Jul 25

Today’s News 25th July 2017

  • Democrats Introduce Absurd Bill To Muzzle Trump's Tweets, Release Taxes, And Stop Saying 'Fake News'

    Content originally published at iBankCoin.com

    The rolling tantrum from the left against President Trump has stumbled into absurd territory. In a bill unveiled last week and co-sponsored by 28 House Democrats – led by Rep. Steve Cohen, who looks dead on the inside, H. Res 456 “Objecting to the conduct of the President of the United States,” details how mean and unpresidential Donald Trump has been.

    Packed with laundry list of grievances and remedies – including a demand that Trump “refrain from posting video of himself wrestling with a press logo,” the bill is nothing more than a sad screed written by a pack of losers.

    And people wonder why the DNC has become a laughing stock…

    Here’s a sample of Trump’s crimes, misdemeanors and mean comments – according to H.Res 456:

    Muh Taxes

    • Whereas President Trump has refused to release his tax returns, in a break from the practice of United States Presidents for more than 40 years;

    (We haven’t had a billionaire with corporate adversaries as president in 241 years)

    Emoluments 

    • Whereas the Trump International Hotel in Washington, DC, has actively courted foreign diplomats for their business and, whereas, some diplomats have said spending money at Trump’s hotel is an easy, friendly gesture to the new President;
    • Whereas, on February 22, 2017, the Embassy of Kuwait held its National Day Celebration at Trump International Hotel Washington, DC;
    • Whereas President Trump is an executive producer of “The Apprentice” and the state-owned television station BBC One in the United Kingdom pays licensing fees to broadcast the show;

    (Ok, let’s say Qatar spent the same $1 million at Trump hotels they gave Bill Clinton for his birthday. After margins, let’s say Trump nets around $100k. Let’s even say Trump lied and is only worth $500 million instead of $3.5 billion. That $1 million from Qatar boils down to just .002% of Trump’s net worth.)

    Comey

    • Whereas, on January 27, 2017, President Trump invited FBI Director James Comey to a one-on-one dinner at the White House, during which he told Director Comey he needed loyalty;
    • Whereas, on February 14, 2017, President Trump told Director James Comey, “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,” and, “He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”;
    • Whereas, on May 12, 2017, President Trump tweeted, “James Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!”;

    Muh Russia

    • Whereas, according to a published report [New York Times, anonymous sources], President Trump told Russian officials, “I just fired the head of the FBI. He was crazy, a real nut job … I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”;
    • Whereas President Trump prohibited American press from witnessing his May 10, 2017, meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Russian Ambassador to the United States Sergey Kislyak at the White House, but allowed a Russian photographer to have access;
    • Whereas President Trump has refused to acknowledge, unequivocally, that Russia meddled in the 2016 Presidential election;

    Muh Foreign Policy

    • Whereas, on April 29, 2017, President Trump invited Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte to visit him at the White House, despite the fact that Duterte has been accused of extrajudicial killings of drug suspects;
    • Whereas, on March 17, 2017, President Trump refused to shake German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s hand in an Oval Office meeting;
    • Whereas, on May 25, 2017, President Trump pushed aside Montenegro Prime Minister Dusko Markovic in order to move to the front of a group of NATO leaders;

    Muh Muslim Ban

    • Whereas, on June 5, 2017, President Trump tweeted, “People, the lawyers and courts can call it whatever they want, but I am calling it what we need and what it is, a TRAVEL BAN!”;
    • Whereas, on May 25, 2017, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit upheld a preliminary injunction blocking President Trump’s revised Executive order, saying it “drips with religious intolerance, animus, and discrimination.”;

    Trump’s a Meanie

    • Whereas President Trump used Twitter to circulate a video of him violently wrestling a man covered by a CNN logo, which, according to the Reporters Committee on Freedom of the Press, was a “threat of physical violence against journalists;
    • Whereas, in a February 4, 2017, tweet, President Trump referred to a Federal judge with whom he disagreed as a “so-called judge”;
    • Whereas, on June 29, 2017, President Trump tweeted, “I heard poorly rated @Morning_Joe speaks badly of me (don’t watch anymore). Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came … to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year’s Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!”;
    • Whereas, on April 28, 2017, President Trump referred to United States Senator Elizabeth Warren as “Pocahontas” in a speech to the National Rifle Association;
    • Whereas President Trump has called press reports, “fake news” and in some instances his administration has prohibited video recordings of White House press briefings;

    What, nothing about TWO SCOOPS?

    WHAT TO DO ABOUT DANGEROUS MEAN DRUMPF? 

