the last typhoon hit the extreme north of the Philippines but the low pressure sucked in the monsoon rains so western Luzon had floods. This includes Manila, which is on the west coast of Luzon.
The problem is that the roads in Manila often flood with heavy rain, due to poor drainage and the drainage canals being blocked by debris/trash that people just throw away into the streets or canals.
Joy returned on Tuesday from Thailand but she said that they did not run into flooded streets so got home from Manila without problems.
And now, another low pressure area is threatening to hit this weekend but like the last typhoon, it is close enough to suck in monsoon rains from the west, so they are closing schools in Manila (Not in our area however),,,,,,,
TROPICAL CYCLONE BULLETIN NR. 7 Severe Tropical Storm #OpongPH (BUALOI) Issued at 5:00 AM, 25 September 2025 Valid for broadcast until the next bulletin at 8:00 AM today.
OPONG CONTINUES TO INTENSIFY WHILE MOVING WEST NORTHWESTWARD OVER THE PHILIPPINE SEA. pic.twitter.com/2xok5yaIdM
this video is in Tagalog but does show maps of what is going on
...
the heavy rains leading to floods is common in the Philippines, which is why there are huge anti corruption protests in Manila going on.
Apparently, government had authorized billions of pesos for flood control projects, but somehow a lot of that money was misspent or disappeared.
note: Exchage rate is about 55 pesos for one US dollar, so one billion pesos is the equivalent of about 17 million USD.
ABS-CBN has timeline of the flood control scandal problem.
The flood control corruption scandal, which first came to light during President Ferdinand Marcos Jnr’s 2025 State of the Nation Address, centers on the alleged loss of P118 billion in government funds, which went to a web of favored contractors, lawmakers and other officials involved in the construction of government flood projects in the last 3 years.
Despite the reported completion of some 5,500 flood control projects since 2022, numerous media reports have revealed many substandard and “ghost” flood control projects that were exposed following massive floods in parts of the country this year
Go to link for timeline.
some projects not even started, some done but with shoddy materials and oodles of money possibly diverted to unknown parties.
The controversy centers on billions of pesos allocated for flood management initiatives, reports of "ghost" projects,[a] substandard construction, and the alleged cornering of contracts by a small group of favored contractors. In response, a series of protests against alleged corruption was conducted in commemoration of the 1972 declaration of martial law.[b]
as the wikipedia article notes: This is a developing story.
The background? Corruption.
all the local bishops (not just the Catholic ones) have condemned those involved in the fraud.
“This scam is a clear betrayal of the public trust because it keeps billions of pesos from going to the most vulnerable populations, such as farmers and the urban poor,” the bishops said.
well duh.
until the bishops and other clergy start naming names and excommunicating those who stole the money, most of us will just shrug.
the problem is that these people are "walang hiya": Without shame.
This is the way some people do business, so probably a lot of them don't even recognize what they are doing is wrong.
But excuse me for not being impressed until they start throwing out the criminals. One doubts they will ever pay back what they diverted, or go to jail for fraud.
As our ten year fight for justice against the ex mayor behind the hit that murdered our nephenw in the crossfire shows, justice is slow and incomplete, and when you die, never mind: You will be buried with a full requium mass complete with Knights of Columbus body guard
Sigh
however, as to typhoons and flooding: we are safe so far: here it is overcast with heavy rains on and off, but no flooding.
One wag here in the Philippines once described how things work in the Philippines: They take bribes under the table, over the table and with the table.
According to the 2007 study, the Office of the Ombudsman had, in 1999, pegged losses arising from corruption at P100 million daily, (note: equivalent to 9.7 million dollars US) whereas the World Bank estimates the losses at one-fifth of the national government budget.
well third world corruption is alas common. But what is astonishing is that a lot of money is being diverted in the USA: going to questionable foreign aid, but also going through NGOs in several layers, all of which take part of the money, and maybe what is worse: Using tax money to subvert the political process. I mean, having the ladies of BLM buy two expensive mansions in Los Angeles is one thing: Paying them to riot and destabilize the US during an election year is much more dangerous.
That is what it sounds like when DOGE opens the books.
no wonder the usual suspects whose bank accounts somehow soared while working for the government are upset.
So should we believe the media, especially when there are reports that USAID money subsidized them?
Do you listen to the hysteria, or to Joe Rogan?
The information is out there, but before X who learned about this? Yes it was there, but didn't get a lot of coverage.
A new investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and Devex can reveal major failings in the largest ever project funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID).
The $9.5 bn initiative, led by US contractor Chemonics International, launched in 2016 with the aim of transforming the way life-saving medicines and other health supplies were bought and delivered to millions of people in poorer countries. But interviews with insiders, as well as exclusive data analysis, can reveal that the project’s inefficiencies have alarmed both senior project staff and high-ranking US government officials. In some cases it has taken almost two years to deliver key supplies.
