Related: Globe Calls For Regime Change in North Korea
Will there be a fireball followed by the sound of a blast?
"China urges US, North Korea to ‘hit the brakes’ on threats" by Christopher Bodeen Associated Press August 16, 2017
BEIJING — China has urged the United States and North Korea to ‘‘hit the brakes’’ on threatening words and work toward a peaceful resolution of their tense standoff created by Pyongyang’s recent missile tests and threats to fire them toward Guam.
The dispute has also raised fears in South Korea, where a conservative political party on Wednesday called for the United States to bring back tactical nuclear weapons to the Korean Peninsula.
In a sign of growing concern on the part of Pyongyang’s only major ally, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said in a phone conversation with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, that the two countries should work together to contain tensions and permit no one to ‘‘stir up an incident on their doorstep,’’ according to a statement posted on the Chinese foreign ministry’s website.
‘‘The most important task at hand is for the US and North Korea to ‘hit the brakes’ on their mutual needling of each other with words and actions, to lower the temperature of the tense situation, and prevent the emergence of an ‘August crisis,’’’ Wang was quoted as saying in the Tuesday conversation.
The ministry quoted Lavrov as saying tensions could rise again with the United States and South Korea set to launch large-scale military exercises on Aug. 21.
‘‘A resolution of the North Korea nuclear issue by military force is completely unacceptable and the peninsula’s nuclear issue must be peacefully resolved by political and diplomatic methods,’’ Lavrov was quoted as saying.
I don't think they can make it any clearer.
You want war with Russia and China?
I don't.
China is North Korea’s main economic partner and political backer, although relations between Beijing and Pyongyang have deteriorated amid the North’s continuing defiance of China’s calls for restraint. In recent months, China has joined with Russia in calling for the United States to suspend annual military drills with South Korea in exchange for Pyongyang halting its missile and nuclear tests as a first step toward direct talks.
There is still time, but.....
On Wednesday, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Corps General Joseph Dunford, continued a visit to China following talks the day before with his Chinese counterpart that touched on North Korea.
Speaking to reporters after viewing a Chinese military exercise outside the northeastern city of Shenyang, Dunford said he told General Fang Fenghui that the United States hoped diplomatic and economic pressure would persuade North Korea to end its nuclear program but that it was also preparing military options.
‘‘We hope for a peaceful resolution but we needed to seriously have a conversation about what might happen if there was military action,’’ Dunford said.
Dunford earlier visited South Korea and stops next in Japan.
North Korea’s military on Tuesday presented leader Kim Jong Un with plans to launch missiles into waters near the US territory of Guam and ‘‘wring the windpipes of the Yankees,’’ even as both Koreas and the United States signaled their willingness to avert a deepening crisis, with each suggesting a path toward negotiations.
Trump tweeted early Wednesday that Kim had ‘‘made a very wise and well reasoned decision,’’ amid indications North Korea had decided not to proceed with its multiple missile launch. ‘‘The alternative would have been both catastrophic and unacceptable!’’ Trump wrote.
During an inspection of the North Korean army’s Strategic Forces, which handles the missile program, Kim praised the military for drawing up a ‘‘close and careful plan’’ and said he would watch the ‘‘foolish and stupid conduct of the Yankees’’ a little more before deciding whether to order the missile test, the state-run Korean Central News Agency said. Kim appeared in photos sitting at a table with a large map marked by a straight line between what appeared to be northeastern North Korea and Guam, and passing over Japan — apparently showing the missiles’ flight route.
The tentative interest in diplomacy follows unusually combative threats between Trump and North Korea amid worries Pyongyang is nearing its long-sought goal of being able to send a nuclear missile to the US mainland. Next week’s start of the military exercises that enrage the North each year could make diplomacy even more difficult.
North Korea’s threats against Guam and its advancing missile capabilities, highlighted by a pair of intercontinental ballistic missile flight tests in July, have raised concern in South Korea, where some believe a fully functional ICBM in Pyongyang would undermine the alliance between Washington and Seoul.
Now word is coming out and confirming what was known more than a month ago, that the ICBM claim is crap. It's another Gulf of Tonkin red herring from the propaganda pre$$.
This has led to growing calls among South Korean conservatives for the United States to redeploy tactical nuclear weapons in South Korea after withdrawing them in the 1990s. The opposition Liberty Korea Party on Wednesday adopted the demand as its official party line, saying that the presence of such weapons would strengthen deterrence against the North.
