El derrumbe

Instructiva nota de Thierry Meyssan sobre la debacle saudita en pleno progreso, aparecida hace unos días en Red Voltaire. La foto de arriba muestra a Mohammed ben Salman Al Saud, de 30 años, príncipe heredero suplente, segundo Primer ministro suplente, ministro de Estado, ministro de Defensa, secretario general de la Corte Real y presidente del Consejo de Asuntos Económicos y Desarrollo de Arabia Saudita. Una joyita el muchacho. Pasemos a la nota:

Título: Arabia Saudita… hacia el derrumbe

Epígrafe: Mientras la casa de los Saud vive los últimos momentos de su dictadura, la decapitación del jefe de su oposición, Nimr al-Nimr, echa por tierra las esperanzas que la mitad de la población saudita aún podía albergar. Thierry Meyssan estima que la caída del reino es inevitable y que llegará acompañada de un periodo de violencia extrema.

Texto: En un año, el nuevo rey de Arabia Saudita, Salman, hijo número 25 del fundador de la dinastía Saud, ha logrado consolidar su autoridad personal en detrimento de las demás ramas de la familia real, como el clan del príncipe Bandar ben Sultan y el del ex rey Abdallah. Pero no se sabe lo que Washington puede haber prometido a los perdedores para que no traten de recuperar el poder que han perdido. En todo caso, una serie de cartas anónimas publicadas en la prensa británica hacen pensar que estos miembros de la familia real saudita no han renunciado a sus ambiciones.

Después de haberse visto obligado por sus hermanos a nombrar al príncipe Mohamad ben Nayef como próximo heredero, el rey Salman rápidamente lo aisló y limitó sus competencias, favoreciendo con ello a su propio hijo, el príncipe Mohammed ben Salman, cuyo carácter impulsivo y brutal no ha podido ser compensado por el Consejo de Familia –que ya no se reúne. De hecho, el príncipe ben Salman y su padre el rey son quienes están gobernando el reino, solos, como autócratas, sin ninguna forma de contrapoder en un país donde nunca se ha elegido un parlamento y los partidos políticos están prohibidos.

Así se ha podido ver al príncipe Mohammed ben Salman asumir la presidencia del Consejo de Asuntos Económicos y Desarrollo, imponer una nueva dirección al Ben Laden Group y apoderarse de Aramco [1]. En todos los casos, su objetivo ha sido marginar a sus primos y poner a sus propios hombres de confianza a la cabeza de las grandes empresas del reino.

El jeque al-Nimr describía de la siguiente manera la vida de la poblacion chiita de Arabia Saudita: «Desde el momento mismo en que usted nace, se ve rodeado por el miedo, la intimidación, la persecución y los abusos. Hemos nacido en una atmósfera de intimidación. Tenemos miedo hasta de las paredes. ¿Cuál de nosotros no está familiarizado con la intimidación y la injusticia a las que nos vemos sometidos en este país? Yo tengo 55 años, he vivido más de medio siglo. Desde que nací hasta hoy, nunca me he sentido seguro en este país. Uno siempre está acusado de algo. Siempre está bajo amenaza. El director de la Seguridad del Estado lo reconoció en mi presencia. Cuando me arrestaron me dijo: “A ustedes, los chiitas, habría que matarlos a todos.” Esa es la lógica de ellos.»

En el plano interno, el régimen saudita se apoya solamente en la mitad de la población sunnita o wahabita, mientras que discrimina a la otra mitad de la población. El príncipe Mohammed ben Salman aconsejó a su padre ordenar la decapitación del jeque Nimr Baqir al-Nimr porque este último había osado desafiarlo.

Dicho de otra manera, el Estado condenó a muerte y ejecutó al principal jefe de su oposición, cuyo único crimen era haber formulado y repetido la consigna: «El despotismo es ilegítimo.» El hecho que ese líder fuese un jeque chiita refuerza inevitablemente la impresión que tienen los no sunnitas de vivir bajo un apartheid, ya que se les prohíbe la educación religiosa y se les prohíbe el acceso a cualquier empleo en el sector público. En cuanto a los no musulmanes, que son un tercio de la población saudita, no están autorizados a ejercer su religion y ni siquiera tienen acceso a la nacionalidad saudita.

En el plano internacional, el príncipe Mohammed y su padre aplican una política basada en las tribus beduinas del reino. Sólo así se explican simultáneamente el financiamiento saudita a los talibanes afganos y a la Corriente del Futuro libanesa, la represión contra la revolución en Bahréin, el apoyo a los yihadistas en Siria y en Irak y la invasión de Yemen. Los Saud siempre apoyan grupos sunnitas, a los que consideran más cercanos al wahabismo que esa familia impone como religión estatal en Arabia Saudita. Pero los apoyan no sólo contra los chiitas duodecimanos sino, en primer lugar, en contra de los sunnitas ilustrados y también en contra de todas las demás religiones (ismaelitas, zaiditas, alevitas, alauitas, drusos, sijs, católicos, ortodoxos, sabateos, yazidíes, zoroastrianos, hindúes, etc.). Y lo más importante es que, en todos los casos, apoyan única y exclusivamente a los líderes provenientes de las grandes tribus sunnitas sauditas.

Es también importante señalar, de paso, que la ejecución del jeque al-Nimr tiene lugar inmediatamente después del anuncio de la creación de una amplia coalición antiterrorista de 34 Estados musulmanes alrededor de Riad. Cuando se sabe que el ejecutado, que siempre rechazó recurrir a la violencia, había sido condenado a muerte por «terrorismo», el mensaje que se desprende de su ejecución es que dicha coalición en realidad es una alianza sunnita contra las demás religiones.

El príncipe Mohammed decidió iniciar la guerra en Yemen, supuestamente para prestar ayuda al presidente Abd Rabbo Mansur Hadi –derrocado por una alianza entre los rebeldes huthis y el ejército del ex presidente Ali Abdallah Saleh– y en realidad para apoderarse de los yacimientos yemenitas de petróleo y explotarlos junto a Israel. Como era previsible, esa guerra no está dando los resultados que esperaba el príncipe y los rebeldes están incursionando en suelo saudita, donde el ejército del reino huye despavorido, incluso abandonando su armamento.

Arabia Saudita es, por consiguiente, el único país del mundo que es propiedad personal de un solo hombre, gobernado por ese autócrata y su hijo, que rechaza todo debate ideológico, no tolera ninguna forma de oposición y no acepta otra cosa que el vasallaje tribal. Estas características, por mucho tiempo consideradas residuos del pasado llamados a adaptarse al mundo moderno, se han enquistado al extremo de convertirse en la identidad misma de un reino anacrónico.

La caída de la casa Saud podría verse provocada por el desplome de los precios del petróleo. Incapaz de rediseñar su tren de vida, el reino se endeuda a toda velocidad y, según los analistas financieros, tendría que enfrentar la bancarrota de aquí a 2 años. La venta parcial de Aramco podría prolongar la agonía, pero tendrá como consecuencia una pérdida de autonomía.

La decapitación del jeque al-Nimr ha resultado el capricho que desborda la copa. La caída se ha vuelto inevitable en Arabia Saudita porque quienes allí viven carecen ahora de toda esperanza. Como resultado, el país enfrentará una mezcla de revueltas tribales y de revoluciones sociales que resultará mucho más mortífera que los conflictos que hasta ahora han sacudido el Medio Oriente.

Lejos de oponerse a este trágico fin, los protectores estadounidenses del reino lo esperan impacientes. Y si no dejan de celebrar la «sabiduría» del príncipe Mohammed, en realidad lo hacen para estimularlo a seguir cometiendo errores. Ya en septiembre de 2001, el Estado Mayor Conjunto estadounidense trabajaba en un mapa de rediseño del «Medio Oriente ampliado» que preveía el desmembramiento del reino en 5 Estados. Y en junio de 2002, durante una célebre reunión del Defense Policy Board, Washington estudiaba cómo deshacerse de los Saud, algo que ahora es sólo una cuestión de tiempo.