The Global Fund’s OIG also alleged in 2021 that it had uncovered a multimillion-dollar fraud committed by a Chemonics subcontractor in Nigeria. A Global Fund report found that “Chemonics’ controls were poorly implemented by negligent staff who missed key red flags” and that an unnamed senior project director was “living substantially beyond their Chemonics salary”. USAID’s own watchdog is now investigating....
then you have the WHO monopoly:
this would be seen as good, except for the fact that these same folks got a lot of stuff wrong with Covid, and looted a lot of money while they were doing it. And now they plan a health treaty where this would give them power over every country.
The World Health Organization charges manufacturing companies a lot of money to have their products “prequalified.”
WHO prequalification activities were long funded by international donors through short-term grants.
In January 2017 therefore introduced a new fee model for medicines — finished pharmaceutical products (FPPs) and active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) — and vaccines, and later for in vitro diagnostics (IVDs), in August 2018.
this of course needs to be done, to check for fraud, inferior medical products, overpricing etc. The problem? Who watches the watchers?
In 2023, the WHO’s “Fee for Services Fund” made a profit of $14.8 million on the $27.8 million in fees that they collected.
Ortel: The simple answer is that billions of dollars in “aid” supposedly were raised to help the desperately poor people of Haiti, yet Bill Clinton and the Clinton Foundation refuse to account, in granular and verified fashion, for any of this aid. If Haiti (before the latest storm) had obviously been better off, perhaps this controversy would not now be swirling with hurricane force winds. But accounts from multiple parties suggest that Haiti has little to show in the parts of the nation that were devastated in January 2010.
then for the conspiracy minded there is the suicide of a whistle blower on how the Haiti funds were used:
Dr. Dr. Dean Lorich, an orthopedic surgeon who volunteered in Haiti and exposed Clinton Foundation corruption and malpractice on the island, has been found dead in New York. He was 54....
hmm... a knife in his chest. That is a hard way to commit suicide, because you have to thrust it in hard which is quite painful, and if you miss the heart, you end up living. It's easier to cut your femoral or carotid artery, or just overdose on medicine. But never mind...
Haiti of course is so corrupt that it has it's own Wikipedia page on that subject.
I wrote in an earlier blogpost about PEPFAR money via USAID being subverted from HIV treatment into population control and the gender agenda.
I did a report in Nov 2023 on my medical blog on how the Biden administration subverted PEPFAR to push population control etc.
By diverting the funding to birth control and pushing sexual policies to limit population, the danger is that people will no longer trust these caregivers:
(Africans) might see them as part of the evil west trying to stop Africans from having babies because of racism.
and of course, such ideas won't just be pushed by locals who remember colonialist racism, but will be believed by religious leaders (Bishops and Muslim leaders).
And of course, China will quietly push this idea. Already the Biden administration and the EU is pushing their sexual agenda (gay rights, encourage teenage sex by sex education), and pushing countries to change their local laws.
finally, I understand why the Pope and the Catholic bishops are defending helping economic migrants to come to the USA, but the CIA/NWO conspiracy theories are thick here too.
but you know, few are true refugees (except maybe the Haitians): They had homes and often had jobs, but were enticed to go with promises of jobs etc. I understand that they might want to work overseas to get a better life, but this could be done legally of course (if the Philippines manages to help the ten percent of the population to work overseas , the US could manage this too. )
But instead the Bishops are helping the dangerous criminal elements to do this, and in a way that endangers the migrants. By doing so they are not just ignoring the criminal gangs and drugs coming in with these non emergency migrations, but ignores that these people will take the jobs of working class Yanks and/or live off of the money taken from their paychecks.
Anthony Esolen satirizes their snobbish bossing of the average working class Yank here.
And using US Taxpayer money to do so, meaning that this entangles the Catholic church with secular authorities on many levels.
it is only time until the rumors that the NWO/CIA/bad guys were behind the coup to put Pope Francis in place move from the crazies to the front page.
Cardinal Vigano, call your office. Windswept house is coming true....
When Musk took over Twitter, he got some honest leftie journalists to check what was going on, and it was found a lot of the censorship about covid was just that: not the truth but censorship.
This upset me as a doc, since honesty is needed to figure out what works to help our patients. And to make things worse modern docs are pressured to follow guidelines to get paid (in the olden days, we had discretion on how to treat).
Well, anyway: Fast forward to DOGE.
Hmm...
anyway, the story that money was being used to get Trumpieboy into jail was well known by anyone with a brain, but the extent of corruption where an independent (sic) US government agency was pushing one political party was a bit of an eye opener.
Yes, I know: A long rant. But I try to limit my writing to things I actually know about from personal observation.
