#and a modicum of financial security and personal freedom | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

collapsedsquid · 5 years

Link

The end of colonial empires in the 1960s and the end of Stalinist ("state socialist," "state capitalist," "bureaucratic collectivist") systems in the 1990s has triggered a process never encountered since the Mongolian invasions in the thirteenth century: a comprehensive and apparently irreversible collapse of established statehood as such. While the bien-pensant Western press daily bemoans perceived threats of dictatorship in far-away places, it usually ignores the reality behind the tough talk of powerless leaders, namely that nobody is prepared to obey them. The old, creaking, and unpopular nation-state—the only institution to date that had been able to grant civil rights, a modicum of social assistance, and some protection from the exactions of privateer gangs and rapacious, irresponsible business elites—ceased to exist or never even emerged in the majority of the poorest areas of the world. In most parts of sub-Saharan Africa and of the former Soviet Union not only the refugees, but the whole population could be considered stateless. The way back, after decades of demented industrialization (see the horrific story of the hydroelectric plants everywhere in the Third World and the former Eastern bloc), to a subsistence economy and "natural" barter exchanges in the midst of environmental devastation, where banditry seems to have become the only efficient method of social organization, leads exactly nowhere. People in Africa and ex-Soviet Eurasia are dying not by a surfeit of the state, but by the absence of it.

Traditionally, liberation struggles of any sort have been directed against entrenched privilege. Equality came at the expense of ruling groups: secularism reduced the power of the Princes of the Church, social legislation dented the profits of the "moneyed interest," universal franchise abolished the traditional political class of landed aristocracy and the noblesse de robe, the triumph of commercial pop culture smashed the ideological prerogatives of the progressive intelligentsia, horizontal mobility and suburban sprawl ended the rule of party politics on the local level, contraception and consumerist hedonism dissolved patriarchal rule in the family—something lost, something gained. Every step toward greater freedom curtailed somebody’s privileges (quite apart from the pain of change). It was conceivable to imagine the liberation of outlawed and downtrodden lower classes through economic, political, and moral crusades: there was, crudely speaking, somebody to take ill-gotten gains from. And those gains could be redistributed to more meritorious sections of the population, offering in exchange greater social concord, political tranquility, and safety to unpopular, privileged elites, thereby reducing class animosity. But let us not forget though that the social-democratic bargain has been struck as a result of centuries of conflict and painful renunciations by the traditional ruling strata. Such a liberation struggle, violent or peaceful, is not possible for the new wretched of the earth.

Nobody exploits them. There is no extra profit and surplus value to be appropriated. There is no social power to be monopolized. There is no culture to be dominated. The poor people of the new stateless societies—from the "homogeneous" viewpoint—are totally superfluous. They are not exploited, but neglected. There is no overtaxation, since there are no revenues. Privileges cannot be redistributed toward a greater equality since there are no privileges, except the temporary ones to be had, occasionally, at gunpoint.

Famished populations have no way out from their barely human condition but to leave. The so-called center, far from exploiting this periphery of the periphery, is merely trying to keep out the foreign and usually colored destitutes (the phenomenon is euphemistically called "demographic pressure") and set up awesome barriers at the frontiers of rich countries, while our international financial bureaucracy counsels further deregulation, liberalization, less state and less government to nations that do not have any, and are perishing in consequence. "Humanitarian wars" are fought in order to prevent masses of refugees from flowing in and cluttering up the Western welfare systems that are in decomposition anyway.

Citizenship in a functional nation-state is the one safe meal ticket in the contemporary world. But such citizenship is now a privilege of the very few. The Enlightenment assimilation of citizenship to the necessary and "natural" political condition of all human beings has been reversed. Citizenship was once upon a time a privilege within nations. It is now a privilege to most persons in some nations. Citizenship is today the very exceptional privilege of the inhabitants of flourishing capitalist nation-states, while the majority of the world’s population cannot even begin to aspire to the civic condition, and has also lost the relative security of pre-state (tribe, kinship) protection.

