The anomaly was 0.84 °C in August 2014, as illustrated by the image below.

The danger is that the Gulf Stream will keep carrying ever warmer water from the North Atlantic into the Arctic Ocean, threatening to unleash huge methane eruptions from the Arctic Ocean’s seafloor, in turn causing even higher temperatures and more extreme weather events, wildfires, etc.

So, what can be done to reduce the risk?

Climate Plan

– Emission Cuts

It is imperative that large emissions cuts are made quickly. The Climate Plan calls for 80% emission cuts by 2020, as one of multiple lines of action that need to be implemented in parallel.

– Greenhouse Gas Removal and Storage

The IPCC points at the need for carbon dioxide removal and also warns about ocean warming continuing for centuries (text below).

Indeed, even if all emissions by people could somehow be brought to an abrupt end, this alone will not stop the rise of ocean temperatures, at least not for a long time. For starters, air temperatures would start rising within days, in response to the disappearance of aerosols that now mask the full wrath of global warming. Furthermore, such a temperature rise would further accelerate feedbacks such as snow and ice decline, methane hydrate destabilization, etc., in turn feeding further temperature rises.

The Climate Plan therefore calls for carbon dioxide removal, as well as for active removal of other greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, and for further lines of action.

– Further Action

Again, merely implementing the above lines of action will not suffice to quickly bring down ocean temperatures. Paleo-climate records show that falls in temperature go hand in hand with falls of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to levels under 280 ppm, as opposed to current carbon dioxide levels that are around 400 ppm.

Raising Funding for Further Action

The Climate Plan calls for comprehensive and effective action that includes additional lines of action. Such additional action will require U.N. supervision, which may make it hard for the necessary action to obtain sufficient funding.

In earlier posts, it was suggested that, besides having fees imposed on facilities that burn fossil fuel and on sales of fossil fuel itself, additional fees could be imposed on commercial international flights. As long as it seems too hard to substantially reduce emissions associated with such flights, it seems appropriate to explore further ways to minimize such flights, e.g. by imposing additional fees that could help fund further action.

There are a number of ways such fees could be implemented. Such fees could be calculated based on the distance traveled or as a percentage of the fare.

Fees could also be calculated on the basis of the traveler’s flying history, e.g. in the form of frequent flyer fees. Such fees could be collected either by the respective airline or airport.

In the box on the right, Ekta Kalra gives further details about how the latter idea could be implemented.

What do you think?

References and related posts

– Four Hiroshima bombs a second: how we imagine climate change
http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2013/08/four-hiroshima-bombs-second-how-we-imagine-climate-change.html

– Arctic Methane Release and Rapid Temperature Rise are interlinked
http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2013/11/arctic-methane-release-and-rapid-temperature-rise-are-interlinked.html

– NOAA, Global Analysis – September 2014
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/2014/9

– NOAA Ocean temperature anomalies
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/time-series

– Climate Plan
http://climateplan.blogspot.com

Government Passes Anti-Constitutional Surveillance Law During Ottawa Shooting

A terrible tragedy befell the nation’s capital yesterday, when a shooter opened fire at government sites in Ottawa. A full investigation must begin to assemble the details, as the flames of hysteria are fanned in the public consciousness. The words “terror” and “terrorism” have been tossed around so casually, that nowadays any hardened criminal would classify as a terrorist according to the Harper Government and mainstream news sources. For that matter, political activists who take issue with the government’s policies at homeand abroad are referenced in the same manner.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, social media is rife with suspicion that this horrendous event may represent a false flag operation, to assist the government’s dismantling of civil liberty and human rights in the name of war, profit, political posturing and public control.

That’s not to say this wasn’t an act of terrorism. Maybe it was, but surely it’s too early to reach a conclusion when the names of suspects hadn’t been released to hypothesize a motive. Or had they?

At 10:13am EDT, The Globe and Mail‘s Josh Wingrove reported that tactical officers were pointing guns at every parliamentary journalist on site.  (Post since removed from Twitter.)

At 12:11pm EDT, The CBC’s Kady O’Malley reported her group was ordered to leave a local rooftop by police, as they continued to search for a culprit and attempted to secure the area.

By 1:14pm EDT, Ms. O’Malley reported a continuing lockdown that blanketed Ottawa. She was unclear if the event was over, as no further information was available.

While Canadian news personalities were at police gunpoint, American outlets like CBS News and the Associated Press had a full story to sell, complete with the dead shooter’s name.

Before the scene was secure at 10:54am EDT, a joint release was published to identify the culprit. It stated:

“The gunmen has been identified by U.S. officials to CBS News as Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, a Canadian national born in 1982.”

Canadian parliamentary bureau chiefs didn’t posses the same information as their U.S. counterparts and faced the barrel of police guns as a press narrative was provided on their behalf by another country. If this is dubbed an act of terrorism that American sources had knowledge about to pre-report, then why weren’t steps taken to prevent the violence?

Many have questioned how a gunman could enter parliament with a rifle unnoticed, in spite of the massive security and busy lineups. Some are calling for greater state police control and warmed to relinquishing their Charter rights, in an effort to fight the new war on domestic terrorism. Something has to justify police militarization since the War on Drugs has been transformed into a lucrative product of capitalism.

The Liberal Party of Canada campaigned against the Harper Government’s ‘politics of fear’, but when they tasted the fear for real this time, the opponents relented and threw their support behind the Prime Minister. The party press release was carefully worded and commendable under the circumstances, but it does resort to the word “terrorize” and submits to the government’s long term agenda.

All Canadians who pay attention to the news are acutely aware of a creeping police state and the loss of privacy rights in the tradeoff. In fact, one Liberal MP, Joyce Murray, proposed Bill C-622 to gain oversight of CSIS and CSEC, so Canadian law enforcement can’t overstep its bounds to the degree that’s been revealed through Snowden leaks.

