Human Wrongs Watch 10 July 2018 (UN Environment)* — “When I take my little girl to the store, I always tell her buy what you need, not what you want! I must be the only shopkeeper who tells customers not to buy more!” This in a nutshell sums up Florence Tay’s passion. Her easy, friendly manner welcomes one into her store “Unpackt”, located in the heart of Singapore’s suburban neighbourhood Ang Mo Kio.

Unpackt is the city-state’s first zero-waste grocery and lifestyle concept store. With a 5.6 million population, Singapore’s consumption trajectory is only set to grow exponentially.

But the challenge that remains is how to ensure that consumption is sustainable.

In 2017, Singapore generated about 7.8 million tons of waste. 820 thousand tonnes of this was made of plastic wastes. Only 6 per cent of all plastic wastes generated was ultimately recycled.

Florence notes that public interest is slowly rising when it comes to plastic pollution.

“Currently, we do have a lot of plastic waste in Singapore, but people are getting more conscious. As people get more conscious, they will slowly change their lifestyle. Zero waste alternatives are not readily accessible in Singapore, so we need to start having options for consumers who can do their shopping without polluting the Earth.”

Unpackt has been a year in the making. With a background in private sector, running businesses and engaging with charities, Florence discovered that her passion lies in helping her community. Inspired by a video she saw of a zero-waste grocery store in Europe, Florence teamed up with her business partner Jeff Lam to set up the store.

“I’m a practical person,” she says. “I realized I was throwing away things that I had paid for, but didn’t necessarily consume.” This motivated her to look into how a packaging-free, zero waste grocery concept could work in a city like Singapore.

Rows of large dispensers with grains, pulses and nuts line up one wall, that customers can help themselves to. Against the other wall are stacked large containers of organic detergents and washing up liquids made from eco-enzymes and natural products such as fruit peels, soap nuts, baking soda and vinegar.

In addition to these, Unpackt also sells reusable utensils, straws, cups, freezer bags, beeswax wraps and the like as well as eco-friendly make-up removers and menstrual cups. Florence shares that they also plan to venture into fresh vegetables and fruits in some months. . .

via Unpacking Plastic Pollution with Singapore’s First Zero-Waste Grocery Store — HUMAN WRONGS WATCH

Americans are on an absolutely spectacular debt binge. Does this mean that the economy is getting better, or does this mean that U.S. consumers are totally tapped out and are relying on borrowed money to make it from month to month? On Monday, the Federal Reserve announced that total consumer credit in the United States increased by a whopping 24.6 billion dollars in May, which was far greater than the 12.4 billion dollar gain that economists were anticipating.  Total U.S. consumer credit has now hit a grand total of 3.9 trillion dollars, but it is the “revolving credit” numbers that are getting the most attention.  Revolving credit alone shot up by 9.8 billion dollars in May, and that was one of the largest monthly increases ever recorded.  At this point, total “revolving credit” has reached a brand new all-time record high of 1.39 trillion dollars, and credit card debt accounts for nearly all of that figure.

The optimists will tell us that this is yet another sign that the U.S. economy is booming, and hopefully they are correct.

But does it really make sense for U.S. consumers to go on a historic debt binge when much of the country is already drowning in debt and just barely scraping by from month to month?

In a previous article, I pointed out that U.S. consumers have been spending more money than they make for 28 months in a row.

That certainly isn’t sustainable.

I also pointed out that 22 percent of all Americans cannot pay all of their bills in a typical month. . .

via U.S. Consumers On An Unprecedented Debt Binge As Credit Card Debt Soars To An All-Time Record High — © blogfactory

As American motorists complain of rising gasoline prices, the Trump Administration and the oil and banking interests behind it are smiling on their way to the proverbial bank. If we look at seeming disparate events in Iran, in Venezuela and now in Libya it becomes clear there is a coherent strategy to promote disruption in key oil flows to the immediate advantage of US oil domination.

A decade ago the idea that the United States could displace Saudi Arabia or the Russian Federation as the world’s largest oil producer was considered unthinkable. Today it is clearly a foreign policy priority of the Trump Administration and the major Wall Street banks financing US shale oil production. The strategy is geopolitical and ultimately aims to weaken Russia, Iran and the other independent world oil producing powers like Venezuela.

If we look at several recent events that have dramatically impacted global oil prices a clear pattern emerges not of free market forces but of geopolitical manipulation, above all by Washington. The cases of Iran, of Venezuela and most recently of Libya make the case clear that Washington is determined to push an oil price high enough to again make economical investment in its developed shale oil industry.

