis, an atmospheric scientist at Woodwell Climate Research Center, says the rapid warming of the Arctic region appears to be the cause of this slowdown.

“There is a general decrease in the winds in summer,” says Francis. “The reason there is a jet stream at all, is because it is cold to the north, and warm to the south, and that temperature difference creates [the condition for the jet stream],” she said.

Because the Arctic is warming much faster than the rest of the planet, there is less temperature difference between those air masses now.

Some of the jet stream behaviour is still unexplained: “Over the Atlantic, the jet has shifted south in summer,” says Tim Woollings, author of Jet Stream and professor of atmospheric physics at Oxford. “Whereas we were expecting it to shift north in response to climate change.”

The heatwave that the UK recently experienced is “just a little taster” of what the rest of Europe experienced, says Woollings. “The real event is over Spain and France,” he says.

Recommended

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The UK experienced two days of extremely high temperatures on Monday and Tuesday before the weather cooled off; Spain and France have seen elevated temperatures for weeks.

As global average temperatures increase, climate models show that heatwaves will get hotter. However, it could be years before researchers know precisely how global warming is influencing these patterns of the jet stream.

“We need a very long record of observation,” says Williams. “It might be decades, or even a century, before we convincingly detect any changes.”

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420

a bunch like this: including game-over libtard cf nial f

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/the-failures-and-inadequacies-of-neoliberalism-are-now-on-stark-display/

no lnx

The failures and inadequacies of neoliberalism are now on stark display

Written by Subin Dennis / Independent Media Institute April 10, 2020

It is a sign of how bad things are when the editorial board of the Financial Times, the world’s leading business newspaper, carries an editorial calling for “radical reforms… reversing the prevailing policy direction of the last four decades.” The FT editorial of April 3 has advocated, among other things, a more active role for governments in the economy, ways to make labor markets less insecure, and wealth taxes. The FT’s editorial board, increasingly concerned about saving capitalism from itself, had written about the need for “state planning” and a “worker-led economy” last year in August. But the April 3 editorial has garnered much more attention since it comes amidst a massive crisis.

By now it has become obvious that substantial state intervention in the economy—frowned upon by the apostles of neoliberal economics—is back to the center stage across the world.

The situation is such that the public sector, long maligned by neoliberal economists and weakened by governments beholden to neoliberalism, is playing a major role in the fight against coronavirus. Its role would have been much more effective and wide-ranging if it hadn’t been hit hard by decades of fund cuts and waves of privatization. Nevertheless, with the ineffectiveness of private production with profit motive as its driving force to handle a crisis becoming more evident, the public sector, production with state direction, and some amount of planning are making a major comeback.

Public Health Care

The case of the sectors that are directly concerned with health care provision is the most conspicuous, with the inadequacies of private health care during a crisis becoming evident to even right-wing leaders.

We see Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister of the UK, repeatedly talking about the need to protect the National Health Service (Britain’s publicly funded health care system). He even said, “there really is such a thing as society,” contradicting Margaret Thatcher, his conservative predecessor who batted for pure individualism in 1987 by saying “There is no such thing as society.”

Britain and many other countries in Western Europe have had relatively robust public health care systems. In many of these countries, such as Italy, Spain and the UK, public health care systems have suffered in recent years because of fund cuts and privatization of public facilities. Apart from the policy vision of the leaders of these countries themselves, they also came under pressure from the technocrats of the European Commission, who repeatedly demanded spending cuts on health care. Along with the easy-going attitude displayed by many of the Western governments in the early weeks of the coronavirus outbreak, such weakening of the public health care systems have made their response to the coronavirus outbreak a more arduous task. For now, the governments of Spain and Ireland have temporarily taken over their private hospitals to deal with the crisis.

The case of the United States, with its private, insurance-based health care system, is far worse.Not only was a sufficient number of testing kits unavailable in the United States for months, but the costs of testing and treatment remain prohibitive for a large section of the population, particularly to the 30 million uninsured and 44 million underinsured. This means that many people simply wouldn’t be able to afford to get tested and treated, endangering the health and lives of themselves and others.