This shooting event also occurs at a time when the Mayor of Ottawa is seeking re-election, with a history of accommodating CSEC as a business partner.

The journalist who brought these Snowden leaks to light is in town to promote his new book about the overreaching powers of a surveillance state. Glenn Greenwald will be speaking just a few blocks from Parliament Hill, in the same neighbourhood that’s under lockdown. It’s purely coincidental that he wrote a scathing piece about the Canadian government and co-dependent media’s abuse of the word “terrorism” a day earlier.

Meanwhile, the NDP noticed a different terrorism anomaly regarding the violence in Quebec on the day before as well. The Prime Minister’s Office was accused of planting a foreboding comment in Question Period, that preempted police reports of a “possible terror attack against soldiers”.

Public Safety Minster Steve Blaney reported the Monday event was “clearly linked to terrorist ideology”, but the Toronto Star reported multiple witnesses saw the suspect with his hands in the air, when at least one police officer opened fire. They also say a knife was “lodged into the ground near where the incident occurred”.

Well, that’s what the original story by Allan Woods, Bruce Campion-Smith, Joanna Smith, Tonda MacCharles and Les Whittington stated. A syndicated copy had to be located at the Cambridge Times, because a newer, edited version at the Toronto Star appeared dramatically altered by Tuesday.

This TorStar article was more than edited and qualifies as being replaced entirely, having lost its tone, facts and spirit from the original published version. It was radically changed to support the government’s narrative and censored independent sources that previously appeared, replacing them with quotes from the Harper administration that focus on the suspect’s motive for Islamic terrorism.

If it wasn’t for smaller newspapers syndicating the Toronto Star‘s original content, there would be no proof of the first comprehensive version. Professional journalists don’t normally condone editors changing the spirit of their work without a disclaimer, especially when five reporters collaborated to produce the same entry. The history created by print newspapers also couldn’t be erased with the click of a button, before the media migrated to internet based reporting that appears to lack mechanisms of accountability.

These two examples oppose each other due to the disparity between facts and there is no footnote to reflect this glaring incongruency. The Toronto Star has been a leader in journalism ethics and wouldn’t alter published pieces to discredit their own reporting without a reason being provided. That is, until they and a bevy of established journalists who remained silent, had a taste of the politics of fear.

It remains to be seen if the New Democratic Party will throw its support behind the Harper Government, as Mulcair deliberates about a public statement that is yet to be released. NDP caucus members who were barricaded in an office describe a loss of safety and feelings of fear though.

Any reasonable person should be afraid when gunshots are flying from hostile individuals, but will the politics of fear be allowed to dictate a terrorism narrative in place of the facts? The Opposition’s privacy and ethics critic, MP Charlie Angus, also describes gunshots around 10am EDT, while American media had solved the event by 10:54am EDT and members of parliament were still being detained without access to the same information.

If the U.S government could assess a terrorist attack on Canadian soil before the Canadian government was aware, then why was it not prevented? On the same token, if the Canadian government was in the middle of mayhem, then how did Americans obtain information that wasn’t available to affected bureaucrats from their own intelligence and law enforcement agencies? What powers does America have over Canada that Canada doesn’t have itself? If a shooting on government property can be solved before it’s even finished, then why wasn’t CSIS, CSEC, DHS and the NSA capable of early intervention? After all, the Wednesday shooter was already placed on the government’s watch list.

The timing is incredible and may very well be motivated by the war against ISIS/ISIL. Canada shed its peacekeeping status for more aggressive combat that generates profits for the Canada Pension Plan and Nigel Wright, with the potential to invite ideological backlash. This is not disputed. An unbiased investigation is required, but the public should be patient for confirmed, judicial facts; bearing in mind political motives, various narratives and the race to sell fear.

On the very day terrorism was alleged in Quebec, the Harper Government passed Bill C-13 without much notice from the peanut gallery. Until Monday, Bill C-13 was one of the most controversial pieces of legislation that was presented under the guise of cyber-bullying, but even the mother of Amanda Todd spoke against the exploitation of her daughter’s death as a tool to create a warrantless surveillance state in this vein.

Due to terrorism accusations made by the Harper Government that took up most of the day, no mainstream news reported the bill’s passage later in the same day. CBC was the only major outlet to mention the bill on Monday, but they neglected to note the House of Commons vote or passage of this legislation at any point in the story. They presented the information as incremental progress while failing to report its successful, parliamentary completion.

This too presents a problem with ethical journalism, but CBC has seen its fair share of challenges since the Harper Government appointed ten Conservative donors to the board of directors, with influence over the public broadcaster’s direction.

Regardless, the only mention of Bill C-13 passing arises from a Saanich News editorial. The smaller publication urges everyone to be vigilant as this legislation completes the last step of approval (ascent) with senate, that is dominated by a Conservative majority.

Surprisingly, the senate passed a first reading of Bill C-13 the very next day. It accomplished that hurdle expediently on Tuesday, but this wasn’t reported by any source whatsoever. Senators then scheduled a second reading in two days’ time, on Thursday, October 23, 2014. The only lapse in this process was the Wednesday parliamentary shooting.

By today Bill C-13 may see the quickest passage through any bureaucracy in the democratic world, without the public or media noticing and while legislators are reeling from the ominous smell of gun smoke. Neither the parliamentary reporters who stared down the barrel of a police gun on Tuesday, nor the members of parliament who were barricaded, would be rested very well.

Plus there’s an RCMP press conference about the Wednesday shooting that will surely distract attention from the new law. In the days ahead, it’s likely they’ll tout Bill C-13 as a way to catch terrorists, also under the guise of cyberbulling and even though being watch listed with preexisting surveillance powers didn’t prevent Michael Zehaf-Bibeau from taking action.

