Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Trump pick for trade rep is….
President-elect Donald Trump has named Robert Lighthizer, a lawyer and a trade official during the Reagan administration, to be U.S. trade representative. …read more
Source: Trump pick for trade rep is….
In 7th Year Of Austerity, Greek Hospitals Have Become "Danger Zones"
By Tyler Durden
It is not a secret and it is not new that public hospitals in Greece collapsed. As Keep TalkingGreece.com notes, the first budget cuts imposed with the first bailout agreement affected the public health. Seven years later, the situation goes from bad to worse in fast speed. The austerity freezing of hiring (1:7) ended up in severe shortages in medical and paramedical personnel. The sharp expenditure cuts deprive hospitals of spare parts and essential material. KTG reported many times in the past about the situation in Greece’s hospitals, the deficiencies in personnel and material, incl bed sheets, the never ending bureaucracy.
Now doctors and workers at the public hospitals mention a new phenomenon: the increasing risk of death due to inner-hospital infections.
Speaking to UK’s Guardian about the Greek public health meltdown, doctors and personnel say that hospitals have become “danger zones”.
Alexis Tsipras’s austerity drive has seen hospitals become ‘danger zones’, doctors say, with many fearing worse is to come.
“In the name of tough fiscal targets, people who might otherwise survive are dying,” said Michalis Giannakos who heads the Panhellenic Federation of Public Hospital Employees. “Our hospitals have become danger zones.”
“Frequently, patients are placed on beds that have not been disinfected. Staff are so overworked they don’t have time to wash their hands and often there is no antiseptic soap anyway.”
The report speaks of “rising mortality rates, an increase in life-threatening infections and a shortage of staff and medical equipment are crippling Greece’s health system as the country’s dogged pursuit of austerity hammers the weakest in society”.
In the name of tough fiscal targets, people who might otherwise survive are dying,” said Michalis Giannakos who heads the Panhellenic Federation of Public Hospital Employees. “Our hospitals have become danger zones.”
Figures released by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control recently revealed that about 10% of patients in Greece were at risk of developing potentially fatal hospital infections, with an estimated 3,000 deaths attributed to them.
The occurrence rate was dramatically higher in intensive care units and neonatal wards, the body said. Although the data referred to outbreaks between 2011 and 2012 – the last official figures available – Giannakos said the problem had only got worse.
Like other medics who have worked in the Greek national health system since its establishment in 1983, the union chief blamed lack of personnel, inadequate sanitation and absence of cleaning products for the problems. Cutbacks had been exacerbated by overuse of antibiotics, he said.
“For every 40 patients there is just one nurse,” he said, mentioning the case of an otherwise healthy woman who died last month after a routine leg operation in a public hospital on Zakynthos. “Cuts are such that even in intensive care units we have lost 150 beds.”
Why The Italian Government Can’t Stop Refugee-Smuggling Boats? Because It Doesn’t Want To
By Tyler Durden
The rule of law is often invoked by as a Western value that “populist” movements want to destroy, yet the establishment’s own governments have long suspended that very same rule of law when it comes to immigration. The most evident example of this is the immigration policy started by the Italian Letta government in 2013 and continued since then under the Renzi government.
In October 2013, the Letta government, facing waves of refugees escaping the chaos of Western backed-Arab Spring in Libya, which later transpired as nothing more than insurgencies of Islamic radical groups, launched the operation “Mare Nostrum” or “Our Sea”, which consisted in the use of the Italian navy near Libyan waters to rescue asylum seekers from the African coast.
As noble as its motivation may be, a side effect of the operation was to encourage even more people to undertake sea travel because now they are certain that the Italian navy will rescue them. The result was a 224% increase in the number of boats leaving Libya, which translates into an average of almost 10 million euro a month for the Italian government.
In November 2014 Mare Nostrum was replaced with the EU-coordinated and funded Triton, covering a smaller part of the Mediterranean at the cost of 3 million euro a month. The official reason for the Triton operation is to control borders, however once we look at facts the goal of the operation is simply to bring in as many people as possible, regardless of whether they are refugees, economic migrants, legals or illegals. Since then, smuggling channels instead of being stopped have multiplied.
An established practice since the “Mare Nostrum” operation, continued under Triton, was for smugglers to launch a rescue signal to the patrolling navy and request assistance. In the meanwhile, NGOs pursuing the “open borders” have joined forces with them, assisting anyone, legal, illegal, refugee, who wants to reach Europe.
