"In another sign of strengthened ties and increased cooperation between the militaries of two countries which spent much of the 20th century as bitter rivals, Russian warships are taking part in China's 70th anniversary of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy.
The four-day showcase in naval power this week will also feature India and other regional navies, including Japan, Australia, and the Philippines. Crucially, the 70th anniversary exercise appears an occasion for Beijing to reassert its own vision of "freedom of navigation" and maritime security issues with "major naval leaders" from the region at a time when the US is challenging Chinese territorial claims in the South and East China Seas..."
"A new report in Wired magazine details howIran has been target of a "Shadow Brokers-style" hack campaignwhich seeks to expose methods, names, and activities behind an elite cyber-espionage team linked to Iran's Ministry of Intelligence.
The Shadow Brokers leaks from 2016 famously targeted the National Security Agency, dumping tools used by the agency online, and later resulted some of the most devastating cyberattacks in history such as the NotPetya and Wannacry attacks, which devastated networks all over the world. Now it appears it's Iran's turn to be targeted by a powerful mystery group doxing Iran's foremost hacking team..."
In 2018, we consumed more oil than any prior year in history – about 99.3 million barrels per day on a global basis. This number is projected to rise again in 2019 to 100.8 million barrels per day.
The Most Oil Reserves by Country
Given that oil will continue to be dominant in the energy mix for the short and medium term, which countries hold the most oil reserves?
Today’s map comes from HowMuch.net and it uses data from the CIA World Factbook to resize countries based on the amount of oil reserves they hold.
Here’s the data for the top 15 countries below:
Venezuela tops the list with 300.9 billion barrels of oil in reserve – but even this vast wealth in natural resources has not been enough to save the country from its recent economic and humanitarian crisis..."
European parliament approves African reparations resolution, ignores ongoing injustice at its own hands...
The major emotion driving the direction of politics today must be guilt. As moral codes have changed over the centuries, many have come to view Europe’s colonial past as a terrible mistake, and shame over now-reviled practices seems to motivate the worldview of millions of people across the West. In 2019, the topic of reparations for slavery has been propelled back into the mainstream discussion; several Democrat 2020 presidential contenders have indicated support for the idea, and students at Georgetown University recently voted to contribute every semester to a fund for the descendents of slaves sold by the institution in the 1800s.
The policy appears to be gaining traction across the Atlantic too, and the European Union parliament has passed a resolution that promotes equality for people of African descent facing “structural racism” in Europe, while hinting at future reparations. But for all this posturing, is the E.U. a force for good in today’s Africa? Or, like so many proposals today, does it just make politicians feel good about themselves and their immediate surroundings, while ignoring the ongoing suffering their policies continue to cause only a short distance away?
Reparations For Colonial Europe
The resolution, though non-binding, “calls on the Member States and the EU institutions to recognise that people of African descent are subjected to racism, discrimination and xenophobia in particular, and to the unequal enjoyment of human and fundamental rights in general, amounting to structural racism.” It provides a historical framework based on the colonial empire-building and “encourages the EU institutions and the Member States to officially acknowledge and mark the histories of people of African descent in Europe, including of past and ongoing injustices and crimes against humanity, such as slavery and the transatlantic slave trade, or those committed under European colonialism.”
It posits that the atrocities committed during this period of history “remain largely unrecognised and unaccounted for at an institutional level in the Member States” and that current-day cultures continue to perpetuate Afrophobic ideas. In addition to various suggested solutions that aim to promote racial equality, the document “calls on the Member States to declassify their colonial archives” and proposes that making amends “may include some form of reparations such as offering public apologies and the restitution of stolen artefacts to their countries of origin.”
"Authored by Mark Nestmann via InternationalMan.com,
Nearly two billion people work in it. And it accounts for perhaps 20% of the world’s total economic activity.
“It” is the black market, or System D, a slang phrase adapted from the French word débrouillard. A débrouillard is a resourceful and self-reliant person. A débrouillard figures out how to get what they need regardless of the obstacles. The obstacles are usually the laws or price controls put in place by the state.
There are a lot of débrouillards in the world. In 2009, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), estimated that around 1.8 billion people – at the time, half the world’s working age people — had unofficial jobs that weren’t registered, regulated, or (in many cases) taxed. The OECD estimated that by 2020, two-thirds of the world’s workforce would be part of System D.
The OECD considers anyone between the ages of 15 and 64 to be “working age.” As of mid-2018, about 65% of the world’s 7.7 billion people were working age; that’s about 5 billion people. If half of them rely on System D to support themselves and their families, that comes to 2.5 billion people.