You mean that the US was promoting revolutions in other countries (and yes, by the way, trying to do the same thing in the USA? )
Well, we here in the Philippines know this: The US via the Omidyar network funded Rappler to take down Duterte, and our lovely ex-president Gloria was got out of jail via human rights organizations led by George Clooney's wife and a trial where there was a lack of evidence against her. Just don't ask how her bank account improved, and just ignore the ZTE scandal where the backstory is that this was how China tried to legally get permission to steal the petroleum under the West Philippine sea... and of course just ignore Hello Garci and the Manguindanao scandals.
this conservative Catholic commentator lists how this has corrupted the Catholic church on many levels.
At ten minutes he mentions the Anti Catholic push in Ireland: I can confirm this: My friend who lives there told me thirty years ago the plan was to get rid of the church which they saw as being in the way of their modern agenda.
Well,
He goes into more aspects of how the bureaucracy funded the Catholic social outreach. Well, the Bishop's organization has long been infiltrated with extreme lefties: Back in the 1970s the Bishops proposed unilateral nuclear disarmament. WTF? And the release of a pro gay document got lots of publicity without anyone mentioning that it was never approved by the bishops, but only by their office workers.
Oh well: No one in the US respects the bishops, with a few exceptions. I mean, it took 30 years to figure out McCarrick was corrupt, and they replaced him with Wuerl, who was in charge of Pittsburgh when everyone knew about the gay infiltration of the seminaries in several western PA diocese: indeed, anyone with gay friends knew about how a lot of priests openly cruised the gay bar scene in Pittsburgh.
I see nothing... nothing.
He is now replaced, but still influences the church. Sigh.
as for USAID: the infiltration means that the money instead of helping people is pushing an agenda, including abortion, gay rights, mass migration, and looking the other way at the drug smugglers.
the good things done are still being done, but often they are infiltrated by the agenda:
fast forward to 20 minutes to how PREPFAR is being subverted to push gay rights and birth control instead of just treating those with HIV who can't afford the expensive medicine.
Canceling USAID might stop this program that is life saving for many, and there is a lot of worry in African countries that it will cancel the program causing HIV patients not to get treatment.
here is the program in Zimbabwe. notice the part about non judgemental approach? Don't use shame to limit behavior. And often this is combined with sex education that normalizes premarital sex in high school girls: not premarriage sex, but promiscuity.
4. Made significant gains toward tackling societal challenges that impede progress in achieving
the global 10-10-102
targets, including reducing the number of countries with punitive laws
that target key populations; reducing stigma and discrimination that undermine effective
responses; and fighting gender-based inequalities and gender-based violence that put
adolescent girls and young women at increased risk for HIV.
italics mine.
translation: don't use shame and negative feed back to those whose behavior threatens the family oriented culture of their country. In other words, impose the gay rights and gender agenda (e.g. in sex education in schools, or promoting birth control in high schools).
Notice they mix the good (decrease gender based inequalities) with this. But of course the details are left out.
5. Developed benchmarks supporting an HIV response that ensures enabling policies are
adopted and implemented, and that countries and communities can lead with the capacity to
deliver prevention and treatment services through domestic systems.
which policies? Hence the push for gay rights and promoting anti family policies, (billboards, social media. sex education in schools) that push the idea that children are a burden and marriage is bad.
when you read about the Gates programs, which push life saving vaccines and treatments, just remember that Melinda Gates decided to make birth control a priority for their money.
And this taints the life saving part of the Gates Foundation: Mixing evil with good allows it to continue since good people don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water. But it also leads to locals distrusting the program: hence the distrust of vaccines, which are being seen as a way for evil westerners to stop you from having children, or as a way to kill your children.
So Trumpieboy has a problem: the good things done by USAID is being used to cover using USAID to push political agenda of the international elites (and their lackies who now run the Democratic party in the USA and who have infiltrated a lot of the churches, including the Catholic church)
quick note: I worked with a lot of this when I worked in Africa, including pushing the spacing of children so that the moms could continue breast feeding for two years. Child spacing is consistent with African traditions. Teaching teenage girls with sex education in high school to use birth control and that promiscuity is okay goes against African tradition.
But I should also note that I am retired and not involved with this here in the Philippines.
Cultural note: here, gays and trans are accepted as just part of the extended family. And like second wives, they are tolerated as long as they keep their indiscretions quiet. This by the way is not true of the aggressive gay community (where a lot of foreigners cruise) in Makati. You see, the culture there is the US pushed modern gay agenda: is to flaunt it, ignore the health effects of gross promiscuity, push it as normal and insist no one tell them that certain actions are sins. (and note this agenda is not just about gays but pushing promiscuous sex as normal, never mind that many poor girls are pushed into it out of need to feed their families).
The Catholic church and most people here in the Philippines tended to look the other way at sexual sin, since the sins of corruption are a lot worse than a quiet gay having a friend or a man with a second wife who quietly pays for the upkeep of his children or a girl working as a hooker in a bar for tourists who does it to support her family.., or even when our city has a "Miss Gay Gapan" contest every year.
But things are getting worse: There is now an epidemic of children being sexually abused, especially the epidemic of on line sexual abuse by foreigners, is getting publicity too.