The European Commission that is responsible for Frontex, and what follows border controls, has a clear opinion on the matter. Commissioner for Home Affairs, Migration and Citizenship Dimitris Avramopoulos said: “Another important element that emerged strongly from the discussions on countering smuggling is that NGOs – and local and regional authorities – which provide assistance to smuggled migrants shall not be criminalised. I fully agree with this, of course, as I also agree on the need to protect the fundamental rights of those who are being smuggled. Those who we need to punish are the smugglers!”
Punishing the smugglers, unless they are part of NGOs, meaning the problem can’t and won’t be solved, because NGOs will always be free to smuggle migrants. This continues a well established tradition; during the Monti government in 2011-12 a Ministry for Immigration was created and given to Andrea Riccardi of the “Comunità of Sant’Egidio”, the prominent Italian open borders NGO. “Comunità of Sant’Egidio” runs projects such as “Humanitarian corridors”. The project funds an alternative route to bring people into Italy. Andrea Riccardi told the French media that he is convinced …read more
Source: Why The Italian Government Can’t Stop Refugee-Smuggling Boats? Because It Doesn’t Want To
Currency & The Collapse Of The Roman Empire
By Tyler Durden
At its peak, the Roman Empire held up to 130 million people over a span of 1.5 million square miles. Rome had conquered much of the known world. The Empire built 50,000 miles of roads, as well as many aqueducts, amphitheatres, and other works that are still in use today. Our alphabet, calendar, languages, literature, and architecture borrow much from the Romans. Even concepts of Roman justice still stand tall, such as being “innocent until proven guilty”. And so, as Visual Capitalist's Jeff Desjardins asks (and answers): How could such a powerful empire collapse?
Courtesy of: The Money Project
The Roman Economy
Trade was vital to Rome. It was trade that allowed a wide variety of goods to be imported into its borders: beef, grains, glassware, iron, lead, leather, marble, olive oil, perfumes, purple dye, silk, silver, spices, timber, tin and wine.
Trade generated vast wealth for the citizens of Rome. However, the city of Rome itself had only 1 million people, and costs kept rising as the empire became larger.
Administrative, logistical, and military costs kept adding up, and the Empire found creative new ways to pay for things.
Along with other factors, this led to hyperinflation, a fractured economy, localization of trade, heavy taxes, and a financial crisis that crippled Rome.
Roman Debasement
The major silver coin used during the first 220 years of the empire was the denarius.
This coin, between the size of a modern nickel and dime, was worth approximately a day’s wages for a skilled laborer or craftsman. During the first days of the Empire, these coins were of high purity, holding about 4.5 grams of pure silver.
However, with a finite supply of silver and gold entering the empire, Roman spending was limited by the amount of denarii that could be minted.
This made financing the pet-projects of emperors challenging. How was the newest war, thermae, palace, or circus to be paid for?
Roman officials found a way to work around this. By decreasing the purity of their coinage, they were able to make more “silver” coins with the same face value. With more coins in circulation, the government could spend more. And so, the content of silver dropped over the years.
By the time of Marcus Aurelius, the denarius was only about 75% silver. Caracalla tried a different method of debasement. He introduced the “double denarius”, which was worth 2x the denarius in face value. However, it had only the weight of 1.5 denarii. By the time of Gallienus, the coins had barely 5% silver. Each coin was a bronze core with a thin coating of silver. The shine quickly wore off to reveal the poor quality underneath.
The Consequences
The real effects of debasement took time to materialize.
Adding more coins of poorer quality into circulation did not help increase prosperity – it just transferred wealth away from the people, and it meant that more coins were needed to pay for goods and services.
At times, there was runaway inflation in the empire. For example, soldiers demanded far higher wages as the quality of …read more
Source: Currency & The Collapse Of The Roman Empire
Who Benefits From War With Russia?
By Tyler Durden
Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,
There is absolutely no upside to any conflict with Russia when it comes to 99.9% of us. The fact so many pundits, anonymous intelligence officials and Hillary Clinton cultists are encouraging such an outcome based on zero publicly available evidence that Russia hacked the DNC/John Podesta and provided it to Wikileaks for the purpose of electing Trump, should be seen as the gigantic red flag that it is. So what’s actually going on? As is so often the case, it is all about money and power.
The best and most concise article I have read thus far explaining the driving influences behind all the anti-Russia/Putin hysteria was written a couple of weeks ago by Robert Parry of Consortium News. The post is titled, Making Russia ‘The Enemy’, and here are some key excerpts:
The rising hysteria about Russia is best understood as fulfilling two needs for Official Washington: the Military Industrial Complex’s transitioning from the “war on terror” to a more lucrative “new cold war” – and blunting the threat that a President Trump poses to the neoconservative/liberal-interventionist foreign-policy establishment.
Indeed, this is primarily about a failed establishment trying to maintain power in the face of repeated public catastrophes and pervasive corruption.