Iran not about nuclear but oil

The obvious point about the Trump administration unilateral rejection of the Iran nuclear agreement, an agreement that was to have enabled Iran to be free from Western economic sanctions and open the way for billions of dollars of foreign investments, above all in her oil and gas industry, is the fact that it had nothing to do with Iran’s nuclear plans per se. It has immediately to do with an excuse to re-impose economic sanctions on Iran oil sales and oil and gas development.

Ignoring UN IAEA reports finding Iran compliant with the nuclear agreement, the Trump Administration in May unilaterally announced a de facto end to the agreement to the protests of EU, Russia and China signatories. On November 4, barring an unlikely Iran capitulation to Washington demands, severe new sanctions targeting mainly Iran oil exports will come into force. Washington is linking its actions to Iran’s agreeing to withdraw support for Shi’ite forces in Yemen and Assad in Syria. Since the nuclear agreement, Iran’s state oil company has managed to rebuild oil exports to almost 4 million barrels daily, near the pre-sanction levels. Through secondary sanctions Washington is making clear EU or other companies aiding Iran to continue oil exports will be sanctioned in any business in the US, a hard hurdle. Already the French energy giant Total has said it will end its joint venture in Iran’s huge energy sector.

On July 2, a senior US State Department official made clear Washington aims in Iran:

“Our goal is to increase pressure on the Iranian regime by reducing to zero its revenues from crude oil sales. We are working to minimize disruptions to the global market, but we are confident that there is sufficient global spare oil production capacity.“

Venezuela as well

At the same time the Trump administration renews targeting Iranian oil in world markets, with a delay until November, it is encouraging the complete collapse of the Venezuela oil production as part of Washington’s ongoing financial and political war against the Maduro government.

At the time of the latest Venezuelan election victory of incumbent socialist President Maduro, Washington escalated sanctions that cut off all access of state oil company PDVSA and Venezuela to US banks, as well, cutting off all refinancing of new debt. Prior to the recent OPEC ministers meeting, Venezuela Oil Minister Manuel Quevedo declared,

“These sanctions are very strong, the sanctions are practically immobilizing PDVSA…It’s an attack on the oil market.”

According to the International Energy Agency, Venezuela oil production averaged 1.36 million barrels of oil daily in June, down from 2.9 million bpd five years ago.

Then with convenient timing, the major US oil company ConocoPhillips seized about $636 million in assets belonging to Venezuela’s state oil company PDVSA due to a2007 nationalization of the US oil major’s projects in Venezuela. The seizure has blocked PDVSA from meeting its export obligations and creating tanker bottlenecks at Venezuelan ports. To counter significant loss in Venezuela oil imports, China’s Development Bank has just announced a US$5-billion loan for Venezuela’s oil industry. Among the major importers of both Venezuela and Iran oil is China, a fact well known to the US Treasury and State Department.

And Libya now

While oil traders have reacted to the supply reductions in both Iran and Venezuela sending prices for various grades of crude oil sharply higher above $70 for the first time in three years, the market situation, seen from the standpoint of the US oil industry, especially shale oil, is not yet secure. That is changing, however, given recent developments in Libya.

Ever since Washington’s “humanitarian” bombing of Qaddafi’s Libya, then one of the most economically advanced countries in Africa, the country has been in a de facto civil war and political division. On the one side is a UN-imposed and Washington supported regime in Tripoli, a deceptively-named Government of National Accord, under an appointed Prime Minister and alsohead of the Presidential Council (PC), Fayez Al-Sarraj. Al-Sarraj is backed by the Muslim Brotherhood, the secretive political Salafist organization behind the Washington-backed Arab Spring and the Mohammed Morsi regime in Egypt. The Tripoli group is also backed by the USA, UK and France.

Al-Sarraj’s prime opponent is Field Marshall Khalifa Haftar who has de facto established military control through the anti-Salafist Libyan National Army, with backing of key tribal leaders in the oil-rich eastern Libya and who is backed by the elected Libyan Libyan House of Representatives (HOR).

Haftar, a bitter foe of the Muslim Brotherhood whom he calls terrorists, has de facto established military control in the eastern part of the country in the Oil Crescent. When his forces took control of key sections of eastern Libya in recent days, including the vital oil ports at Hariga and Zueitina, Haftar went in direct opposition to the Tripoli US-backed regime and announced that control of the eastern oil ports would go to the separate Benghazi-based National Oil Company, affiliated with the eastern government, which is not recognized by the UN. At that point, with Washington backing, the Tripoli Western NOC declared force majeure over the eastern ports and brought shipments of up to 850,000 barrels/day of Libyan oil off the world market on July 2. . .