Most of these 2.5 billion people are débrouillards by circumstance rather than choice. They live in countries like Venezuela, Zimbabwe, or Nigeria where the only way to buy the goods and services they need is by breaking the law. Venezuela is a great example. Consumer basics like food and medicine are no longer available in stores or pharmacies. The only way to get them is through System D.
A 2012 study concluded that collectively, the black market accounts for more than one-fifth of global GDP. Today’s global GDP comes to about $80 trillion. System D, then, adds another $16 trillion of economic activity to the global economy. If the black market were a country, it would have the world’s second largest GDP, second only to the US ($19.3 trillion)..."
"On the same day the Mueller report went public, CIA Director Gina Haspel made a rare public appearance at Auburn University outlining the Central Intelligence Agency's new priority to better understand "nation-state adversaries such as Russia and Iran," according to a new WSJ report.
Though she made no mention of the special council's now public report, she said the agency had made both Russia and Iran a central focus over the past year, shifting resources to these areas to better prepare for the threat..."
The liberal world order, which lasted from the end of World War 2 until today, is rapidly collapsing. The center of gravity is shifting from west to east where China and India are experiencing explosive growth and where a revitalized Russia has restored its former stature as a credible global superpower. These developments, coupled with America’s imperial overreach and chronic economic stagnation, have severely hampered US ability to shape events or to successfully pursue its own strategic objectives. As Washington’s grip on global affairs continues to loosen and more countries reject the western development model, the current order will progressively weaken clearing the way for a multipolar world badly in need of a new security architecture. Western elites, who are unable to accept this new dynamic, continue to issue frenzied statements expressing their fear of a future in which the United States no longer dictates global policy.
At the 2019 Munich Security Conference, Chairman Wolfgang Ischinger, underscored many of these same themes. Here’s an excerpt from his presentation:
“The whole liberal world order appears to be falling apart – nothing is as it once was… Not only do war and violence play a more prominent role again: a new great power confrontation looms at the horizon. In contrast to the early 1990s, liberal democracy and the principle of open markets are no longer uncontested….
In this international environment, the risk of an inter-state war between great and middle powers has clearly increased….What we had been observing in many places around the world was a dramatic increase in brinkmanship, that is, highly risky actions on the abyss – the abyss of war….
No matter where you look, there are countless conflicts and crises…the core pieces of the international order are breaking apart, without it being clear whether anyone can pick them up – or even wants to. (“Who will pick up the pieces?”, Munich Security Conference)..."
There is a name for this institutionalized, commoditized fraud: moral decay.
Moral decay is an interesting phenomenon: we spot it easily in our partisan-politics opponents and BAU (business as usual) government/private-sector dealings (are those $3,000 Pentagon hammers now $5,000 each or $10,000 each? It's hard to keep current...), and we're suitably indignant when non-partisan corruption is discovered in supposed meritocracies such as the college admissions process.
But we're less adept, it seems, at discerning systemic moral decay, which infects the very foundations of the economy and society.
Consider America's favorite pastime, corrosive partisan politics. This distemper is often traced back to (surprise!) extreme partisans, but as the chart below shows, political partisanship has risen in near-perfect correlation with wealth-income inequality, which it itself the hallmark of deeply systemic corruption, as the system is rigged to benefit the few at the expense of the many. (Chart courtesy of Slope of Hope.)
There's a phrase that describes a socio-economic system becoming the means for personal aggrandizement at the expense of civil society itself: moral decay.How else can we describe a system whose inputs and processes are rigged so the output is the vast majority of all income gains flow to the top 0.1%? (See chart below.)..."
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov declared today that the Western, liberal model of society is dying, and a new world order is taking its place..."
On the hot summer morning of Aug. 2, 1980 a massive explosion ripped apart the main waiting room of the Bologna railway station. Eighty-five people were killed and hundreds more injured. Though at first blamed on Italy’s legendary urban guerrillas, The Red Brigades, it soon emerged that the attack had, in fact, originated from within the ‘deep state’ of the Italian government itself..."
"Authored by José Antonio Ocampo, formerly United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs, via Project Syndicate,
This year, the world commemorates the anniversaries of two key events in the development of the global monetary system. The first is the creation of the International Monetary Fund at the Bretton Woods conference 75 years ago. The second is the advent, 50 years ago, of the Special Drawing Right (SDR), the IMF’s global reserve asset..."