The scission of citizenship and sub-political humanity is now complete, the work of Enlightenment irretrievably lost. Post-fascism does not need to put non-citizens into freight trains to take them into death; instead, it need only prevent the new non-citizens from boarding any trains that might take them into the happy world of overflowing rubbish bins that could feed them. Post-fascist movements everywhere, but especially in Europe, are anti-immigration movements, grounded in the "homogeneous" world-view of productive usefulness. They are not simply protecting racial and class privileges within the nation-state (although they are doing that, too) but protecting universal citizenship within the rich nation-state against the virtual-universal citizenship of all human beings, regardless of geography, language, race, denomination, and habits. The current notion of "human rights" might defend people from the lawlessness of tyrants, but it is no defense against the lawlessness of no rule.

Currently interesting piece written in 2000.

45 notes · View notes

itsfinancethings · 4 years

Link

The Chinese Communist Party generally doesn’t set targets it can’t meet—or at least fudge with a modicum of credibility. Skepticism over official statistics aside, of the 38 objectives set out in its 2019 Work Report, all were met. Growth at 6.1% fell within the 6% to 6.5% prediction; 2.5 million more new jobs were created than the 11 million aimed for; more than the targeted 10 million people were lifted out of poverty. In fact, only one Work Report target has not been hit since foreign trade growth fell shy of expectations in 2015, according to the Trivium analysis firm.

And so, following a 6.8% first quarter contraction due to the coronavirus pandemic, all eyes were on Premier Li Keqiang on Friday when he delivered the 2020 Work Report at the start of the National People’s Congress (NPC)—China’s rubberstamp annual parliament. The upshot: China would “not set a specific target for growth this year,” said Li, the first time in three decades it failed to do so. “We must redouble our efforts to minimize the loses resulting from the virus,” he added.

It’s another bleak sign for the global economy, given the world’s top trading nation has weathered COVID-19 better than most. Instead of growth, employment now appears the focus of China’s macroeconomic policy, with Li setting out the goal of adding 9 million urban jobs over the year. The state also aims to eliminate rural poverty—a chimeric ambition given poverty is considered a relative rather than absolute standard these days—and cut business taxes by $350 billion, while keeping consumer inflation to 3.5%.

In laying out these policies to cadres sporting medical masks in Beijing’s cavernous Great Hall of the People, Li emphasized that efforts to stymie the virus’s spread had, and would, continue to take priority. “This is a price we must pay, and a price worth paying,” he said.

Li’s approach wasn’t entirely unexpected. In the first four months of 2020, China’s fiscal revenues fell 14.5% year-on-year, the Ministry of Finance said Monday. And with families around the world tightening their belts, sales of the kind of low-cost fashion and consumer items China previously exported with vigor will take a huge hit. Domestic consumption, too, is struggling as Chinese shoppers spying lean times ahead adopt more prudent habits. The nation’s budget deficit will swell by 1 trillion renminbi ($140 billion) this year to aid recovery, Li said.

“China’s economic recovery rate must reach the highest level in the world,” Hu Xijin, editor of China’s state-run Global Times, tells TIME. “This is the strong expectation of the entire Chinese society.”

Trade tensions

Beijing’s masterplan appears to strengthen state-run enterprises to secure jobs in the short-term and prioritize investment in new technologies to ensure long-term advantage. Due to be approved at the NPC is a proposal to invest some 10 trillion renminbi ($1.4 trillion) over six years to 2025 in developing key technologies from 5G networks to artificial intelligence. The investment drive echoes China’s controversial “Made in China 2025” plan to dominate strategic industries, thus reducing its dependence on foreign—particularly American—technology.

This is a special priority after the Trump administration ramped up efforts to stop Chinese firms such as Huawei—the world’s top telecoms equipment supplier—from using American components, particularly semi-conductor chips. On May 16, the Commerce Ministry closed a loophole Huawei had been exploiting to keep using American components. The Shenzhen-based firm has a 12-month stockpile of those crucial parts, according to reports, but needs to find other sources pronto as tech decoupling gathers pace. According to a report by research group the Hinrich Foundation, “the intensifying nature of the U.S.-China tech war … has sparked a flurry of protectionist policies in Washington and elsewhere.”

Yet there was no mention of the trade war in Li’s 23-page Work Report, other than to reconfirm Beijing’s commitment to the “phase one” deal struck with Washington last year. Today, the world’s two biggest economies have hiked tariffs on $470 billion of goods. Given President Trump’s broadsides over the origins of COVID-19, and economic pressures on both nations’ economies, there are significant doubts whether the existing agreement is salvageable.

