the unbalanced evolution of homo sapiens

Advancing global de-dollarization, China’s central bank is boosting its gold reserves while signing currency swap deals in yuan with countries like Argentina, encouraging the use of renminbi instead of US dollars.   by Ben Norton  Part 5 - Argentina and Brazil deepen economic integration, with eyes on new Latin American currency While Buenos Aires is collaborating more closely with Beijing (its second-largest trading partner), Argentina has simultaneously pushed for stronger ties with Brazil (its largest trading partner) and economic integration of Latin America. Brazil’s left-wing President Lula da Silva returned to power on January 1. Two days later, Argentina’s Ambassador Daniel Scioli met with Brazil’s Economic Minister Fernando Haddad. Scioli said his government’s top priority was “ the agreement on deep Argentina-Brazil integration ” that the countries’ Presidents Alberto Fernández and Lula da Silva are due to sign at the summit of the Community of Latin American and Car...

failed evolution   On 11 April 2019, the Ecuadorian government of traitor Lenin Moreno, invited the Metropolitan Police into the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and they arrested Julian Assange . Since then, Assange is kept in Belmarsh high security prison in London, without actual charges.   The real reason world's number one political prisoner is still kept in this high security prison, is because he exposed horrendous war crimes carried out by the US imperialists and their allies.   The ruthless Western imperialist regime wants to punish the No1 real journalist in the world and make him an example for any Whistleblower or real journalist who will attempt to expose its big crimes in the future.   And the Anglo-American axis has now become officially a fascist coalition , framed by the rest of its Western pets. UK's Home Secretary Priti Patel, one of the most ruthless ever, decided to extradite Julian Assange to US. No surprise of course. The only question we had...

Brazil, Argentina, and Colombia have refused to send weapons to Ukraine, despite pressure by the US and EU. Latin American left-wing leaders have urged peace with Russia and called for neutrality in the West’s new cold war.   by Ben Norton  Part 1 Brazil, Argentina, and Colombia have rejected requests by the United States and European Union that they send weapons to Ukraine. The commander of the US military’s Southern Command (Southcom), which operates in Latin America and the Caribbean, revealed on January 19 that Washington has been pressuring countries in the region to arm Ukraine. Southcom wants Latin American nations to “ replace [their] Russian equipment with United States equipment – if those countries want to donate it to Ukraine ”, said Army General Laura J. Richardson. But Latin America’s left-wing leaders have refused, instead maintaining neutrality and urging peace.   The socialist governments in Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua blamed NATO expansion and US medd...

Some of the most incendiary accusations made against Iran’s government by corporate media, celebrity influencers and Western leaders in the past months are little more than fabrications. And most remain uncorrected.   by Setareh Sadeqi and Christopher Weaver   Part 3 - Iran pioneers time traveling technology   CNN falsely claimed that the family home of a female Iranian rock climber, Elnaz Rekabi, had been demolished as punishment for her participating without a hijab in a South Korean competition on October 15, 2022. Rekabi, a member of the Iranian national team, spoke after the South Korean competition and explained that not wearing a headscarf was unintentional – due to a rushed competition – and not meant as a political statement. English-language websites began running stories that Rekabi had been abducted and her family home had been destroyed by the ‘regime’ in retribution. BBC, The Guardian, Le Monde and others had claimed Rekabi went missing, while raising conce...

Four years ago, the UK government recognised Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s president. He’s now gone, but the Bank of England is still holding some of the country’s key assets. JOHN McEVOY   Part 1   In late December, Venezuela’s leading opposition parties voted to oust Juan Guaidó as “interim president” and dissolve his parallel government. This was clearly not the ending the UK government had in mind. Four years ago, the British government made the bold decision to recognise Guaidó as Venezuelan president, and proceeded to facilitate his legal battle to seize roughly $2bn of gold held in the Bank of England. Indeed, the UK government insisted at every turn that it recognised Guaidó – and not Nicolás Maduro – as Venezuelan president. In turn, Guaidó’s lawyers argued that he was authorised to represent and control the assets of the Central Bank of Venezuela held in London. Throughout this time, Guaidó paid his UK legal costs by drawing on millions of dollars of his country’s asse...

