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Category Archives: Trade

Five Reasons Why the US-Led Crusade Against Venezuela Will Probably Fail, by Elias Marat

Posted on January 25, 2019 | Leave a comment

Maduro will probably remain in power. From Elias Marat at themindunleashed.com:

Events in Venezuela shook the world on Wednesday, with many left wondering if January 23 was the beginning of the end for the government of President Nicolas Maduro and the beginning of a new chapter of U.S. interventionism.

Here are five reasons why it’s unlikely that this latest drama in the South American nation is the “endgame” that the mainstream media is hyping up.

1. “Interim president” … who, what?

On Wednesday, amid massive anti-government mobilizations, the U.S. and a number of Latin American states – along with Canada and some regional organizations such as the Organization of American States – all recognized National Assembly leader Juan Guaido’s self-proclamation that he would thereby be the “interim president” of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.

A relatively unknown 35-year-old member of the opposition-held National Assembly can’t simply snap his fingers and assume the presidency, even if he has the diplomatic nods of some powerful countries in the region or across the globe.

To illustrate the absurdity of the move, a comparison would be like Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi responding to “not my president” chants at a Women’s March by declaring herself “interim President of the United States of America Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Armed Forces” – with the consecration of Russia, Turkey, Iran and El Salvador. Such a move to recognize an unelected president as the legitimate leader of the country would fly in the face of the Constitution as well as international law – and such is the case in Venezuela as much as it would be in the U.S.

Guaido only entered the fractured world of opposition lawmakers – who’ve seen a carousel of leaders come and go – in 2015, and was only pulled from relative obscurity into the national and international limelight in the past couple months.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Insurrection, Military, Trade

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Venezuela’s Great Dream Was Always a Scam… by Bill Bonner

Posted on January 24, 2019 | Leave a comment

The regime the US government is trying to replace in Venezuela hasn’t exactly covered itself in glory. It deserves to be replaced, although preferably by the actions of the Venezuelans themselves, not the usual US spooks and goons. From Bill Bonner at bonnerandpartners.com:

BALTIMORE, MARYLAND – “Soldiers revolt…”

“Millions on verge of starvation…”

“Biggest mass exodus in history of the Americas…”

What a glorious show! Right before our eyes… a real-life, real-time experiment…

…all the conceits… the pretensions… the balderdash… the claptrap…

…all laid out for the world to see. And now, stretched out in front of us like a drug dealer in the morgue, is a Great Dream busted up so thoroughly that there can be no doubt – it was a scam from the get-go.

You put a pot on the burner. Eventually, it boils. And Caracas was boiling last night. Earlier in the day, a direct challenge to Nicolás Maduro’s presidency. Juan Guaidó – president of Venezuela’s National Assembly – declared himself the legitimate president of the country.

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Posted in Business, Civil Liberties, Collapse, Crime, Cronyism, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Government, History, Politics, Trade

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Will Globalists Sacrifice The Dollar To Get Their ‘New World Order’? by Brandon Smith

Posted on January 20, 2019 | 1 comment

Globalists will sacrifice whatever needs to be sacrificed, including you and your family’s lives, to get their new world order. From Brandon Smith at alt-market.com:

Trade is a fundamental element of human survival. No one person can produce every single product or service necessary for a comfortable life, no matter how Spartan their attitude. Unless your goal is to desperately scratch an existence from your local terrain with no chance of progress in the future, you are going to need a network of other producers. For most of the history of human civilization, production was the basis for economy. All other elements were secondary.

At some point, as trade grows and thrives, a society is going to start looking for a store of value; something that represents the man-hours and effort and ingenuity a person put into their day. Something that is universally accepted within barter networks, something highly prized, that is tangible, that can be held in our hands and is impossible to replicate artificially. Enter precious metals.

Thus, the concept of “money” was born, and for the most part it functioned quite well for thousands of years. Unfortunately, there are people in our world that see economy as a tool for control rather than a vital process that should be left alone to develop naturally.

The idea of “fiat money”, money which has no tangibility and that can be created on a whim by a central source or authority, is rather new in the grand scheme of things. It is a bastardization of the original and much more stable money system that existed before that was anchored in hard commodities. While it claims to offer a more “liquid” store of value, the truth is that it is no store of value at all.

