Where does one start. Biggest sell-out in the world, Scorsese? Overrated? Bought?
The film is about Hoffa and his killing. In the process, Scorsese writes away the Jewish mob, AKA the Kosher Nostra, the Purple Gang, Murder Incorporated, Allen Dulles, the real Richard Nixon, J. Edgar Hoover and mixes it all together with fiction and intent.
I don’t normally write movie reviews. I grew up in Detroit, my dad was a Teamster organizer who grew up with Jimmie Hoffa, someone at our home often until mom decided dad would get an auto plant job instead of one making license plates.
Scorsese doesn’t film a second of it in Detroit, his Machus Red Fox, the Hoffa disappearance joint is dismal. He writes out Tony Giacalone and also forgets who the head of the “Italian mob” worked for, Maxie Stern, down at the vending companies I will leave out.
Stern came up working with Josef “Legs” Lehman, Detroit enforcer and, curiously enough, brother of my grandmother, Marta Lehman.
My dad and “Jimmie” went to work for very German and very non-Jewish, non-Irish and non-Italian Josef at around age 12.
What began as a kidnap/ransom business eventually turned into running security for bootlegging on behalf of the Lansky-Purple Gang-Bronfman empire. Boats ran from Bronfman’s Seagrams distillery to Wyandotte, just south of Detroit. In 1926 my father was arrested in a shootout with State Police (I ended up one of them later on….ironicalness) and it took a while to get him out of lockup in Marquette.
The story revolves around Russell Bufalino, didn’t know him but knew the family, Detroit Italian Bakery, Home Juice Company, folks we would visit from time to time, I just knew them as family friends, nice people.
Key to the fiction is the war on the Kennedy family by the Kosher Nostra who is rewriting history.
Let’s establish a few facts. Allen Dulles planned the Bay of Pigs as CIA director under Ike, and did it with help of Nixon who was going to be placed in the White House in a rigged election.
Joseph Kennedy didn’t rig the election with “the mob,” which is and always was Jewish, like in the film “Once Upon a Time in America.”
Kennedy and Bronfman were far from close and Bronfman was Meyer Lansky’s partner along with J. Edgar Hoover, Allen Dulles and Richard Nixon later using Spiro Agnew as a cutout.
Dulles and Nixon began together in 1946 when Nixon came home from the Navy (non-combatant/Quaker) to work with Dulles bringing war criminals into the US under Operation Paperclip.
The Bay of Pigs was a Nixon/Dulles/Bush deal run through Zapata oil, not out of Miami with featured David Ferrie running the boats out of New Orleans, not as depicted. I know or rather knew everyone involved, they were all brought out to run cocaine later under Reagan.
Under Hoover, the FBI did the dirty work of the Jewish mob who owned the FBI. Nothing has changed.
Now it’s Epstein and MEGA that are being camouflaged, providing cover for the ADL and AIPAC and blaming poor Woody Allen and the Pope.
The ADL is Murder Incorporated, shaking down top corporations under the guise of persecuting Palestinians, something prettymuch everyone loves to do.
As to the Hoffa death, as depicted accurate with the exception of those involved. Few are alive today.
What is not such a great film, slow-moving with some decent bloodletting, is also a political smear job, covering up so much of the history which VT exposes.
The corruption of both U.S. and Iraqi officials during the U.S. occupation is well documented. UN Security Council resolution 1483 established a $20 billion Development Fund for Iraq using previously seized Iraqi assets, money left in the UN’s “oil for food” program and new Iraqi oil revenues. An audit by KPMG and a special inspector general found that a huge proportion of that money was stolen or embezzled by U.S. and Iraqi officials.
Many of this new generation of Iraqis who have grown up amid the ruins and chaos the U.S. occupation left in its wake believe they have nothing to lose but their blood and their lives, as they take to the streets to reclaim their dignity, their future and their country’s sovereignty.
The history of Iraq since 2003 has been a never-ending disaster for its people. (Photo: Martyn Aim/Getty Images)
As Americans sat down to Thanksgiving dinner, Iraqis were mourning more than 60 protesters killed by police and soldiers on Thursday in Baghdad, Najaf and Nasiriyah. Nearly 400 protesters have been killed since hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets at the beginning of October. Human rights groups have described the crisis in Iraq as a “bloodbath,” Prime Minister Abdul-Mahdi has announced he will resign, and Sweden has opened an investigation against Iraqi Defense Minister Najah Al-Shammari, who is a Swedish citizen, for crimes against humanity.
According to Al Jazeera, “Protesters are demanding the overthrow of a political class seen as corrupt and serving foreign powers while many Iraqis languish in poverty without jobs, healthcare or education.” Only 36% of the adult population of Iraq have jobs, and despite the gutting of the public sector under U.S. occupation, its tattered remnants still employ more people than the private sector, which fared even worse under the violence and chaos of the U.S.’s militarized shock doctrine.