This brings us to what’s at stake. The taboo nobody wants to evaluate. The decision senators will have to make while recovering from a psychologically traumatic breach of personal security.

We’re talking about public data surveillance, or what closely resembles stalking.

There are plenty of ambiguous words used to describe big data monitoring, but few understand what it means or how deeply it’s abused behind the sealed doors at CSEC. Warrantless internet surveillance has the potential to track a target’s GPS movements with updating by the minute. It can penetrate the entire chain of communication between an individual and their contacts, including strangers who make reference to the target by any degree of separation across the world wide web. The technology has predictive behaviour capabilities. Every citizen caught in this widespread dragnet is psychologically assessed through language semantics and assigned a persuasion, to determine if any of them presents a public relations issue, or if the original target has too much influence to garner support for their business, political and/or social beliefs.

Five Eyes governments have established media surveillance programs specifically. They surveil news topics and journalists, to monitor the reporter’s effect on public perception. When anyone posts a news link on any form of social media, all comments are collected and ranked for government and law enforcement dissemination. Canada spent $20 million and hired 3,300 staff to spy on journalists and political opponents since 2012. The European Commission and United Statesdoes the same, in this vacuum of nonexistent legislation to protect the public’s privacy in the modern age. Instead of updating constitutional rights to reflect modern technology, they’ve crafted legislation like Bill C-13 that revokes those rights entirely.

This goes beyond the confines of metadata and only the Privacy Commissioner of Ontario has taken up the cause, likely to the chagrin of political parties that have begun to use similar technology against their opponents during elections. Whatever good this intrusive spying could accomplish is outweighed by the bad. Michael Sona only possessed a list of phone numbers and intentions, let alone mapping of the entire public’s thoughts and updates on the location of political foes by the minute.

If anyone physically tailed a political candidate, volunteer or supporter every minute of the day and night, or attempted to record every one of their exchanges, it would be considered criminal harassment. If that person also tailed every contact who spoke about their target and psychologically assessed them to create charts, it would surpass Hollywood’s fascination with the complex plotting of serial offenders.

But this isn’t fiction and warrantless internet surveillance can be used to harm a civilian, based on their political beliefs. In the United States it’s already used to surveil judges in addition to journalists, adding a difficult challenge to the essence and appearance of democracy. The dialogue is strictly controlled to conceal these uses and they’re couched in the terrorist argument, to discourage the public from searching deeper.

The Harper Government was first to import these tactics to Canada. Then the Liberals and NDP followed suit, claiming they’d be at a disadvantage for electoral purposes. As the public was being shocked into the idea of domestic terrorism, Bill C-13 passed without discussion to transform Canada into a surveillance state that permits this behaviour outright.

Residents have been told if they don’t break the law there is nothing to fear. This subverts any purpose for the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and replaces that document with a Trust Me clause from the government. It replaces the core legal relationship between citizens and law enforcement with unrestrained power and no need for oversight to justify its use. It imperils evidentiary laws that are designed to protect the innocent.

Perhaps lawyers have been quiet about this issue because one of the government surveillance contractors also controls their Quick Law program, as well as court and university databases. Perhaps professors have been quiet because they hire these surveillance companies to monitor their science and research fellows at a prominent Canadian university that partners with CSEC.

To hear what this technology and warrantless surveillance can do to ordinary families when abused, a comprehensive interview with an affected Canadian journalist can be heard at the season premier of The View Up Here. This clip begins at 3:15 (to avoid some technical issues) and surprising revelations develop as the process and ramifications of surveillance are explained by example. The interview further details government censorship of the press in North America, with international consequences. It’s two hours long and worth the investment if the public wishes to retain its right to have beliefs or join like-minded groups with one another.

Beyond the dry language of legislation, this is how the words of Bill C-13 can be utilized by an aggressive government, law enforcement and the Five Eyes intelligence community. Suggested reading provides the history and development of technology and related policies in Canada, the United States and Europe. It was becoming law in Canada when the airwaves were filled with terrorism accusations and the government expected no one to notice. It also relates to media surveillance that could explain a few altered stories, removed posts and political misunderstanding within the party apparatus itself.

***

“Economic Genocide” in Latin America: The Unspoken Legacy of Wall Street and the IMF

United Nations General Assembly, September 24, 2014: Argentina’s President Fernandez de Kirchner Denounces Economic Terrorism

Dazzling and supremely erudite, Argentina’s President Cristina Fernandez Kirchner denounced as terrorism the economic policies that have been strangling the developing world during the past century, and are continuing these criminal actions today, the legacy of Milton Friedman’s Chicago Boys’ gangster economic policies.  These policies, implemented by the infliction of “shock therapy,”  institutionalizing torture, murder and disappearances of individuals, groups, and often heads of state who defy these barbaric economic models, are policies which are more accurately described as global economic theft, sanctioned by the theory that “might makes right.”  

The IMF’s “conditionalities” were described, in sanitized language, as “structural adjustment programs,” demanding the obliteration of free national education and health care programs, causing the destitution of majorities of citizens in the developing countries, and resulting in the gross indebtedness of collaborating governments to parasitic interests of multinational corporations, banks, hedge funds, vulture funds and their ilk.  The Milton Friedman Chicago Boys policies were described by one of  Friedman’s most brilliant students, the German born economist Andre Gunder Frank, as “economic genocide.”

President Kirchner described her late husband, President Nestor Kirchner’s success in rebuilding Argentina, despite the total bankruptcy into which decades of the Chicago Boys policies had plunged a devastated Argentina.  She described the earlier chaotic situation, in which Argentina had five presidents in one week during 2001, a disaster rivaled, perhaps, only by Bolivia, which, similarly hostage of the Chicago Boys, had three revolutions in one afternoon, finally resulting Bolivia’s progressive presidency of Juan Jose Torres in 1970.  President Torres was overthrown, ten months later, by fascist General Hugo Banzer, with the blessing of Washington, and was then murdered in Argentina in 1975.