But what is changing this easy going approach is not just a quiet revulsion against the US pushing their gender agenda, but the huge increase in people joining Protestant churches.
----------------
update: EdwardPentin post on Professor Fonana's essay on globalism and the present day Catholic church,
to quote a Bloomberg headline, “The World Bank Somehow Lost Track of at Least $24 Billion.”
In fact, that may understate the reality: the World Bank’s “accounting gap” could be as big as $41 billion. The missing funds in question were for “climate finance” projects, “financed by taxpayer dollars from its member countries, the biggest being the US.”
According to the Oxfam report that was the source for the Bloomberg story, “There is no clear public record showing where this money went or how it was used, which makes any assessment of its impacts impossible.” It is possible that much, maybe even most, of the missing money went to the intended people and purposes. But only the hopelessly naïve would dismiss the probability of rampant waste, malfeasance, graft, and outright theft as explanations for that “gap.” Spending of such magnitude and velocity with sloppy oversight is an invitation to thieves.
well, duh. Everyone knows that aid money tends to get stolen. So does profit from oil and mining projects in Africa. Al J expose here. So what else is new?
when my granddaughter tried to take a plane from Manila to Thailand for a job teaching, the government stopped her, until paper work and investigation of her and her job offer could be investigated.
They explained that Thailand was a center for human trafficking.
Filipinos, especially attractive young women, are hired to be maids or workers and end up as prostitutes. There is also a lot of drug smuggling, where poor folk are enticed to become mules to deliver drugs to their destinations.
Well, everything cleared, and she flew out last week with her mother to check on the job and housing, and everything was fine.
The background of this is organized crime, and the POGOs, gambling casinos linked to organized crime that were opened 20 years ago despite the warnings by the Catholic bishops, President Arroyo allowed the POGOS as a way to get jobs for locals and money for the government.
According to the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corporation (PAGCOR), POGOs began operating in 2003 but it was only in 2016, after Duterte came to power, that the government began regulating online gaming hubs.
which brings us to this story I found today on twitter/X:
His company, Yatai International Holdings Group (abbreviated Yatai IHG), is registered in Hong Kong and headquartered in Thailand.[2] He became a fugitive in 2012, after fleeing Chinese authorities.[7] In 2014, a Shandong court convicted him of running an illegal lottery business in the Philippines that targeted Chinese online users, and had netted US$298 million in profits.[8]
so convicted in China 2014, but that didn't slow him down.
In 2015, he began building a business in Cambodia, involved in the illicit business of helping Chinese gamblers front-load gambling bets made in Cambodian casinos.[2]
From there, he expanded his business interests to the Philippines and acquired ownership of one of Manila's largest spa and entertainment centers.[2]
the US Institute of Peace (a US Govt think tank) in 2020 posted this report on what was going on in Myanmar.
To circumvent Chinese laws against gambling, ethnic Chinese with citizenship in other countries spearhead these projects.
Of concern to Beijing, they have co-opted Chinese government institutions and agencies to present their activities as central to China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
notice that several of these articles mention the Philippines? that is an ongoing scandal here which I have not been following.
But recently, instead of watching soap operas, everyone here is following the Senate hearings on Alice Guo, a fake citizen who became mayor of a small town in Pampanga. that has been linked to casinos and crime (and is near a military base but no spying found...yet).
n what was supposed to be the final hearing on Philippine offshore gaming operators (POGO), Guo deviated from her usual responses to assert her innocence—and to hint at a bigger boss.
“Your honor, hindi ako mastermind. Masasabi ko po is isa akong victim (Your honor, I am not a mastermind. I can say that I am a victim) ,” Guo said.
For most of her appearances in the Senate since being detained by Indonesian authorities in September, Guo has typically given one of three responses: she either claims ignorance, invokes her right against self-incrimination or cites a death threat.
Sen. JV Ejercito then asked Guo if she was a pawn of an international criminal syndicate.
Guo responded that she was not exactly used, but acknowledged that she has a reputation for being helpful.
This article from the Straits Time Singapore notes connections with organized crime there.
Guo had incorporated the company behind the scam compound, Baofu Land Development, in 2019 with two convicts in Singapore’s $3 billion money laundering case, Chinese nationals Zhang Ruijin and Lin Baoying.
alas, I am not an expert on the Chinese Triad but WIKIPEDIA page discusses their long history
and the liberal Brookings Institute has a long analysis of the relationship between organized crime and the Chinese government
Indeed, these criminal networks provide a variety of services to the Chinese government, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and Chinese legal enterprises. They help build networks of corruption and influence among foreign politicians and businesses.
In interviews with Vanda Felbab-Brown, current and former law enforcement officials from the United States, Asia, Australia, and Africa stated that China-linked criminal groups monitor the Chinese diaspora and act as extralegal enforcers on behalf of Chinese authorities against those who speak and act against the Chinese government and CCP. Thus, Chinese government officials often unofficially extend the umbrella of party protection and government authority to these actors.