Wang Zhao/AFP via Getty Images A cleaner wearing protective gear sprays disinfectant along a production line at a Mercedes Benz automotive plant during a media tour organised by the government in Beijing on May 13, 2020, as the country’s industrial sector starts again following shutdowns during the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak.

On Tuesday, Li signaled that American firms are still welcome in China by writing a congratulatory note to U.S. industrial conglomerate Honeywell, which opened its new emerging market headquarters and innovation center in the coronavirus epicenter of Wuhan. Investments of this nature don’t typically merit personal messages from top leaders, though given spiraling Sino-U.S. relations, Li’s letter pointedly set out that “encouraging foreign companies to increase investment in and cooperation with China will not change.”

Economists are meanwhile generally bullish about China’s prospects. “We do think that China will stage a faster recovery than most other major economies,” says Julian Evans-Pritchard, senior China economist for Capital Economics, in a briefing note. “That said, we think the government is right not to be too ambitious about the speed of the rebound.”

It’s good news for President Xi Jinping, who had been under pressure for China’s fumbled early response to the outbreak, including the detention of whistleblower doctors. But since then, “Xi has built on the failures of Western democracies and the relative success in containing the virus in China,” says Prof. Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China Institute at the University of London. “I don’t think Xi’s position is at any risk.”

Showdown over Hong Kong

Xi clearly feels confident enough to push controversial national security legislation through the NPC to curb secession, sedition, terrorism and foreign interference in freewheeling Hong Kong, which has been wracked by almost a year of increasingly violent anti-Beijing protests. Delegates also heard strong words for self-ruling Taiwan’s independence movement.

“National security is the bedrock underpinning a country’s stability,” NPC spokesman Zhang Yesui told assembled media in Beijing on Thursday. “Safeguarding national security serves the fundamental interests of all Chinese people, including our Hong Kong compatriots.”

Hong Kong’s Basic Law (the territory’s mini-constitution) says that its own lawmakers are required to pass a national security law, but an attempt to do so in 2003 had to be withdrawn after what were then the largest protests the financial hub had seen. No attempt has been made since. A clearly frustrated Beijing is now effectively bypassing Hong Kong’s legislature and a motion to draw up the new law is set to be approved by the close of the NPC on May 28. Critics say it has worrying implications for political freedom in the enclave. “[They are] completely destroying Hong Kong,” said Dennis Kwok, a pro-democracy lawmaker.

Anthony Wallace/AFP via Getty Images Pro-democracy protesters hold black placards that translate as “National Security Law comes to Hong Kong, Hong Kong becomes Xinjiang, Stanley Prison becomes Qincheng Prison, Hong Kongers Revolt”, as they march towards the Chinese Liaison Office in Hong Kong on May 22, 2020.

The topic is also set to become the latest bugbear between China and the U.S., with senior figures on both sides of Washington’s political aisles opposing the encroachment on Hong Kong’s autonomy. Last year, Trump signed the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act that linked the territory’s special trade status to its continued autonomy from Beijing. U.S. senators are now set to introduce a bipartisan bill to sanction Chinese officials and entities who enforce the new national-security legislation, reports the Wall Street Journal. “Attempting to circumvent the [Hong Kong] legislature shows a complete disrespect for the rule of law,” tweeted Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Renewed protests have already began cropping up in Hong Kong after the relaxation of weeks of coronavirus lockdown. Opposition to the new legislation is expected to be particularly fierce as the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown approaches on June 4—a date traditionally marked by defiant candlelit vigils in the only place in China allowed to hold them, at least for the time being. The city’s democracy movement is meanwhile hoping to repeat its landslide success in last November’s local council elections in polls for the legislature in September. It aims to take control of the chamber and stymie the Beijing-backed administration’s attempts to govern.

Bringing Hong Kong’s protesters to heel seems to be one NPC pledge that can’t be easily fudged.

#IFTTT #Blogger

0 notes

mideastsoccer · 5 years

Text

Global Turmoil: Ethics offer a way out of the crisis

By James M. Dorsey

A podcast version of this story is available on Soundcloud, Itunes, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn, Spreaker, Pocket Casts, Tumblr, Podbean, Audecibel, Patreon and Castbox.

Rarely is out-of-the-box thinking needed more than in this era of geopolitical, political and economic turmoil.

