The Crisis of Cuba and Venezuela, Immigration Chaos

Posted on August 30, 2016August 30, 2016 by Denise Simon

9 Latin nations band together to plead with U.S. over Cuba

Cuban migrants were photographed in November outside the border control building in Penas Blancas, Costa Rica, after Nicaragua closed its borders to Cuban migrants. Nine Latin American governments on Monday charged that U.S. policy toward Cuban migrants has created a humanitarian crisis for the region. Esteban Felix AP

McClatchy/WASHINGTON:Eight Latin American governments on Monday joined Costa Rica in calling on the United States to end its special treatment for Cuban migrants.

The Ecuadorean foreign minister delivered a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry signed by the foreign ministers of the eight countries and Costa Rica in expressing their “deep concern” that U.S. policy toward Cuban migrants is creating a humanitarian crisis and encouraging “a disorderly, irregular and unsafe flow of Cubans.”

“Cuban citizens risk their lives, on a daily basis, seeking to reach the United States,” the letter says, according to excerpts forwarded by Ecuador’s embassy in the United States. “These people, often facing situations of extreme vulnerability, fall victim to mafias dedicated to people trafficking, sexual exploitation and collective assaults. This situation has generated a migratory crisis that is affecting our countries.”

The letter was signed by the foreign ministers of Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama and Peru.

State Department officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

This situation has generated a migratory crisis that is affecting our countries. Nine Latin American governments

The countries have been caught up in the drama of record-breaking Cuban migration. More than 46,500 Cubans were admitted to the United States without visas during the first 10 months of the 2016 fiscal year, according to the Pew Research Center. That figure compares with more than 43,000 in 2015 and just over 24,000 in 2014.

Several of the countries found themselves caring for thousands of stranded Cubans who were stuck at their borders or in the interior after running out of money to continue the journey.

Costa Rican Foreign Minister Manuel González told McClatchy in an interview last week that the issue has cost his country millions of dollars it doesn’t have and has raised complaints from Costa Ricans about spending resources on stranded foreigners when they were needed by the nation’s own citizens.

“The difficulties between the U.S. and Cuba has a direct consequence on other countries in our region that serve as transit,” González said. “And we are, in a way, paying the consequences of that bilateral relationship.”

The difficulties between the U.S. and Cuba has a direct consequence on other countries in our region that serve as transit.

The nine signatories say the “main cause of the current situation” is the Cuban Adjustment Act, which allows Cubans who reach American soil to remain in the United States, even if they arrived without legal documentation. The signatories say revising the act would be the first step toward addressing the worsening crisis.

They have called for Kerry to attend a “high-level meeting” to review the issue.

“It is time for the United States to change its outdated policy for Cuban migrants, which is undermining regular and safe migration in our continent,” said Ecuadorean Foreign Minister Guillaume Long.

John Kirby, the State Department spokesman, confirmed Tuesday that Kerry had received the letter and said the U.S. was continuing talks with the nine governments. He called on the countries to respect the human rights of migrants and asylum-seekers.

“Irregular migration often involves dangerous journeys that illustrate the inherent risks and uncertainties of involvement with organized crime, including human smugglers and traffickers, in attempts to reach the United States,” Kirby said.

The Obama administration has also been encouraging the countries to enforce their own immigration requirements and send undocumented Cubans back to Cuba. But Cuban activists worry that that policy will only encourage Cubans to instead flee the island on dangerous ocean voyages to reach Florida.

The number of Cubans making the sea trip has nearly doubled in the past two years, Coast Guard statistics show.

Related reading: Creating the exile pool

Normalization has so far not included an end to the Cuban Adjustment Act, which encourages Cubans to become undocumented aliens. Mexicans are told to stay home or “get in line” for a green card, but Cubans who reach US shores can be fast-tracked to citizenship. More here.

Meanwhile, there is Venezuela.