The difference between the United States on the one hand, and China and South Korea on the other, comes readily into the picture here. Testing and treatment for coronavirus is free in China, which was crucial in the country’s success in bringing the epidemic under control. South Korea has done extensive testing, which was made available for free. Treatment costs were covered by the government and the insurance companies.

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AN

http://www.alternet.org/environment/:{exxon-using-tobaccos-failed-free-speech-defense-decades-deception-climate-change}:

The past week has seen a barrage of opinion pieces carrying water for the fossil fuel industry, defending against the ongoing fraud investigations. The Washington Post had two pieces, Newsweek had one and the Financial Times had an editorial, in addition to op-eds in a couple of other conservative outlets. Of those six, half were penned by groups funded at least in part by fossil fuel companies.

The arguments are all by and large the same, claiming that the investigations infringe on fossil fuels companies’ right to free speech while steadfastly ignoring the fact that ExxonMobil funded climate denial to protect their business model. Only the Financial Times editorial actually acknowledges the “misleading claims from fossil fuel interests and their allies” but concludes that it is “because the stakes [of the debate] are so high that all arguments must be heard.” While that sounds fair at first Glantz, it quickly sounds silly when applied to a recent example: the tobacco industry’s denial of the fact that its carcinogenic product is addictive.

All but one of the pieces similarly ignored the tobacco industry precedent and the only person who mentioned it was one of the few voices not plugged into the professional denial apparatus.

As for the pros, Newsweek ran a blog post from the Hoover Institution, which rambled on about climate science that’s supposedly still uncertain, lamenting that fair debate is impossible if one side can bring the other to court. Not mentioned is how a fair debate can be possible if one side launches multi-million dollar PR campaigns to mislead the public about the science.

Feds Refer Exxon #Climate Investigation to FBI: https://t.co/MS5BfY7PNp via @EcoWatch pic.twitter.com/mBWybUPmVb

— DeSmogBlog (@DeSmogBlog) March 7, 2016

Heritage’s Hans von Spakovsky’s piece in the Washington Times misses the tobacco precedent, but went all the way back to the Spanish Inquisition for his First Amendment fear mongering.George Will used his column in the Washington Post to offer a lesson on how this campaign is part of a larger progressive strategy to shut down debate. But apparently it’s Will that needs a history lesson, as he uses as evidence a story about a 2013 IRS investigation accusing the agency of targeting conservatives. But that investigation “found no evidence” that the IRS actions were politically motivated. No doubt his column is similarly bereft of evidence.

The Washington Post also gave space to the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) to defend itself by pretending it is being investigated for political dissent, not its years of Exxon funding for climate denial. Worth noting CEI’s careful phrasing about its relationship with Exxon, which CEI says “publicly ended its support for us after 2005.” With Donors Trust and others making it possible to anonymize giving, the key word is “publicly.”

Ironically, despite the admission that its Exxon funding is a perfectly legitimate reason to look into its communications, CEI considers its subpoena to be a fishing expedition. Meanwhile, CEI’s own coal-funded Chris Horner continues to engage in nuisance FOIAs for climate scientists.

Exxon’s defense is a hot topic in denierland, as it advances the narrative that the fossil fuel industry is an embattled population facing government persecution. But here’s a reality check: Before Honduran activist Berta Cáceres was murdered on March 2, she reported receiving 33 death threats after years of intimidation. Instead of investigating a man who had previously bragged about his plans to murder her, authorities claim the prime suspects are two of her fellow activists.