Haftar’s army is known to be very close to Egyptian President al-Sissi, also a bitter foe of the Muslim Brotherhood. Haftar also has good relations with Putin’s Russia. Preventing Haftar’s forces in the oil-rich east from creating a parallel oil economy independent of the US-backed Tripoli regime is adding to the dramatic change in global oil markets and is almost certain to push world market prices well above $80 a barrel, to levels not seen since 2014.

Conveniently that would be a profitability level that would give a huge boost to US shale oil output.

US Shale: a New Oil Geopolitics?

Scott Sheffield the chairman of the Texas-based Pioneer Resources, one of the largest US shale oil producers, in a recent interview in Vienna during the recent OPEC meeting, declared that before the end of this year, that the United States will pass Russia to become the world’s largest oil producer. He stated that US production will exceed 11 million barrels daily in 3-4 months and could “very quickly” reach 13 million bpd, and 15 million bpd within seven or eight years, based on production of shale oil from places like the Permian Basin in Texas. He stated that the most favorable price for shale right now is in a range of $60 to $80 a barrel. Could it be that by targeting the oil supplies of Iran, of Venezuela and now of Libya the influential energy companies behind the Trump foreign policy, are aiming to insure that US shale oil floods the world market in coming months to displace not only that oil but also, increasingly, Russian oil?

via Washington’s Latest Myths, Lies and Oil Wars — Astute News

In June of 2015, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, and Barclays, among other Libor-rigging giants, pleaded guilty to felony charges related to the [Libor] conspiracy and greed to pay more than $2.5 billion in criminal fines to U.S. regulators.

(AP Photo / Edouard H.R. Gluck)

Representing only a single instance of a commonplace practice played out the world over, this corporate criminality instigated the outage of Craig Brandt, an attorney from Oakland, California. He set out to enact an audacious plan. With other individuals, Mr. Brandt endeavored to have the Oakland City Council “take radical action to combat plutocracy, inequality and financial dislocation”. Mr. Brandt wanted to create a city-owned “public bank”.

Recent posts on this blog have explored economic inequality and its ramifications. The post this week continues this series, beginning to focus on potential solutions to what some see as a looming economic catastrophe. As Part 3 our Economic Inequality series, consider this article by Jimmy Tobias: “What if People Owned the Banks Instead of Wall Street?”

Across the country, community activists, mayors, city council members, and more are waking up to the power and the promise of public banks. Such banks are established and controlled by cities or states, rather than private interests. They collect deposits from government entities—from school districts, from city tax receipts, from state infrastructure funds—and use that money to issue loans and support public priorities. They are led by independent professionals but accountable to elected officials. Public banks are a way, supporters say, to build local wealth and resist the market’s predatory predilections. They are a way to end municipal reliance on Wall Street institutions, with their high fees, their scandal-ridden track records, and their vile investments in private prisons and pipelines. They are a way, at long last, to manage money in the public interest. ~from the Tobias article . . .

via What if We Owned the Banks? — Seeking Good

via We’ve Found $16.1 Million in Political and Taxpayer Spending at Trump Properties

By Martin SIEFF | Strategic Culture Foundation | 27.06.2018

It is no coincidence that the Sword, Sorcery and Dragons Fantasy Games of Thrones – filmed in large part on location in my native Northern Ireland – has entranced the American viewing public over the past decade: For the early 21st century has seen US policymakers and opinion-shapers plunging ever deeper into one fantasy after another. But even Game of Thrones pales in incredibility and absurdity next to the fantasy still believed by most Americans — That Barack Obama was a wise and responsible, peace-loving statesman.

In truth, Obama, casually and with evident self-satisfaction, unleashed series of catastrophic foreign national security policies that sent the world careening to the brink of nuclear war and inflicted needless suffering on scores of millions of people. No Game of Thrones villain ever did anything like that damage.

I have no doubt that the ludicrous award of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize to Obama will go down in history as the most ridiculous such award in the entire history of the institution.

What in reality was Obama’s record as President of the United States?

He authorized a totally unnecessary and strategically meaningless $1 trillion nuclear build up over the coming generation that will play a major role in bankrupting the United States. It was also a move guaranteed to set off a ruinous global thermonuclear arms race with Russia, China and other powers who understandably fear being made defenseless before a succession of ever more unilateral and unpredictable US leaders.

Obama claimed to be deeply concerned about nuclear nonproliferation and hosted a Nuclear Safety Summit in Washington whose only real achievement was to feed his already enormous and delusional appreciation of his own self-worth.

However, as analyst Rebecca Heinrichs of the conservative Hudson Institute in Washington concluded, “If one actually looks at the risks of nuclear war as well as the likelihood of proliferation at the start of the President’s term compared to now, the Obama’s nonproliferation record earns a failing grade.”