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Posted in banking, Business, Civil Liberties, Collapse, Currencies, Debt, Economy, Government, Trade

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China Overrated by Right-Wing Kooks: These Crazies Are Just Like Hitler, by Fred Reed

Posted on January 7, 2019 | Leave a comment

I spent a week in China last month, dealing with a drone company whose drones are far superior to anything American companies produce. Here’s news to those who say the Chinese can only copy. By definition you cannot copy something if what your building is better. The Chinese have the largest share of the drone market, by virtue of cutting edge technology. I was in Suzhou, which has 10 million people. It’s next to Shanghai, which has 24 million people. In my week in China, I didn’t see one fat person. Maybe a few pounds overweight, but they’d be considered normal, not even obese, here in the US. Everywhere I went, people were working, working, working. The US underestimates China at its peril. From Fred Reed at theburningplatform.com:

One often sees the silly assertion by right-wing extremists that feminists, social justice warriors, and other “cranks” are enstupidating American education. The purpose. according to these fascists, who are just like Hitler,  is “to make historically incompetent groups look competent.” The racism in these absurd claims is obvious. In particular such  Neo-Nazis say that mathematical education is being destroyed to benefit “retards.” This “dumbing down,” they say, will hand the future to China.

This is conservative drivel. Nothing suggests that China is gaining on the US in science and technology, except the evidence, and this can be ignored. It is particularly important to keep in mind that the Chinese cannot innovate, only copy American technology.

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Posted in Business, Education, Governments, History, Science, Technology, Trade, Uncategorized

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Trump to Europe: You’re Vassals and I Don’t Care, a Strategic Culture Editorial

Posted on January 7, 2019 | Leave a comment

There’s nothing new in Trump’s attitutude towards Europe, he’s simply giving voice to the way America’s leaders have felt about Europe for decades. From the Strategic Culture editorial board at strategic-culture.org:

“I don’t care about Europe,” declared US President Donald Trump this week during his White House cabinet’s first meeting of the new year.

The American president probably revealed more about the true nature of US-European relations than he intended.

Trump was speaking in the context of American military involvement with Europe, as well as trade and other issues. He was reiterating the tedious mantra that the US is allegedly being “taken advantage of” by European allies by not spending more on their military budgets.

It was the usual rambling, barely articulate fallacy from Trump who portrays the inherent military profligacy of American corporate capitalism not as a destructive vice, but as a supposed virtuous cause of “protection” for allies and the rest of the world. In short, delusional American exceptionalism.

But it was Trump’s bluntly stated contempt for European allies that was notable. In a quip to a question about his reported unpopularity in Europe, the president said he didn’t care what Europeans think. A few seconds later, in a betrayal of his arrant egotistical state of mind, Trump turned around and claimed that he would be popular if he stood in an election in Europe!

Ironically, though, perhaps we should be grateful to Trump for his brash outspokenness. By dissing Europe with such contemptuous disregard, he lays bare the true face of Washington’s relations with the old continent.

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Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Imperialism, Military, Politics, Trade, War

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How China Colonized An Entire Continent Without Firing A Single Shot, by Tyler Durden

Posted on January 6, 2019 | Leave a comment

China grants loans to African companies and if they default, China grabs the infrastructure. That’s a strategy Western countries and governments have been employing for decades. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

Back in 1885, to much fanfare, the General Act of the Berlin Conference launched the Scramble for Africa which saw the partition of the continent, formerly a loose aggregation of various tribes, into the countries that currently make up the southern continent, by the dominant superpowers (all of them European) of the day. Subsequently Africa was pillaged, plundered, and in most places, left for dead. The fact that a credit system reliant on petrodollars never managed to take hold only precipitated the “developed world” disappointment with Africa, no matter what various enlightened, humanitarian singer/writer/poet/visionaries claimed otherwise.

And so the continent languished….  until 2012 when what we then dubbed as the “Beijing Conference” quietly took place, and to which only Goldman Sachs, which too has been quietly but very aggressively expanding in Africa, was invited.

As the map below, which we first showed in 2012, in just two years after 2010 China had pledged over $100 billion to develop commercial projects in Africa, a period in which the continent had effectively become de facto Chinese province, unchallenged by any developed nation which in the aftermath of the financial crisis had enough chaos at home to bother with what China may be doing in Africa.

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Posted in Business, Debt, Economy, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Government, Imperialism, Trade

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Trump And Xi – You Are Scaring Markets Cut It Out. By Eric Margolis

Posted on January 5, 2019 | Leave a comment

Trade wars can in fact lead to shooting wars. From Eric Margolis at lewrockwell.com:

The United States and China look like two punch-drunk prizefighters squaring off for a major championship fight.  They have no good reason to fight and every reason to cooperate now that both their stock markets have been in turmoil.

Six hundred point market swings down and then up look like symptoms of economic nervous breakdown.

Factions in both nations are beating the war drums, putting presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping under growing pressure to be more aggressive.

Trump shoulders much of the blame for having started this unnecessary confrontation by imposing heavy duties on Chinese goods.  The US president has turned the old maxim on its head that nations that trade heavily don’t go to war.  The US and China, both huge trading partners, appear headed to military clashes, or even full scale war, if their governments don’t come to their senses soon.

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Posted in Financial markets, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Politics, Trade, War

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