Western reporting conveniently casts Iran as the dominant foreign player in Iraq today. But while Iran has gained enormous influence and is one of the targets of the protests, most of the people ruling Iraq today are still the former exiles that the U.S. flew in with its occupation forces in 2003, “coming to Iraq with empty pockets to fill” as a taxi-driver in Baghdad told a Western reporter at the time. The real causes of Iraq’s unending political and economic crisis are these former exiles’ betrayal of their country, their endemic corruption and the U.S.’s illegitimate role in destroying Iraq’s government, handing it over to them and maintaining them in power for 16 years.
The corruption of both U.S. and Iraqi officials during the U.S. occupation is well documented. UN Security Council resolution 1483 established a $20 billion Development Fund for Iraq using previously seized Iraqi assets, money left in the UN’s “oil for food” program and new Iraqi oil revenues. An audit by KPMG and a special inspector general found that a huge proportion of that money was stolen or embezzled by U.S. and Iraqi officials.
Lebanese customs officials found $13 million in cash aboard Iraqi-American interim Interior Minister Falah Naqib’s plane. Occupation crime boss Paul Bremer maintained a $600 million slush fund with no paperwork. An Iraqi government ministry with 602 employees collected salaries for 8,206. A U.S. Army officer doubled the price on a contract to rebuild a hospital, and told the hospital’s director the extra cash was his “retirement package.” A U.S. contractor billed $60 million on a $20 million contract to rebuild a cement factory and told Iraqi officials they should just be grateful the U.S. had saved them from Saddam Hussein. A U.S. pipeline contractor charged $3.4 million for non-existent workers and “other improper charges.” Out of 198 contracts reviewed by the inspector general, only 44 had documentation to confirm the work was done.
U.S. “paying agents” distributing money for projects around Iraq pocketed millions of dollars in cash. The inspector general only investigated one area, around Hillah, but found $96.6 million dollars unaccounted for in that area alone. One American agent could not account for $25 million, while another could only account for $6.3 million out of $23 million. The “Coalition Provisional Authority” used agents like these all over Iraq and simply “cleared” their accounts when they left the country. One agent who was challenged came back the next day with $1.9 million in missing cash.
The U.S. Congress also budgeted $18.4 billion for reconstruction in Iraq in 2003, but apart from $3.4 billion diverted to “security,” less than $1 billion of it was ever disbursed. Many Americans believe U.S. oil companies have made out like bandits in Iraq, but that’s not true either. The plans that Western oil companies drew up with Vice President Cheney in 2001 had that intent, but a law to grant Western oil companies lucrative “production sharing agreements” (PSAs) worth tens of billions per year was exposed as a smash and grab raid and the Iraqi National Assembly refused to pass it.
Finally, in 2009, Iraq’s leaders and their U.S. puppet-masters gave up on PSAs (for the time being…) and invited foreign oil companies to bid on “technical service agreements” (TSAs) worth $1 to $6 per barrel for increases in production from Iraqi oilfields. Ten years later, production has only increased to 4.6 million barrels per day, of which 3.8 million are exported. From Iraqi oil exports of about $80 billion per year, foreign firms with TSAs earn only $1.4 billion, and the largest contracts are not held by U.S. firms. China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) is earning about $430 million in 2019; BP earns $235 million; Malaysia’s Petronas $120 million; Russia’s Lukoil $105 million; and Italy’s ENI $100 million. The bulk of Iraq’s oil revenues still flow through the Iraq National Oil Company (INOC) to the corrupt U.S.-backed government in Baghdad.
Another legacy of the U.S. occupation is Iraq’s convoluted election system and the undemocratic horse-trading by which the executive branch of the Iraqi government is selected. The 2018 election was contested by 143 parties grouped into 27 coalitions or “lists,” plus 61 other independent parties. Ironically, this is similar to the contrived, multi-layered political system the British created to control Iraq and exclude Shiites from power after the Iraqi revolt of 1920.
Today, this corrupt system keeps dominant power in the hands of a cabal of corrupt Shiite and Kurdish politicians who spent many years in exile in the West, working with Ahmed Chalabi’s U.S.-based Iraqi National Congress (INC), Ayad Allawi’s U.K.-based Iraqi National Accord (INA) and various factions of the Shiite Islamist Dawa Party. Voter turnout has dwindled from 70% in 2005 to 44.5% in 2018.
Ayad Allawi and the INA were the instrument for the CIA’s hopelessly bungled military coup in Iraq in 1996. The Iraqi government followed every detail of the plot on a closed-circuit radio handed over by one of the conspirators and arrested all the CIA’s agents inside Iraq on the eve of the coup. It executed thirty military officers and jailed a hundred more, leaving the CIA with no human intelligence from inside Iraq.
The government Iraqis are protesting against today is still led by the same gang of U.S.-backed Iraqi exiles who wove a web of lies to stage manage the invasion of their own country in 2003, and then hid behind the walls of the Green Zone while U.S. forces and death squads slaughtered their people to make the country “safe” for their corrupt government.