French train drivers, teachers and refinery workers were among those who walked off their jobs on Thursday (19 January) in a nationwide day of strikes against government plans to raise the retirement age by two years to 64.   by EURACTIV.com with Reuters  Part 3 - Tax the rich? But with public sector workers often at the forefront of strikes, some seven out of 10 primary school teachers have said they will strike, their main union said. In Paris, students blockaded at least one high school in support of the strike action. EDF and grid operator RTE data showed electricity production was down by roughly 12% of total power supply, prompting France to raise its imports. Shipments were blocked at TotalEnergies’ refineries in France, union and company officials said. TotalEnergies chief executive Patrick Pouyanne said on Wednesday that one day of strikes would not disrupt refinery operations, but this could change if protests continued. The impact on air traffic was largely limited ...

Ukraine’s Western-backed leader Volodymyr Zelensky sent a love letter to US companies, thanking “ such giants of the international financial and investment world as BlackRock, JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs ” for buying up his country’s assets. “ Everyone can become a big business by working with Ukraine ”, he enticed, claiming that the reconstruction of his nation “ will be the largest economic project of our time in Europe ”.  [...] Zelensky’s government has imposed some of the world’s most aggressive anti-worker policies, passing legislation that “ deprives around 73% of workers of their right to union protection and collective bargaining ”, which even the US government-funded Solidarity Center of the AFL-CIO labor federation condemned as a “ significant assault on worker rights in Ukraine “. Zelensky’s staunchly anti-worker, anti-union, and pro-corporate ideology came through clear in the neoliberal rhetoric of the speech he gave to the US chamber of commerce organization. He comp...

Greece’s main opposition leader and former prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, requested a censure motion against the government after he revealed names of people who were tapped by the state intelligence unit. “ The last six months Mitsotakis is lying that he wasn’t aware, ” Tsipras told lawmakers Wednesday, accusing Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis of being responsible for spying on the officials. Current labor minister Konstantinos Hatzidakis was being tapped from November 2020 to May 2021, when he was energy minister, while the head of armed forces and other military officials were spied on from July 2020 to May 22, according to Tsipras.    [...]   Tsipras’s comments came a day after he met with the head of the independent authority for Communication and Privacy, who handed him a letter with the findings of his investigation into who was under electronic surveillance from the state spy unit. The agency also sent the letter, which was classified, to all parliamenta...

BRICS is “developing a fairer system of monetary exchange” to challenge the “dominance of the dollar”, South Africa revealed. Saudi Arabia is considering selling oil in other currencies. Economist Zoltan Pozsar says the US “unipolar era” is over.   by Ben Norton  Part 2 - BRICS works to ‘develop a fairer system of monetary exchange’ as alternative to ‘dominance of the dollar’ South Africa’s Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor told Russia’s state media outlet Sputnik that the BRICS bloc is working to “ develop a fairer system of monetary exchange ”, to weaken the “ dominance of the dollar ”. Pandor’s comments were ignored by Western media outlets, but widely reported in the Indian press. “ We have always been concerned by the fact that there is a dominance of the dollar and that we do need to look at alternative [systems] ”, she said. “ The systems currently in place tend to privilege very wealthy countries and tend to be really a challenge for countries, such as ourselves, which h...

Western sanctions led Russia to greatly increase trade with Asia, while devastating Europe’s economy. The US tech war against China is damaging its own industry.   by Renate Bridenthal  Part 4 - Western sanctions on Russia backfire in Europe   By contrast, Germany is facing the most collateral damage from the loss to its markets and the sanctions on energy, notably bringing an end to the supply of cheap Russian gas through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline. In 2020, U.S. Congress imposed secondary sanctions on banks that processed transactions related to the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines and on ship insurers that serviced them. When construction of Nord Stream 2 was finished in 2021, Washington imposed new sanctions on insurance and certification companies to keep it from opening. Finally, both pipelines were sabotaged in an undersea explosion in September 2022. As a result, the industries that had made Germany preeminent in Europe, such as steel, chemicals, machinery, and autom...