The earlier history of Argentina described by President Kirchner, a history common to almost all Latin America Southern Cone governments hostage to the Chicago Boys’ policy of economic genocide, is succinctly summed up by Professor John Dinges in his work “The Condor Years,” (Pages 154-155).

[By 1975],  “Inside the U.S. embassy Legal Attache Robert Scherrer quickly developed information that the Torres murder was part of the new security forces cooperation among the military governments…the bloody reality of mounting repression and the assassination of three prominent figures – the Uruguayan Senators Michelini, Gutierrez and Bolivian President Torres who had sought protection in Argentina… .Slowly, among those reading the most secret intelligence traffic about Latin America – in the embassies, in the CIA, in the Defense Intelligence Agency, the FBI and the State Department there was an awakening to a flow of hard evidence that was soon to become a flood:  that by 1975 the government of Argentina was committing human rights violations on a massive scale never before seen in Latin America, and the six military governments of the Southern Cone were cooperating to assassinate one another’s opponents.”

This was the Argentina in which Presidents Cristina and Nestor Kirchner spent their earliest years.  This was the environment in which the Chicago Boys’ murderous economic policies were forced down the throats of the majority of Argentina’s citizens, utilizing torture, murder and “disappearances” to facilitate the “privatization” of the country’s resources in the organized theft of the nation’s patrimony.  This theft was engineered by one of history’s most deadly mobs of criminals, the Chicago Boys, trained by the sociopath Milton Friedman, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for economics in a decision grossly discrediting the legitimacy of the Nobel Committee.

President Kirchner described the economic and social recovery steered by her husband, President Nestor Kirchner, a program of social and economic inclusiveness which made education widely available to Argentina’s majority, which decreased unemployment while establishing social safety nets, a program in which Argentina’s economy began to thrive, as Nestor Kirchner weaned Argentina’s economy from the IMF ‘debt trap’ (the title of the superb book by economist Cheryl Payer), and made arrangements to pay off the astronomical debts amassed during the previous period of economic domination by the Chicago Boys, (debts for which Nestor Kirchner’s government was in no way responsible). President Cristina Fernandez Kirchner spoke with legitimate pride of Argentina’s success in reducing widespread poverty, despite the financial disaster engineered by the thugs of the international financial system who are currently still attempting to hold Argentina hostage.

President Kirchner voiced the concerns of the greater part of the developing world, which voted on September 9, 2014, for the United Nations General Assembly resolution:  “Toward the Establishment of a Multilateral Legal Framework for Sovereign Debt Restructuring Process.”  Argentina’s Foreign Minister, Hector Timerman (whose father, the great journalist and human rights advocate, Jacobo Timerman, had been imprisoned and tortured for two years in Argentina during that same “dirty war” of 1976 described earlier) introduced that resolution, “establishing an ethical political and legal pathway to end unbridled speculation.”  The resolution was adopted, with 124 nations supporting it, eleven nations opposing it, and forty one abstentions…The scandalous profits made by parasitic “vulture funds” are funneled into campaign and lobbying to prevent change in the current viciously unjust economic architecture.  The Cuban delegate stated the appalling fact that “Developing countries had paid many times the amounts originally received as loans and that devoured resources essential for development.”  The distinguished American economist Joseph Stiglitz  has repeatedly emphasized precisely this same fact.

President Kirchner denounced U.S. Federal Judge Thomas Griesa, whose currently strangling injunctions, prohibiting Argentina’s repayment of 92.4 percent of the debt until the “vulture funds” are paid in full,  would force the return of Argentina’s economy to destitution, totally destroying the new economic and social programs which are empowering Argentina’s majority, and would quickly restore the earlier squalor of the economically colonized Argentina into which Milton Friedman’s thugs and the IMF had forced Argentina to subsist for decades of Kirchner’s earlier life.

In her masterpiece, “The Shock Doctrine,” exposing the criminal thuggery of Friedman’s Chicago Boys, Naomi Klein states:

“In the early nineties, the Argentine state sold off the riches of the country so rapidly and so completely that the project far surpassed what had taken place in Chile a decade earlier.  By 1994, 90 percent of all state enterprises had been sold to private companies, including Citibank, Bank Boston, France’s Suez and Vivendi, Spain’s Repsol and Telefonica.  Before making the sales, (former President) Menem and (former Finance Minister) Cavallo had generously performed a valuable service for the new owners:  they had fired roughly 700,000 of their workers, according to Cavallo’s own estimates; some put the number much higher.  The oil company alone lost 27,000 workers during the Menem years, An admirer of Jeffrey Sachs, Cavallo called this process “shock Therapy.”  Menem had an even more brutal phrase for it: in a country still traumatized by mass torture, he called it “major surgery without anesthetic.”*

“* In January 2006, long after Cavallo and Menem were out of office, Argentines received some surprising news.  It turned out that the Cavallo Plan wasn’t Cavallo’s at all, nor was it the IMF’s:  Argentina’s entire early-nineties shock therapy program was written in secret by JP Morgan and Citibank, two of Argentina’s largest private creditors.  In the course of a lawsuit against the Argentine government, the noted historian Alejandro Olmos Gaona uncovered a jaw-dropping 1,400 page document written by the two U.S. banks for Cavallo in which “the policies carried out by the government from ’92 on are drawn up…the privatization of utilities, the labour law reform, the privatization of the pension system.  It is all laid out with great attention to detail

….Everyone believes that the economic plan pursued since 1992 was Domingo Cavallos’s creation, but that’s not the way it is.”  In the long term, Cavallo’s program in its entirety would prove disastrous for Argentina.