Ahmed Chalabi and the INC filled that vacuum with a web of lies that warmongering U.S. officials fed into the echo chamber of the U.S. corporate media to justify the invasion of Iraq. On June 26th 2002, the INC sent a letter to the Senate Appropriations Committee to lobby for more U.S. funding. It identified its “Information Collection Program” as the primary source for 108 stories about Iraq’s fictitious “Weapons of Mass Destruction” and links to Al-Qaeda in U.S. and international newspapers and magazines.
After the invasion, Allawi and Chalabi became leading members of the U.S. occupation’s Iraqi Governing Council. Allawi was appointed Prime Minister of Iraq’s interim government in 2004, and Chalabi was appointed Deputy Prime Minister and Oil Minister in the transitional government in 2005. Chalabi failed to win a seat in the 2005 National Assembly election, but was later elected to the assembly and remained a powerful figure until his death in 2015. Allawi and the INA are still involved in the horse-trading for senior positions after every election, despite never getting more than 8% of the votes – and only 6% in 2018.
These are the senior ministers of the new Iraqi government formed after the 2018 election, with some details of their Western backgrounds:
Adil Abdul-Mahdi – Prime Minister (France). Born in Baghdad in 1942. Father was a government minister under the British-backed monarchy. Lived in France from 1969-2003, earning a Ph.D in politics at Poitiers. In France, he became a follower of Ayatollah Khomeini and a founding member of the Iran-based Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) in 1982. Was SCIRI’s representative in Iraqi Kurdistan for a period in the 1990s. After the invasion, he became Finance Minister in Allawi’s interim government in 2004; Vice President from 2005-11; Oil Minister from 2014-16.
Barham Salih – President (U.K. & U.S.). Born in Sulaymaniyah in 1960. Ph.D. in Engineering (Liverpool – 1987). Joined Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) in 1976. Jailed for 6 weeks in in 1979 and left Iraq for the U.K. PUK representative in London from 1979-91; head of PUK office in Washington from 1991-2001. President of Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) from 2001-4; Deputy PM in interim Iraqi government in 2004; Planning Minister in transitional government in 2005; Deputy PM from 2006-9; Prime Minister of KRG from 2009-12.
Mohamed Ali Alhakim – Foreign Minister (U.K. & U.S.). Born in Najaf in 1952. M.Sc. (Birmingham), Ph.D. in Telecom Engineering (Southern California), Professor at Northeastern University in Boston 1995-2003. After the invasion, he became Deputy Secretary-General and Planning Coordinator in the Iraqi Governing Council; Communications Minister in interim government in 2004; Planning Director at Foreign Ministry, and Economic Adviser to VP Abdul-Mahdi from 2005-10; and UN Ambassador from 2010-18.
Fuad Hussein – Finance Minister & Deputy PM (Netherlands & France). Born in Khanaqin (majority Kurdish town in Diyala province) in 1946. Joined Kurdish Student Union and Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) as a student in Baghdad. Lived in Netherlands from 1975-87; incomplete Ph.D. in International Relations; married to Dutch Christian woman. Appointed deputy head of Kurdish Institute in Paris in 1987. Attended Iraqi exile political conferences in Beirut (1991), New York (1999) & London (2002). After the invasion, he became an adviser at the Education Ministry from 2003-5; and Chief of Staff to Masoud Barzani, President of the KRG, from 2005-17.
Thamir Ghadhban – Oil Minister & Deputy PM (U.K.). Born in Karbala in 1945. B.Sc. (UCL) & M.Sc. in Petroleum Engineering (Imperial College, London). Joined Basra Petroleum Co. in 1973. Director General of Engineering and then Planning at Iraqi Oil Ministry from 1989-92. Imprisoned for 3 months and demoted in 1992, but did not leave Iraq, and was reappointed Director General of Planning in 2001. After the invasion, he was promoted to CEO of Oil Ministry; Oil Minister in the interim government in 2004; elected to National Assembly in 2005 and served on 3-man committee that drafted the failed oil law; chaired Prime Minister’s Advisors’ Committee from 2006-16.
Major General (Retd) Najah Al-Shammari – Defense Minister (Sweden). Born in Baghdad in 1967. The only Sunni Arab among senior ministers. Military officer since 1987. Has lived in Sweden and may have been member of Allawi’s INA before 2003. Senior officer in U.S.-backed Iraqi special forces recruited from INC, INA and Kurdish Peshmerga from 2003-7. Deputy commander of “counterterrorism” forces 2007-9. Residency in Sweden 2009-15. Swedish citizen since 2015. Reportedly under investigation for benefits fraud in Sweden, and now for crimes against humanity in killing of over 300 protesters in October-November 2019.