WashingtonPost: VENEZUELA’S MAN-MADE humanitarian crisis is deepening. The Associated Press reports that the typical resident of Caracas, the capital, spends 35 hours a month waiting in line to buy food, and 9 in 10 say they can’t find enough . After the government of Nicolás Maduro opened six border crossings to neighboring Colombia on Aug. 13, about 380,000 Venezuelans poured across in the first eight days, desperately seeking supplies. Sackings of food warehouses by hungry mobs have been reported; 50 animals in the Caracas zoo are said to have starved to death. Meanwhile, Mr. Maduro refuses to allow aid shipments into the country, contending they are unneeded.

The United States and most of Venezuela’s neighbors have responded to this collapse of a once-prosperous oil-producing country by doing their best to ignore it. They issue feckless statements calling for “dialogue,” overlooking the by-now obvious reality that the regime has no intention of seriously negotiating with the opposition. This week, it will become harder for the United States and others to remain apathetic. Opposition parties are seeking to organize a mass demonstration in Caracas on Thursday; last Saturday, the regime responded by transferring a top leader from house arrest to prison. The government appears intent on crushing the protest movement, rather than responding to its legitimate demands.

First among these demands is the staging of a referendum by the end of this year to recall Mr. Maduro from office. Venezuela’s constitution provides for such a process, and though its requirements are onerous, the opposition has shown it can meet them. Early this month, the government-controlled electoral authority acknowledged that the recall campaign had met an initial requirement for gathering petition signatures across the country. But it then released a timetable indicating that a referendum would not be held by the end of this year, the effective deadline for a meaningful vote. If Mr. Maduro were recalled after Jan. 10, he would be replaced by his vice president, rather than an opposition nominee.

Mr. Maduro, who polls show would win as little as 15 percent of the vote in a recall ballot, has been gloating over this obstructionism. He ordered the firing of hundreds of government employees who signed recall petitions. When a U.S. federal indictment was unsealed against a general for drug trafficking, Mr. Maduro appointed him interior minister, in charge of domestic security forces.

Prodded by the secretary general of the Organization of American States, the Obama administration and 14 other governments issued a statement on Aug. 11 calling for the referendum to be held “without delays.” On Sunday, the State Department toughened its rhetoric, condemning the imprisonment of opposition leader Daniel Ceballos as “an effort to intimidate and impede the Venezuelan people’s right to peacefully express their opinion September 1.” The administration should be prepared to act if the regime responds violently to the protest. It should quickly punish officials involved in repression and press the OAS to move against Venezuela under its democracy charter.

At the same time, the United States should begin coordinating with Colombia, Brazil and other nations about ways to respond to the humanitarian crisis. As Mr. Maduro cracks down, Venezuelans are likely to get hungrier.

Generational terror by Hamas and Islamic State

Posted on August 29, 2016August 29, 2016 by Denise Simon

DailyMotion

HuffingtonPost: Five children appear to shoot prisoners to death in a new video released by the self-described Islamic State.

The video identifies the kids as British, Egyptian, Kurdish, Tunisian and Uzbek, and the location as the ISIS-controlled province of Ar-Raqqa in Syria, according to a translation by SITE Intelligence, a terrorism analysis firm.

The Huffington Post is not providing the video here to avoid promoting the extremist group’s propaganda.

The Islamic State has a well-documented history of recruiting children into its ranks and enlisting them in brutal acts. As of February, CNN reported the group had eulogized 88 child soldiers killed in battle, the vast majority of them from Syria and Iraq.

A July story in Der Spiegel details the harrowing ordeal of two adolescent Iraqi brothers captured by ISIS and placed in a juvenile military training camp. They described being trained in the use of guns and other weapons, and beaten to harden them for combat. On one occasion, a fighter at the front demonstrated beheading on a real captive.

The brothers, who escaped after one of them was brutally beaten for secretly calling his mother on a mobile phone, said they found it easier to adjust to the violent lifestyle after they took certain pills they were given. The drug might have been fenethylline (sold under the brand name Captagon), a stimulant popular with ISIS that fosters energy and feelings of strength and invincibility.

