Thursday, June 9, 2016
As hunger mounts, Venezuelans turn to trash for food
Until recently, Julio Noguera worked at a bakery. Now he spends his evenings searching through the garbage for food.
"I come here looking for food because if I didn't, I'd starve to death," Noguera said as he sorted through a pile of moldy potatoes. "With things like they are, no one helps anyone and no one gives away meals."
Across town, unemployed people converge every dusk at a trash heap on a downtown Caracas sidewalk to pick through rotten fruit and vegetables tossed out by nearby shops. They are frequently joined by small business owners, college students and pensioners — people who consider themselves middle class even though their living standards have long ago been pulverized by triple-digit inflation, food shortages and a collapsing currency.
Venezuela's poverty had eased during the administration of the late President Hugo Chavez. But a study by three leading Caracas universities found that 76 percent of Venezuelans are now under the poverty line, compared with 52 percent in 2014.
Staples such as corn flour and cooking oil are subsidized, costing pennies at the strongest of two official exchange rates. But fruit and vegetables have become an unaffordable luxury for many Venezuelan families.
"We're seeing terrible sacrifices across many sections of society," said Carlos Aponte, a sociology professor at the Central University of Venezuela. "A few years ago, Venezuela didn't have the kind of extreme poverty that would drive people to eat garbage."
The trash pickers aren't just people who've lost their jobs.
Jhosriana Capote, a vocational student, comes to the trash heap to supplement her pantry. She recently completed an internship with a Coca-Cola subsidiary.
"I used to be able to find food, but not anymore. Everything is lines," she said after an evening picking through the refuse.
Dumpster diving isn't a new phenomenon in Venezuela, but it is a growing one. Venezuela was once South America's richest nation, but a fall in oil prices combined with other economic problems has sparked desperation.
Nearly half of Venezuelans say they can no longer afford to eat three meals a day, according to a recent poll by the local firm Venebarometro. The poll surveyed 1,200 adults at their homes the first week in April and had a margin of error of plus or minus of about 2 percentage points.
The government blames the political opposition, accusing it of waging an "economic war" to stir unrest and oust President Nicolas Maduro from power. The administration has launched an aggressive program to build urban farms in an effort to address food shortages.
One recent night, two young girls found some cilantro, lemons and remains of a cabbage in the garbage. Their mother, Monica Espinosa, said the scavenging helps them get by since her husband walked out on the family. Espinosa said she still owns two apartments, but makes ends meet by cooking sauces from the vegetables she finds and selling them to stores, earning about $6 a week.
"I'm a single mother with two children, and this is helping me get by," she said.
Credit to AP
'We want them dead’: ISIS names 39 British residents on chilling 8,000-strong 'kill list’
The internet jihadis posted the full names and home addresses of around 8,000 “targets” and urged extremist sympathisers to “kill them strongly” in a chilling new online threat.
The deranged fanatics’ list includes 39 British residents as well as 7,848 Americans, 312 Canadians and 69 Australians which it wants murdered “as revenge for Muslims”.
It is not known if the list, which was published in English and Arabic, consisted of new names or those featured in earlier kill lists posted by the warped online jihadis.
Hackers claiming to be from the ‘Cyber Caliphate’ also posted satellite images of US air bases on its Telegram account, but the same images could be found on Google Earth.
The United Cyber Caliphate has previously published similar lists, such as one in 2015 revealing the full names of 3,600 New York residents as well as their addresses underneath the headline: “We Want Them #Dead.”
The twisted online fanatics also reportedly hacked into US State Department records last year and released private information about 43 employees it wanted executed.
In November 2015, the cyber jihadis leaked details of 54,000 Twitter accounts, including passwords, in a show of online power that sent shockwaves through social media.
According to a report by American intelligence firm Flashpoint, the United Cyber Caliphate was formed in April 2015 after a merger of several radical Islamic hacking groups.