In 2003, the U.S. and its allies unleashed unspeakable, systematic violence against the people of Iraq. Public health experts reliably estimated that the first three years of war and hostile military occupation cost about 650,000 Iraqi lives. But the U.S. did succeed in installing a puppet government of formerly Western-based Shiite and Kurdish politicians in the fortified Green Zone in Baghdad, with control over Iraq’s oil revenues. As we can see, many of the ministers in the U.S.-appointed interim government in 2004 are still ruling Iraq today.
U.S. forces deployed ever-escalating violence against Iraqis who resisted the invasion and hostile military occupation of their country. In 2004, the U.S. began training a large force of Iraqi police commandos for the Interior Ministry, and unleashed commando units recruited from SCIRI’s Badr Brigade militia as death squads in Baghdad in April 2005. This U.S.-backed reign of terror peaked in the summer of 2006, with the corpses of as many as 1,800 victims brought to the Baghdad morgue each month. An Iraqi human rights group examined 3,498 bodies of summary execution victims and identified 92% of them as people arrested by Interior Ministry forces.
The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency tracked “enemy-initiated attacks” throughout the occupation and found that over 90% were against U.S. and allied military targets, not “sectarian” attacks on civilians. But the U.S. officials used a narrative of “sectarian violence” to blame the work of U.S.-trained Interior Ministry death squads on independent Shiite militias like Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army.
The government Iraqis are protesting against today is still led by the same gang of U.S.-backed Iraqi exiles who wove a web of lies to stage manage the invasion of their own country in 2003, and then hid behind the walls of the Green Zone while U.S. forces and death squads slaughtered their people to make the country “safe” for their corrupt government.
More recently they again acted as cheerleaders as American bombs, rockets and artillery reduced most of Mosul, Iraq’s second city, to rubble, after twelve years of occupation, corruption and savage repression drove its people into the arms of the Islamic State. Kurdish intelligence reports revealed that more than 40,000 civilians were killed in the U.S.-led destruction of Mosul.
The cost of rebuilding Mosul, Fallujah and other cities and towns is conservatively estimated at $88 billion. But despite $80 billion per year in oil exports and a federal budget of over $100 billion, the Iraqi government has allocated no money at all for reconstruction. Foreign, mostly wealthy Arab countries, have pledged $30 billion, including just $3 billion from the U.S., but very little of that has been, or may ever be, delivered. On the pretext of fighting the Islamic State, the U.S. has reestablished a huge military base for over 5,000 U.S. troops at Al-Asad airbase in Anbar province.
The history of Iraq since 2003 has been a never-ending disaster for its people. Many of this new generation of Iraqis who have grown up amid the ruins and chaos the U.S. occupation left in its wake believe they have nothing to lose but their blood and their lives, as they take to the streets to reclaim their dignity, their future and their country’s sovereignty.
The bloody handprints of U.S. officials and their Iraqi puppets all over this crisis should stand as a dire warning to Americans of the predictably catastrophic results of an illegal foreign policy based on sanctions, coups, threats and the use of military force to try to impose the will of deluded U.S. leaders on people all over the world.
Nicolas J S Davies is the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq and of the chapter on “Obama At War” in Grading the 44th President: A Report Card on Barack Obama’s First Term as a Progressive Leader.
(ZH) — On Friday six European countries issued a bombshell joint statement declaring their intent to join INSTEX, or the Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges, a European special-purpose vehicle serving as a ‘SWIFT alternative’ to bypass US sanctions on Iran.
Finland, Belgium, Denmark, Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden released a joint statement asserting it’s of “the utmost importance to the preservation and full implementation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPoA) on Iran’s nuclear program by all parties involved.”
“In light of the continuous European support for the agreement and the ongoing efforts to implement the economic part of it and to facilitate legitimate trade between Europe and Iran, we are now in the process of becoming shareholders of the Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges (Instex) subject to completion of national procedures,” the statement reads.
Instex is an initiative set up by France, Germany and the UK in January 2019 to provide humanitarian and sanctions relief to Iran after in November 2018 the SWIFT network suspended Iranian banks under Washington pressure, months after Trump pulled the US out of the nuclear deal.
Though the new alternative financial device had shaky beginnings amid further aggressive threats from the US administration, it continued through a trial phase even though Tehran officials had complained it appeared ‘too little, too late’.
But now as this latest six country statement announces, it will serve as the European vehicle to “facilitate legitimate trade between Europe and Iran,” while also providing incentive for Tehran to return to its commitments under the JCPOA, specifically to recently breached uranium enrichment limits. Upon the announcement, US Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell lambasted the move, saying:
Terrible timing – why fund the Iranian regime while its killing the Iranian people and shutting off the internet? You should be standing for human rights not funding the abusers.
Today announced that we are joining INSTEX together with the #E3 to facilitate trade with #Iran and help preserve the #JCPOA. https://www.regjeringen.no/no/aktuelt/join_instex/id2680468/ …
Specifically he called out a tweet by Norway’s ambassador to Iran hailing the news of multiple Scandinavian countries joining the nuclear deal-saving initiative.