They are a fringe group and I doubt the new president of South Korea will agree. He didn't even want the THAAD.
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Related: 5 missing after Army helicopter goes down
Went down during a nighttime training exercise, we are told, and this is the second reported incident in the last three weeks (the Osprey going down in Australia the other). Face it, folks, the fraud and corruption within the war machine's procurement process means we are NOT READY for a WAR with ANYONE!
Meanwhile, on Russia's doorstep:
"Poland needs until 2019 to clear trees felled by heavy wind" Associated Press August 16, 2017
WARSAW — Poland’s forestry authority said Wednesday it will take until 2019 to clear away trees that were broken and felled last weekend by extremely heavy winds in the northwest and central part of the country.
The losses on some 111,195 acres are the worst ever recorded by the national forestry agency founded in 1924. Falling trees also destroyed animal habitats and killed many animals, the State Forests body said Wednesday.
‘‘We are dealing with undoubtedly the biggest disaster in the history of Poland’s forestry, and I suspect, also in Europe’s forestry,’’ State Forests head Konrad Tomaszewski said, adding that new forests would be planted to replenish the areas.
It will take up to 100 years for the destroyed forests to grow back to the state they were in before the winds hit, said Anna Malinowska, spokeswoman for the forestry authorities.
Footage on TVN24 showed images of huge areas covered with trees lying like matchsticks. Weather forecasts warned Wednesday of more storms coming.
That is where my print copy ended and I just can't help but wonder if some weapon was detonated as a message.
Are there any NATO war games going on?
Army troops and firefighters were helping local communities remove fallen trees and secure damaged houses, chiefly in the regions around Gdansk, Torun, and Szczecin.
The government has faced criticism that it reacted too slowly and sent the military with aid days after the disaster, in which six people died Friday and Saturday.
The Defense Ministry argued that it acted immediately on a request for help it received from local authorities on Monday.
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At least the heat has broke, right?
"UK sets out goals for an open Irish border post-Brexit" by Stephen Castle August 16, 2017
LONDON — The militarized checkpoints that once stood along the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland became flash points for sectarian violence during the Troubles, and no one wants to see their return after Britain quits the European Union in 2019, but a document released by the British government Wednesday on how to preserve the open border there has underscored the complexity of Britain’s planned departure from the bloc, known as Brexit.
Might as well just stay in, right?
Northern Ireland is a part of the United Kingdom, while Ireland has been an independent nation since 1921. Both are members of the European Union — a shared status that has helped London and Dublin put aside historical differences and develop such a close relationship that border controls have disappeared. Travelers generally do not even know when they have passed from one country to the other.
After Brexit, however, the roughly 300-mile frontier with Ireland will be the United Kingdom’s only land border with a bloc whose economic arrangements, including its single market, it plans to leave. That creates a host of problems.
The customs union allows members to trade freely among themselves while charging a single tariff on some goods from nonmembers. When Britain leaves the bloc, goods crossing the border into Ireland could be subject to varying tariffs. Policing those tariffs could be burdensome.
They write the trade deals that benefit corporate conglomerates with no such concerns.
The same principle holds for the single market. It is maintained through a detailed set of standards that Britain would either have to abide by or face the logistical nightmare of checking goods entering the European Union from its territory.
Adopting the same tariffs and standards as the European Union would clear up a lot of problems but would undermine the supposed purpose of Brexit in the first place, which is to re-establish control over immigration and national sovereignty.
The document published Wednesday represents the first, if somewhat vague, attempt to deal with these problems as they affect the Irish frontier. It rules out the reintroduction of physical infrastructure such as customs posts.
Immigration would not be policed at the Irish frontier, nor would there be passport checks on people entering mainland Britain from Northern Ireland.
The document hints that European citizens would probably be allowed to enter Britain freely and directly from Europe even after Brexit, although they might face some restrictions on their right to work.
The bigger problem is trade.
Wednesday’s document calls on the European Union to agree to a series of waivers for small businesses and farmers, to avoid the need for them to complete customs formalities, but that is only part of the problem. Even if that were agreed, larger companies would surely face higher costs. The British government is hazy on this point, talking about setting up simplified customs procedures and applying unspecified technologies to track goods.