By hyping the Russian “threat,” the neocons and their liberal-hawk sidekicks, who include much of the mainstream U.S. news media, can guarantee bigger military budgets from Congress. The hype also sets in motion a blocking maneuver to impinge on any significant change in direction for U.S. foreign policy under Trump…
All of this maneuvering also is delaying the Democratic Party’s self-examination into why it lost so many white working-class voters in normally Democratic strongholds, such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
Rather than national party leaders taking the blame for pre-selecting a very flawed candidate and ignoring all the warning signs about the public’s resistance to this establishment choice, Democrats have pointed fingers at almost everyone else – from FBI Director James Comey for briefly reviving Clinton’s email investigation, to third-party candidates who siphoned off votes, to the archaic Electoral College which negates the fact that Clinton did win the national popular vote – and now to the Russians.
Democrats now are excitedly joining the bash-Russia movement, making it harder to envision how the party can transition back into its more recent role as the “peace party” (at least relative to the extremely hawkish Republicans).
The potential trading places of the two parties in that regard – with Trump favoring geopolitical détente and the Democrats beating the drums for more military confrontations – augurs poorly for the Democrats regaining their political footing anytime soon.
If Democratic leaders press ahead, in alliance with neoconservative Republicans, on demands for escalating the New Cold War with Russia, they could precipitate a party split between Democratic hawks and doves, a schism that likely would have occurred if Clinton had been elected but now may happen anyway, albeit without the benefit of the party holding the White House.
Source: Who Benefits From War With Russia?
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New date for Trump’s press conference: Jan. 11
Presidents-elect normally answer questions at a press conference a few days after the election. But Donald Trump has gone almost two months without holding one. …read more
Source: New date for Trump’s press conference: Jan. 11
Why Donald Trump Is Spot-On About The Russians And The Election
By Tyler Durden
Submitted by John Reed Stark via LinkedIn.com,
President-elect Donald Trump has recently questioned: 1) President Obama's finger pointing at the Russians for election-related cyberattacks; and 2) the current media and pundit frenzy alleging a Russian cyber-strike targeting Secretary Hillary Clinton in order to assure a Trump presidency. President-elect Trump plans to press U.S. intelligence agencies to defend their conclusions, stating,
“I know a lot about hacking. And hacking is a very hard thing to prove. So it could be somebody else. And I also know things that other people don’t know, and so they cannot be sure of the situation.”
Having worked since 1995 as a first-responder to cyber-attacks, including serving 11 years as Chief of the SEC's Office of Internet Enforcement, I whole-heartedly agree with President-elect Trump. His skepticism is not only appropriate and warranted — it's spot-on.
Official U.S. Statements About Russian Hacking of U.S. Election
Despite countless inflammatory headlines about Russian election hacking, there exist only two official U.S. statements specifically addressing the facts of recent election-related hacking incidents. The first is the October 7, 2016 Joint Statement from the Department of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Election Security (the “Joint Statement“). The second is the December 29, 2016 Joint Analysis Report of the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, entitled, “GRIZZLY STEPPE – Russian Malicious Cyber Activity” (the “JAR“).
Both government statements are curt, vague, opaque and miles away from being concrete — and both also beg far more questions than answers.
The Joint Statement
The Joint Statement adopts a cautionary approach to any sort of attribution or motive behind who “directed the recent compromises of e-mails from U.S. persons and institutions, including from US political organizations.” The Joint Statement states that the hacks:
“. . . are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process. Such activity is not new to Moscow — the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there. We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.”
Announcing that we think the hacks “are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts” falls far short of a legitimate prosecutorial conclusion based upon actual evidence of Russian culpability and attribution. The Joint Statement's authors are clearly hedging their bets, which is exactly what any reasonable cyber-investigator would do under the circumstances.
After all, attributing disparate attack vectors to the same culprit is always speculative. The entire virtual criminal design could all be a ruse, where one country’s cyber gang coopts the techniques of another country’s cyber gang, to confuse or disassemble.
Moreover, even in its most favorable light, the <a target=_blank rel="nofollow" href="http://www.dhs.gov/news/2016/10/07/joint-statement-department-homeland-security-and-office-director-national" rel="nofollow noopener" …read more
Source: Why Donald Trump Is Spot-On About The Russians And The Election
Chinese Interbank Lending Freezes; Government Bond Trading Halted After Massive PBOC Liquidity Drain
By Tyler Durden
Earlier today, we were surprised to note that having aggressively drained liquidity from the interbank funding market, on the first trading day of 2017, the PBOC not only fixed the Yuan well lower (sy 6.9498 vs 6.9370 on the last day of 2016, even if this was well stronger than the Offshore Yuan), but the People’s Bank of China withdrew even more liquidity. It did that by injecting CNY20 billion via 7-day reverse repos and another CNY20 billion via 14-day reverse repos in its open-market operations Tuesday, according to traders, while continuing to skip 28-day reverse repos.