Elementos fundamentales:

- Estados Unidos logró resolver el problema de la sucesión del rey Abdallah, pero ahora está empujando a Arabia Saudita a cometer errores. Estados Unidos tiene ahora como objetivo dividir el reino en 5 partes.

- El wahabismo es la religión de Estado en Arabia Saudita, pero la familia Saud se apoya –tanto dentro del país como fuera de este– únicamente en las tribus sunnitas y practican un apartheid contra la población que practica otras religiones.

- El rey Salman, de 80 años, deja el ejercicio del poder en manos de uno de sus hijos, el príncipe Mohammed, de 30 años. Este último se ha apoderado de las grandes empresas del país, inició la guerra en Yemen y acaba de obtener la ejecución del jefe de la oposición, el jeque al-Nimr.

Nota:

[1] La Saudi Aramco es la empresa nacional a cargo de la comercialización del petróleo de Arabia Saudita. Nota de la Red Voltaire.

Se viene el estallido?

A ver qué les parece esta nota de Lawrence Summers para el Washington Post de anteayer. El autor, economista, es profesor y fue presidente de la Universidad de Harvard; también fue asesor económico del presidente Obama entre 2011 y 2013. La idea general es que estamos en vísperas de algún tipo de crack sistémico en el universo financiero. Incidentalmente, nos quedamos con esta notable frase que, sobre el crecimiento de China, dice sobre el final de su nota: “China put in place more cement and concrete between 2011 and 2013 than the United States did in the whole of the 20th century.”


Título: Why the Fed needs to prepare for the worst right now

Texto: Often markets are volatile at the end of the year — as many traders go on holiday and those with losses unload them — and then settle down as a new year begins. Not this year. U.S. and European markets closed significantly lower on Friday after a very rough week despite a very strong U.S. jobs report. The week’s economic news was dominated by dramatic declines in China’s stock market and currency; the week also saw a further plunge in oil prices even in the face of major tension between Iran and Saudi Arabia.

A week when bad market news repeatedly makes the front page raises the general question of how much forecasters and policymakers should look to speculative markets as indicators regarding future prospects. And it raises the more specific question of how alarmed policymakers should be about the prospect of a global slowdown, especially in light of the financial dramas playing out in China.

There is little question that markets are highly volatile relative to the fundamentals they seek to assess. Economist Paul Samuelson famously quipped 50 years ago, “the stock market has predicted nine of the last five recessions.” Former Treasury secretary Robert Rubin was right when he would regularly reassure anxious politicos in the Clinton White House that “markets go up, and markets go down” on days when a market move created either joy or anxiety. The best executives manage their company with an eye to long-run profitability, not daily stock price. And policymakers do best when they concentrate on strengthening economic fundamentals rather than on daily market fluctuations.

At the same time, because markets aggregate the views of a huge number of participants, and because they are constantly assessing the future (unlike economic statistics, which only reflect the past), they are like canaries in coal mines: very valuable in giving warning when conditions change. That is why several studies have shown that prediction markets do a better job of forecasting elections than pollsters and why Hollywood studios use such markets to judge the likely success of movies.

Policymakers who dismiss market moves as reflecting mere speculation often make a serious mistake. Markets were on to the gravity of the 2008 crisis well before the Federal Reserve was; to the unsustainability of fixed exchange rates in Britain, Mexico and Brazil while the authorities were still in denial; and to the onset of a slowdown or recession well before forecasters in countless downturns.

While markets do sometimes send false alarms and should not be slavishly followed, the conventional wisdom essentially never recognizes gathering storms. The Economist reports this week that, looking across all major countries over the past several decades, there were 220 instances in which a year of positive growth was followed by one of contraction. In its April forecasts during the growth year, the International Monetary Fund did not anticipate a coming recession on a single occasion!

Market signals should be taken especially seriously when they are long-lasting and coming from many markets, as is the case with current indications that inflation will not reach target levels within a decade in the United States, Europe or Japan. Especially ominous are moments when news fails to rally markets as would be expected such as with the U.S. stock market and Friday’s strong employment report or the decline of oil prices in the face of heightened Middle East tensions.

Last week we saw huge negative movements in Chinese markets and a large foreign market response. While it certainly could be the case that the Chinese developments reflect a combination of market psychology and clumsy policy responses, and that the strong response of world markets is an example of transient contagion, I doubt it.

Over the past year, about 20 percent of China’s growth as reported in its official statistics has come from its financial-services sector, which has mushroomed to the point where it is about as large relative to national GDP as in Britain, and Chinese debt levels are extraordinarily high. This is hardly a case of healthy or sustainable growth.

In recent years, China’s growth has come heavily from massive infrastructure investment; indeed, China put in place more cement and concrete between 2011 and 2013 than the United States did in the whole of the 20th century. This growth, too, is unsustainable, and even if it is replaced by domestic services, China’s contribution to demand for global commodities will fall way off.

Habla Vladimiro

Habló el líder del Mundo Libre, Vladimir Vladimírovich Putin, y habló claro, como siempre. Dijo, por ejemplo: "El problema de Europa fue cederle parte de su soberanía a EE.UU." Otra: "No soy su amigo, soy presidente de Rusia". Otra: "Objetamos firmemente contra lo que estaba pasando en Irak, Libia y otros países. No nos escucharon. Ahora, cuando tienen cientos de miles o quizás millones de refugiados, ¿qué creen, nuestra postura era antioccidental o prooccidental?" La nota es de Russia Today:


Título: Putin: "Declararnos enemigos cuando nuestra actitud no le gusta a alguien no es la mejor opción"

Epígrafe: Pese a las sancionas y la coyuntura de los precios, o quizá debido a ello, la economía rusa volverá a estabilizarse y a mejorar gradualmente, cree Vladímir Putin.

Texto: En una entrevista concedida al periódico alemán 'Bild' el presidente de Rusia, Vladímir Putin, aborda varios temas del pasado común de Rusia, Europa Occidental y EE.UU. y sostiene que Rusia no ha mantenido en ningún momento una postura 'antioccidental'.

"Objetamos firmemente contra lo que estaba pasando en Irak, Libia y otros países. Dijimos que no hacía falta hacerlo, meterse allí y cometer tantos errores. No nos escucharon. Al contrario, consideraban que manteníamos una postura antioccidental, inamistosa respecto a Occidente. Ahora, cuando tienen cientos de miles o quizás millones de refugiados, ¿qué creen, nuestra postura era antioccidental o prooccidental?", se preguntó.


Un archivo hecho público

El presidente ruso citó durante la entrevista los protocolos de varias conversaciones sostenidas en 1990 entre el entonces canciller de Alemania del Oeste, Helmut Kohl, el ministro de Asuntos Exteriores, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, y el diputado de la Dieta Federal Egon Bahr y, por la parte soviética, Mijaíl Gorbachov y el diplomático y alto funcionario del Partido Comunista Valentín Falin. Estos documentos, comentó, no habían sido hechos públicos hasta ahora.

"Si durante la reunificación de Alemania no se emprenden pasos decisivos para superar la grieta que divide a Europa en bloques contrincantes, el desarrollo puede tomar un rumbo muy desfavorable, que llevará a la URSS a un aislamiento internacional", citó Putin las palabras de Bahr.

El veterano, ya para aquella época, de la política alemana e ideólogo de la reunificación de Alemania Bahr propuso cosas concretas, destacó Putin. Habló de la necesidad de crear en el Centro de Europa una alianza nueva. La OTAN, especialmente sus estructuras militares, en su opinión, no deberían extenderse hacia la Europa central. Bahr incluso insistía en que la Unión Soviética no aceptara la propagación de la Alianza Atlántica, subrayó el presidente ruso. "Estaba convencido de que era preciso cambiar de formato completamente, alejarse de los tiempos de la Guerra Fría. Pero nosotros no hicimos nada para que así fuera", sintetizó.