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Time for a trade war:
"Stocks rose slightly Wednesday as Urban Outfitters and Target helped retailers rally. That was enough to cancel out more losses at energy companies. Both did better in the second quarter than analysts expected, and Target raised its forecasts for the year. Urban Outfitters stock rose 17.5 percent, but it’s still down 31 percent this year and recently traded at eight-year lows. Target gained 3.6 percent. Gap climbed 2.3 percent, and Express added 4.8 percent. The S&P 500 index of retailers climbed 1.7 percent after a 2.3 percent fall on Tuesday. With bond yields falling, banks and financial companies turned lower, as well. Lower bond yields mean lower interest rates on loans and fewer profits for banks. Lincoln National fell 1.4 percent, and Bank of America gave up 1.1 percent. Regions Financial slipped 1 percent....."
Related:
"Urban Outfitters Inc. surged the most since the apparel company went public 24 years ago, after its Free People and Anthropologie chains performed better than predicted, helping offset a slump at its flagship business. Earnings in the quarter were 44 cents a share, the company said Tuesday. That topped the 36 cent-average of projections. On Wednesday, the retailer’s stock climbed as much as 27 percent. Chief executive Richard Hayne highlighted “encouraging fashion apparel trends,” which could help boost the company’s performance in future quarters. Hayne has been working to improve sales in a retail environment plagued by store closures, slow fashion trends, and discount-hungry shoppers. The chain has been investing in growing internationally, improving digital offerings, and expanding its wholesale market, but progress has been slow."
"Target, which is spending billions to remodel stores and strengthen its online business, showed signs Wednesday that the turnaround efforts are starting to win back shoppers. The retailer reported that a key sales figure rose in the second quarter, its revenue beat Wall Street expectations and its online sales jumped 32 percent. The Minneapolis-based company also boosted its earnings expectations for the year. The strong results from Target came a week after J.C. Penney, Macy’s, and other major retailers reported another quarter of falling sales as more people shop online or at other stores. Rival Walmart will report its earnings on Thursday. Target is spending $7 billion in three years to remodel old stores, open small ones in cities and college towns, and offer faster delivery for online orders. It is also adding more clothing and furniture brands, and said Wednesday that its children’s line Cat & Jack brought in $2 billion in sales since its launch a year ago."
Tired of the double-talk yet?
"Union Pacific is laying off 500 managers and 250 other workers to reduce costs and eliminate about 8 percent of the railroad’s managers. The railroad told the affected workers Wednesday that their jobs will be eliminated by mid-September. Union Pacific CEO Lance Fritz said that eliminating open positions through attrition and improving productivity isn’t enough to cut costs. Railroads have been under pressure to reduce costs because of weak growth in freight shipments overall and a sharp decline in coal shipments in recent years. Both of the major freight railroads in the eastern United States — CSX and Norfolk Southern — have announced more aggressive cost-cutting efforts in the past year."
Rail is the way most goods get to urban and suburban areas, and if the volumes are down it does not portend the booming economy we are constantly told about.
"Betsy Duke was working in a Virginia Beach dinner theater in the mid-1970s, struggling to make ends meet, when she applied for a job at a dry cleaner. It turned her down. Instead, she became a part-time teller. On Tuesday, Wells Fargo & Co. named her the first woman to oversee one of the nation’s largest banks. She will become chair of the lender’s board at the start of next year, capping one of the most epic climbs — by man or woman — into the financial industry’s top echelons. Her career already included a stint as a Federal Reserve governor, starting on the brink of 2008’s financial meltdown. This time, she will supervise a management team contending with scandal after scandal."
Yeah, she will clean up all the Wells Fargo corruption and the very $y$tem itself! More deck chair rearranging!
"Fed officials confront new reality: low inflation and low unemployment" by Binyamin Appelbaum New York Times August 16, 2017
WASHINGTON — Federal Reserve officials are struggling to make sense of a new economic reality in which low inflation and low unemployment are persisting side by side.
At the Fed’s most recent meeting, in late July, most officials said they expected the phenomenon to fade away by next year as low unemployment finally starts to drive up inflation, but a growing number of officials see the pattern as proof that the Fed needs to adjust its assumptions, according to an account of the meeting that the Fed published on Wednesday.
The timing of the Fed’s next rate move is considerably less certain. The Fed entered the year predicting three rate increases of a quarter-point each; so far it has delivered two, with a third seen possible in December, but the weakness of inflation, which the Fed now expects to remain below its target annual pace of 2 percent for the fifth-consecutive year, is prompting some Fed officials to hesitate.