Credit to Express
The Federal Reserve's Strange Behavior Makes Perfect Sense
I have made this comment many times in the past, but I think it needs to be stated again here: If you think the Federal Reserve’s goal is to maintain or repair the U.S. economy, then you will never understand why they do the things they do or why the economy evolves the way that it does. The Fed’s job is not to protect the U.S. economy. The Fed’s job is to DESTROY the U.S. economy to make way for a truly global system.
There seems to be a collective delusion within certain parts of the liberty movement that the “globalists” (the banking and political elites that promote total global centralization of finance and power) are a purely American or Western problem, and that they have some kind of loyalty to the success, or perceived success, of the U.S. “empire.” This is nonsensical when you look at the progression of the American fiscal system after the Fed was established over a century ago.
In the past 100 years, the U.S. has suffered a gradual but immense devaluation in the dollar’s real buying power. We witnessed the first long-term fiscal depression in the nation’s history. We saw the removal of the gold standard. We saw the dismantling of the greatest industrial base in the history of the world. We have struggled through the implosion of the derivatives and credit bubble, which Fed officials have openly admitted responsibility for. And now, we are on the verge of the final implosion of a massive equities bubble and the collapse of the dollar itself.
All of these developments require careful planning and staging, not recklessness or random chance. Free-market economies tend to heal and adapt over time. Only constant negative manipulation could cause the kind of steady decline plaguing the U.S. ever since the Federal Reserve was forced into being.
The Fed has had multiple opportunities to strengthen the economic lifespan of America, but has ALWAYS chosen to take the exact opposite actions needed, guaranteeing an inevitable outcome of crisis. The goal of internationalists and international bankers is to acquire ever more centralized authority, and thus, ever more centralized power. The U.S. is an appendage to the great vampire squid, an expendable tool that can be sacrificed today to gain greater treasures tomorrow. Nothing more.
But this reality just does not seem to sink into the skulls of certain people. They simply cannot fathom the idea that the Fed is a saboteur. Not a bumbling greed fueled monster, or even a mad bomber, but a careful and deliberate enemy agent with precise destruction in mind.
Case in point; the recent institution of the Fed rate hike program. No one really gets it and no one is asking the right questions. Why, for example, did the Fed begin raising rates in December? No one asked them to take such measures. Certainly not day traders in the market casino; they were too busy enjoying the fiat inflation of biggest equity bubble in the encyclopedia of humanity. The politicians weren’t demanding any drawback of Fed stimulus, they were too busy enjoying the fraudulent recovery afforded by the recapitalization of too-big-to-fail banks. So, again, why bother promoting rate hikes that are essentially guaranteed to cause a market crisis?
Some might argue that the Fed must raise rates slightly so that they have room to cut them again when their stimulus schemes eventually fail. This is certainly possible, however, such an action only reinforces the position that the Fed is deliberately undermining the U.S. system. To hike rates now only to then cut them immediately after would result in the end of faith in the central bank’s ability to administer our financial structure. A crash would occur regardless.
I do not believe the Fed intends to cut rates again, at least not until it is already too late to stall a full spectrum breakdown in stock markets. Even though the majority of analysts, mainstream and independent, hold the position that the Fed is unlikely to raise rates for a second time (or ever again), I am not convinced that this is the plan. The question remains — why begin raising rates at all if the goal is not to bulldoze forward and squeeze the U.S. economy?
As I wrote in my article “The Global Economic Reset Has Begun,” the Fed has a habit of doing exactly what it says it is going to do. They may fool the public as far as the exact timing of policy changes, but they never back away from the policy changes themselves. I cannot find a single instance in the history of the central bank in which they announced future measures and then didn’t eventually follow through within the year. This is how I predicted the first rate hike in December of last year, and it is why I believe another rate hike is coming this summer. Fed officials today have been adamant that at least two more rate hikes will be initiated in 2016. If they do not enact these hikes, it will be the first example that I will have witnessed or seen in research in which they “backed off” completely from a policy initiative.
Some analysts argue that this makes no sense. The Fed has spent the better part of the past eight years trying to keep equities markets alive. Why would they now risk crashing the same markets with rate hikes that will cut off corporations and banks from cheap or free overnight loans? Why would they strangle the steady stream of stock buybacks that have been supporting the markets for the past few years? Why risk the fragile rice paper psychology of the markets? Why would they kill the “golden goose”?