There are currently 1,500 male children serving ISIS in Iraq and Syria, according to estimates cited by Der Spiegel. In the face of a U.S.-led campaign of airstrikes, the group escalated its use of children in propaganda videos in 2015, an expert told the German news source.

Away from its home base, the Islamic State appears to be laying the groundwork for juvenile forces as well. ISIS operatives who have taken over parts of Afghanistan can be seen in a November documentary by PBS’s “Frontline” instructing young children how to use weapons and kill those they consider infidels.

Social Security Insolvency Estimates

Posted on August 29, 2016August 29, 2016 by Denise Simon

Social Security’s looming $32 trillion shortfall

CNBC: You can look at the financial health of Social Security in many ways.

The official version, found in the Social Security and Medicare Boards of Trustees’ annual report, is this:

Social Security’s total income is projected to exceed its total cost through 2019, as it has since 1982. After 2019, interest income and money taken out of reserves will provide the resources needed to offset Social Security’s annual deficits until 2034.

By then, if Congress does nothing, the federal government will collect enough in payroll taxes to pay about 75 percent of scheduled retirement benefits until 2090.

The Social Security Administration projects that unfunded obligations will reach $11.4 trillion by 2090. That’s up $700 billion from the $10.7 trillion the administration projected for its 2089 shortfall.

Infinite horizon

Despite the huge numbers, there’s even a less generous way of looking at the fiscal shortfall.

A projection, known as the “infinite horizon,” takes into account all the program’s future liabilities, even those beyond the 75-year period that Social Security actuaries typically use in their calculations.

Under the infinite horizon, Social Security will have $32.1 trillion in unfunded liabilities by 2090, $6.3 trillion more than last year’s projection. (See the chart below.)

The full chart is here. The infinite horizon calculation is the most important part of the trustees’ annual report, said Laurence Kotlikoff, a Boston University economics professor and co-author of “Get What’s Yours,” a best-seller about how to maximize claiming Social Security retirement benefits.

“We’re not broke in 20 years to 30 years, we’re broke now,” Kotlikoff said. “All the bills have been kept off the books by Congress and presidential administrations for six decades.”

The $6.3 trillion increase in the infinite horizon projection shows that Social Security Administration actuaries are more pessimistic about economic and wage growth, Kotlikoff said.

A reduction in the interest rate used to make calculations under the infinite horizon projection from 2.9 percent to 2.7 percent was the main contributor to the rise in the unfunded obligations forecast from last year, according to the trustees’ report.

“You can’t hide the numbers under a bunch of malarkey,” said Kotlikoff, who is running for president as a write-in candidate.

Kotlikoff had an influential ally in his quest for better accounting for Social Security and other federal programs. In 2013, Sen. Tim Kaine, the Democratic Party’s vice presidential nominee, co-sponsored bipartisan legislation that would require the federal government to use infinite horizon calculations and so-called fiscal gap accounting, which considers the difference between the government’s projected financial obligations and the present value of all projected future tax and other revenue. The bill, which Kotlikoff championed, did not pass.

Presidential proposals

Presidential candidates from the two major political parties have yet to present detailed plans for how they will address Social Security’s shortfall.

Hillary Clinton said she won’t cut Social Security benefits and will expand the program, especially for widows and people who have left the workforce to take care of children, spouses or relatives.

She plans to ask “the highest-income Americans to pay more, including options to tax some of their income above the current Social Security cap and taxing some of their income not currently taken into account by the Social Security system,” according to her campaign website.

Currently, earnings up to $118,500 are taxed for Social Security benefits. Eliminating the cap this year would mean the trust fund reserves would be depleted in 2055 instead of 2034, according to estimates from Karen Smith, a senior fellow in the Income and Benefits Policy Center at the Urban Institute.

Clinton opposes “any attempts to gamble seniors’ retirement security on the stock market through privatization.” However, investing a portion of Social Security’s trust fund assets in stocks would likely reduce the need for higher payroll taxes without disrupting the capital markets, according to a recent analysis by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.