Most Fed officials subscribe to a view of inflation in which prices rise more quickly as unemployment declines. The basic idea is that companies must offer higher and higher wages to keep their workers. Now, the Fed is confronting “the coexistence of low inflation and low unemployment,” a phenomenon that inverts the “stagflation” experience of the 1970s, when both inflation and unemployment climbed.
That means it is the dreaded D-word, DEFLATION.
The money-pumpers don't even want to say it because it would fly in the face of the months, nay, years of great economy narrative.
The meeting account said most officials continued to regard low unemployment as the most important factor. They said inflation was rising slowly because of temporary factors, like a decline in cellphone service prices, and they remain inclined to raise the Fed’s benchmark rate later this year but as low inflation persists, alternative theories have blossomed. Some Fed officials see evidence that the low unemployment rate overstates the health of the job market, and therefore that the Fed should wait to raise interest rates. Low rates support job growth by encouraging borrowing and risk-taking.
The real unemployment rate is 37.1 percent.
Others see evidence that the connection between unemployment and inflation has been overstated.
Some Fed officials have suggested that the public is losing confidence that the Fed will raise inflation back to a 2 percent annual pace, which could make it harder for the Fed to do so, because inflation expectations can become self-fulfilling.
We LOST confidence in them a LONG TIME AGO, ha-ha!!
OMG!
The account said some voting members of the Fed’s policy arm, the Federal Open Market Committee, wanted reassurance that inflation was rising before voting to raise rates again.
That's where the print copy thankfully ended.
The slow pace of wage growth is driving a parallel debate. Wages have increased modestly in recent years, and the minutes noted again there was “little evidence of wage pressures.”
Some officials see further confirmation that the economy is weak.
Others, however, see the data as misleading.
And yet I still read a Globe every day.
One possibility, advanced by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, is that aggregate wage measures remain low because the baby boomers are retiring. In this view, older, high-wage workers are being replaced by younger workers who make less simply because they are at an earlier stage in their careers. That is holding down measures of average wages, but individual workers may still be seeing healthier wage growth.
Problem is, that flies in the face of all the stories that tells us older workers can't afford to retire, thus holding back the college graduates, etc, etc.
And there are also those who contend that wage growth is doing about as well as one would expect given the slow growth of productivity.
Yeah, blame the workers for having to do more with less.
Fed officials continue to retreat from the expectation that the Trump administration will deliver a large dose of fiscal stimulus, whether in tax cuts or increased infrastructure spending. The Fed reported that companies, too, are losing hope.
How fooli$h they were!
“Uncertainty about the course of federal government policy, including in the areas of fiscal policy, trade and health care, was tending to weigh down firms’ spending and hiring plans,” the minutes said.
No wonder Trump was giving it to MConnell. Failure on repeal and replace puts a huge boulder in the middle of his path.
The Fed also included in the minutes a warning about the Trump administration’s plans to reduce what it regards as overly burdensome financial regulation.
“It would not be desirable,” the minutes said, “for the current regulatory framework to be changed in ways that allowed a re-emergence of the types of risky practices that contributed to the crisis.”
So the bankers are saying to the administration please restrain us because this house of cards about to come down again.
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"US demands big NAFTA changes, setting stage for tough talks" by Binyamin Appelbaum New York Times August 16, 2017
Busy guy.
WASHINGTON — The renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement is off to a rocky start.
The Trump administration lectured Canada and Mexico on the failures of the current agreement at an opening news conference Wednesday morning, while behind closed doors negotiators began to seek significant concessions from the United States’ neighbors.
“We feel that NAFTA has fundamentally failed many, many Americans and needs major improvement,” said Robert Lighthizer, the US trade representative, who is leading the US team aiming to overhaul the 25-year-old agreement.
The Canadian and Mexican representatives were publicly pleasant, emphasizing their commitment to regional trade and the benefits resulting from a regional alliance, but both nations also say the current agreement is not tilted against the United States.
The talks that began Wednesday are the first of several scheduled rounds between now and the end of the year, when the three nations hope to conclude a deal.
Will Trump even make it that far?
Pence is for all the trade agreements.
It is a very fast timetable in the world of international negotiations, reflecting political imperatives in all three nations more than the practical realities of an immensely complex negotiation.
Meaning it won't get done.
Strange how corporate treaties and wars can get started at a moments notice, but anything that would be of benefit to citizens of the world are always slow-moving processes.
Both Mexico and the United States have national elections scheduled next year.