La expansión de la OTAN

En los anteriores 20 o 25 años, específicamente después de la disolución de la Unión Soviética, cuando dejó de existir el segundo centro de gravedad en el mundo, surgió el deseo de disfrutar "la cima de la gloria mundial, el poder y el bienestar". "No existía ningún deseo de acudir al derecho internacional, a la Carta de la Organización de las Naciones Unidas", dijo el líder ruso en referencia a Estados Unidos y algunos de sus aliados. "Y cuando alguien les molestaba, se declaraba inmediatamente que la ONU era algo vetusto".

Más allá de la expansión de la OTAN hacia el Este en materia de seguridad surgió el sistema de defensa antimisiles, que se está desarrollando en Europa bajo el pretexto de detener la amenaza nuclear iraní.

El actual presidente de Estados Unidos, Barack Obama, dijo que si la amenaza nuclear de Irán deja de existir no habrá ningún motivo para crear un sistema de defensa antimisiles, recordó Putin. "Actualmente se ha firmado un acuerdo con Irán, está en estudio el levantamiento de las sanciones, todo bajo control de la OIEA, el primer uranio está llegando al territorio de Rusia para su procesamiento, sin embargo el sistema de defensa antimisiles sigue desarrollándose. Se han firmados acuerdos bilaterales con Turquía, Rumanía, Polonia y España. En España se están desplegando las fuerzas navales en el marco de la defensa antimisiles. En Rumanía y ha sido creada una región de defensa, otra aparecerá en Polonia hacia el año 2018 y en Turquía se ha instalado un radar", dijo el presidente ruso.


Posibles soluciones

"Hemos oído mil veces, reiterado como un mantra por los políticos estadounidenses y europeos, que los países tienen el derecho a elegir la manera como garantizan su seguridad —recordó—. Es también verdad que otros países tienen el derecho a decidir sobre la extensión de su organización o no, actuar como consideren apropiado desde el punto de vista de la seguridad internacional en general". A partir de este derecho, cree Putin, los principales miembros de la OTAN podrían haber dicho que no querían la adhesión de nuevos países y la expansión de la Alianza, puesto que veían de otra manera el futuro de Europa.

"¿Está escrito en el Tratado del Atlántico Norte que aceptará obligatoriamente a todos aquellos que quieran ingresar? No. Debe haber ciertos criterios, ciertas condiciones. Si hubieran tenido voluntad política habrían podido hacer todo lo que hubieran querido. Pero no quisieron. Quisieron gobernar. Se aferraron al trono", polemizó Putin en referencia a la hipotética opción de no aceptar los nuevos miembros en la Alianza Atlántica en la época postsoviética. Las actuales situaciones críticas en Europa, en su opinión, son una consecuencia de aquel error.

Estas crisis no existirían si las potencias occidentales hubieran puesto en práctica lo que propuso el "viejo y listo alemán", Egon Bar: hubieran creado una nueva asociación de países capaz de unir Europa.


Los errores de Rusia

Rusia ha cometido varios errores en los casi 25 años transcurridos desde la disolución de la URSS, admitió el presidente ruso. "No declaramos cuáles eran nuestros intereses nacionales, y tendríamos que haberlo hecho desde el principio. El mundo sería más equilibrado". Entre los procesos destructivos dentro del propio país Putin enumeró la caída de la producción industrial, el desplome del sistema social y el separatismo, y recordó también la "evidente agresión del terrorismo internacional".

"Por supuesto, somos nosotros mismos los culpables, no hace falta acusar a nadie. Pero a nosotros nos parece evidente que nadie prestó atención a esto o, al revés, se prestó apoyo político, informativo, financiero y en ocasiones militar a las fuerzas subversivas en Rusia. Y al fin, de repente nos hemos dado cuenta de que, independientemente de cuál sea el discurso, los intereses geopolíticos existen aparte", afirmó el dirigente.

Pero los problemas de la Europa de hoy se deben a errores comunes cometidos desde los primeros pasos posteriores a la Perestroika. "El muro de Berlín cayó hace 25 años, pero la escisión en Europa no ha sido superada, los muros invisibles fueron desplazados hacia el Este", dijo el presidente ruso. "Esto creó los fundamentos para los futuros reproches mutuos, la incomprensión y las crisis".


"Cuando digo 'Crimea' pienso en las personas"

Cuando el periodista alemán planteo la cuestión de Crimea al presidente ruso, este reaccionó con una pregunta: "¿En qué piensa usted cuando dice la palabra 'Crimea'?". "Un cambio en las fronteras", contestó el corresponsal de 'Bild'. "Pues yo pienso en la gente: en dos millones y medio de personas", señaló Putin. Les asustó el golpe de Estado producido en Kiev, explicó. Implicó a fuerzas extremadamente nacionalistas, que en parte se quedaron con el poder y en 2014 amenazaron directamente a la población rusófona. Eso era un problema para Crimea, porque allí hay más personas de lengua materna rusa que en otras partes de Ucrania.

Putin recordó que el comportamiento de los militares rusos en Crimea no implicó ninguna víctima mortal sino que, al contrario, evitó muertes humanas. "Usamos las Fuerzas Armadas para contener a los más de 20.000 militares de Ucrania y para que no intervinieran durante el referéndum de la población de Crimea. Aquellas personas participaron en el referéndum y votaron. Quisieron formar parte de Rusia". Ese referéndum fue un acto de democracia, una expresión de la voluntad del pueblo, aseguró el líder ruso. "Para mí no es importante el territorio y las fronteras, sino el destino de la gente", afirmó.

Abordó también el aspecto de la legalidad del cambio de soberanía.

"Es imprescindible siempre observar el derecho internacional", admitió. "En el caso de Crimea el derecho internacional no fue violado. De conformidad con la Carta de las Naciones Unidas, todos los pueblos tienen el derecho a la autodeterminación".


El lado positivo de las sanciones y el bajo precio del petróleo

Imponer sanciones a Rusia en 2014 fue "una decisión estúpida y perjudicial", según Putin. "No es lo más complicado que estamos viviendo", aseguró. El mayor daño para la economía rusa proviene de la bajada de precios de los productos tradicionales de exportación. No obstante, en la influencia de ambos factores hay un lado positivo, opina el mandatario. "Cuando los precios del petróleo son altos existe la tentación de aprovechar todos los ingresos petroleros para ahcer frente a los gastos corrientes. Y el déficit inducido por el sector ha crecido hasta un límite peligroso. Ahora tenemos que bajarlo, y esto sanea la economía".

Rusia mantiene un alto nivel de reservas, informó el presidente: el Banco Central tiene más de 300.000 millones de dólares en reservas de oro y divisas, y existen otros dos fondos de reserva del Gobierno, de 70 y 80 millones de dólares respectivamente. Además, en Rusia se cree que la economía volverá a estabilizarse y a subir gradualmente. "Hemos adoptado una serie de programas, incluido el de desplazamiento de artículos importados, que implican inversiones en áreas de alta tecnología".

Con Occidente, dijo, Rusia comparte amenazas comunes e, igual que antes, busca "mancomunar los esfuerzos de todos los países, tanto en Europa como en el mundo entero, para luchar contra estas amenazas". "No se trata solo del terrorismo, sino también de la delincuencia, la trata de personas y la lucha por proteger el medioambiente", enumeró el presidente ruso. "Hay muchos problemas en común. Sin embargo, esto no significa que cada vez tengamos que compartir la opinión de otros en una u otra cuestión. Declararnos enemigos cada vez que nuestra actitud no le guste a alguien no es la mejor opción. Quizás a veces sería mejor escuchar, reflexionar de manera crítica, aceptar opiniones y encontrar soluciones comunes".


"No soy su amigo, soy presidente de Rusia"

Vladímir Putin ha descartado en su entrevista con 'Bild' que él o su percepción de los problemas globales hayan cambiado. Admitió también que puede ser amigo de ciertas personas, pero no como presidente ruso.