Advancing global de-dollarization, China’s central bank is boosting its gold reserves while signing currency swap deals in yuan with countries like Argentina, encouraging the use of renminbi instead of US dollars.   by Ben Norton  Part 4 - China uses currency swap lines to help debt-burdened countries, while advancing de-dollarization China began conducted currency swaps with Argentina back in 2009, under left-wing President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. Deals have been repeatedly renewed since then. But the South American nation is not the only country that has worked out a system like this with the East Asian giant. In December, the Wall Street Journal reported that Beijing’s central bank is using an “ unusual channel ”: “ currency-swap lines to support governments that borrowed heavily from Chinese banks ”. The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) has given hundreds of billions of dollars worth of yuan to dozens of countries in exchange for their domestic currencies, the newspa...

Democracy Now!   Former British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, famed linguist and dissident Noam Chomsky and others gave testimony Friday at the Belmarsh Tribunal in Washington, D.C., calling on President Biden to drop charges against Julian Assange.    The WikiLeaks founder has been languishing for close to four years in the harsh Belmarsh prison in London while appealing extradition to the United States. If convicted in the United States, Julian Assange could face up to 175 years in jail for violating the U.S. Espionage Act for publishing documents that exposed U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Friday's event was held at the National Press Club and co-chaired by Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman.   

The Grayzone   The Grayzone 's Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate cover NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg's comment at the World Economic Forum that " weapons are the way to peace, " and discuss Washington's latest mad plans for escalating the Ukraine proxy war – even at the price of nuclear conflict. 

Some of the most incendiary accusations made against Iran’s government by corporate media, celebrity influencers and Western leaders in the past months are little more than fabrications. And most remain uncorrected.   by Setareh Sadeqi and Christopher Weaver   Part 2 - BBC Persian accuses Iran of killing more than Russia in Ukraine   On, November 18, BBC Persian posted an image Instagram and Facebook showing a crowd of Iranians cheering as a vehicle was set on fire. “The bloody crackdown on protests has left as many deaths as the war in Ukraine,” read the BBC Persian headline.  This was, at best, an act of journalistic malpractice, as the hyperbolic headline was only explained in the third paragraph of the BBC’s article as referring to two entirely different, arbitrarily chosen date ranges for Iran and Ukraine. The BBC continued, “ As human rights organizations report, between September 22 and October 17, 224 protesters died in Iran and in Ukraine between September 1...

by Sarantis Michalopoulos   Part 3 - The Commission’s silent anger   Syriza MEP Kostas Arvanitis said he would raise the issue with the relevant EU authorities as the opinion targets ADAE ” and the country’s rule of law ”. Arvanitis also said, “ no intimidation and no interference can stop the investigation either inside or outside the country. ” Greece is still waiting for the outcome of the European Parliament PEGA committee’s investigation over the “Greek Watergate” and a crucial visit to Athens by the LIBE committee. An EU official told EURACTIV that the European Commission, which has been quite sensitive regarding the role of independent national authorities, felt the matter “ would be for the national authorities to examine ”. “ Any attempts by national security services to illegally access data of citizens, including journalists and political opponents, if confirmed, is unacceptable, ” the EU official said. “ You know that we follow the situation in Greece, as well as o...

French train drivers, teachers and refinery workers were among those who walked off their jobs on Thursday (19 January) in a nationwide day of strikes against government plans to raise the retirement age by two years to 64.   by EURACTIV.com with Reuters  Part 2 - Public transport woes Public transport was severely disrupted. Only between one-in-three and one-in-five high-speed TGV lines were operating, with barely any local or regional trains running, the SNCF rail operator said. In Paris, some metro stations were closed and traffic was seriously disrupted, with few trains running. In the busy Gare du Nord station, people rushed to catch the few trains still operating while employees in yellow vests were assisting frazzled commuters. Zoheir Djema, 42, who arrived at the station from nearby Chantilly, said he would head back home after he found out there would be no return trains in the afternoon. Restaurant worker Beverly Gahinet, who missed work because her train was cancell...

Consortium News   The former leader of the British Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, defends Julian Assange at the Belmarsh Tribunal in Washington DC. He appeals to politicians worldwide to recognise the threat that criminalising journalism poses, and stand up for their democracies and citizens' right to tell & know the truth.