The overarching issue is the importance of trade deficits. Americans buy more goods and services from Mexico than Mexicans buy from the United States. Last year, the difference was $55.6 billion. The Trump administration regards this number as an indictment of the current trade deal — evidence that Mexico is taking advantage of the United States.
While trade with Canada has been more balanced in recent years, Lighthizer said Wednesday that over time the United States has run a significant trade deficit with Canada, too.
Such trade deficits, Lighthizer said, “can’t continue.” President Trump has made it clear that he regards trade deficits as a primary measure of the nation’s economic health.
Mexico and Canada, however, are united in discounting the importance of trade deficits. Many economists agree that the focus on bilateral trade is misplaced. A nation may run a deficit with one trading partner and a surplus with another. What matters is the totality.
Talk about feeding globali$m.
“Canada doesn’t view trade surpluses or deficits as a primary measure of whether trade works,” Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s minister of foreign affairs, said Wednesday.
She has a rather odd family history in light of current events.
Mexico has been even more pointed in resisting the assertion that there is a problem. The economy minister, Ildefonso Guajardo Villarreal, told a Mexican Senate commission last week that he was “delighted to analyze the situation that we call ‘trade rebalancing’ if and when we manage to improve that through expanding trade, not restricting it.”
Why wouldn't they feel that way? They are the ones benefiting (the companies and government, not the workers. It's still poverty wages down there).
There is general agreement among the three nations that NAFTA needs to be modernized. It was written before the advent of Internet-based commerce, for example, and there is broad support for stronger enforcement of workplace and environmental protections. Indeed, the three nations already renegotiated NAFTA once as part of the discarded Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement.
That's where the print ended and the web took over; however, we were told -- and are told constantly -- that the deal had sufficient protections in place when they put it in place.
You know, after someone distorts, deceives, and lies about things over and over and over again and again, you start not believing them.
A key question looming over the negotiations is how the Trump administration’s public bombast will translate into the details of the negotiations. The administration in its early months has repeatedly talked tough and then sought to conciliate trading partners.
Made the Korean back down from what I've read, and no talk of him being a white supremacist neo-Nazi, either.
The administration, for example, insists that it wants to do away with a system of independent arbitration that allows companies to seek the elimination of tariffs. The system has been used primarily by Mexican and Canadian companies to force the United States to abandon protectionist measures found to be in violation of the agreement.
Another area of potential conflict concerns the automobile industry. The United States wants to discourage importation of auto parts from countries outside the NAFTA region. Under the current agreement, a car assembled in Mexico can be imported into the United States without paying an import tax if at least 62.5 percent of the car, measured by value, was made in North America. The Trump administration wants to raise that bar, and to require that a significant portion of those parts come from the United States.
The United Automobile Workers union has long sought such a change, but carmakers are wary. The importation of some cheap parts helps to hold down the cost of the final product. In general, a higher share of NAFTA components, and a higher share of U.S. components, means a more expensive car.
“Many in the business community feel that the NAFTA is working quite well and they don’t want disruption in existing supply chains,” said Jeffrey J. Schott, a NAFTA expert at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington.
Some issues appear relatively straightforward. The Trump administration is eager to insert provisions addressing currency manipulation. Canada and Mexico float their currencies, and are unlikely to resist the symbolic gesture, but on more substantive issues, both Canada and Mexico have shown a growing willingness to resist US demands.
The biggest currency manipulator in the world is the Federal Reserve -- as long as the dollar is the reserve currency of the world.
Luis de la Calle, a former NAFTA trade negotiator for Mexico, said the shock value of Trump’s bluster and threats had diminished since the presidential election. “Most people thought back then that he had powers to impose duties, close the border, prevent investment,” de la Calle said. “Now people have learned what trade experts knew all along, that he doesn’t have those powers.”
Unless he was a true fascist, then he would have those powers!!
Trump also will need to win congressional support for a revised agreement. Democrats, who have long sought changes to NAFTA, share many of his stated goals, but Trump’s political problems could complicate any alliance.
Meaning they will forsake the good of the country and its people for political gain. Disgusting.
There is also little if any congressional support for the administration’s threat to withdraw from the trade agreement if Canada and Mexico resist improvements.
And it will be even less likely under a Democrat House.
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Now you will have to excuse me. There is a regime change operation currently underway and it is within United States borders and against a duly-elected president, as distasteful as he may be to some. Kind of ironic when you think about. The U.S. government wages wars to bring people "democracy," then subverts it at home.