As the US official’s tweet reveals, the White House is using the latest weeks-long protests and government-ordered internet blockage inside Iran to keep up the pressure and focus on a ‘human rights’ narrative amid the security forces crackdown.
Despite the criticism and what will no doubt be a continued flood of US official anger in response to the news, France said it asserts European autonomy amid an over-reaching Washington administration. French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves le Drian called it an “important decision” that will show “Europe’s autonomy of action.”
Following decades of increased life expectancy rates, Americans have been dying earlier for three consecutive years since 2014, turning the elusive quest for the ‘American Dream’ into a real-life nightmare for many. Corporate America must accept some portion of the blame for the looming disaster.
Something is killing Americans and researchers have yet to find the culprit. But we can risk some intuitive guesses.
According to researchers from the Center on Society and Health, Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine, American life expectancy has not kept pace with that of other wealthy countries and is now in fact decreasing.
The National Center for Health Statistics reported that life expectancy in the United States peaked (78.9 years) in 2014 and subsequently dropped for 3 consecutive years, hitting 78.6 years in 2017. The decrease was most significant among men (0.4 years) than women (0.2 years) and happened across racial-ethnic lines: between 2014 and 2016, life expectancy decreased among non-Hispanic white populations (from 78.8 to 78.5 years), non-Hispanic black populations (from 75.3 years to 74.8 years), and Hispanic populations (82.1 to 81.8 years).
“By 2014, midlife mortality was increasing across all racial groups, caused by drug overdoses, alcohol abuse, suicides, and a diverse list of organ system diseases,” wrote researchers Steven H. Woolf and Heidi Schoomaker in a study that appears in the latest issue of the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association.
At the very beginning of the report, Woolf and Schoomaker reveal that the geographical area with the largest relative increases occurred “in the Ohio Valley and New England.”
“The implications for public health and the economy are substantial,” they added, “making it vital to understand the underlying causes.”
Incidentally, it would be difficult for any observer of the U.S. political scene to read that passage without immediately connecting it to the 2016 presidential election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
Taking advantage of the deep industrial decline that has long plagued the Ohio Valley, made up of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Kentucky, Trump successfully tapped into a very real social illness, at least partially connected to economic stagnation, which helped propel him into the White House.
Significantly, thirty-seven states witnessed significant jumps in midlife mortality in the years leading up to 2017. As the researchers pointed out, however, the trend was concentrated in certain states, many of which, for example in New England, did not support Trump in 2016.
“Between 2010 and 2017, the largest relative increases in mortality occurred in New England (New Hampshire, 23.3%; Maine, 20.7%; Vermont, 19.9%, Massachusetts 12.1%) and the Ohio Valley (West Virginia, 23.0%; Ohio, 21.6%; Indiana, 14.8%; Kentucky, 14.7%), as well as in New Mexico (17.5%), South Dakota (15.5%), Pennsylvania (14.4%), North Dakota (12.7%), Alaska (12.0%), and Maryland (11.0%). In contrast, the nation’s most populous states (California, Texas, and New York) experienced relatively small increases in midlife mortality.
Eight of the 10 states with the highest number of excess deaths were in the industrial Midwest or Appalachia, whereas rural US counties experienced greater increases in midlife mortality than did urban counties.
A tragic irony of the study suggests that greater access to healthcare, notably among the more affluent white population, actually correlates to an increase in higher mortality rates. The reason is connected to the out-of-control prescription of opioid drugs to combat pain and depression.
“The sharp increase in overdose deaths that began in the 1990s primarily affected white populations and came in 3 waves,” the report explained: (1) the introduction of OxyContin in 1996 and overuse of prescription opioids, followed by (2) increased heroin use, often by patients who had become addicted to prescription opioids, and (3) the subsequent emergence of potent synthetic opioids (eg, fentanyl analogues)—the latter triggering a large post-2013 increase in overdose deaths.
“That white populations first experienced a larger increase in overdose deaths than nonwhite populations may reflect their greater access to health care (and thus prescription drugs).”
In September, Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin, reached a tentative settlement with 23 states and more than 2,000 cities and counties that sued the company, owned by the Sackler family, over its role in the opioid crisis
Other factors also helped to drive up the U.S. mortality rate, including alcoholic liver disease and suicides, 85% of which occurred with a firearm or other method.
The United States spends more on health care than any other country, yet its overall health report card fares worse than those of other wealthy countries. Americans experience higher rates of illness and injury and die earlier than people in other high-income nations.
Researchers were perplexed but not surprised by the data as there existed clear signs back in the 1980s that the United States was heading for a cliff as far as longevity rates go.
So what is it that’s claiming the life of Americans, many at the prime of their life, at a faster pace than in the past? The reality is that it is likely to be an accumulation of negative factors that are finally beginning to take a toll. For example, apart from the opioid crisis, there has also been an almost total collapse of union representation across Corporate America, which has essentially crushed any form of workplace democracy. This author, a former member of three worker unions, witnessed this egregious abuse of corporate power firsthand, which is apparent by the total stagnation of wages for many decades.