Heartbreaking! @GoldmanPrize Activist Berta Cáceres Murdered in Honduras https://t.co/Zj97cmwQi3 @FoEint @greenpeace pic.twitter.com/tAujvEGtMR

— EcoWatch (@EcoWatch) March 3, 2016

Looks like the fossil fuel industry isn’t the one facing persecution after all.

https://fair.org/home/venezuela-coverage-takes-us-back-to-golden-age-of-lying-about-latin-america/

no lnx pix many

FEBRUARY 22, 2019

Venezuela Coverage Takes Us Back to Golden Age of Lying About Latin America

MARK COOK

Crowd in support of the elected Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro

Venezuelan pharmacy

Venezuelan pharmacy at a time when Time (5/19/16) was telling readers, “Basic medicines like aspirin are nowhere to be found” in Venezuela.

I was sitting in my apartment in Caracas, Venezuela, reading the online edition of Time magazine (5/19/16), which carried a report that there was not even something as basic as aspirin to be found anywhere in Venezuela: “Basic medicines like aspirin are nowhere to be found.”

I walked out of the apartment to the nearest pharmacy, four blocks away, where I found plenty of aspirin, as well as acetaminophen (generic Tylenol) and ibuprofen (generic Advil), in a well-stocked pharmacy with a knowledgeable professional staff that would be the envy of any US drugstore.

A few days after the Time story, CNBC (6/22/16) carried a claim that there was no acetaminophen to be found anywhere, either: “Basic things like Tylenol aren’t even available.” That must have taken the Pfizer Corporation by surprise, since it was their Venezuelan subsidiary, Pfizer Venezuela SA, which produced the acetaminophen I purchased. (Neither Time writer Ian Bremer nor CNBC commentator Richard Washington was in Venezuela, and there was no evidence offered that either of them had ever been there.)

I purchased all three products, plus cough syrup and other over-the-counter medications, because I doubted that anyone in the United States would believe me if I couldn’t produce the medications in their packages.

Unrelenting drumbeat of lies

Venezuelan Youth Orchestra in New York City, 2016

In fact, I myself wouldn’t have believed anyone who made such claims without being able to produce the proof, so intense and unrelenting has been the drumbeat of lies. When the Youth Orchestra of Venezuela gave a concert in New York in early 2016, before I moved to Caracas, I went there thinking, “Gee, I hope that the members of the orchestra are all well-dressed and well-fed.” Yes, of course they were all well-dressed and well-fed!

When I mentioned this in a talk at the University of Vermont, a student told me that he’d had the same feeling when he was following the Pan American soccer championship. He wondered if the Venezuelan players would be able to play, because they’d be so weakened from lack of food. In fact, he said, the Venezuelan team played superbly, and went much further in the competition than expected, since Venezuela has historically been a baseball country, unlike its soccer-obsessed neighbors Brazil and Colombia.

Hard as it may be for followers of the US media to believe, Venezuela is a country where people play sports, go to work, go to classes, go to the beach, go to restaurants and attend concerts. They publish and read newspapers of all political stripes, from right to center-right, to center, to center-left, to left. They produce and watch programs on television, on TV channels that are also of all political stripes.

Chavismo supporters

Supporters of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro (photo: TeleSur)

CNN was ridiculed recently (Redacted Tonight, 2/1/19) when it carried a report on Venezuela, “in the socialist utopia that now leaves virtually every stomach empty,” followed immediately with a cut to a demonstration by the right-wing opposition, where everybody appeared to be quite well-fed.

But surely that’s because most of the anti-government demonstrators were upper-middle class, a viewer might think. The proletarians at pro-government demonstrations must be suffering severe hunger.

Not if one consults photos of the massive pro-government demonstration on February 2, where people seemed to be doing pretty well. This is in spite of the Trump administration’s extreme economic squeeze on the country, reminiscent of the “make the economy scream” strategy used by the Nixon administration and the CIA against the democratic government of President Salvador Allende in Chile, as well as many other democratically elected governments.

Rival demonstrations

Ultimas Noticias: Capriles: Partidos no apoyaban autojuramentación de Guaidó

Últimas Noticias on Twitter (2/1/19): “Capriles: The Parties Weren’t Supporting the Auto-Inauguration of Guaidó”

That demonstration showed considerable support for the government of President Nicolás Maduro and widespread rejection of Donald Trump’s choice for president of Venezuela, Juan Guaidó.Guaidó, who proclaimed himself to be president of the country and was recognized minutes later by Trump, even though a public opinion poll showed that 81 percent of Venezuelans had never heard of him, comes from the ultra-right faction in Venezuelan politics.