The governments of Brazil and Argentina are making plans to create a new currency for Latin America, called the Sur (“south” in English), according to a report in the Financial Times . Other countries in the region will be invited to use the currency. Their goal is to “ boost regional trade and reduce reliance on the US dollar ”, the newspaper noted, citing government officials. Argentina’s Economic Minister Sergio Massa told the Financial Times that the South American nations will soon “ start studying the parameters needed for a common currency, which includes everything from fiscal issues to the size of the economy and the role of central banks ”. Massa said they are preparing “ a study of mechanisms for trade integration ”. But he cautioned that it could take years to develop, and this is just “ first step on a long road which Latin America must travel ”. Brazil and Argentina will discuss the currency plans at the meeting of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CE...

BRICS is “developing a fairer system of monetary exchange” to challenge the “dominance of the dollar”, South Africa revealed. Saudi Arabia is considering selling oil in other currencies. Economist Zoltan Pozsar says the US “unipolar era” is over.   by Ben Norton  Part 1 The international economic system had been dominated for decades by the United States, but this financial architecture is rapidly fracturing with the creation of new institutions in the Global South. The BRICS bloc of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa is working “ to develop a fairer system of monetary exchange ”, to challenge the “ dominance of the dollar ”, South Africa’s foreign minister has revealed. Saudi Arabia publicly confirmed that it is considering selling its oil in other currencies. China’s President Xi Jinping said Beijing will buy energy from the Persian Gulf states in its own currency, the renminbi. Prominent economist Zoltan Pozsar, of the Swiss investment bank Credit Suisse, has ob...

Western sanctions led Russia to greatly increase trade with Asia, while devastating Europe’s economy. The US tech war against China is damaging its own industry.   by Renate Bridenthal  Part 3 - Western sanctions lead to more Russian self-sufficiency Sanctions have been raining down on Russia ever since, against individuals, companies, and government agencies, most importantly against its oil exports, but also against its sale of aluminum, uranium, and agricultural goods. Initial harm included a sizeable drop in Russia’s GDP and living standards, the loss of foreign investment, a sharp increase in inflation, and a temporary depreciation of the ruble. The U.S. later restricted Russia’s access to capital markets and to oil and gas extraction technology, which can inhibit Moscow’s financing of oil field development, notably in the Arctic, where Russia has the longest shoreline. However, Putin turned much of this around with policies of import substitution, government subsidies, a...

Advancing global de-dollarization, China’s central bank is boosting its gold reserves while signing currency swap deals in yuan with countries like Argentina, encouraging the use of renminbi instead of US dollars.   by Ben Norton  Part 3 - Chinese and Argentine central banks sign yuan currency swap deal Argentina has struggled for centuries with odious debt owed to colonial and neo-colonial powers. Today, the South American nation is trapped in $44 billion in dollar-denominated debt with the IMF. Seeking to fortify its sovereignty and weaken US control, Argentina has strengthened its relations with China and Russia. China is already Argentina’s second-biggest trade partner, after Brazil, and the ties between the countries are growing. In February 2022, Buenos Aires joined Beijing’s massive global infrastructure project, the Belt and Road Initiative. Argentina has also applied to join the expanded BRICS+ bloc, alongside Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. This Janua...

Democracy Now!   In Washington, D.C., human rights and free speech advocates gather today for the Belmarsh Tribunal, focused on the imprisonment of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Assange has been languishing for close to four years in the harsh Belmarsh prison in London while appealing extradition to the United States on espionage charges. If convicted, Assange could face up to 175 years in jail for publishing documents that exposed war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Five major news organizations that once partnered with WikiLeaks recently called on the Biden administration to drop charges against Assange.    British MP and former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, who is in Washington, D.C., to participate in the Belmarsh Tribunal, speaks about Assange and freedom of the press. We also speaks about the state of leftism around the globe, from labor rights in the U.K. and Europe to the war in Ukraine, to political unrest in Brazil and Peru. 

globinfo freexchange     As we described many times in this blog, corporate power grew rapidly since the early 70s with the rise of neoliberalism and its subsequent establishment as the dominant culture, especially in the West.  In the motherland of neoliberalism, the United States, corporations essentially legalized corruption in politics during the 70s in order to capture the entire political system and put it under their complete control. As David Harvey describes in his book A Brief History of Neoliberalism :                          The supposedly ‘progressive’ campaign finance laws of 1971 in effect legalized the financial corruption of politics. A crucial set of Supreme Court decisions began in 1976 when it was first established that the right of a corporation to make unlimited money contributions to political parties and political action committ...