"Me preguntan: ¿su humilde servidor es un amigo o un enemigo?", dijo el dirigente. "Las relaciones entre Estados no se desarrollan de manera distinta a como se desarrollan entre las personas. No soy amigo, ni novia o novio, soy presidente de la Federación de Rusia. Son 146 millones de personas que tienen sus intereses y estoy obligado a defenderlos. Estamos dispuestos a hacerlo sin confrontaciones, a buscar compromisos, pero, por supuesto, a partir del derecho internacional, comprendido uniformemente por todos".

No a Ucrania en la UE?

Upa. Se pone fulera la cosa para el ingreso de Ucrania en la Unión Europea. Leemos en Zero Hedge de hoy:


Título: Juncker: "Dutch 'NO' Vote Will Lead To A Big Continental Crisis"

Texto: In April the Dutch people will vote on the European-Ukraine association treaty.  In an interview with the NRC, a Dutch leading newspaper, Juncker warned the Dutch voters a “NO” will lead to a big continental crisis. “Russia and anti European movements will profit from a Dutch No, the Dutch has to vote yes for reasons not related to the treaty, the Dutch should act like an European strategist” according to Mr Juncker.

Even the Dutch leader of the most pro European party, Mr  Pechtold, was shocked by the warning, fearing it will have an avert affect on the Dutch voters.

The Dutch government introduced a consulting referendum in 2015, the Dutch law claimed democratic improvements while in reality it was constructed to prevent a referendum from ever happening. Dutch people who want a consultative referendum are obliged to collect 300.000 paper signatures. On average it takes an hour to collect one valid signature, the Dutch authorities were absolutely convinced that no one will ever manage to collect that many signatures.

Paradoxically an organization was created by Dutch authorities to facilitate a Dutch referendum, knowing that its principal never want to see a referendum happening. For this reason they do not accept the use of the Dutch digital authentication system (DigID), a system introduced by the Dutch authorities to communicate digitally with the Dutch authorities.

Unfortunately for the Dutch lawmakers a Dutch blog figured out how to collect “real” signatures digitally. People literally has to draw their “real” signature on the PC, using a drawing canvas in their electronic form. They were able to collect about 300.000 signatures, while the Dutch mainstream media completely ignoring this watershed moment.

The first Referendum under the new law is going to be against the Ukraine association treaty. The organization sees the European association treaty with Ukraine as provoking unnecessary violent tension in Europe. The EU was established to promote stability and peace within Europe, however with the treaty they are neglecting the founding principals.

The Europe association treaty and NATO’s involvement in Ukraine resulted in

- Violent riots in Kiev
- Expulsion of the Ukraine government
- Annexation of the Crimea
- War in eastern Ukraine
- Possible enlargement of the EU without the consultation of the EU citizen
- Flow of money to a country that is still ruled by corrupt oligarchs
- European-NATO encroaching into former Soviet Republics

As the Netherlands head the EU presidency, the Dutch will go to the ballot box to vote against the European Ukraine association treaty. Brussels’ elite already knows that there is resentment against the enlargement of the European Union, it is however new that the referendum also includes NATO policies.

Los consejos de Demetrio

Ayer posteamos el pronóstico para 2016 de uno de los doomsayers más leídos del Imperio. Hoy posteamos a nuestro ruso favorito: Dmitri Orlov, fino analista independiente de la caída de la Unión Soviética y de las lecciones que pueden extraerse de este proceso (véase su sitio web cluborlov.com). Acá va su “receta” para el mundo en 2016: colapsar tempranito y con cierta frecuencia. Diríase que los argentinos seguimos la línea orloviana, no?

Título: My Prescription for 2016: Collapse Early and Often

Texto: We are in the time of year when most sensible animals living in northerly climates are hibernating in burrows and hollow tree trunks, while the somewhat less sensible pundits make their predictions for the coming year. My prediction is always the same—things will go on more or less same as before, until something major breaks, while the probability of something major breaking goes up with each passing year. I have called this event “collapse,” and have predicted, year after year, that it will eventually happen. And so, instead of repeating this less than useful prediction, this year I will instead provide a prescription.

Not too many people, I expect, will want to follow my prescription; not too many of my family members, or friends, or acquaintances, or you who are reading this. And that's fine because, as I have learned over and over again, there is no strength in numbers. Quite the opposite: the probability of any given trick working is in inverse proportion to the number of times it is tried, or the number of people who try it. And so, if you are reading along and think “I can't possibly do this because of [insert lame excuse]!” then—good! Fine with me. Fewer people equals more oxygen.

And that applies to the few people who will actually bother to read this. Lots more people will not want to read this, because—what collapse? Gasoline prices are low, Obama has shut down most of the wars, the economy is strong enough for the Fed to have started hiking rates, and once Bernie Trump gets into the White House, everything else will be set right too. To the people who think that, someone like me, who predicted collapse a while back, was clearly wrong, and needs to be psychoanalyzed, not followed. Again, fine with me, so long and thanks for all the bullshit.

The reasons it's all bullshit are as follows.

• Gasoline prices are low because high oil prices crashed the economy. In turn, low oil prices are destroying the North American oil patch, which was only showing new signs of life thanks to fracking and tar sands, which are expensive to produce and only make sense when oil prices are high. Rest assured, prices will go back up, and then back down, until, in the end, oil comes to be regarded as useless toxic waste. A year ago I described exactly this scenario.

• The wars are over because all of them pretty much ended in defeat for the US. None of them achieved any of their stated objectives. Now, some of you will jump up and try to comment that the stated objectives were not the real objectives, which were to sow chaos and destruction for the sheer hell of it while enriching defense contractors. That's fine too, because such “real” objectives are consistent with imperial collapse: empire wants to steal a precious vase; empire smashes it instead; success! Moreover, whatever the objectives, they don't matter any more, because now they can't be achieved no matter what. The new Russian/Chinese/Indian/Syrian ordnance, such as the S-300/400/500 air and space defense systems, the Kalibr long-range supersonic cruise missile, along with various electronic warfare systems such as Khibiny, has rendered most US forces obsolete. You can say that defeat is victory but, as I explained two years ago, it isn't. Cancel Red Alert and set course for nearest dry dock.

• The Fed is pretending to hike rates to avoid the impression that it has lost control. This is not the only sort of pretense being attempted in the financial arena; there are plenty of others. The US economy isn't growing, and if you subtract out the effect of runaway debt (which will never be repaid no matter what scenario you consider as likely) then it's actually shrinking. More accurately, it can be said that it is sucking in whatever it can in order to avoid collapsing. It is a black hole, as I described half a year ago.

• As far as the “Bernie Trump will save us” theme, it is well understood by now that the US is no longer a democracy. (Maybe it was one once upon a time, maybe not; it doesn't matter.) Consider the matter settled. Anyone who thinks that it is still possible to effect positive change in the US by voting is a conspiracy theorist of the most miserable, deluded kind.

* * *

There are some general properties of collapses to keep in mind.

1. All things that must collapse eventually do. All empires collapse—no exceptions. All buildings collapse—unless they are demolished first. All Ponzi schemes—such as the current financial system, based on runaway debt—collapse when you least expect them to. Seeing as collapses aren't optional, it makes sense to get used to the idea of them happening, and to learn how make the best of them. Some people consider this and are filled with grief. As I pointed out before, collapse is the worst possible time to suffer a nervous breakdown, so please get your blubbering over with ahead of time.

2. Some collapses are actually good for you. Some really important things could be saved provided whatever less important thing that would cause them to collapse collapses first. For instance, if indistrial civilization were to collapse soonish, this would avoid ecosystem collapse, leaving whatever survivors would be left with breathable air and a survivable climate. And if the gigantic bubble in human population, which grew apace with the burning of fossil fuels, were to pop before turning the planet into a giant smoldering trash heap, then the few survivors would have a reasonable chance of making it.