The move resulted in a net drain of CNY155 billion for the day, and followed a substantial drain of a net CNY245 billion last week – the first removal of liquidity in three weeks. We promptly followed up with a warning:
PBOC drains a net CNY155 billion for the day. Keep an eye on overnight SHIBOR/ HIBOR/ Repo
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) January 3, 2017
Just over an hour later, it appears our warning was warranted, because according to the latest daily fixing of the Treasury Market Association, as a result of the PBOC’s massive liquidity drain which soaked up a nearly a third of a trillion Yuan in the past two weeks, the interbank market is freezing again as follows:
- 1-month yuan interbank rate in Hong Kong rises 1.16ppts to 13.01%,
- 3-month CNH Hibor +89bps to 10.02%;
Most importantly, the overnight CNH Hibor rate soared 4.95% to 17.76%, the highest since September, andconfirming of yet another daily freeze in interbank lending simply so that the PBOC can punish all those who are still short the Yuan.
The good news: at least the UCDCNH tumbled by as much as 200 pips on the session. The bad news, it is unclear how much more of this daily volatile punishment Chinese and Hong Kong banks can take.
But wait, because the interbank freeze was not all, and in a repeat of two weeks ago when China’s halted the trading of its government bond future, the Shanghai Stock Exchange announced that Shanghai halted trading of the 3.99% government bond due May 2065 after “abnormal fluctuations.” It was not exactly clear what that particular phrase meant aside from “aggressive selling” as per the chart below.
According to a statement, trading was set to resume at 11:06 am after being halted at 10:36am, but not before the exchange called on investors to “remain rational and reminded them of trading risks.” In other words, please don’t sell, especially when the central bank just yanked a near record amount of liquidity from the market.
Source: Chinese Interbank Lending Freezes; Government Bond Trading Halted After Massive PBOC Liquidity Drain
Assange To Hannity: "Our Source Is Not The Russian Government"
By Tyler Durden
It won’t be the first time Julian Assange was interviewed and asked whether the source of the hacked DNC and Podesta emails was Russia; however, it will be the first time everyone pays attention to his answer. Recall that the first such interview of Assange – when the question of who had sourced Wikileaks with the hacked emails came up – took place exactly two months ago, on November 3. Back then, in an interview televized by RT, John Pilger explicitly asked Asange where the emails in question had come from.
Assange’s response was straightforward: “The Clinton camp has been able to project a neo-McCarthyist hysteria that Russia is responsible for everything. Hillary Clinton has stated multiple times, falsely, that 17 US intelligence agencies had assessed that Russia was the source of our publications. That’s false – we can say that the Russian government is not the source.”
That particular interview took place when Trump has losing badly in the polls, and as such few people paid attention: after all, what difference did it make who had leaked the Podesta emails: Hillary Clinton was assured to win (with a 90%+ probability according to the NYT and other “non-fake news” outlets).
Needless to say, the issue of Russian hacking has since come back with a vengeance, and culminated last week with Obama expelling 35 Russian diplomats in the greatest diplomatic escalation between the US and Russia in decades; an action which took place based on a flimsy 13-page DHS/FBI report which demonstrated that anyone could have hacked the DNC emails if only they spent a few dollars to purchase a piece of Ukranian PHP malware.
Which is why many more will pay attention to Assange’s next interview with Sean Hannity, which will air Tuesday on Fox News. According to a Fox News release, the two will discuss Russian hacking, the 2016 presidential election, and both the Obama and upcoming Trump administrations. It will air at 10 p.m. on Jan. 3, with additional portions of the interview airing throughout the week. As Variety adds, The interview will mark Assange’s first face-to-face cable news appearance. It is not, however, the first time he’s spoken publicly to Hannity. Most recently, in December, Assange called into Hannity’s radio show, in which the host gushed to Assange that “you’ve done us a favor” in exposing gaps in U.S. cybersecurity.
And while what Assange would say was rather predictable, as he would simply reiterate what he has said previously, courtesy of Real Clear Politics, we have an advance glimpse into the punchline, to wit:
HANNITY: Can you say to the American people, unequivocally, that you did not get this information about the DNC, John Podesta’s emails, can you tell the American people 1,000 percent that you did not get it from Russia or anybody associated with Russia?
ASSANGE: Yes. We can say, we have said, repeatedly that over the last two months that our source is not the Russian government and it is not a …read more
Source: Assange To Hannity: "Our Source Is Not The Russian Government"
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