…So many jobs were lost that well over half the country would eventually be pushed below the poverty line.”

As President Fernandez Kirchner charges, today it is obvious that U.S. Federal Judge Griesa’s ruling is an attempt to destabilize Argentina, using a new imperialist tactic devised by the current gangsters of international capitalism who thrive by devouring the lives and patrimony of the majority of citizens of the developing world, and, indeed, impose these tactics upon the “99%” percent of citizens within the countries of the developed world.

President Fernandez Kirchner explicitly denounced as economic terrorists the “vulture funds” which, supported by the United States’ judicial system, are attempting to destabilize and ultimately overthrow her government.  She stated:  “Not only those who place bombs are terrorists, but also those who destabilize the economy of countries, and cause hunger, misery and poverty from the sin of speculation.”

Judge Griesa is attempting, in fact, to fine Argentina $50,000 per day for not complying with his ruling, and declaring Argentina in contempt of court.”  In response to his brutal arrogance, President Kirchner cited a quote from former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who described such “creditors” as immoral, preventing countries from tackling problems of education, health and poverty.

Argentina’s president spoke fiercely of such engineered poverty and destitution as creating fertile breeding ground for terrorist leaders recruiting among those who have lost all hope of lives affording them options for fulfillment and dignity, and her voice echoed, 35 years later, the speech delivered on August 27, 1980 at the United Nations Eleventh Special Session on Economic Development:  “Toward a New International Economic Order”:  Joaquim Chissano, then Foreign Minister of Mozambique addressed the General Assembly, decades ago, and stated:

“The existing economic order is profoundly unjust.  It runs counter to the basic interests of the developing countries…we see the perpetuation of underdevelopment in Africa, Asia and Latin America.  The peoples of those continents are forced to face hunger, starvation, poverty, nakedness, disease and illiteracy increasingly.  We denounce any kind of economic prosperity or independence for part of mankind built on the dependence, domination and exploitation of the rest of mankind…the developing countries have warned the world about the need to take measures to eliminate the main obstacles to emancipation and progress of the peoples struggling for a proper standard of living which would meet the basic needs of life.

…During the colonial period we were branded as rebels and insurgents when we demanded the restitution of our status as human beings.  When we demanded independence we tried to talk peaceably with our masters, but no one would listen.  The dialogue of force was imposed upon us.  We took up arms.  Much blood was spilt.  But only in that way were we able to win.”

Twenty-nine years later, at the 64 Session of the United Nations General Assembly, on September 24, 2008, Stjepan Mesic, President of the Republic of Croatia, and the last President of Yugoslavia stated:

 “Our world is finally still dominated by an economic model which is self-evidently exhausted and has now reached a stage where it is itself generating crises, causing hardship to thousands and hundreds of thousands of people.  If one attempts to save this already obsolete model at any cost, if one stubbornly defends a system based on greed and devoid of any social note worthy of mention, the result can be only one:  social unrest harboring the potential to erupt into social insurgence on a global scale.”

Cristina Fernandez Kirchner, President of Argentina today raises her powerful voice in, once again, the noble call for economic and social justice.  Those who are guilty of perpetuating the injustices she and so many other world leaders abhor walked out of the hall as she spoke.  And those are the ones who may ultimately pay the fatal price for ignoring her warning.

Happy Black Thursday: Do Tumbling Buybacks Signal Another Market Crash?

“Frankly, we are so far off the economic rails, the locomotive is stuck in a swamp and the trailing cars are piling up around it.”Anonymous, Comments line, Naked Capitalism

Since the end of the recession in 2009, investors have borrowed a record amount of money to finance their stock acquisitions. According to the Financial Times, margin debt on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) peaked in February, 2014 at $466 billion and has only recently dipped slightly lower. That’s $85 billion more than 2007 at the peak of the bubble. (Below: Margin debt tends to trace the trajectory of the markets fairly closely, although it’s a poor indicator of a market “top”.)

When stocks start see-sawing like they did last week, it’s usually a sign that over-extended investors are dumping their stocks to meet margin calls. The same thing happened in the run-up to the Crash of 1929. Stocks dropped sharply in late October which forced deeply-indebted investors to unload their holdings at firesale prices. The falling prices triggered a panic that sent stocks into freefall wiping out billions of dollars, crashing the markets, and paving the way for the Great Depression. Here’s a brief summary of what happened:

“On September 3, the market dropped sharply only to rise and then drop again. It was like tremors before a big earthquake but nobody heeded the warning. The market had sagged temporarily before, but it always came back stronger. The market dipped sharply again on October 4 (and) October 21 saw an avalanche of selling as many tried to salvage something from their loss. On October 24 — Black Thursday — the panic took on a life of its own as selling orders overwhelmed the Exchange’s ability to keep up with the transactions…

Wall Street financiers tried to inspire confidence by buying as many shares as they could. It worked — temporarily. (But) on Monday the panic started again, and then came Black Tuesday — October 29. The panic on the Exchange floor changed to bedlam. According to one observer,

“They hollered and screamed, they clawed at one another’s collars. It was like a bunch of crazy men. Every once in a while … you’d see some poor devil collapse and fall to the floor.” This was the Crash, although few could see it at the time… Thirty billion dollars had been lost — more than twice the national debt. The nation reeled, and slipped into the depths of the Great Depression. ” (The Wall Street Crash, 1929, Eyewitness to History)

Unsurprisingly, the banks were at the center of that fiasco too, as was their principle agent, the Federal Reserve. In fact, the International Monetary Fund just issued a scathing rebuke of the Fed’s policies saying that zero rates, which have been in effect for over 5 years, have put the financial system at risk again. Here’s more on the IMF report from the Guardian:

“Accommodative policies aimed at supporting the recovery and promoting economic risk taking have facilitated greater financial risk taking,” the IMF said. As evidence it pointed to rising asset prices, smaller premiums on riskier investments and the lack of volatility in financial markets…”

The IMF said there was a trade-off between the upside economic benefits of low interest rates and the money creation process known as quantitative easing and the downside financial stability risks… “market and liquidity risks have increased to levels that could compromise financial stability if left unaddressed.” (IMF warns period of ultra-low interest rates poses fresh financial crisis threat, Guardian)

In other words, fixing the price of money at zero for years-on-end, increases financial instability while doing nothing for the real economy. The IMF is basically admitting that the Fed has created the conditions for another meltdown.