The pro-Maduro demonstration suggested, not surprisingly, that Guaidó had failed to win much popular support outside the wealthy and upper-middle class. But Guaidó couldn’t even win support from many of them. The day before rival rallies February 2, Henrique Capriles, the leader of a less extreme right-wing faction, gave an interview to the AFP that appeared in Últimas Noticias (2/1/19), the most widely read newspaper in Venezuela. In it, Capriles said that most of the opposition had not supported Guaidó’s self-proclamation as president. That may explain the surprisingly weak turnout at Guaidó’s demonstration, held in the wealthiest district of Caracas, and obviously outshone by the pro-government demonstration on the city’s main boulevard.

The New York Times did not show pictures of that pro-government demonstration, limiting itself to a claim by unnamed “experts” (2/2/19) that the pro-government demonstration was smaller than the anti-government one.

Readers can look at the photos of the rival demonstrations and judge for themselves. Both groups did their best to pull out their faithful, knowing how much is riding on a show of popular support. The stridently right-wing opposition paper El Nacional (2/3/19) carried a photo of the right-wing opposition demonstration:

El Nacional Front Page

If that was the best photo it could find, it was remarkably unimpressive compared to the photos in the left-wing papers CCS (2/2/19)….

CCS Article on Maduro speaking to crowd

…and Correo del Orinoco  (2/3/19), which were only too happy to publish pictures of the pro-government event:

Correo del Orinoco front page

Unlikely humanitarian

A huge anti-government demonstration was supposed to make possible a coup d’état, a maneuver the CIA has used repeatedly—in Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Brazil in 1964 and many more, straight through to Honduras in 2009 and Ukraine in 2015. The turnout at the Trump administration’s demonstration was disappointing, and the coup d’état never occurred. The result is that Trump has expressed a sudden interest in getting food and medicine to Venezuelans (FAIR.org, 2/9/19).

Trump, who let thousands die in Puerto Rico and put small children in cages on the Mexican border, seems to be an unlikely champion of humanitarian aid to Latin Americans, but the corporate media have straight-facedly pretended to believe it.

CBC: How a bridge between Colombia and Venezuela became part of a propaganda fight

The CBC (2/15/19) acknowledged that the bridge depicted as being blocked to humanitarian aid has in fact never been opened.

Most have suppressed reports that the Red Cross and the UN are providing aid to Venezuela in cooperation with the Venezuelan government, and have protested against US “aid” that is obviously a political and military ploy.

The corporate media have continued to peddle the Trump-as-humanitarian-champion line, even after it was revealed that a US plane was caught smuggling weapons into Venezuela, and even after Trump named Iran/Contra criminal Elliott Abrams to head up Venezuelan operations. Abrams was in charge of the State Department Human Rights Office during the 1980s, when weapons to US-backed terrorists in Nicaragua were shipped in US planes disguised as “humanitarian” relief.

Canada’s CBC(2/15/19) at least had the honesty to acknowledge that it had been had in swallowing a lie from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that the Venezuelan government had blockaded a bridge between Colombia and Venezuela to prevent aid shipments. The newly built bridge has not yet been opened: it has never been open, apparently because of hostile relations between the two countries, but the non-opening long predates the US government’s alleged food and medicine shipments.

The absurdity of $20 million of US food and medicine aid to a country of 30 million, when US authorities have stolen $30 billion from Venezuela in oil revenue, and take $30 million every day, needs no comment.

‘Failed state’

Financial Times: Venezuela Risks a Descent Into Chaos

The Financial Times (4/11/16) reported in 2016 that Venezuela was a “failed state,” “pure chaos” with “something akin to a civil war going on.”