3. Bigger collapses are nastier than smaller ones. For example, if you had lots of local banks and credit unions making loans to people who then couldn't repay them, then some large number of these banks and credit unions would collapse, insured depositors would be repaid, bad debts would be written off, and the entire system would eventually recover. But if you have a handful of gigantic banks and financial institutions holding most of the bad debts, and they fail all at once, then that brings down the entire system. And if you bail them out, then the entire system ends up on life support for the rest of its life, because nobody has any incentive to stop generating bad loans, since now everyone expects to be bailed out again and again.

4. Frequent collapses are better than infrequent ones. This is because unless things—be they populations, Ponzi schemes, economies, cities or empires—collapse on a regular basis, they tend to get too big. And when they get too big, their collapse (which is inevitable, see Point 1 above) becomes bigger, making them worse (see Point 3 above). Plus, frequent collapses of the nonfatal kind can be actually good for you (see Point 2).

For example:

• If the electric grid collapses now and again, then you will eventually learn that you need to get yourself a 12V system, a generator, some solar panels, a wind generator, and install LED lights.

• If water pressure goes down to zero periodically, then you will learn that you need to put in some cisterns, a filtration system, a demand pump, and collect water off the rooftop.

• If garbage collection stops for periods of time, then you will learn to incinerate and to compost, and will try to minimize the amount of nonbiodegradable trash you generate.

• If paid work disappears for periods of time, then you will learn that you need to keep a few months' worth of savings around to ride out these periods.

• If stores run out of food on a semi-regular basis, then you will learn that you need to grow your own food, put a chicken coop in the back yard and figure out how many lazy beds of potatoes you need.

• If banks periodically confiscate all your money (that's called a “bail-in,” and it's actually been made legal not too long ago), then you will learn to keep an absolute minimum of money in the banks, and figure out other, more reliable forms in which to store your savings.

• If you were to periodically find yourself cut off from the medical system, then you would find out ways of staying healthy and of treating yourself.

• If you periodically found it impossible to buy gasoline, you would learn that you can't rely on your car, and would instead bicycle, or walk, or take public transportation.

• If your country's government periodically turned fascist and started detaining, torturing and killing people indiscriminately, then you'd learn that you need to get yourself a second passport, and practice getting out of the country in a hurry.

These are all examples of small, frequent collapses that are good for you.

But that's not what everyone seems to be aiming for, now, is it? What everyone seems to be aiming for is preventing any and all of these small, frequent, nonfatal collapses. However, such efforts are in direct contradiction with Point 1: “All things that must collapse eventually do.” Instead of preventing collapse, such tactics guarantee a single, huge, catastrophic collapse that can very well turn out to be fatal for huge masses of people. But that's OK: see Point 2: if “the gigantic bubble in human population... pops before turning the planet into a giant smoldering trash heap, then the few survivors will have a reasonable chance of making it.”

And so, what if you aspire to being one of these few survivors who might stand a reasonable chance of making it? My prescription is simple: Collapse Early and Often.

Fingir hasta el final

Continuando con la serie de pronósticos para el año que comienza, reproducimos el ensayo realizado por James Howard Kunstler, un reconocido doomsayer estadounidense. Kunstler se distingue del pelotón de apocalípticos contemporáneos por su humor ácido, su inteligencia y la profundidad de su mirada. Su sitio web es www.kunstler.com y el ensayo, publicado el 4 de enero, es el siguiente:

Título: Pretend to the Bitter End

Texto:

Forecast 2016

There’s really one supreme element of this story that you must keep in view at all times: a society (i.e. an economy + a polity = a political economy) based on debt that will never be paid back is certain to crack up. Its institutions will stop functioning. Its business activities will seize up. Its leaders will be demoralized. Its denizens will act up and act out. Its wealth will evaporate.

Given where we are in human history — the moment of techno-industrial over-reach — this crackup will not be easy to recover from; not like, say, the rapid recoveries of Japan and Germany after the brutal fiasco of World War Two. Things have gone too far in too many ways. The coming crackup will re-set the terms of civilized life to levels largely pre-techno-industrial. How far backward remains to be seen.

Those terms might be somewhat negotiable if we could accept the reality of this re-set and prepare for it. But, alas, most of the people capable of thought these days prefer wishful techno-narcissistic woolgathering to a reality-based assessment of where things stand — passively awaiting technological rescue remedies (“they” will “come up with something”) that will enable all the current rackets to continue. Thus, electric cars will allow suburban sprawl to function as the preferred everyday environment; molecular medicine will eliminate the role of death in human affairs; as-yet-undiscovered energy modalities will keep all the familiar comforts and conveniences running; and financial legerdemain will marshal the capital to make it all happen.

Oh, by the way, here’s a second element of the story to stay alert to: that most of the activities on-going in the USA today have taken on the qualities of rackets, that is, dishonest schemes for money-grubbing. This is most vividly and nauseatingly on display lately in the fields of medicine and education — two realms of action that formerly embodied in their basic operating systems the most sacred virtues developed in the fairly short history of civilized human endeavor: duty, diligence, etc.

I’ve offered predictions for many a year that this consortium of rackets would enter failure mode, and so far that has seemed to not have happened, at least not to the catastrophic degree, yet. I’ve also maintained that of all the complex systems we depend on for contemporary life, finance is the most abstracted from reality and therefore the one most likely to show the earliest strains of crackup. The outstanding feature of recent times has been the ability of the banking hierarchies to employ accounting fraud to forestall any reckoning over the majestic sums of unpayable debt. The lesson for those who cheerlead the triumph of fraud is that lying works and that it can continue indefinitely — or at least until they are clear of culpability for it, either retired, dead, or safe beyond the statute of limitations for their particular crime.

Of course it says something about the kind of society we’ve become that such racketeering has become so normative and pervasive, and that evading responsibility for its consequences has been elevated to a sort of enviable skill-set. In fact, the art of evasion has taken the place of what used to be called honor. We live in a low time that honors only low men. Ironically, we affect to admire only “superheroes” because it has become impossible to imagine mere humans showing courage, fortitude, and respect for truth. All conduct is provisional and equivocal. Every law can be parsed to serve what it was created to oppose. Anything goes and nothing matters.

In this year’s go-round, I’ll try to describe what happened so far, where we stand, and where I think things are going. My method is emergent and heuristic. I’m allergic to charts and graphs, which are among the prime tools of the racketeers and the wishful thinking impresarios for bending the truth. Sadly, also, statistical analysis plays into the fantasy that if you can measure enough things you can control them. (And if you mis-measure things on purpose, you can pretend to be in control.) This illusion of control is the weakest ingredient in the financial system. When it does finally reach failure mode, it tends to produce calamity.

I’m more interested in the longer view than the moment-at-hand. The swirl of events generally includes more vectors and factors than any calculus can manage. Outcomes easily slip away from the linear. Ultimately this is a exercise that might be called a history of the future — that is, just a story.

Banking and Markets

The big event of the year past was the Federal Reserve’s Waiting for Godot act concerning the fed funds rate. When Godot finally showed up two weeks before year’s end, it was in the expected-but-pitiful form of a 25-50 basis point hike — which gives the impression of a possible 50 point rise, but with the way more likely probability of actually sticking to the lowest end of the gradient (and actual overnight lending rates were already a few basis points above zero, so the net was really less than 25 basis points.)

The background of this charade was pretty clear to anyone not brain damaged from the rigors of playing Candy Crush on their phone: the Fed was hiking rates into a wobbling global economy; they were forced to act at year’s end or surrender the last shreds of their credibility (i.e. being taken to mean what they say); and they left the door open to retreat in 2016 if necessary. But the damage to the Fed had already been done. They were unmasked as a propaganda machine powerless against the real tides of economy, creating only mischief and misunderstanding, and ultimately undermining all soundness in the relationship between money and real human activity. Anything they do in the election year ahead will be viewed with suspicion, specifically of pimping for Hillary Clinton’s coronation. And her relationship with the biggest banks is well-understood. So they had to make their grand gesture in December.