In 2011, Obama a fecklessly allowed his warmongering, hyper-aggressive secretary of state Hillary Clinton to arrange with Britain and France the use of NATO air power to destroy the state of Libya by giving tactical support and protection to rebels against veteran leader Muammar Gaddafi.

Gaddafi’s previous decade of consistent cooperation with the US and its allies in the struggle against extreme Islamist terror and his monitored compliance with demands to scrap Libya’s nascent nuclear [program] were all for naught. Obama and Clinton’s reckless and even clownish policies ensured the complete disintegration of Libya, creating an infernal anarchy in which Islamist terror groups could thrive and metastasize throughout sub-Saharan Africa.

Far from encouraging nations to scrap their nuclear programs as Gaddafi in fact had done, Obama’s childish approval of the destruction of Libya sent precisely the opposite message to nations around the world: “Scrap your nuclear deterrents and there will be nothing to stop the United States from destroying you whenever its leaders feel like it.”

It was the same story in Syria where Obama and Clinton eagerly approved the flow of half a billion dollars a year to such groups including, incredibly the Nusrah Front, the Syrian franchise of al-Qaeda, heirs to the conspirators who [are said to have] killed nearly 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001. . .

via The Myth of Barack Obama as the Great and Noble Nobel Global Statesman

By Aaron Kesel | Activist Post

An astounding 20 groups of Amazon shareholders sent its CEO, Jeff Bezos, a letter urging him to stop selling the company’s face recognition software to law enforcement, CNN reported.

The software, called Rekognition, came under greater scrutiny last month when the ACLU published revealing internal documents related to its use by police. Numerous civil rights organizations co-signed a letter demanding Amazon stop assisting government surveillance, and several members of Congress have expressed concerns about the partnerships.

“We are concerned the technology would be used to unfairly and disproportionately target and surveil people of color, immigrants, and civil society organizations,” the shareholders, which reportedly include Social Equity Group and Northwest Coalition for Responsible Investment, wrote. “We are concerned sales may be expanded to foreign governments, including authoritarian regimes.”

Amazon’s Rekognition software can analyze images from all types of sources—images or videos from any police surveillance tool—including CCTV, body cameras, and drones all matched against databases.

This isn’t the first time that Amazon was caught working with law enforcement. Amazon’s fifth transparency report revealed earlier this year that the company provided more customer data to U.S. law enforcement in the first half of last year than in its history with a shocking 1,936 different requests between January and June 2017, ZDNet reported.

Of those 1,936 requests, Amazon complied and replied to 1,200 subpoena requests, 189 search warrants and 76 other court orders – for a whopping 1,465 requests they responded to. That’s 42 percent of all subpoenas, 44 percent of search warrants and 52 percent of other court orders.

That’s an incredible rise from the year prior where Amazon received:

• 1,618 subpoenas, which the company fully complied with 679 cases.
• 229 search warrants, which the company fully complied with 100 cases.
• 89 other court orders, which the company fully complied with 46 cases.

Amazon didn’t state why there was a spike in U.S. government requests during the first half of the year, but for a company that openly has a partnership with the CIA for $600 million for cloud servers, this information should be troubling. The oddest part of this data is the fact that Amazon stated they received no content removal orders, which begs the question what merit were the cases based on if not illegal content?

via Amazon Shareholders Call On Jeff Bezos To Stop Selling Facial “Rekognition” Software To Police

Alison Abbott considers a persuasive case for the link between body and mind.

Collage of coloured sagittal MRI scans of the human brain.
Magnetic resonance imaging scans of the human brain.Credit: Simon Fraser/SPL/Getty

The Inflamed Mind: A Radical New Approach to Depression Edward Bullmore Short (2018)

Depression affects one in four people at some time in their lives. It is often difficult to treat, in part because its causes are still debated. Psychiatrist Edward Bullmore is an ardent proponent of a radical theory now gaining traction: that inflammation in the brain may underlie some instances. His succinct, broad-brush study, The Inflamed Mind, looks at the mounting evidence.

The book outlines a persuasive case for the link between brain inflammation and depression. Bullmore pleads with the medical profession to open its collective mind, and the pharmaceutical industry to open its research budget, to the idea. He provides a current perspective on how the science of psychiatry is slowly emerging from a decades-long torpor. He sees the start of a shift in the Cartesian view that disorders of the body ‘belong’ to physicians, whereas those of the more ‘immaterial’ mind ‘belong’ to psychiatrists. Accepting that some cases of depression result from infections and other inflammation-causing disorders of the body could lead to much-needed new treatments, he argues. . .

via Depression: the Radical Theory Linking it to Inflammation — Madison Area Lyme Support Group