Donald Trump has said he wants to preserve Social Security, saying the key to do so is to have “an economy that is robust and growing.”

Stronger economic growth may delay Social Security’s insolvency, but it would not fix its underlying fiscal problems, according to Smith’s research.

So what would have a big impact on Social Security’s fiscal standing if you don’t cut benefits? Raising payroll taxes. Smith found that increasing payroll taxes by 3 percentage points from 12.4 percent — half paid by employers and half paid by employees — to 15.4 percent would make Social Security reserves last at least 53 years longer, or until 2087.

Few politicians are proposing that fix for future generations.

Russia Helping Tehran Protect Fordow Nuclear Facility

Posted on August 29, 2016August 29, 2016 by Denise Simon

This is rather old news until the actual deployment, yet John Kerry and Europe has not sanctioned Russia and Iran must be only doing peaceful activities at Fordow, which is built inside a mountain.

Iran began constructing the Fordow uranium enrichment facility in secret as early as 2006. It was publicly revealed by U.S. President Barack Obama, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown in September 2009, shortly after these nations presented evidence of the facility to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The facility appears to be a repurposed tunnel complex, with the main enrichment halls buried within a mountain in order to harden the facility against a potential military strike. Satellite imagery dates the construction of the facility to a period between June 2006 and July 2007, while Iran has told the IAEA that it began to build the facility during the second half of 2007. After the disclosure of the plant’s existence, Iran downplayed its role in its nuclear program, moving slowly to install the planned number of centrifuges at the site. In mid-2011, it announced it would install advanced centrifuges at the FFEP rather than IR-1 centrifuges. The facility is designed to hold approximately 3,000 centrifuges. It never installed advanced centrifuges in the facility, but instead deployed the IR-1 model.

The Fordow site has two enrichment halls, Units 1 and 2, each designed to hold 8 cascades of 174 centrifuges per cascade. Iran fully outfitted the facility in late 2012 – early 2013.

On June 8, 2011, Iran announced that it planned to move its production of 19.75% enriched uranium from the Natanz Pilot Fuel Enrichment Plant (PFEP) to the FFEP, and that it would enrich 3.5% low-enriched uranium produced at the Fuel Enrichment Plant at Natanz. Since February 2013, Iran has produced 19.75 percent enriched uranium at the FFEP using sets of tandem cascades to enrich uranium to 19.75 percent and strip the tails to natural uranium (0.711 percent). Iran claims that the 19.75 percent enriched uranium produced in this facility will be used to produce medical isotopes in the Tehran Research Reactor.

TEHRAN, Aug. 29 (MNA) – The first footage showing the deployment of S-300 missile defense system at Fordow nuclear site was aired Sunday, August 28. The footage was shown following Ayat. Khamenei’s speech in which he stressed the defensive nature of the system and the necessity for upgrading the country’s defense capabilities.

Iran deploys long-range missiles to Fordo nuclear site

Iranian students form a human chain during a protest to defend their country’s nuclear program outside the Fordo Uranium Conversion Facility in Qom in 2013 (AFP Photo/Chavosh Homavandi)

Tehran (AFP) – Tehran has deployed a recently delivered Russian-made long-range missile system to central Iran to protect its Fordo nuclear facility, state television said Sunday.

Protecting nuclear facilities is paramount “in all circumstances” General Farzad Esmaili, the commander of Iran’s air defences, told the IRIB channel.

“Today, Iran’s sky is one of the most secure in the region,” he added.

A video showed an S-300 carrier truck in Fordo, raising its missile launchers toward the sky, next to other counter-strike weaponry.

The images were aired hours after supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei gave a speech to air force commanders, including Esmaili, in which he stressed that Iranian military power was for defensive purposes only.

“Continued opposition and hype on the S-300 or the Fordo site are examples of the viciousness of the enemy,” Khamenei said.