The campaign of disinformation and outright lies about Venezuela was kicked off in 2016 by the Financial Times. Ironically, it chose the 14th anniversary of the 2002 failed coup d’etat against President Hugo Chávez—April 11, 2016—to claim that Venezuela was in “chaos” and “civil war,” and that Venezuela was a “failed state.” As with the Time and CNBC reports, the Financial Times reporter was not in Venezuela, and there was no evidence in the report that he had ever been there.

I asked right-wing friends in Venezuela whether they agreed with the Financial Times claims. “Well, no, of course not,” said one, stating the obvious, “there is no chaos and no civil war. But Venezuela is a failed state, since it has not been able to provide for all the medical needs of the population.” By that standard, every country in Latin America is a failed state, and obviously the United States too.

The New York Times has run stories (5/15/16, 10/1/16) claiming that conditions in Venezuelan hospitals are horrendous. The reports enraged Colombians in New York, who have noted that a patient can die on the doorstep of a Colombian public hospital if the patient has no insurance. In Venezuela, in contrast, patients are treated for free.

One Colombian resident in New York said that his mother had recently returned to Bogotá after several years in the United States, and had not had time to obtain medical insurance. She fell ill, and went to a public hospital. The hospital left her in the waiting room for four hours, then sent her to a second hospital. The second hospital did the same, leaving her for four hours and then sending her to a third hospital. The third hospital was preparing to send her to a fourth when she protested that she was bleeding internally and was feeling weak.

“I’m sorry, Señora, if you don’t have medical insurance, no public hospital in this country will look at you,” said the woman at the desk. “Your only hope is to go to a private hospital, but be prepared to pay a great deal of money up front.” Luckily, she had a wealthy friend, who took her to a private hospital, and paid a great deal of money up front.

Such conditions in Colombia and other neoliberal states go unmentioned in the US corporate media, which have treated the Colombian government, long a right-wing murder-squad regime, as a US ally (Extra!, 2/09).

You Tube: Por Culpa de Chavez

“Latin American Juvenile Cardiac Hospital, Caracas: It’s Chávez’s Fault!” (YouTube, 3/31/11)

Well, OK, but are the reports of conditions in Venezuelan hospitals true or grossly exaggerated? “They are much better than they were ten years ago,” said a friend who works in a Caracas hospital. In fact, he said, ten years before, the hospital where he worked did not exist, and new hospitals are now being opened. One was dedicated recently in the town of El Furrial, and another was opened in El Vigia, as reported by the centrist newspaper Últimas Noticias (3/3/17, 4/27/18).  The government has also greatly expanded others, like a burn center in Caracas and three new operating rooms at the hospital in Villa Cura.

Meanwhile, the government is inaugurating a new high-speed train line,The Dream of Hugo Chávez, in March (Correo del Orinoco, 2/6/19). Since the US media have never allowed reporting on any accomplishments in the years since  Chávez took office in 1999, but only any alleged, exaggerated or, as noted, completely invented shortcomings, readers have to consult an alternative history. Here is one offered by a Venezuelan on YouTube (3/31/11): “Por Culpa de Chávez” (“It’s Chávez’s Fault”). Depicting new hospitals, transit lines, housing, factories and so on built under Chavismo, it might help many understand why the Maduro government continues to enjoy such strong backing from so many people.

Economic warfare

This is not to minimize Venezuela’s problems. The country was hit, like other oil-producing countries, and as it was in the 1980s and ’90s, by the collapse of oil prices. That failed to bring down the government, so now the Trump administration has created an artificial crisis by using extreme economic warfare to deprive the country of foreign exchange needed to import basic necessities.  The Trump measures seem designed to prevent any economic recovery.

Like any country at war (and the Trump administration has placed Venezuela under wartime conditions, and is threatening immediate invasion), there have been shortages, and products that can mostly be found on the black market. This should surprise no one: During World War II in the US, a cornucopia of a country not seriously threatened with invasion, there was strict rationing of products like sugar, coffee and rubber.