And the excessive risk taking is not limited to margin debt either. It’s visible in financial assets across the board. Take stock buybacks, for example. Buybacks, which add nothing to a company’s productivity or real value, merely juice stock prices so shareholders and executives can cream bigger profits for themselves. What most people don’t know about buybacks is that the fatcat corporate bosses are not recycling profits into share purchases, but taking advantage of the low rates to load on more debt. Check out this eyepopping chart at Zero Hedge which shows the lethal symmetry between corporate borrowing and stock buybacks:

Why is this happening?

It’s happening because the Obama administration reduced the budget deficits thereby choking off the fiscal stimulus the economy needs to grow. That bit of belt-tightening weakened overall demand forcing corporations to look for other ways to boost profits. What many CEOs figured out was that they could increase earnings by cutting costs and shedding workers while, simultaneously, goosing stock prices by taking advantage of the low interest rates and adding more debt. This is the strategy that energized the stock buyback craze, the revenue-shrinking, worker-trimming, industry-gutting plan to enrich the few at the expense of the company, its employees and its future. Check this out from the WSJ:

“Preliminary data showed stock buybacks reached $116.2 billion in the second quarter … down 27% from $159.3 billion recorded for the first quarter of this year, the second highest on record.

For the 12 months ended June, companies raised their stock repurchases to $533 billion, an increase of nearly 27% from a year earlier. Meanwhile, combined buyback and dividend expenditures for the period reached a record of $865.9 billion, with buybacks representing 61.6% of the total.” (Companies reduced stock buybacks in 2nd quarter, Wall Street Journal)

So you want to know why stocks keep soaring higher on so-so economic data?

Buybacks, that’s why. Here’s a clip from an earlier article in the WSJ that underscores the magnitude of the flimflam:

“Last year, the corporations in the Russell 3000, a broad U.S. stock index, repurchased $567.6 billion worth of their own shares—a 21% increase over 2012, calculates Rob Leiphart, an analyst at Birinyi Associates, a research firm in Westport, Conn. That brings total buybacks since the beginning of 2005 to $4.21 trillion—or nearly one-fifth of the total value of all U.S. stocks today.” (Will Stock Buybacks Bite Back?, Wall Street Journal)

If buybacks represent 20 percent of the total value of stocks today, then what’s going to happen when conditions change, that is, when QE ends and rates rise?

Stocks are going to tumble, right?

Right. And if you want to see how destructive this buyback chicanery really is, just check out the details on IBM’s recent earnings debacle. Here’s the story from the New York Times:

“In the first six months of this year, the company spent more than $12 billion … on its own shares … But all these “shareholder friendly” maneuvers have been masking an ugly truth: IBM’s success in recent years has been tied more to financial engineering than actual performance.

That became readily apparent Monday morning when the company announced its earnings, missing analysts’ expectations by a wide margin. The stock fell more than 7 percent to $169.10 by the end of the day, below the average price Mr. Buffett paid since he started buying the stock in 2011.

The company’s revenue hasn’t grown in years. Indeed, IBM’s revenue is about the same as it was in 2008.

But all along, IBM has been buying up its own shares as if they were a hot item. Since 2000, IBM spent some $108 billion on its own shares, according to its most recent annual report. It also paid out $30 billion in dividends. To help finance this share-buying spree, IBM loaded up on debt.

While the company spent $138 billion on its shares and dividend payments, it spent just $59 billion on its own business through capital expenditures and $32 billion on acquisitions. …All of which is to say that IBM has arguably been spending its money on the wrong things: shareholders, rather than building its own business.

“IBM’s financials make it self-evident that its stock-rigging strategy is not about value creation through ‘investment,’ ” David A. Stockman, the director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan… “IBM is a buyback machine on steroids that has been a huge stock-market winner by virtue of massaging, medicating and manipulating” its earnings per share.” (The Truth Hidden by IBM’s Buybacks, Andrew Ross Sorkin, New York Times)

But IBM is no different than anyone else. They’re all doing the same thing; “dissipating corporate assets” and “shrinking their businesses” (Yves Smith) to enrich greedy executives and their voracious shareholders. And who can blame them, after all, these corporations are merely responding to the incentives created by the Fed’s monetary policies. Stock buybacks make perfect sense when credit is easy and the price of money is zero.

So why did stock prices plunge last week?

It’s all about expectations. Investors know that the conditions that have been favorable for stock buybacks are about to change, (The Fed plans to end QE in October.) so they are making their adjustments while prices are still high. That’s why the markets have been gyrating lately. It’s also why buybacks have dropped by 27 percent in the last quarter. Check out this graph from Zero Hedge:

Corporations have been willing to buy their own shares because (a) money is cheap and (b) because they knew the Fed was shrinking the supply of financial assets by buying US Treasuries. Now that the Fed is threatening to turn off the money-spigot, (which will have the same effect as raising rates) the buybacks will slow and stocks will drop. Of course, that’s not the way the analysts at Goldman Sachs see things. They think the slowdown in stock buybacks is just a temporary glitch that coincides with earnings reports. According to Business Insider:

“Goldman Sachs’ David Kostin believes a temporary pullback may explain why the S&P 500 has tumbled from its all-time high of 2,019 on Sept. 19.