“The S-300 system is a defence system not an assault one, but the Americans did their best for Iran not to get hold of it.”

The Fordo site, built into a mountain near the city of Qom has stopped enriching uranium since the January implementation of a nuclear deal with world powers.

Under the historic accord, Iran dismantled most of its estimated 19,000 centrifuges — giant spinning machines that enrich uranium, keeping only 5,000 active for research purposes.

Iran and the United States, Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia negotiated for more than two years before signing a historic July 2015 agreement that removed some international sanctions in return for curbs on Tehran’s controversial atomic programme.

Iran Evaded Sanctions with Venezuela’s Help

Posted on August 26, 2016August 26, 2016 by Denise Simon

New evidence Iran evaded sanctions, continued nuclear weapons development with Venezuela

ForeignNewsDesk: New evidence suggests Iran received help from Venezuela with its nuclear program despite a decade of U.N.-mandated sanctions aimed at curbing the rouge regime’s controversial nuclear and ballistic missile programs.

A 2009 document obtained by Brazil’s leading weekly, Veja magazine, shows late dictator President Hugo Chavez signing off on the release of funds to help Iran with its nuclear ambitions.

Specifically, the document states the funds were to be designated for the import of equipment for a gunpowder factory and the development of production plants for nitroglycerin and nitrocellulose, elements used in rocket propulsion for Iran’s government. There is also the suggestion that Chavez may have helped Iran produce rocket motors.

The document provides written proof that Iran successfully continued with its weapons-building program, circumventing what were perceived as ‘watertight’ sanctions.

The revelation comes as Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif is currently touring South America visiting Bolivia, Chile, Cuba, Ecuador Nicaragua and Venezuela, in what Iranian officials have billed as a “new chapter” in strengthening political and economic ties between Iran and South American countries.

“In my line of work, I can’t believe in coincidences. I can’t believe that $400 million was given to Iran in cash and now Zarif is running through Latin America. The Iranian regime understands that in Latin America corruption can be used to their advantage,” said Joseph M. Humire, executive director of the Center for a Secure Free Society, who points to the long-standing relationship between Venezuela and Hezbollah, Iran’s terror proxy.

Humire is also the co-editor of Iran’s Strategic Penetration of Latin America.

“Latin America is Hezbollah’s biggest cash cow. It would make sense that this is a very strategic visit by Zarif to continue some of Iran’s previous activities which were challenged because of sanctions,” Humire said, adding that Hezbollah has been deeply involved in drug trafficking in Latin America to offset any financial hardship brought about by the sanctions.

As a member state of the United Nations, Venezuela was obliged to cooperate with United Nations Security Council Resolution 1747 that unanimously called for a ban on arm sales to the Islamic republic.

But uncertainties were already high in 2009 when Turkey intercepted a suspicious shipment from Iran to Venezuela containing 22 containers of lab equipment capable of producing explosives but was labelled as “tractor parts.”

Humire, who has long analyzed Iran’s involvement in Latin America has studied twenty different transactions between the two countries in several areas, finding that even those dealings considered legal, were problematic due to the “dual use” that they could present.

“Iran’s secretive military programs go far beyond violating sanctions. It has to do with providing military and industrial support in these countries,” Humire said.

“At the far end of that, you can begin to speculate they are beginning to develop military assets.”

In a 2011 hearing at the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee, then head of U.S. Southern command General Douglas Fraser told the committee that the U.S. was concerned about weekly flights between Venezuela and Iran dubbed the “Axis of Evil Express,” that could potentially be used to transport terrorists and weapons.

“My concern, as I look at it, is the fact that there are flights between Iran and Venezuela on a weekly basis, and visas are not required for entrance into Venezuela or Bolivia or Nicaragua,” Fraser told the hearing.

Another discrepancy in Iran’s investments in Venezuela, according to Humire, is considering that if the Iranian regime was after economic growth, they would go to “viable countries like Brazil, Colombia, not the ones that are broke, particularly with the heavy instability in Venezuela.”

Congress knows:

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