Hey Donald, instead of worrying about Haitians eating Garfield you need to check out some of the Chinese ethnics entering the USA illegally.
the Laptop from hell. Supposed to be only about his drug and sex addiction, but the censorship of the story is more than being about a man's psychological problems and how the press hid the story to help Biden win the election: It's about money. Bribes from the Ukraine and China... Who wudda thot?
The left used to care about politicians who got rich, often at the expense of public welfare, by being bribed by capitalists and big business or even foreign governments paying them as "lobbyists", but when you hear about people getting rich from bribes to spy on the US from foreign countries, you wonder what is going on.
Craig Singleton, senior China fellow at the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank, said the case illustrated how China tries to use covert actors to shape political decisions at all levels of government in the United States.
“Just as TikTok has raised concerns about data collection and influence operations, this situation underscores the lengths to which China is willing to go to infiltrate and manipulate American institutions from within,” Singleton said.
“The charges against Linda Sun illustrate a broader strategy by China to infiltrate and exert influence at all levels of U.S. governance, from local to federal, by exploiting trust and access within political circles,” he said.
A lot of this is about trying to stop Taiwan from doing it's own propaganda to keep the US informed about what is going on there.
But it's not just Taiwan: Remember all the push back and censorship of the lab origin of the Wuhan virus?
Sigh
and this doesn't even point to the money from the Ukraine or Israel or Iran.
No wonder the powers that be are trying to censor twitter. And when I check on old blog posts, I notice a lot of the youtube videos have been taken down. WTF?
in the meanwhile, China is increasingly trying to steal resources in the West Philippine sea by "colliding" with Philippine coast guard ships, (i.e. deliberately ramming these ships) even within the economic zone of the Philippine islands.
and of course China hacked my Federal OPM file along with a 22 million others who served in the federal government, so I am probably on a list somewhere in China.
Aren't these the machines that are being questioned by Trumpie boy and his minions?
It says a lot about the present day USA that the lowly Philippines can question such things, but Trumpieboy and his minions are being taken to court for daring to question the election in the USA might have been stolen.
Ironically the machines were bought because (hello Garci) there was a suspicion about illegal ballots in the back room were changing election results.
n Mexico, the illegals were, until the last few years, almost all Mexicans and others from Latin American nations. But now over a third of the illegals coming across the Mexican border are from much farther away and pay large fees to international criminal syndicates to travel long distances to reach Mexico and then across the border into the United States. Even before this Mexico had found itself unable to control the drug cartels that now are the real power on the Mexican side of the U.S. border. Anyone who wants to move illegal migrants across that border must pay the cartels for safe passage. The cartels can also arrange for easy entry into Mexico via airports or ship by bribing border and customs officials. The Mexican cartels made over $100 million a year from the fees the illegal migrants (via the groups moving them) pay to get across the border, and that does not include the lucrative fees for helping get international illegals into Mexico. The cartels make far more moving drugs but the people smuggling fees are another income source and confirm which cartel controls which segment of the border.
I have sympathy for those seeking a better life, but the dirty little secret is that there is a larger agenda behind this: Cheap labor for rich companies and cheap nannies/maids for Karens...
------------------- The conspiracy pages point out that the climate change agenda is directed from above (and the anti climate change propaganda is also directed from above).
As a driving force placing pressure on public and private sectors to comply, the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) plays a key role in funneling trillions from the global economy while influencing government policies and propping up the climate hoax narrative. While IRENA is pivotal in the “no-regrets” initiative to transform the global economy, the international organization enjoys immunities and privileges which allow them to operate without transparency or accountability.
True or not true?
here is IRENA film on their policies.
Sounds lovely... but what does it mean at the grassroots level?
these NGOs pushing "Global warming" are funded by someone, and when I read that they are pushing Biden to give money to poor countries that suffer from global warming, all I wonder is: how much of this money will end up being stolen by rich politicians/businessmen and put into their Swiss/Malaysian etc. bank accounts?
and if you really want to delve into the cloudcuckooland behind conspiracy theories, just do a google about how Covid was supposedly used by the powers that run the world to push the Great Reset.
------------------------------------
The UN was told to bugger off when one of their organizations pressured the Philippines to push gay rights.
Gays are accepted here, and the Philippines is touted on gay sites as a place that is gay friendly to visit. Sex tourism is big here, for both lovely ladies and good looking guys.
Two problems with sex tourism: it's connections with drugs, and the exploitation of street kids.
but priorities you know: gay rights is the priority, not putting in place policies that would help people find jobs.
what would really help the ordinary folk here in the Philippines would be cheap energy: we need cheap diesel and fertilizer (we use organic, but non organic fertilizer is from fossil fuel) to grow rice, and if the price of rice goes up, poor people will not be able to afford food.