The stakes couldn't be higher in a world in which civilizationalist leaders risk shepherding in an era of even greater political violence, disenfranchisement and marginalisation, and mass migration.

The risks are magnified by the fact that players that traditionally stood up for at least a modicum of basic economic, social, political and minority rights have either joined the civilisationalists or are too tied up in their own knots.

The United States, long a proponent of human rights, even if it was selective in determining when to adhere to its principles and when to conveniently look the other way, has abandoned all pretence under President Donald J. Trump.

Europe is too weak and fighting its own battles, whether finding its place in a world in which the future of the trans-Atlantic alliance is in doubt, Brexit or the rise of civilizationalist leaders within its own ranks.

The long and short of this is that civil society’s reliance on traditional strategies and tactics to exert political pressure serves to fly the rights flag but is unlikely to produce results.

The same is true for traditional often heavy-handed and violent government attempts to quell protests.

In some ways, this weekend’s landslide vote for pro-democracy forces in Hong Kong lays down a gauntlet for the governments of the city and China.

“Even if the current wave of protests recedes, the instability will very likely persist for some time and may even become a permanent situation… because the problems that cause the protests appear unresolvable by means of the current political and economic system,” said Israeli journalist Ofri Ilany.

Mr. Ilany put his finger on the pulse. This decade’s global breakdown in confidence in political systems and leaders not only spotlights the problem but may also create opportunities for out-of-the-box thinking.

The key lies in the fact that protesters across the globe in Santiago de Chile, La Paz, Bogota, Port-au-Prince, Quito, Paris, Barcelona, Moscow, Tbilisi, Algiers, Cairo, Khartoum, Beirut, Amman, Tehran, Jakarta, and Hong Kong as well as movements like the Extinction Rebellion essentially want the same thing: a more transparent, accountable and more economically equitable world.

The Middle East and North Africa, the one part of the world that exasperates the most, also represents the worst and the best of responses to the global clamour for change.

While Egypt under general-turned-president Abdel Fattah Al Sisi is almost a textbook example of what drives global protest, Tunisia and Kuwait, offer lessons to be learnt. So do some of the world’s longer standing success stories such as Singapore.

Tunisia has emerged as the one country that experienced a successful revolt in 2011 and was able to safeguard its achievements because its leaders, much like Singapore’s Lee Kwan Yew, saw power as a tool to secure national rather than personal interests and at a time of crisis worked with civil society to engineer a national dialogue that crafted a way forward.

Similarly, Kuwait, a constitutional semi-democratic anomaly in a region governed by secretive autocrats, recently opted for a more transparent competitive approach towards politics.

As a result, Kuwait saw this month its ruling family take its internal differences and disputes public. The differences forced the government to resign as members of the ruling family accused each other of embezzlement in advance of parliamentary elections scheduled for next year and a possible succession in which the assembly would have a say.

Achieving protesters’ goal of more equitable and accountable political and economic systems involves not only adherence to the rule of law, including the implementation of international law, and application of the principle of equality before the law of not only individuals and organizations but also states.

It further involves the need to make principles of right and wrong and of respect of human dignity the moral and ethical underpinnings of the architecture of a new world order by which all ranging from an individual to a state are judged.

That is the fundamental message of protests across the globe that denounce a world in which financial or economic benefit justifies violations of rights and civilisationalists have abandoned any pretence of adherence to international law.

Heeding the protesters’ message means ensuring that at least international law provides an effective mechanism to hold accountable security forces that use lethal force against largely peaceful protesters as well as politically responsible officials that authorize unjustified brutality in what often amounts to mass killings.

This year’s numbers speak for themselves, including some 100 on a single day in Sudan, more than 350 in a matter of weeks in Iraq, more than 100 in Iran and scores in Chile.

The need for morals and ethics is gaining momentum with hardline realist proponents of the projection of power as well as some leaders raising the alarm bell.

The rise of artificial intelligence persuaded former US secretary of state and national security advisor Henry A. Kissinger, a symbol of realpolitik and the wielding of power, to recognize the importance of morals and ethics.

Writing in The Atlantic, Mr. Kissinger warned that the consequence of artificial intelligence “may be a world relying on machines powered by data and algorithms and ungoverned by ethical or philosophical norms.”