The stock markets skidded a little below sideways this year (except for the Nasdaq) which glided up more than 5 percent (techno-grandiosity rules!) — with one upchuck at the end of the summer that was remedied by China bailing out its own janky stock markets and playing games with its currency.

Gold and silver continued their four-year swoon thanks to repeated massive wee hour dumps of futures contracts before the traders in New York even got out of bed. The charts conclusively show this shady activity, raising the question: why would any seller want to hugely undercut the price of what he seeks to sell by selling into a market where no buyers are present… or even awake? The answer seems to be: to make the dollar appear more firm than it really is.

The many years of ZIRP (zero interest rate policy), combined with the previous accumulation of debt unlikely to be paid back has made it ever more difficult to issue new debt with any likelihood of being paid back. But ZIRP has also nullified the relationship between interest rates and risk. In a system unencumbered by central bank interventions, interest rates would have to go a whole lot higher on instruments with such poor prospects. Of course, higher interest rates would only make new bonds that much less likely to be serviced by their issuers, especially governments laboring under Himalayan-scale debt loads. The tension in this equation has been provisionally papered over by the use of interest rate swaps, reverse repos, and other abstruse machinations and derivatives aimed at suppressing true price discovery.

The corporate stock buyback fiesta of 2015 was the perfect example of an anything goes and nothing matters ethos. It happened in full view of everyone, and it happened solely to assure corporate executives that they would enjoy their bonuses and fringe benefits and nobody complained about it. Even so, it barely accomplished anything index-wise. The markets went sideways even with all that insider action because the fundamentals suck and the global economy was obviously sinking into a deflationary contraction.

My auditors derive no end of mirth from my attempts to predict the stock markets each year. So, to add to their enjoyment, I’ll be even more precise this time around. I predict that the S & P will top on January 15, 2016, at 2142, and then crumple below 1000 by June. Carnage at the margins of the bond market — high yield paper — will spread to the center and we’ll finally see the re-pricing of risk back in the European sovereign market. French, Spanish, UK, and Italian 10-year paper below 2.0 percent? What a colossal joke that’s been! Fasten your seat belts and check your pension funds.

Oil and Deflation

The oil picture has bamboozled both the broad public and the smaller cohort of supposedly sentient observers. I maintain that the deflationary contraction underway worldwide is largely due to the fact that the world has run out of a particular form of oil: affordable oil. Turns out the peak oil story is still true, just playing out differently than a lot folks predicted. We’re at the mercy of a pretty basic equation: oil over $75-a-barrel destroys industrial economies; oil under $75-a-barrel destroys oil companies. There is no “just right” Goldilocks place on the gradient.

The public got bamboozled by the Ponzi scheme of shale oil. It seemed like a fabulous techno-rescue: the “fracking miracle!” It operated by converting mountains of cheap leveraged capital into a very rapid bump-up in US oil production. It got full traction after a couple of years of $100 oil squashed economic activity — and then squashed demand for oil. Whoops. The problem was that shale oil was very expensive to produce even if reduced demand drove the market price very low. Back at $100-plus a barrel, hardly anyone made any profit on shale. At $40 a barrel shale was a laughable loser. So, in 2015, the shale oil companies laid off thousands of workers, idled the drilling rigs, and kicked back to pray that the price would go back up. Which it didn’t. Incidentally, all kinds of associated ventures went bust with that. The landscape of North Dakota is littered with unfinished garden apartment complexes that may never be completed, and the discharged construction carpenters and roofers drove back to Minnesota ahead of the re-po men coming for their Ford F-110s. Sad, I know….

The rapid ramp-up in shale oil production from 2010 to 2014 was intended as a demonstration project to convince Wall Street to stuff ever more investment capital into oil companies. It was also part of an enormous PR campaign to allow the people running things in business and government to pretend that America’s oil problems were behind us. The “shale miracle” was going to make us “Saudi America,” It was going to boost us into “energy independence.” It played into the Master Wish beneath all the wishful thinking in America: Please, God, let us be able to drive to WalMart forever. It wasn’t so much an evil conspiracy as a feckless collective effort in denial and self-delusion

It happened that a lot of that Wall Street finance came in the form of high-yield (junk) bonds issued by the oil companies — with fat commissions for the big banks to cream off in creating the bonds. So when the price of oil crashed below $50, a lot of oil companies — especially the smaller ones with no cash flow — couldn’t service the interest payments. What lies ahead in 2016 is a debacle of bond defaults and corporate bankruptcies in the US oil patches. What’s more, because of the peculiar geology of shale oil and the rapid depletion of the fracked wells, it is necessary to incessantly drill and frack new wells to keep production even level, let alone rising. That calls for evermore rounds of new financing. But since the current financial obligations can’t be serviced, new financing will not be not forthcoming. And so neither will additional production. All of which means that shale oil production is going to crash in 2016 when the backlog of previously-drilled but untapped wells runs out. I’ll predict that US oil production will go down a million barrels a day before 2017. That includes the roughly 5 percent annual decline of conventional oil.

Some might suppose that such a crash would drive prices back up again as the supply necks down. There are a couple of problems with that supposition. One is that the previous round of $100-plus oil did a lot of permanent damage to the economy, in particular to small businesses and households (i.e. middle-class workers). That damage looks more and more permanent, meaning a smaller aggregate economy and still-shrinking demand base as businesses and citizens go broke and stay broke. If oil prices do return to a level that would justify exploration and production of expensive, hard-to-get oil, (probably north of $110) it will only crash industrial economies again — and there are only so many times this can happen before the system is so damaged recovery is no longer possible. Another problem is that the oil price crash has done significant damage to the oil industry itself, including its credibility as a viable target for investment. Contrary to hopes and expectations, current low oil prices are doing nothing to re-stimulate economic activity. It all has the look of a self-reinforcing feedback loop, a downward spiral in a global complex networked system getting clobbered by the diminishing returns of its principal activities.

Hence I would predict that the price of oil will fall further in 2016, below the $30 mark, and that it will lead to more carnage in the oil industry, in banking and debt defaults, and to new manifestations of geopolitical trouble that could lead to profound oil scarcities and rationing. We can’t seem to face the fact that our techno-industrial paradigm was designed to run on cheap oil, which is just no longer available.

Geopolitics

People are getting very nervous. They can’t help harking back a hundred years to the mysterious lead-up of the First World War, which brought an end to the first iteration of globalism with a bang. The great nations of 1914 just seemed to get haplessly drawn into a debacle that no one had bargained for — the slaughter of the trenches, bankrupted national treasuries, the fall of three dynasties, the rise of the fascists and Bolsheviks… ugh!

Many people with more than half a brain are seeing similar motifs today — a general movement toward major war by way of sheer fecklessness. For instance, the ongoing effort led by the USA to antagonize Russia for no apparent good reason, dragging the dupes of NATO along with it. I won’t rehash our stupid operation to destabilize Ukraine. David Stockman covered that so nicely last week in his blog. Anyway, that Ukraine action was all back in 2013-14. Ukraine is now a failed state. I predict that in 2016 Ukraine will beg Russia to take it back into the Russian sovereign fold, to become once again a province of greater Russia. However, Russia will demur. Russia actually can’t afford such a woebegone, unreliable, and expensive ward. So Ukraine will then go begging back to the US and NATO to dole out financial life-support. By that time, the US and western Europe will be so economically distressed that they will only pretend to bail out Ukraine, just as they pretend to bolster their own economies via smoke-and-mirrors central bank shenanigans. Ukraine will sink into a World Made By Hand level of neo-medievalism, blazing the trail for everybody else in the world. Think: lawlessness, banditry, gangster autarky, neo-serfdom. Sounds harsh, I know, but it is what it is.