Usually the Philippines has to import rice (one of Marcos' promisese was to help the agriculture sector, which is changing as small farms are mechanizing and the kids of small farmers don't want to stay on the farm to live in poverty).
Today's headline is that the price of LPG is up. Why is this important? Because the poor use LPG for cooking. There is an alternative: Wood. But this is more polluting: I have been providing the maid with money to use LPG for years because her son had recurrant asthma/bronchitis from using wood to cook.
And of course, using wood for cooking in rural areas is a major cause of deforestation.
The Philippines has a love/hate relationship with the USA: they don't want to get in the middle of a war with China, but they also know that if Taiwan falls, Luzon is next. And the Chinese are hated here (which complicates things since Chinoy families run the economy and China is a major investor here).
But the terraine and logistical problems of invading Taiwan gets even more complicated if the country decides to defend themselves like the Ukraine.
I remember when the western powers estimated Russia would win in two weeks, and only Elon Musk stepped in quickly to help with Starlink communications during those days.
and one lesson being learned from the Ukraine: That drones (including cheap civilian drones) are part of the picture.
I know nothing about crypto currancies except that some countries have banned them, and apparantly a lot of countries worry about fraud and criminals and the ability of ordinary citizens to do money stuff where the gov't can spy on them. So a lot of countries are planning to stop private crypto currancies and have their central banks issue their own
The Indian government is preparing to ban private cryptocurrencies and allow the country’s central bank to launch an official digital currency.
The proposed legislation follows a crackdown on cryptocurrencies in China, where financial regulators and the central bank have made all digital currency transactions illegal.
so could the yanks be far behind? Biden is looking into doing the same thing.(March 2022) presumably by executive order, since one doubts Congress would survive if people recognized the privacy implications of a digital curracny where your money can be tracked (and maybe in the future be linked to the ability to limit your money use if your social credit number is low).
All of this is about billions of illicit money stuff that goes on all the time despite laws: if caught, the banks shrug and pay the fine (which is a pittance compared to their profit for looking the other way) but of course few bankers go to jail.
CoreyDigs has a long article with links about the background to what is going on and tries to find links and connect the dots.
In the meanwhile, China and Russia are trying to partner with other countries to make an alternative to the US dollar for international trade.
AlJ report on the BRICS summit.
so what does this mean for you?
I have no idea: as Bones would say: I'm a doctor, not an international financier.
But one does wonder if this will survive, given reports of China staying in covid shutdown, floods in China, over investment in ghost cities, and bank runs.
But it might mean China will be able to put more pressure on the Philippine so they can steal our asseets (petroleum, fish) and the ability to block the sea lanes in the West Philippine sea.
BongBong is being inaugurated today and big crowds of supporters and anti BBM demonstrators will be in Manila...(and we have a rice delivery in the Manila suburbs so security checks might delay our drivers delivering to the suburban Manila markets).
The US is doing their best to undermine him of course: he still has all that lovely money stolen from Yamashita's gold the Philippine people by his father. But a lot of folks just shrug, and like my husband, say: They're all crooks. And before you cast stones at the Philippines, maybe ask how all those folks in the US Congress became millionaires on their small gov't salary...
Rappler can still go to the Court of Appeals (CA), which earlier upheld the original 2018 SEC revocation order, but remanded the case to the SEC to reevaluate the order as the involved foreign investor, Omidyar Network Fund, had donated on Feb. 28, 2018, the Philippine depositary receipts (PDRs) to Rappler to “cure” the defect found by the SEC.
This will be labled a war on the press (duh: big deal. Set up this English language press site on a different server)...this will not stop the news from getting out on private vlogs, but a lot of these are run by pro china bots, but never mind.
more information on the Omidyar network fromThe Grey Zone: Rappler was not established just to try to destroy Duterte, but an experiment on how to track and manipulate people.
Using a patented user engagement model and a community mapping data analytics tool, Rappler tracks how stories and emotions move through its community. It starts with a mood meter on every story, an effort to capture non-rational reactions. Developed with psychologists and sociologists, the mood meter is based on research that shows up to 80% of how people make decisions in their lives is not about what they think but how they feel.
Every vote on the mood meter is aggregated by the mood navigator in the middle of the home page, a novel way of navigating a news site.
Big sister is watching you.
one problem: Rappler is in English, so doen't monitor the grass roots, only the netcitizens. And it was not the affluent English fluent netcitizens who elected BBM: It was the working class and poor, who remember how they had jobs when his father ran the Philippines.
But I didn't know Rappler was tracking me when I read articles on their website.
Hmm:
But what if the major net outlets in the first world start doing this on their readers?
Not only are a few of them influencing US policies by providing most of the information to congress, but there is a question who is funding them.
They note Adm McMaster resigned because of the Koch brothers funding about a report that said human rights violations should be ignored, but somehow no one resigned over foreign countries who give oodles of money to think tanks to influence their reports, some of which go against US interests.