Threats resulting from the abandonment of international law and the lack of moral and ethical yardsticks were evident in this month’s unilateral recognition by the Trump administration of the legality of Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territory long viewed by jurists and the international community as illegal.

The move highlighted the link between protecting individual rights and freedoms and national security.

Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad warned that the administration’s move meant that “we are no longer safe. If a country wants to enter our country and build their settlements, that is legal. We cannot do anything,”

Mr. Mahathir was projecting onto states a sentiment of vulnerability among protesters and minorities across the globe that results from the random, unrestricted employment of power by those in positions of authority.

Similarly, Singapore’s Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon warned last month that "countries increasingly adopt a zero-sum mentality in eschewing multilateral agreements as shackles on sovereignty and a burden on economic growth."

Mr. Menon’s words must have been music in the ears of Norway’s successful US$1 trillion rainy-day oil fund that has proven that growth and profitability are achievable without abandoning norms of moral and ethical investment.

Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global (GPFG), the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund returned three percent or US$28.5 billion to the country’s pension pot during in the second quarter of 2019.

Guided by Norway’s Council of Ethics, which monitors the fund’s investments, GPFG recently

blacklisted shares in British security company G4S because of the risk of human rights violations against its workforce in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

Said New York Times columnist David Brooks: “The world is unsteady and ready to blow… The big job ahead for leaders…is this: Write a new social contract that gives both the educated urban elites and the heartland working classes a piece of what they want most.”

To achieve the kind of social and economic justice as well as live-and-let live environment that Mr. Brooks advocates, leaders, governments and civil society will have to rediscover and readopt the moral and ethical values that are embedded in the world’s multiple cultures and common to much of mankind.

Dr. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, an adjunct senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute and co-director of the University of Wuerzburg’s Institute of Fan Culture

#Protest #Hong Kong #latin america #chile #sudan #Egypt #iraq #algeria #middle east

0 notes

uniteordie-usa · 7 years

Text

Cataclysm | Zero Hedge

http://uniteordiemedia.com/cataclysm-zero-hedge/ Cataclysm | Zero Hedge The USSR didn’t just fail one day, as does a person who dies of a sudden heart attack or stroke. It was more like a wasting illness brought on by an unhealthy lifestyle. A physician tells a morbidly obese patient: “Your daily consumption of twelve cocktails, three packs of cigarettes, and 4,000...

The USSR didn’t just fail one day, as does a person who dies of a sudden heart attack or stroke. It was more like a wasting illness brought on by an unhealthy lifestyle. A physician tells a morbidly obese patient: “Your daily consumption of twelve cocktails, three packs of cigarettes, and 4,000 calories, and your refusal to engage in exercise more strenuous than walking to the refrigerator will kill you, but I can’t say when.” For both individuals and governments, certain choices are incompatible with continued existence, and the Soviet government made plenty of those.

Very few people foresaw its failure when it was imminent, even purported experts. The small group who said Soviet communism wouldn’t work because it couldn’t work were disparaged right up until it didn’t work. However, the deck is always stacked in favor of those predicting this or that government will fail. Ultimately they all do because they all come to rest on a foundation of coercion and fraud, which doesn’t work because it can’t work.

There is both a quantitative and qualitative calculus for individuals subject to a government: what the government takes versus what individuals get back. Government is a protection racket: turn over your money and it promises physical security from invasion and crime, and adjudication and restitution in the event of civil or criminal wrongs. The quantitative calculus: am I getting more back than I put in? The qualitative calculus: what activities and people does the government help or hinder?

Protection rackets are often indistinguishable from extortion rackets, the “protector” a bigger threat to the “protected” than the threats against which they’re supposedly protected. Such is the case with the US government, as it was with the former Soviet government. Blessed with naturally defensive geographies and huge nuclear arsenals, the chances of the US being attacked are (or were, in the case of the former Soviet Union) remote. The cost for actual protection provided by those governments has been a tiny fraction of what’s been extracted by force or fraud from their citizenries, the very definition of an extortion racket.

Freedom militates against stupidity; coercion compounds it. Competitive markets and a wide-open intellectual climate either kill the worst ideas or impel their improvement. Power corrupts so completely because those who hold it rarely face negative feedback or consequences. Critics are mocked, stifled, imprisoned, or murdered. The costs of failure are borne by the victims. The perpetrators blame those failures on lack of funding or authority and receive more of the same.