The Venezuelan government has made food, medicine and pharmaceuticals available at extremely low prices, but much of the merchandise has made its way to the black market, or over the border to Colombia, depriving Venezuelans of supplies and ruining Colombian producers. The government recently abandoned some of the heavy price subsidies, which resulted initially in higher prices. Over the past few weeks, prices have been coming down as supplies stayed in Venezuela, especially as the government gained greater control over the Colombian border to prevent smuggling.

There has never been a serious discussion of any of this in the US corporate media, much less any discussion of the campaign of lies or the Trump administration warfare. There has been no comparison with conditions in the 1980s and ’90s, when Venezuela’s neoliberal government imposed IMF economic recipes, resulting in a popular rebellion, the bloody 1989 Caracazo, when wholesale government repression took the lives of hundreds (according to the government at the time) or thousands (according to government critics), and martial law took the lives of many more.

Efforts by the right-wing opposition to provoke a similar uprising, and another Caracazo that could justify a foreign “humanitarian intervention,” have failed repeatedly. So the US administration and corporate media simply resort to the most extreme lying about Latin America that has been seen since the Reagan administration wars of the 1980s.

==

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sw

The Financial Times

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Accessed July 2010: [1]

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URL: http://www.ft.com/home/uk

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  1. ↑ Directors, The Financial Times, accessed July 18, 2010.

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Niall Ferguson, MA, D.Phil., "is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and William Ziegler Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He is also a Senior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford University, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

"Born in Glasgow in 1964, he was a Demy at Magdalen College and graduated with First Class Honours in 1985. After two years as a Hanseatic Scholar in Hamburg and Berlin, he took up a Research Fellowship at Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1989, subsequently moving to a Lectureship at Peterhouse. He returned to Oxford in 1992 to become Fellow and Tutor in Modern History at Jesus College, a post he held until 2000, when he was appointed Professor of Political and Financial History at Oxford. Two years later he left for the United States to take up the Herzog Chair in Financial History at the Stern Business School, New York University, before moving to Harvard in 2004.

"His first book, Paper and Iron: Hamburg Business and German Politics in the Era of Inflation 1897-1927 (Cambridge University Press, 1995), was short-listed for the History Today Book of the Year award, while the collection of essays he edited, Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (Macmillan, 1997), was a UK bestseller and subsequently published in the United States, Germany, Spain and elsewhere.

"In 1998 he published to international critical acclaim The Pity of War: Explaining World War One (Basic Books) and The World’s Banker: The History of the House of Rothschild (Penguin). The latter won the Wadsworth Prize for Business History and was also short-listed for the Jewish Quarterly/Wingate Literary Award and the American National Jewish Book Award. In 2001 he published The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700-2000 (Basic), following a year as Houblon-Norman Fellow at the Bank of England.

"He is a regular contributor to television and radio on both sides of the Atlantic. In 2003 he wrote and presented a six-part history of the British Empire for Channel 4, the UK terrestrial broadcaster. The accompanying book, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (Basic), was a bestseller in both Britain and the United States. The sequel, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire, was published in 2004 by Penguin. His latest book is The War of the World: Twentieth Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, which was published to critical acclaim in September 2006. He is currently completing a biography of Siegmund Warburg and has recently begun researching the life of Henry Kissinger.

"A prolific commentator on contemporary politics and economics, Niall Ferguson writes and reviews regularly for the British and American press. He is a contributing editor for the Financial Times. In 2004 Time magazine named him as one of the world’s hundred most influential people.

"He and his wife Susan have three children. They divide their time between the United States and the United Kingdom." [1]

Ferguson compares climate change to eugenics in his new C4 series "Civilization"[2]

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His Website is http://www.niallferguson.com

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http://harvardmagazine.com/2007/05/the-global-empire-of-nia.html

References

  1. ↑ Biography, Niall Ferguson, accessed April 23, 2009.
  2. ↑ "[1]"
  3. ↑ "[2]"

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