A small number of think tanks dominate the witness table, and they happen to be institutions that are particularly opaque about their funders. Four think tanks accounted for about one-third of all expert witnesses at the House Foreign Affairs Committee in the past two Congresses, … …three (of the) think tanks most frequently invited to House Foreign Affairs Committee hearings provide incomplete, or no, information about their funding.
It is, of course, an old problem: they also cite this Seattle Times article from 2014. that cited the NYT article complaining about foreign countries (mainly Europe and the Middle East) doing this.
and the Chinese People's daily complained that some American think tanks are making baseless charges of human rights violations about the Uighars and Tibet against China. of course.
as for the Philippines, I suspect a lot of politicians and news media sites are getting rich from both the USA and Chinese sources.
as for the USA... sounds like Trumpieboy might have stirred up the bees nest when he started outing such things in the FBI/CIA etc. Yes, he lies, but so do they.
and goes into details about Hikvision lobbying and the Chinese corruption of WHO that kept the world in the dark so the Wuhan virus could get everyone sick.
Lots of conspiracy theories that the Covid was released (probably accidentally) from the Wuhan lab that was doing research in how to weaponize the SARS types viruses. (i.e. have scientists change the virus so it will kill people, not just animals).
The Asia Time, a Hong Kong paper that used to be a good source before China took it over, has a discussion of what was going on.
Weaponizing germs to kill people is, of course a war crime, but hey, they are just doing it so they can see how the virus works so they can quickly make a vaccine to stop the spread if such a mutation occurs in nature (e.g. Bird flu), or released by someone really really nasty, is their reply.
But why did US government linked researchers seek to do that? Because several lab errors that could have released dangerous pathogens occurred in US Labs, so those in charge said the experiment was too risky to do and stopped them.
Can't have that: Science is too important to leave to elected officials. So they found a loophole:
Ah, but this ban did not cover other countries, of course.
So now the real question: Why was that research outsourced to China? and even paid for by US taxpayers, with little publicity by US whistleblowers (outside of conspiracy sites such as Fox Business channel, the Daily Mail, Coast to Coast am or Alex Jones and their ilk I mean).
HSBC allowed fraudsters to transfer millions of dollars around the world even after it had learned of their scam, leaked secret files show.
Britain's biggest bank moved the money through its US business to HSBC accounts in Hong Kong in 2013 and 2014.
Its role in the $80m (£62m) fraud is detailed in a leak of documents - banks' "suspicious activity reports" - that have been called the FinCEN Files.
HSBC says it has always met its legal duties on reporting such activity.
well, maybe. The report says that lots of information about this was given to regulators in the past. So who was doing the regulation?
The files show the investment scam, known as a Ponzi scheme, started soon after the bank was fined $1.9bn (£1.4bn) in the US over money laundering. It had promised to clamp down on these sorts of practices.
...
The documents leak includes a series of other revelations - such as the suggestion one of the biggest banks in the US may have helped a notorious mobster to move more than $1bn.
way down in the article, it notes what brought the information about the Ponzi scheme to the attention of whoever: A lady in California was bilked out of $3000 and the guy who told her to invest the money was killed in April 2014. by local thugs, presumably hired by a woman who was scammed. The Ponzi scheme targeted those not very rich and who were naive, mainly Asian and Hispanics who trusted him because he pretended to have Christian ties.
Unfotuntately, he scammed the wrong lady.
(Personal hit jobs are the way things are alas done in countries where law is weak and cops can be bribed. Indeed, a lot of the "drug war" deaths blamed on Duterte were pay back murders by families denied justice, who figured Duterte's cops would now look the other way when they took rough justice on the one who harmed them).
The MSM has a bad reputation for their biased political reporting, but it is the press who is trying to dig out the facts here....the story broke via Buzzfeed of all people. If you remember, Buzzfeed also revealed the sleezy deals of Paul Manafort, who ended up in jail.
and the Muller investigation into the Russia links with the Trump campaign found a lot of this corruption was going on.
And yes, there is a Russian/US election link, but the links also include the Ukraine (not mentioned: if these schemes are related to Kolansky/Burisma/Biden links) Nigeria, Malaysia, etc etc. Yes, Epstein is mentioned but no details.
The records show that five global banks — JPMorgan, HSBC, Standard Chartered Bank, Deutsche Bank and Bank of New York Mellon — kept profiting from powerful and dangerous players even after U.S. authorities fined these financial institutions for earlier failures to stem flows of dirty money.
U.S. agencies responsible for enforcing money laundering laws rarely prosecute megabanks that break the law, and the actions authorities do take barely ripple the flood of plundered money that washes through the international financial system.
In some cases the banks kept moving illicit funds even after U.S. officials warned them they’d face criminal prosecutions...