“Most companies are precluded from engaging in open-market stock repurchases during the five weeks before releasing earnings,” Kostin notes. “For many firms, the beginning of the blackout period coincided with the S&P 500 peak on September 18. So the sell-off occurred during a time when the single largest source of equity demand was absent…

“We expect companies will actively repurchase shares in November and December,” he writes. “Since 2007, an average of 25% of annual buybacks has occurred during the last two months of the year.” (GOLDMAN: We’re Blaming The Stock Market Sell-Off On A Pullback In Buybacks, Business Insider)

Goldman could be right, but I don’t think so, mainly because increased volatility and ructions in the bond market suggest that market dynamics have changed. It’s a whole different ballgame now. “The VIX Volatility Index topped 30 briefly last week — often seen as an unofficial warning sign, while CNNMoney’s own Fear & Greed Index is still in “Extreme Fear” mode with the current reading is 5.” And the troubles in the bond market are even scarier. Check this out on Bloomberg:

“Corporate bond values are fluctuating the most in more than a year as Wall Street’s biggest banks opt against using their own money to absorb debt being sold by clients.

The 22 dealers that do business with the Fed reduced their net holdings of high-yield bonds by $1.7 billion in the two weeks ended Oct. 8 to a net $6.3 billion, Fed data show. They were joining the crowd in selling, with high-yield bond mutual funds receiving $7.4 billion of withdrawals since mid-September…” (Leveraged Money Spurs Selloff as Record Treasuries Trade, Bloomberg)

Here’s more from Bloomberg:

“High-yield investors are more worried that no one will bid on their bonds than they are about the risk of companies defaulting. At a time when the default rate for below investment-grade companies is holding at about half its historical average, junk-bond investors are increasingly concerned that they’ll be unable to sell when they want to…

“Clients now want to sell any bond they don’t want to hold for the long-term for fear that they will not be able to sell them later,” Bank of America Corp. analysts led by Michael Contopoulos wrote in a note today. The recent volatility “has been a wake-up call for many that dealer balance sheet constraints leads to faster price discovery and gappier price moves.”… (Lonely Bond Buyers Feel Deserted When Junk-Market Rout Heats Up, Bloomberg)

Investors are afraid that they won’t be able to get out when they want to?

Precisely, and that fear is adding to market volatility.

So what happens now?

Well, it looks like things are going to get a whole lot crazier for a while, particularly if economic data is weak, and the Fed winds down QE on schedule. Then we could see a noticeable increase in the violent swings in daily trading. One thing to keep an eye on is yields on high-yield debt which have been gradually rising signaling that investors are less eager to provide cheap credit to marginal corporate borrowers. That’s going to make it more expensive to finance stock buybacks which means that the main driver of the stock market is going to begin to stall. When buybacks drop off, the markets will drift sideways leading to a selloff in the bond market that could spark a race for the exits. Here’s how Jeff Cox sums it up over at CNBC:

“Picture this: The bond market gets spooked by a sudden interest rate scare, sending a throng of buyers streaming toward the exits, only to find a dearth of buyers on the other side. As a result, liquidity evaporates, yields soar, and the U.S. finds itself smack in the middle of another debt crisis no one saw coming…

We saw the imbalance this summer, when global unrest caused sudden outflows from high-yield corporates, and last spring, when a swift, but not unprecedented, move in rates caused a negative knee-jerk reaction in credit spreads. As one trader put it: “The Taper Tantrum was the 30-second preview to a full feature film that might yet play out.” (This is the ‘doomsday’ bond market scenario, Jeff Cox, CNBC)

We’ve already had three dress rehearsals for Cox’s “doomsday scenario” since last summer, (the most recent of which took place last Wednesday when the Dow dropped 460 pts before rebounding.) so there’s no doubt that there’s trouble ahead. Once stocks start to fall, the bond bubble will burst igniting a broader selloff and a swift plunge in prices. That will leave the balance sheets of many corporations and financial institutions deep in the red precipitating a second major financial crisis in less than 7 years.

Sound plausible?

I think so. And the problems can all be traced back to the easy money policies of the Central Bank; our friend, the Fed.

Silencing Dissent: US Political Prisoners Mumia Abu-Jamal and Jeremy Hammond in the Sacrifice Zone of Empire

Recently, two cases concerning the constitutional rights of people in prison came to public light. They involve two U.S. political prisoners: Mumia Abu-Jamal who is serving a life sentence at a facility in Frackville, Pennsylvania and Jeremy Hammond, who is serving a ten year sentence at a federal prison in Manchester, Kentucky.

On Monday October 20, it was reported that Hammond, a young Chicago based computer programmer, had been held in solitary confinement for the last 10 days. In November 2013, he was sentenced after he plead guilty for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for allegedly revealing more than five million emails from the private intelligence firm Strategic Forecasting (Stratfor).

The Courage Foundation, an international organization dedicated to the protection of truth-tellers, published a statement on their site, noting the organization’s belief that Hammond’s solitary confinement is retaliatory punishment for filing complaints against the prison for withholding his mail.

The next day, another news story surfaced concerning world-renowned political prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal. He had been convicted for the killing of a Philadelphia police officer in 1982 in a highly biased trial.

On Tuesday October 21, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett signed a bill that is said to protect victims from possible mental anguish supposedly caused by any action by an inmate or former offender. Under this new law called “Revictimization Relief Act,” prisoners in the state of Pennsylvania can now be sued for speaking out from behind bars.

This legislation was apparently passed as a way to silence Abu-Jamal (photo, right), one of the state’s most famous prisoners. The measure was put forward after Abu-Jamal delivered a recorded commencement speech for his fellow alumni at Vermont’s Goddard College earlier this month. The American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania criticized the bill, saying it cannot “pass constitutional muster under the First Amendment.”

