Saturday, September 30, 2017

Final Testament

Seeing Clearly,

"We are dying here, and if we don't get the food and water into people's hands, what we are going to see here is something close to genocide."  Carmen Yulin Cruz, Mayor, San Juan Puerto Rico, says with her voice breaking and tears welling up.
Do watch the brief video. This does not look politically motivated. She's painfully speaking her heart, despite her obvious hesitancy to do so.
"Political Attack", tweets POTUS Trump.

Brad Setser's view of the financial position of Puerto Rico and her creditors. Instructive, really...

Puerto Rico is Our Future, Richard Heinberg. Right-On! Heinberg presented an alternative future scenario to Peurto Rican officals in 2013. Now is the right time to enact it. It would mean financial firms like Goldman Sachs lose control of trends and events. (Yeah, prob'ly not yet...)

We are about to see what forced migration from climate disasters looks like in America. It is way different from what economic migrants, with job skills, moving to a market for those skills. How many Katrina refugees do you know? How are they doing for work, compared to wetbacks? (No derogation intended. These are all my patients. I have labored as a wetback in 2 foreign countries, myself.)

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson acknowledged for the first time that the US is in direct communication with the government of North Korea over its missile and nuclear tests... Tillerson is in China on Saturday for what the NYT described as a “brief visit.” ... “We ask, ‘Would you like to talk?’ We have lines of communication to Pyongyang – we’re not in a dark situation, a blackout. We have a couple, three channels open to Pyongyang.” ... When asked whether those channels ran through China, he shook his head. “Directly,” he said. “We have our own channels.”

Battle stations are fully manned in Catalonia, whether by Spanish police, or Catalans in pajamas, trying to keep a school open for tomorrow's vote. Both sides have long overshot any hope for compromise. The question is how severe the crisis will be. There is a lot of hidden money riding on this. People have long been manipulated. There is no fundamental existential crisis, demanding this political crisis. This article shows the dirty laundry and tax-sheltered billions.

Iraqi Kurdish Independence Referendum update and context:
In the mid 1960s and 70s Israel cooperated with Iran, then a U.S. ally under the Shah, to fight against its Arab enemies - Iraq, Syria and Egypt. As part of the cooperation the Mossad sent Lt. Colonel Tzuri Sagi to develop plans for and build up a Kurdish army to fight Iraqi troops in northern Iraq. Tzuri Sagi was also responsible for the Israeli assassination attempts against Saddam Hussein. His Kurdish cooperation partner was the leader of the Barzani clan, Mullah Mustafa Barzani. The Kurdish army the Israelis created is now known as Peshmerga. The son of Mullah Mustafa Barzani, Masoud Barzani, is now the illegitimate president of the Kurdish region of Iraq.

Three Quarters of a Million Humans in Yemen have cholera, some of the worst diarrhea that war and poverty can buy:
The epidemic is the worst of its kind in modern records, and has surpassed the number of cases in Haiti’s epidemic that occurred between 2010 and 2015 in a matter of months. More than half the population lacks access to clean drinking water. These terrible conditions are partly the result of the bombing damage to water and sewage treatment plants. The Hadi government’s decision to move the central bank has also contributed to the collapse in public services.

Paul Craig Roberts explains current US political economy:
What we are witnessing in the United States is the first country to reverse the development process and to go backward by giving up industry, manufacturing, and tradable professional skill jobs.  The labor force is becoming Third World with lowly paid domestic service jobs taking the place of high-productivity, high-value added jobs.

Upon the Next Crisis, the Rules Will Suddenly Change (to benefit elites, not the rest of us) Charles Hugh Smith [Priority #1 is always to expand power and control]

The RepubliTrump tax proposal will reduce federal tax revenues (increase deficit), increase taxes on the middle-class, and mostly benefit the top 1%, precisely as promised (not to you; the other promise.)

David Stockman, who has been through that process, summarizes: "After nine months of work these geniuses have come up with $6 trillion of easy to propose tax rate cuts and virtually no plan whatsoever to pay for them."

Take all of the property in poor countries. Make the people dependent upon your wages and charity to barely survive. Complain about them. (Hey, it's happening here, too!)

Modern Monetary Theory, paying attention to the man behind the curtain... [Hey, this is really clear, no frock-pomp-and-dirge at all!]
"For those seeking a grand, unifying sociopolitical economic theory, MMT will disappoint. But as an analytic tool, MMT clarifies who holds genuine power—sovereignty—within society, and how they organize the money system to serve their interests. Unsurprisingly, this is often a story of tremendous cruelty and exploitation. But the revelation that the rules of money are not immutable laws of nature but are instead created and constantly modified by people opens up possibilities beyond the scope of our current political imagination."

Tropical rain forests take carbon out of the atmosphere, and build it into trees and leaves, except when you log and burn them. 
Tropical forests released as much carbon into the atmosphere last year as all or US transportation. They didn't mean to, and it wasn't their fault...

Expiring

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