In 2015 the action between the US and Russia shifted to Syria. Our monumental blunderings in the Middle East, which included enabling the creation of ISIS, left us bereft of any coherent way to counter the barbarism and animus of radical Islam. So, our “adversary” Mr. Putin stepped in, on the premise that destabilizing what remains of the Syrian government under Mr. Assad was not such a good idea — as he explained very clearly to the UN General Assembly. It remains to be seen whether Russia will be able to pacify Syria, much of which lies in ruins now. But unlike the USA, Russia doesn’t have ambivalent intentions where ISIS is concerned. We’ve pretended that any old freelance gang opposing Assad is our friend. Russia’s aims are pretty straightforward: prop up Assad, rescue whatever governing institutions remain in Syria, and smash ISIS. In exchange they get a warm-water naval base on the Mediterranean. That’s supposed to be an existential threat to the USA.

The basic regional beef there, anyway, is between the Sunni and the Shi’ite, which is to say Arabian-sponsored Islamic maniacs versus Persian-sponsored Islamic maniacs. Unfortunately, that translates into the Saudi Arabia / USA and Iran / Russia contest of wills. Throw in some league wild-card players like Hezbollah and Israel and you have a pretty yeasty mix for rising animosities. Sadly, the US can’t seem to formulate a strategy that doesn’t make things worse for people in the region or for the US homeland (or for our allies in Europe, plagued by refugees they cannot comfortably absorb and the awful threat of terror events).

I expect in 2016 that Obama’s policy will be to just get out of the way of Putin and see what happens. He doesn’t have much left in the kit-bag for now. The worst thing to come out of this for Obama, really, is if Putin can succeed in pacifying Syria, America’s leaders will look bad — incompetent and foolish — which is the actual case, of course. Maybe sometimes you just have suck up your mistakes. Much as Obama dislikes Hillary, I doubt he wants to upend the whole groaning Democratic Party Washington DC patronage pyramid, so he might be careful to not start World War Three during the election year. He can leave that to Hillary, should her coronation actually occur on Jan 20, 2017.

Anything might happen across the Islamic world in 2016. Every Islamic nation is grossly overpopulated, given the poor quality of the terrain. Most of them occupy territory that has been horribly degraded during the population explosion of the past hundred years, and stand to suffer hugely from climate and weather abnormalities ahead. Governments will fall and may not be replaced by anything resembling a coherent polity. Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Iraq (fuggeddabowdit), Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia are all only marginally stable for now. Afghanistan is hopeless. We will never control the terrain or the people who live there. But we will continue to maintain a garrison to defend Kabul, pretending that control of the capital city is enough.

And then there is the Big Kahuna: Saudi Arabia, with its dwindling oil income and growing multitude of dependant layabouts. King Salman’s misadventure in Yemen’s civil war has birthed another failed state and dented Saudi Arabia’s resources. If the other clans of Arabia, whoever they turn out to be, overthrow Salman, they will also create an opening for ISIS-flavored non-royals to incite a multi-dimensional civil war. An upheaval in KSA would surely produce profound disorder in the oil markets. The USA would get suckered into this tar-pit wrestling match. The attempt to stabilize our old “ally” with troops on the ground would probably work out about as well as our adventure next door in Iraq did. The further result will be more conflict in this broad swathe of the world over remaining scarce resources, especially water, along with hot war at various scales, and ever more massive movements of populations fleeing the turmoil. If they journey to Europe, they will be turned away. The Camp of the Saints becomes a reality show.

Turkey, with the second-largest military in NATO, could have been a force for stability in the Middle East, but strongman President Recep Tayyip Erdo?an can’t get out of his own way. He can’t decide whether he’s on the side of the Islamists or the West and his attempts to play footsie with both, while piling up private booty, have left him suspect among both camps. Lately he has ventured into such misadventures as shooting down a Russian warplane and receiving stolen goods in the form of ISIS oil shipments from Syrian and Iraqi wells. He was unable to enlist NATO into joining the argument over Turkish airspace and has fatally alienated his western auditors by his actions. He’s lucky that Putin didn’t turn Ankara into an ashtray. The Kurds on Turkey’s southern border threaten to start a civil war by asserting their own nationhood, now just de facto. Meanwhile, the Turkish economy is faltering again, reinforcing its longtime status as “the sick man of Europe.”

Europe’s decades as the West’s delightful tourist theme park are over. The continent is back to being a dangerous free-for-all of nations, tribes, and factions, with the overlay of alien Islamic intruders making things worse. Who knows who or what will blow up next over there. When it becomes obvious in 2016 that the 2015 refugee influx was not a one-off that the Eurozone could comfortably absorb, the individual nations will commence the deportations. Getting to that has been a difficult road, with the headwind of the memory of the Holocaust. But then, unlike the Jews of the 1930s, the Islamists are slaughtering concert-goers, booby-trapping subways, shooting civilians in restaurants, beheading journalists, and explicitly threatening the existence of European society. This business with Islam is different and we are now four generations past Auschwitz. Europeans may just have to get real about defending their respective and collective cultures.

2016 will be the lead-up to the French presidential election of 2017. François Hollande has the whole of the coming year to demonstrate his weakness. But can the French stomach Marine Le Pen’s demi-fascist National Front. The French right wing is not for reduced government, just for pushing people around differently. As 2016 goes on, look for good ole Sarko (Nicolas Sarkozy) to flank them both. Sarko is a bit crooked, but as strong-willed as Le Pen, and not as crazy. French voters will be fed up Hollande-style squishiness, but unready for a female Hitler. Sarko is the Devil they know and they will want him back.

The same election time-line goes for Germany. Voters there will increasingly revolt against what Mutti Merkel represents: how she jammed a million Islamic refugees down Europe’s craw. They’re not shopping for another Hitler, either, but they will be looking for a strong-willed someone to protect the volk against the foreign hordes, of whom they are getting good and goddam sick. There is also the matter of Germany baby-sitting all the bankrupt nations to the south.

As 2016 unfurls, the PIIGS will spin back into financial intensive care. Spain, Italy, Portugal, Greece will eventually have to face the absence of buyers for their bonds and the falsity of their low interest rates. Spain, for one, is not finished with the Catalonian secession problem. Portugal needs to return to the 18th century. The clowns in Brussels have no plan to repair the finances of Euroland beyond massive QE that cannot be endless. Whoever replaces Merkel as chancellor may be the one who senses that Germany ought to lead the way out of the Euro currency fantasy and all the awful liabilities it entails.

Great Britain is a basketcase in search of a basket to land in. It has no economy left besides the swindlers of “the City,” its version of Wall Street, and that janky establishment is losing its grip as a desirable financial capital after years of sharp practice, with much of its action moving to Shanghai. Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron is a catamite for the big banks. The Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn is an old-school romantic unionist Leftie in a nation with little remaining industrial workforce. Unlike France or Germany, Britain’s parliamentary system can route a government on short notice. The debt implosion of 2016 and rescheduled Great Depression 2.0 will thrust UK Independence Party’s Nigel Farage into the spotlight to salvage what remains of Old Blighty.

The big question around Asia is whether China can navigate its way out of the blind alley it’s trapped in: a banking system steeped in crony corruption, bad debt everywhere, and malinvestment like unto nothing the world has ever seen before. The country is choking on excess industrial capacity just as the world enters its epic Peak Everything contraction. Can they keep on pumping out salad shooters and Han Solo dolls to a world drowning in plastic crap and too broke to buy more of it? They still have $3.4 trillion in foreign exchange reserves to theoretically bail themselves out. But that starts affecting the value of their pegged currency, and their main trading partner (us) can play endless currency war games with them to dissuade them from dumping the rest of their accumulated US treasury paper, which, of course, only pisses them off more and makes them look for surreptitious ways to fight back — which is what currency war is all about. Which is also exactly why China (with Russia and others) has started up its own Asian version of the IMF, the BRICs Development Bank, and an alternative to the SWIFT international clearing system.

Chinese economic and financial statistics are even less reliable than the overcooked sludge offered up by the US agencies, but the tanking of commodity prices worldwide tells enough of a story: China is sure not expanding as much as the good old days, if at all. It’s been a great ride, but it was super-quick, and it happened just prior to the world reaching the bona fide limits to growth. China’s contraction may be as quick as its rise, and if that is the case, it will be rough ride into the same vortex of contraction that everybody else is entering.