In a recorded phone interview with Noelle Hanrahan of Prison Radio, former Black Panther Abu-Jamal called the bill “a blatant, naked violation” of both the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and of the United States that grants the right of free speech to all people. In the same interview, he said, “the press ignores prisoners, as a rule. Most of what happens in prisons are never or rarely reported in the press.” This bill furthered the censorship and reduced the ability for someone like him to speak to the public at all.

Abu-Jamal and Hammond, two men with very different backgrounds share much in common. Both were placed in prolonged solitary confinement, which the UN Special Rapporteur on torture called “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, and may amount to torture.”

Since his arrest in March 2010, Hammond was regularly cut off from contact with his friends and family and was more than once in solitary. Abu-Jamal has spent the last 30 years in prison, almost all of it in solitary confinement on Pennsylvania’s death row before prosecutors agreed in 2011 to reduce the sentence.

They both have always held strong commitment to social justice. Hammond revealed secret collusion of corporations and the state to engage in unconstitutional spying on human rights activists. At his sentencing hearing he stated his motivation:

The acts of civil disobedience and direct action that I am being sentenced for today are in line with the principles of community and equality that have guided my life. I hacked into dozens of high profile corporations and government institutions, understanding very clearly that what I was doing was against the law, and that my actions could land me back in federal prison. But I felt that I had an obligation to use my skills to expose and confront injustice—and to bring the truth to light.

Prior to serving his sentence, Abu-Jamal was a renowned activist and journalist and has since published several books and hundreds of articles and columns from behind bars. They are both prisoners of conscience. Their commitment to justice is not the only thing that binds them together. They both have seen hidden views inside the prison industrial complex even before they entered it and have been punished for unveiling to the public what they saw.

In the book Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, journalists Joe Sacco and Chris Hedges documented their travel to forgotten corners of impoverished and extracted parts of America, which they called “sacrifice zones.” Their account started with the Western plains, where lives of Native Americans were sacrificed and their lands offered up for predatory capitalism’s promise of progress and development.

Prisons are now becoming sacrifice zones offered up for the ambition of empire. They are more and more being privatized for immoral corporate profiteering. The young, the poor and people of color have become prime targets. In his book Punishment and Inequality in America, Bruce Western explores the recent explosion of mass incarceration in the U.S. He addressesthe unequal ratio of prison population between whites and blacks. Over two million prisoners are composed of disproportionate numbers of minorities and people with little education. He documented how almost 60 percent of black male high school dropouts have spent time in prison in their early thirties.

Those behind bars are made invisible. They are often stripped of their constitutional rights and cut off from communication with the outside world. This is one of the places where our youth’s future is locked up for state sanctioned racism and sacrificed for capitalism’s bottomless greed.

From the margins where injustice shapes the landscape of everyday life, individuals like Hammond and Abu-Jamal expose the lies of the government and hypocrisy of the criminal justice system. From the darkness inside, they cast a light on what those in power don’t want us to see.

For instance, Hammond shared his personal experience as a prisoner at the Metropolitan Correctional Center during Hurricane Sandy. He described how when the storm hit, they lost power and prisoners were left behind with no hot water, heat, mail or phones. He described how the government abandoned them.

“Very frightening to consider what would happen to us prisoners – already disenfranchised, silenced, marginalized and forgotten – in the event of a more devastating natural disaster. There’s a universal consensus here – ‘they’d probably leave us to die.’”

Whatever happens behind closed doors will eventually expand as the corporate state’s addiction to power has no limit. It is this spreading hidden oppression that Abu-Jamal has been warning about from prison for decades. Months before Edward Snowden leaked the shocking news of mass surveillance of U.S. citizens, Abu-Jamal had presciently noted that the American prison experience is expanding into the outside world:

… if you look inside the bars, you’re looking at millions of men and women and juveniles… But even beyond that, I mean, how free are we today, those who claim to be non-prisoners? Your computers are being read by others in government. Your letters, your phone calls are being intercepted. We live now in a national security state, where the United States is fast becoming one of the biggest open-air prisons on earth.

Hammond and Abu-Jamal, a generation apart sit behind bars in this sacrifice zone. They represent those who are silenced for speaking truth to power. They have not only revealed insidious levels of surveillance and deep state racism, but have also highlighted the growing level of illegitimate governance that inflicts violence and perpetuates cruelty and misery.

These sacrifice zones of the corporate state are expanding. The recent shooting of an unarmed young black man in Ferguson revealed the insidious disease of white supremacy and how easily U.S. cities can turn into a military occupied police state. With unprecedented persecution of whistle-blowers, the Obama administration continues to threaten press freedom and engage in extrajudicial killing through drone attacks for anyone who is on the receiving end of U.S. imperial foreign policy.

The world is quickly becoming one big open-air prison. The NSA is inflicting mass surveillance by working hand in hand with private companies like Google and Verizon to infiltrate all forms of communication. The U.S. continues to send weapons to aid Israeli government’s assaults on Gaza against Palestine civilians. From the creation of ISIS and the crisis in Ukraine, the U.S. empire is desperately attempting to stave off the imminent end of the petrodollar monopoly game by spreading terror around the world and at home.

It is time to stop the operation of a heartless corporate industrial complex that chews up innocent lives and destroys the environment in order to maximize profits at any cost. We must resist this aggression and its blatant violation of civil liberties before it devours all that is sacred to us. What is sacred should never be sacrificed.

Hi Pondo,

Here is my latest blog post. You are welcome to post it or link to it.

Harmaline Wonderland of Gnomes, Elves, Faeries and Sprites

http://eventhorizonchronicle.blogspot.com/2014/10/harmaline-wonderland-of-gnomes-elves.html

best regards,
Richard Sauder