Today’s real average wage – that is, after accounting for inflation – has about the same purchasing power it did about half a century ago. Meanwhile, in the majority of cases, increases in salary have a marked tendency to go to the highest-paid tier of executives.
In a report by Pew Research, “real terms average hourly earnings peaked more than 45 years ago: The $4.03-an-hour rate recorded in January 1973 had the same purchasing power that $23.68 would today.”
One needs only consider the growing mountain of tuition debt now consuming the paychecks of many university graduates, many of whom have yet to land their dream 6-figure job from their relatively worthless liberal education, to better understand the quiet desperation that exists across the country.
At the same time, the exponential rise in the use of social media, which has been proven to trigger depression and loneliness in users, also deserves serious consideration. What society is experiencing with its massive online presence is a total overhaul as to the way human beings relate to each other. Presently, it would be very difficult to argue that the changes have been positive; in fact, they seem to be contributing to the early demise of millions of Americans in the prime of life.
Taken together, abusive labor practices that ignores workplace democracy, the epidemic of opioid usage, compounded by the anti-social features of ‘social media’ suggests a perfect storm of factors precipitating the rise of early deaths in the United States. Since all of these areas fall in one way or another under the control of corporate power, this powerful agency must find ways to help address the problem. The future success of America depends upon it.
Most disruption predicted in San Jose, Seattle, Salt Lake City, Boulder, Detroit, Huntsville, Louisville, and more…
82% of Americans think Artificial Intelligence (AI) is more harmful than helpful. Reports indicate there are many good reasons for this and it’s not just about massive job loss (see 1, 2, 3).
Proponents insist we’ll all be okay though – we just need UBI (Universal Basic Income). $1000/month might be okay for some, but not everyone could live off that. For those who manage to keep their jobs – they’ll still be more “exposed” to AI. They also may be forced to “merge” with it. Oh the humanity – or inhumanity.
White-collar jobs (better-paid professionals with bachelor’s degrees) along with production workers may be most susceptible to AI’s spread into the economy
AI could affect work in virtually every occupational group. However, whereas research on automation’s robotics and software continues to show that less-educated, lower-wage workers may be most exposed to displacement, the present analysis suggests that better-educated, better-paid workers (along with manufacturing and production workers) will be the most affected by the new AI technologies, with some exceptions.
Our analysis shows that workers with graduate or professional degrees will be almost four times as exposed to AI as workers with just a high school degree. Holders of bachelor’s degrees will be the most exposed by education level, more than five times as exposed to AI than workers with just a high school degree.
Our analysis shows that AI will be a significant factor in the future work lives of relatively well-paid managers, supervisors, and analysts. Also exposed are factory workers, who are increasingly well-educated in many occupations as well as heavily involved with AI on the shop floor. AI may be much less of a factor in the work of most lower-paid service workers.
Men, prime-age workers, and white and Asian American workers may be the most affected by AI
Men, who are overrepresented in both analytic-technical and professional roles (as well as production), work in occupations with much higher AI exposure scores. Meanwhile, women’s heavy involvement in “interpersonal” education, health care support, and personal care services appears to shelter them. This both tracks with and accentuates the finding from our earlier automation analysis.
Bigger, higher-tech metro areas and communities heavily involved in manufacturing are likely to experience the most AI-related disruption
In a world where central banks have repressed savers with over a decade of zero and negative interest rates, crushing the middle class and turning the US into a banana republic whose middle class is now shrinking so fast…
… it is perhaps remarkable that workers are still able to leave the workforce and enjoy some years of peaceful retirement instead of working every day until they die.
Of course when it comes to retirement, some countries are more equal than others – especially those where worker entitlements have been historically so generous that removing them would lead to nothing short of a revolution, even if it means a slow-motion fiscal suicide for the state which can no longer afford such generosity.
So for all those asking which countries have the most generous retirement systems, here it the answer. We doubt it will come as a surprise that some of Europe’s most fiscally challenged countries are also those that offer the longest retirement across the entire OECD universe. Incidentally, those pointing out the “sexism” that women tend to live longer and enjoy a longer retirement, we are confident that no feminists will touch that particular “inequality” with a ten-foot pole.
A tangent of the chart above: just because some of Europe’s most socialist nations have the most retirement regimes right now, does not mean they will in the future: as the next chart shows, in an progressively aging world, where there is roughly 45 retirees per 100 workers, this number is set to skyrocket by 2050, when such retirement havens as Italy and Greece will sport more than 100 retirees per 100 workers, a regime that is absolutely unsustainable.
And one bonus chart: yes, places such as Greece may have one of the most generous retirement regimes, but working all those long years to finally hit retirement in the thrice insolvent European nation is hardly a walk in the park: as the next chart shows, there is a great dispersion between those countries that have the most stressful working environment such as Greece, Turkey, Hungary and Spain, and those where work is a joy such as Scandinavia, New Zealand and the UK (although we somehow doubt the latter will remain on this list for long). Perhaps it’s only fair that after working in hell, one should at least be entitled to a few years of peaceful retirement.