As the recent jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows, our fiscal foundations are crumbling and eventually, the fundamentals of our economy will overwhelm central bank orchestrated optimism anyway. Keep in mind, the report of only 38,000 jobs added in May does not paint the full picture of the unemployment problem in America.
The BLS and the mainstream media consistently gloss over the REAL job loss statistics including U-6 measurements which indicate that more than 664,000 working age Americans were removed from unemployment rolls and are no longer “counted” as jobless. This brings the grand total number of workers without jobs or that are underemployed to nearly 95 MILLION! The BLS ignores these people in their primary calculations for the national unemployment rate, which magically dropped again last month to 4.7 percent.
While the “official” jobs numbers are bad enough to cause concerns among mainstream traders and economists, the real numbers are far worse.
Nearly every base economic indicator globally, from raw materials demand, to manufacturing and exports, to corporate earnings, to retail sales and employment are printing negative this year. Despite all of this, markets remains levitated (for now) because the insane assumption within the mostly inane world of stocks is that bad economic news ensures the fed will bow to market forces and support the equities bubble for another quarter. When the entirety of investment markets embraces a singular assumption, when the markets has "no doubts", this is when bad things happen.
I have to laugh when I hear the claim that the Fed “cannot raise rates” in light of the new data. The fed is not "trapped"; rather, it is the U.S. economy that is trapped with the Fed as the instigator. Obviously, the Fed was well aware of the real unemployment problem as well as numerous other negative data when they hiked rates the first time in December. So, let’s just say it plainly — The Fed is NOT dependent on data when making its decisions. The Fed does whatever it wants to do whenever it feels like doing it, and it is very likely that Fed policy decisions are made months in advance, while publicly scheduled policy meetings are designed just for show.
They may claim that they care about the latest dismal jobs report, or other detrimental fiscal developments, but they don’t. They have their own agenda and their own data points, many of which we will never be privy to.
I would also mention the fact that the Fed has raised rates during recessionary economic conditions on several occasions, including during the onset of the Great Depression; a move which Ben Bernanke later publicly admitted was the ultimate cause of the prolonged depression event. You can read my analysis of this in my article “What Fresh Horror Awaits The Economy After Fed Rate Hike?”
With May’s job report so negative even with all the BLS manipulation, it is presumed that the Fed will not hike rates again at their June meeting. I believe that the Fed is certainly capable of raising in June. The timing of the meeting, right before the vote in the UK on the Brexit referendum, is perhaps not a coincidence.
While I understand the argument that the Fed would be “better off” taking its time and raising in July or September, I want readers to entertain another possible scenario for a moment. Imagine if the Fed raised rates in June to everyone’s shock and surprise. Market turmoil is almost a guarantee. A hike in June BEFORE a Brexit event would also be easier to rationalize to the public than a hike after a Brexit event.
Imagine then that, again, to everyone’s shock and surprise, the Brexit vote is successful and the UK leaves the European Union (a supposed black swan that the IMF has warned will cause a global equities crisis).
At this point, who gets blamed for the resulting equities crash? The Fed? The citizens of the UK? Who? If the globalists wanted to trigger the next leg down in the global economy, I can’t think of better circumstances or a better smokescreen.
I also acknowledge the possibility that only one of these events might be necessary to increase market turmoil. But from the perspective of an evil-minded internationalist, wouldn’t it be spectacular to have both? I could be wrong, but it is something to think about…
If you want answers to questions on why the Fed takes the risks it does, or why internationalists engineer crisis events, I suggest you read my article “The Economic End Game Explained.” Suffice to say, the Fed serves the interests of globalists and Fabian socialists, not the interests of America as a nation, and the globalists know that chaos is the best method for influencing populations to accept a “new order.” I would also say that they are pulling the plug simply because this year is most opportune.
I don’t pretend to fully understand every detail of the timelines of globalists and the motivations behind them, but I do know that the evidence shows they have such timelines, and according to recent actions the clock appears to be running out.
Credit to Zero Hedge
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