So in front of the world, China is breaking the agreement to let Hong Kong have some separation from the mainland. The big push: They want to stifle dissent/whistleblowers. And of course, they will enable "extradition" of those "wanted" in the mainland for (thought) crimes... Because if they don't, the protests will spread (and note that the western press rarely covers mainland Chinese protests, which are alas common but small so far). but this is about more than stifling freedom. It must of course, be seen as part of the full court press by China against all of their neighbors: Threatening Taiwan, extending "borders" around their (illegal) man made islands in the West Philippine sea, threatening Malaysia and Viet nam by insisting the entire WPS/South China sea belongs to them, bullying Australia by banning imports from them because they dared to question the origin of the Batflu, and of course, bullying the WHO to tell the world the bat flu wasn't contagious, and then preventing outside scientists from doing an outside independent investigation of the origin of the batflu. I'm sure I left some stuff out, but you get the picture. What is not being discussed: How a Chinese takeover will affect the banks and financial markets of Hong Kong. Hong Kong is Chinese, but it has a 100 year history of British rule of law, meaning that the law, not the dictator/boss, makes the decisions. So a lot of people invest their money in Hong Kong banks (including a lot of Chinese millionaires). China would like to take over the Hong Kong financial market/banks and merge them with Shanghai banks, eventually making Shanghai the money capital of Asia. the problem? corruption. One argument that many of us made against including Chinese companies for investing our federal TSP funds was that you couldn't trust them. Everyone here in the Philippines is aware of Chinese corruption and dirty practices in pushing shoddy, substandard, and counterfeit goods. True, much of the west's medicine and goods are made in China, but often under the supervision and using the standards of the western or Japanese company who licenses the factory. But do you trust Chinese brands? Here in the Philippines, poorer folks can't afford to buy the stuff from the US/Japan/Korea, so they buy goods and medicines made in China and take their chances it won't break right away, or in the case of medicine, that it will actually work. The same rules apply to the banks and the stock market. the take over plan that has been in place for over a decade is about taking over the independent Hong Kong financial institutions by merging them with Chinese run institutions. LINK. JIM CRAMER newsletter from 2014:
China Revives Neglected Plan to Link the Hong Kong and Shanghai Stock Markets
Regulators say mutual stock market access is coming to China and Hong Kong. They said the same thing in 2007.
ERIC JOHNSONAPR 11, 2014 6:00 AM EDT
BEIJING (TheStreet) -- If China makes good on its latest market liberalization plan, Hong Kong investors next fall will be trading Shanghai-listed stock and vice versa -- more than seven years after regulators introduced a similar plan and promptly shelved it.
That's right: seven years.
here is the important part that you will find out if you bother to read the entire article: unlike Hong Kong, there is no following the rules:
Financial regulators at agencies such as CSRC, the China Banking Regulatory Commission and the People's Bank of China are famous for moving slowly. Market reforms in areas such as interest rate liberalization and foreign exchange rate controls, for example, started years ago and are still evolving.
But the Hong Kong/Shanghai market-access "through train" -- an expression coined in 2007 and still used today -- has been particularly slow in coming.
so yes, the revolution is about freedom, but for the Chinese government it is part of a long term plan to take over Asian financial markets. Ah, but will investors now remove their money from Hong Kong based banks if the Chinese takeover is not stopped ? not much about this in the press yet (which is why I had to use an article from 2014). But Trumpie boy was a businessman who knows all the dirty tricks in the book, but as the saying goes: hire a thief to catch a thief. So I suspect he knows about these type of shenanigans and is ten steps ahead of the press coverage, which ignores the fall of the Hong Kong stock market due to investor's fears of a Chinese takeover, and instead blames the domino effect that is causing the fall of the Dow to Trumps' actions "to pressure China". That link was from Forbes, but they aren't alone. Notice how this CNBC headline (From Sept2019, discussing the gov't stopping the federal TSP funds from investing in China and then discussing this as if the US gov't was stopping ALL investments there, which is not what was done but never mind) the headline frames the argument it's all the fault of the US, even though the article points out there are major problems? Constricting investments into Chinese companies could hit the US as hard as it hits China and lots of opinions, mostly pro China and many from Chinese university think tanks.... and you won't read about this problem until paragraph 24:
One of the reasons the White House may be considering the investment restriction is reportedly to protect U.S. investors from excessive risk due to lack of regulatory supervision of Chinese companies.
“There’s a kernel of legitimacy in this,” said James Early, CEO of investment research firm Stansberry China. He pointed out that many Chinese companies that were able to access U.S. public markets around 2010 received no consequences for fraudulent behavior.
Italics mine. So will the world notice the Chinese takeover of the financial market in Hong Kong and recognize it as part of a long term plan to replace the US dollar with their own currency? --------------- StrategyPage has a different take, and that analysis includes a lot of stuff about military... hmm... will the fleeing rich Hong Kongers migrate to British Colombia, which is already a Chinese enclave? And for us, way down in the article they mention the influenza that hits pigs, and now another danger: Foot and mouth disease which hits cattle and water buffalo is going around North Korea and into China.