As he throws Prince Andrew under the bus, Prince Charles, heir to the throne, is desperate to keep his fortune-building business out of the limelight. But a new book reveals all
Stuart C. Wilson/Getty
Buckingham Palace has been decontaminated. Prince Andrew’s office has been closed down. Any chair he sat in has been reupholstered, all doorknobs swabbed down. Let’s not even talk about the bathrooms.
I can’t remember a time when the royal family’s damage control was so swift and absolute. Priests are excommunicated with less haste and more mercy than Andrew in the wake of his disastrous BBC Epstein-related interview, and its ever-cascading fallout. But I detect the odor of scapegoating and hypocrisy in the decisive role that Prince Charles has played in this purge against his brother.
The urgency of Charles’s actions amounted to panic—the kind of panic that suggests that the future King is worried that the whole “firm” is in jeopardy. Nobody wants to lose the Queen but there are distinct signs that the prospect of King Charles IV is far from appealing to many of her subjects.
A recent poll by YouGov found that millennials are cooling toward the monarchy—among 18- to 24-year-olds, only 41 percent are in favor of keeping it.
And one of the things that more and more people are sniffing out about Charles is that he’s a phony—that behind his façade of concern for the future of the planet and talk about slimming down the monarchy, he is an outrageous hypocrite on both counts.
There is persuasive evidence for this in a new book, What the Royal Family Don’t Want You to Know…And What Do You Do? (Biteback Publishing, UK) by Norman Baker, a former government minister and long-time Member of Parliament who has become a zealous auditor of the royal firm’s accounts and travel habits.
Among the red flags that Baker raises are:
Charles has turned his vast personal fief, the Duchy of Cornwall, into a brand of high-end supermarket foods that makes an annual profit of more than £21 million ($27.1 million) on which he pays no corporate taxes.
Although he pays income tax (albeit “voluntarily”) he is allowed to make huge deductions for expenses including the costs of a personal staff of 28, including butlers, valets and gardeners—as well as those of the Duchess of Cornwall, Camilla, including her jewels, clothes and stabling for horses.
He pays market price rent to the Duchy on Highgrove, his sprawling country estate, but all that money comes straight back to him in the Duchy’s profits without any deductions for tax—amounting, in fact, to self-dealing.
The Duchy audits its own accounts and gives no right of access to the government watchdog, the National Audit Office.
When Charles made a tour of Europe to promote awareness of climate change he flew to Rome, Berlin and Venice on a private jet, leaving a carbon footprint of 52.95 tonnes—using commercial flights would have reduced emissions by 95 percent.
The latest available annual travel costs (2018/19) for Charles and Camilla were £1.3 million ($1.68 million) and in that one year the carbon emissions generated by travel by the whole royal family doubled to 3,344 tonnes.
The Daily Beast reached out to Buckingham Palace for comment, and did not receive a response.
What makes Baker’s book particularly unusual is that he is currently a member of the Privy Council, the body of the “great and the wise” appointed as advisers to the Queen.
The title Duke of Cornwall is a lesser of Charles’s titles, Prince of Wales being the principal. But there is no loot with the Welsh title, nor much involvement with Wales except being invested with the title at an empty medieval pile, Caenarvon Castle, for which it is required to learn a few perfunctory lines of Welsh.
In contrast, the Duchy of Cornwall is loaded with wealth and land holdings that go back to 1337. Only 13 percent of the land is in Cornwall; there is four times as much in neighboring Devon, including 160 miles of coastline, and some hugely valuable sites in London.
The idea of using the Duchy name to brand a line of foods began in 1992 by using organic cereals from Duchy farms to make a line of biscuits named “Duchy Originals” – thereby seeming to be consistent with Charles’s well publicized devotion to the purity of organic products.
However, along with the world economy, the business crashed in 2008, making a loss of £3.3 million ($4.26 million). Charles was bailed out by the Waitrose supermarket chain, which saw an opportunity to punch the brand back into life by making it like a combination of Whole Foods and a royal franchise—all Duchy products carry the Duchy’s coat of arms as their logo.
Pork prices have been surging in China as African swine fever ravaged supply, while India has been struggling with eye-watering onion prices due to extended monsoons [File: Dania Maxwell/Bloomberg]
Food prices are climbing fast in the world’s biggest emerging markets, posing a possible inflation threat after months of dormant pressures.
Asia’s two largest developing economies face a price surge for staple products — pork in China and onions in India — that are central to consumers’ diets. In Turkey and Nigeria, supply problems are driving up costs, while United Nations data show global food prices rose at the fastest pace in October in more than two years.
While the spike is painful for poorer consumers, it hasn’t reached a level to convince central banks to pull the brake on policy easing, as they remain focused on boosting economic growth amid a global slowdown. Average inflation across emerging markets is still at an all-time low, according to a Bloomberg gauge of consumer price indexes.