Nothing succeeds like failure in coercive systems. Just look at the US governments “wars” on poverty, drugs, and terrorism. For rational people in free, competitive systems an ever-expanding gap between shining intentions and dismal reality prompts psychological turmoil. The powerful salve outbreaks of cognitive dissonance with arrogance, which expands apace with their failing programs. Just look at Obamacare, which its progenitor hails as his greatest accomplishment.

As the protection racket and its sub-rackets expand, the “protected” receive less and less, but pay more and more. By now, both the quantitative and qualitative calculuses are clear to productive Americans: they’re being reamed by people they despise, who in their arrogance and willful blindness despise them. The government steals trillions directly, but still resorts to financial sub-grifts—debt, fiat money, and central banking—to feed its insatiable money-lust. Like the government’s debt, stupidity compounds exponentially and rational people wonder how long unsustainable rackets can persist. The racketeers, if they realize their rackets can’t last, don’t care; they’re going to milk them as long as they can.

With the world’s most powerful military, largest nuclear arsenal, and most intrusive surveillance apparatus, the ostensible power of the US government is daunting. Yet, if a tenth of the US population ran up their debts, withdrew their funds from the financial system, and then stopped making debt service payments for a few months, it would propel a run on the banking system, choking the government’s financial lifeline and exposing its worthless fiat debt scam. Thus, the government is hardly invulnerable. As stupidity compounds, so too do its vulnerabilities.

The foundation of the global economy and financial system is interlinked debt. Anyone paying attention during the last financial crisis recognized that it took surprisingly few defaults—debt markdowns that marked down the value of the corresponding credit-assets—in a highly leveraged and interconnected system before that system unraveled and imploded. Anyone with a modicum of analytic ability and intellectual integrity realizes that the “solution” to that last financial crisis—more government and central bank debt—was another instance of stupidity compounding itself. Now, there’s more craziness in the debt asylum than there was in 2007.

There probably won’t be a voluntary debt payment moratorium, although for anyone asking how “we the people” can throw off the burdensome yoke of “our” government that would be a fine place to start. There doesn’t have to be; the mechanics of debt implosion guarantee the same result. Most of the world’s financial assets are debt or equity claims. Equity has a lower legal right to a debtor’s assets than debt. A debt collapse will leave the world impoverished, and so too its governments. Many real assets will be tied up in creditors’ squabbles. Governments’ and their central banks’ vaunted abilities to drive interest rates to subzero, go further into debt, and exchange their pieces of paper or computer entries for other pieces of paper or computer entries will mean little in a world submerged in debt, worthless paper and computer entries.

Those who scoff at the notion of cataclysmic collapse ignore ubiquitous signs of deterioration and recent history. Real economic growth and incomes have been trending downward since the turn of the century, even by official statistics. One has to question how much of the growth in either is the product of statistical legerdemain—government statistics leave much to be desired—and debt. If debt grows at 5 percent and the economy and incomes grow at 2, is the economy actually growing? Should some present value accounting be made of the fact that the longer debt growth exceeds economic growth, the greater the burden that debt imposes on the economy?

Some say the last financial crisis proved that governments and central banks can prevent a debt implosion. They’re drawing the wrong conclusion. It “proved” that massive injections of fiat debt defibrillated the patient, and it still serves as essential life support. However, not even life support will keep the patient alive the next time the EKG flatlines. All governments will then have are lots of weapons, worthless debt, millions of angry beneficiaries, and whatever loyalty they can still command, literally, from the police-military-surveillance complexes.

At which point, the calculus becomes intolerable for those long milked and bilked by governments, and offering them only further pain with no gain. Inevitably, they will consider their options: flight, secession, devolution, or revolution. Governments are only temporary arrangement and pendulums swing. Cataclysm should afford, for those inclined, opportunities—if they’re willing to fight for them—to live under arrangements more conducive to individual freedom and voluntary interaction.

Read More: www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-04-25/cataclysm

0 notes

itsfinancethings · 4 years

Link

Trade tensions

Showdown over Hong Kong

Bringing Hong Kong’s protesters to heel seems to be one NPC pledge that can’t be easily fudged.

#IFTTT #Blogger

0 notes