My one wild-hair prediction about China for 2016: after Kim Jong-Un pulls some bonehead move against his neighbor to the south, China invades North Korea and installs a more rational management regime there. Kim Jong-Un ends up as a lounge singer in Macao. Lucky boy.

Homeland Frolics

Be very afraid. Donald Trump isn’t funny anymore. He’s Hitler without the brains and the charm. But he’s gotten where he is for a reason. He expresses perfectly the depravity of the culture he springs from: narcissistic, morally rudderless, vulgar, shameless, lost in fantasy, and sadistic. Hillary (last name unnecessary) is not much better, but she’s not nearly as dumb, only more thoroughly corrupt. These are the avatars of our two major political parties. Be very afraid and weep!

The good news is that political parties do occasionally blow up and vanish from the scene, and that would be an interesting possible outcome of the 2016 national elections. Trump could accomplish this much more briskly with the Republicans. He’s made it clear already that he feels zero loyalty to the Red Team, and noises offstage can be heard that the party faithful would find some way to either expel or end-run the Donald Creature. Given our litigious society, one outcome of this would be an election held hostage by the courts. Oy vey is mir. Another possibility is that a message would be transmitted to the Trump Team from some combination of rogue elements in the NSA and the US Military that he’d better drop out or else. It would be done in such a way that Trump would not be able to use it for further narcissistic grandstanding. Were that not to happen, and were Trump somehow able to get elected, I predict there will be a coup d’état against him inside of April 2017. Hello constitutional crisis. Where it might go from there, no one can say.

Of Trump’s opponents for the Republican nomination, the only one I can grudge up any interest for is Rand Paul, who is a truly disruptive figure without being a maniac. In fact, I think he would make a good president, sober, thoughtful, unencumbered by obligation to the forces of racketeering. But he appears to have a near-zero chance of winning the party’s nomination.

Hillary is the opposite of a disrupter; she is the racketeer Godmother. As things proceed, however, she would merely preside over Great Depression 2.0. Unlike FDR in GD 1.0, Hillary would inspire no trust among a fractious population out for revenge against the very enablers of Hillary’s election, namely the Wall Street bankers. The nation would fall into factional fighting and possibly even regional breakup under Miz It’s-My-Turn. But I get ahead of myself…. The question at hand for 2016 is: Can Hillary be stopped. At this point, I don’t see how, given all the weight of the party machinery calibrated in her favor by the equally odious National Party Chairperson, Congressperson Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Bernie Sanders mounted a noble opposition campaign, and perhaps it is too early to write him off here before the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary. Perhaps something can happen and he can at least slay the candidacy of Rodan the Flying Reptile – my other nickname for the Hillary Creature. Apart from that is my basic aversion to Bernie’s political philosophy as a self-proclaimed “socialist.” I know it sounds like a glib dismissal of a cartoonish political label, but Bernie’s self-applied label implies ever more intrusion by ever bigger government into the life of this nation. History wants to take us in another direction now, away from so much hyper-centralized control, and we go against the flow at our peril. While I admire Bernie’s presence as a vocal opposition to Hillary, I’m not keen on what he’s actually selling.

I know that Martin O’Malley is still “out there,” but he appears to be a blank cartridge, or a six-pack in search of worldview, and I don’t believe as some observers have averred that this is the fault of the media. In the few Democratic “debates” held last fall he offered next to nothing outside a conventional punch-list of shopworn center-left ideology — that is, no recognition of the extraordinary problems this country faces in the climax of the techno-industrial idyll, and the long emergency that is following it.

And that’s all you get on the Democratic side for the moment: a powerful sense that the fix is in. Yet there is the very real problem of Hillary’s loathsomeness and how that would go down at the polls. There’s even a pretty good chance that many women would vote against her. So my provisional conclusion / prediction for the November contest is that Hillary runs and loses against some as-yet-unknown un-Trump person. President Cruz? Ach! Rubio? Back in the playpen! Christie? Leave the body, take the canoli…! Jeb? El pendejo supremo! To be continued….

Race Relations and the Cowardice of the Thinking Classes

2015 was sure a bad year for different groups of Americans trying (or not) to get along, especially black people and white people. American society is feeling the full force of the identity ideologies cooked up on the college campuses over the past several decades, now boiling over into an orgy of victim-pleading, identity grandstanding, sexual hysteria, scapegoating, intellectual despotism, juridical blackmail, and (let’s not forget) careerist posturing. The more irrelevant higher education gets, the more strenuously the social justice inquisitors mount their persecutions against those who don’t buy the race-gender-privilege party line. In 2015 it has morphed into a campaign against free speech and free inquiry. The “diversity” deans multiply like fruit flies.

I made the “error” last year of suggesting that black Americans would benefit if the teaching of spoken English were made a high priority of primary and secondary schooling — and I was vilified for saying that. My opponents have not offered any useful counter-ideas beyond name-calling. I suspect that many people of good intentions are running out patience with this racket — and it is a racket for extorting preferential treatment and money from guilt-tripped white people.

In the arena of crime and policing, the situation is especially bad. Black lives matter, but not so much for black people themselves, who are ardently slaughtering each other in places like Baltimore, St. Louis, Detroit, Milwaukee, and “Chi-raq” at a rate proportionately much greater than other ethnic groups in the land. The martyrs of the movement act in ways likely to get them in trouble, for instance the hapless 12-year-old Tamir Rice, shot brandishing a BB gun designed to look exactly like the US Army 1911 issue .45 caliber ACP, Michael Brown thugging out on officer Darren Wilson, Trayvon Martin beating down George Zimmerman. The cops present at several notorious incidents include black officers; a black female sergeant who was supervising the action on the sidewalk in Staten Island when her colleagues choked Eric Garner. (she did nothing to intervene); the several black policemen in Baltimore who took Freddy Gray on his fatal ride in the paddy wagon. It’s a scene fraught with ambiguity, to be generous.

Where are we going with race relations in this country? For now, not in a favorable direction. The trend will be for police to regard certain neighborhoods as “no-go” areas — if only to avoid the gigantic multi-million dollar litigations that grow out of these ambiguous confrontations. Some may view that as a good thing, but it will only play into the decadent ethos that anything goes and nothing matters in this country. The larger question going forward is whether Black America will continue to insist on being an oppositional culture. That is what it has become, though the cowed thinking classes will not acknowledge it. They also will not recognize the need for a common culture in this nation, a set of truly shared values and standards of conduct.

Climate Change

This is the underlayment of despair that reflective persons cannot avoid thinking about when all the other petty issues of human relations and the project of civilization are disposed of. Weird weather? Biblical Floods? Melting icecaps? Sea level creep? It was 70 degrees on Christmas Eve here in upstate New York, dandelions blooming in the yard, just a week or so ago. Some people I know can’t stop thinking about climate change. Somehow I manage to put it out of mind and ruminate on other things, or even feel good about something that is happening in the present — a good meal, a gathering of friends, an evening of live music…. but it’s always lurking there in the background like some hooded reaper in a New Yorker cartoon.

Despite the hoopla of the Paris climate change talks, I’m not persuaded that national governments will really do anything, or even that anything they might do would avail to make things better. I’m not even so concerned about whether climate change is man-made or not. I just accept that something is up and that as things change, we will have to adjust. It seems to me that the adjustment will not be easy and five hundred years from now there will be far fewer human beings, if any, around. From the point of view of the planet’s well-being, that is probably a good thing.

In the mean time, let’s do the best we can to carry on and be as kind as possible to one another. Good luck in 2016!

Feo feo

Viene feo el comienzo de año para las plazas financieras internacionales. La figura muestra que para el índice Dow Jones se trata del peor comienzo de año desde 1900... En fin, chicos, el 2016 empezó movidito. La imagen es de Zero Hedge.