“We think it’s likely they would look through food inflation that is concentrated on a handful of products and driven by idiosyncratic factors,” said Taimur Baig, managing director and chief economist at DBS Bank Ltd. in Singapore. “Bias toward further monetary and fiscal easing will remain in 2020, in our view.”
Price Shock
Nevertheless, the threat of a price shock is real. Nomura Holdings Inc. economists recently warned of three potential triggers of higher food costs — weather-related shocks, higher oil prices and a sharp depreciation in the dollar — saying emerging and frontier markets are most at risk since food costs make up a larger portion of their consumers’ income.
The key will be whether the increases begin to feed into consumers’ longer-term inflation expectations, which could drive up wages and core inflation in a spiral, said Sonal Varma, Nomura’s chief economist for India and Asia ex-Japan.
“This is a big policy dilemma for central banks, to have supply-side driven higher food inflation while growth is weakening,” Varma said. “The question is: Do central banks believe that this is durable or that it’s transitory?”
Here’s how the phenomenon is playing out in key emerging markets:
China
Pork prices doubled in October following massive livestock culls to protect against swine fever, pushing up consumer inflation to 3.8%, the highest level since January 2012. Though pork prices have since come off their recent highs, economists expect inflation to peak at 5% or 6% in January. Inflation at that level could impede central bank efforts to ease monetary policy and boost an economy amid an ongoing trade war and weak domestic demand.
In the meantime, swine fever is jumping borders, with neighboring Vietnam culling almost 6 million pigs to prevent the spread of the disease. It hasn’t showed up yet in Vietnam’s CPI — partly because high food prices a year ago have skewed the statistical base — but the impact likely will be reflected in coming months, said Alex Holmes, an Asia economist at Capital Economics Ltd. in Singapore. Live pig prices in November are up almost 30% from a year earlier, according to an industry group.
India
In India, where spikes in the cost of onions have sparked social unrest in years past, a 26% year-on-year rise in vegetable prices pushed October headline inflation above the Reserve Bank’s threshold of 4% for the first time in 15 months.
That runs up against a central bank intent on easing policy to spur growth. Data due Friday is likely to show India’s gross domestic product grew 4.5% in the July-September quarter, its slowest pace since early 2013, according to a Bloomberg survey of economists.
The latest Bloomberg survey shows consumer price inflation expected to peak at 4.8% in the October-December period, before tapering off.
Turkey
Food inflation hovered near 30% in the first quarter and has remained above 15% for much of the year, due to a currency crisis in August 2018 coupled with supply-chain issues and a heavy reliance on natural irrigation. The government has taken to buying produce directly from farmers and selling it in cities, with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan denouncing alleged price-gougers as traitors and terrorists. Recent droughts in grain-producing provinces raise concerns about possible supply constraints next year, with the central bank expecting food inflation at 11% by the end of 2020.
Africa
A regional drought has curbed food output in some southern African countries. Driven by increases in the cost of corn products, food-price growth has pushed Zambian inflation to a three-year high, and monthly food inflation in Zimbabwe has reached almost 50% as supplies dwindle. In Nigeria, the price of imported rice has surged 7.3% since August after President Muhammadu Buhari ordered border closures, partly to counter widespread food smuggling.
Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters has condemned Swedish prosecutors who yesterday dropped a rape investigation into WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange, saying the whole thing was “a complete bogus set-up” from the beginning.
Waters told RT that the statement from Swedish prosecutors claiming that the evidence against Assange had “weakened” since 2010 was a “mealy-mouthed bunch of bullsh*t” and that there was “no evidence to support the idea that [Assange] injured anybody.”
It’s partly because of this whole “set-up” that Assange is still suffering in London’s Belmarsh Prison with no real process of law being followed, Waters said. “Assange is being slowly murdered by the state because he told uncomfortable truths about US war crimes,” he added.
The law is being thrown out the window at the behest of the growing mono-empire that is the USA — and it is so wrong.
The British rock ‘n’ roll legend said that Assange’s continued detainment behind bars was “purely political” and that there is no question that he is a political prisoner who is being used as a “warning” to others who might be inclined to do real journalism.
In any sane universe, Julian Assange would be lauded as a hero of the people.
Waters also took aim at mainstream media, where he said it is now nearly impossible to find a truthful narrative of events. “To find the truth these days is extremely difficult,” he said.
Assange is currently languishing in Belmarsh awaiting a hearing on extradition to the US, where he could face 175 years in prison for publishing leaked military documents and exposing war crimes. A London court ruled against the whistleblower in October after his lawyers sought to have the extradition hearing delayed.
“Our citizens should know the urgent facts…but they don’t because our media serves imperial, not popular interests. They lie, deceive, connive and suppress what everyone needs to know, substituting managed news misinformation and rubbish for hard truths…”—Oliver Stone