    H. Res 456 demands the following of President Trump:

    • Release his tax returns;
    • Place his private business assets in a blind trust or to divest from them;
    • Refrain from using Twitter inappropriately
    • Refrain from calling reporting “fake news”
    • Refrain from posting video of himself wrestling with a press logo
    • Stop limiting full electronic press access to White House press briefings;
    • Unequivocally acknowledge that Russia interfered in the 2016 United States Presidential election, and work to protect our electoral process from any future foreign interference;
    • Conduct United States foreign policy in a manner that reflects the United States traditional role as leader of the free world.

    Sorry losers – the United States elected a candid billionaire with a vast business empire, who’s been tweeting whatever is on his mind for nearly a decade, and who can shake whoever’s god damn hand he wants. The madman can order his press secretary to conduct briefings by candlelight – or play the clip of himself beating up the CNN logo before every single meeting.

    Trump also negotiated a ceasefire in Syria, secured billions of investment commitments towards US jobs, given ICE and DHS the freedom to perform a record number of human trafficking arrests, pulled out of the hugely unfair Paris climate accord, and made French President Emmanuel Macron his bitch – all within his first 6 months as President.

    I have an idea: 

    H. Res 457 – “Figuring out why the hell Democrats lost the House, Senate, Oval Office, and Supreme Court Act”

    • Whereas, in the 2016 election the Democrats ran a criminal establishment candidate;
    • Whereas, in the 2016 election the DNC conspired to chat against candidate Bernie Sanders;
    • Whereas, after the 2016 election Maxine Waters and a bunch of other nutbag Democrats ranted on national TV about conspiracy theories involving the President – turning the DNC into an international laughing stock of temper-tantruming children;
    • Whereas the MSM has colluded with members of congress to smear President Trump on a daily basis;

    Resolved, that congressional Democrats and members of the MSM who have colluded to denigrate a sitting President should

    • Grow the f*ck up;
    • Get back to work;
    • Don’t hate the player, hate the game;

    Follow on Twitter @ZeroPointNow § Subscribe to our YouTube channel

  • "Shrinkflation" – How Food Companies Implement Massive Price Hikes Without You Ever Noticing

    Do you ever get the sense that your favorite steak at that Quick Service Restaurant of your choice keeps getting thinner and thinner all while your check size at the end of the night continues getting larger and larger.  Well, it is.  How else are publicly traded chains going to continue to deliver margin growth to wall street in the midst of rising labor costs, rising commodity costs and shrinking customer traffic?

    As a new study in the U.K. just revealed, shrinking portion sizes among food manufacturers is actually way more common than you might think and you probably never even noticed it.  In fact, according to data from the Office for National Statistics, over 2,500 consumer products in the U.K. shrunk in size over the past five years despite being sold for the same price.

     

    But it’s not just food manufacturers that are shrinking portions while maintaining price as many consumers goods items from chocolate to coffee to toilet paper are all experiencing the same trends.  Known in grocery circles as ‘liar packs’, shrinking portion sizes became an attractive alternative to simply raising prices back during the great recession when consumers became particularly sensitive to price.  Of course, the net effect is exactly the same but it’s much more difficult to notice that fine print on the bottom corner of the packaging than it is the price tag at check out.  Per The Telegraph:

    Mark Jones, a food and drink solicitor at Gordons law firm, said: “Shrinkflation was borne out of the recession and has gathered staggering pace since 2009. The ONS’s report confirms this. Against the back drop of a weak economy, commodity prices have been rising over the last five years.

     

    “The recession made people very price sensitive and you can see the evidence of that by looking at the impressive growth of discount retailers in the last five years, no retail sector has grown faster.

     

    “Suppliers and retailers do not want to raise the ‘on the shelf’ price, but both have had to adapt to increasing commodity prices.

     

    “Shrinking the size of the products being sold, whether that is toilet paper, chocolate or cleaning products, is just another way of pushing through a price increase, but in a more subtle way. How many of us noticed Andrex reduce the number of sheets on a toilet roll from 240 to 221?”

     

    And here is the breakdown by month over the past 5 years:

     

    But it’s not just British consumers getting duped by “shrinkflation” as all the same games are played in the U.S. markets as well.  For example, who is actually going to notice that 10 sheets of paper are missing from the Bounty rolls on the right versus those on the left?  Yet, assuming that both packages are sold at the same price this small reduction in size equates to a substantial 9% price hike on a per sheet basis.

     

    Meanwhile, these containers are completely identical aside from some tiny print in the bottom right hand corner.

     

    Conclusion: Caveat emptor…there is a whole army of Harvard MBAs working in consumer goods companies all around the world whose sole mission in life is to get you to pay more for less without ever noticing.

  • Trump's Slide Into Endless-War Syndrome

    Authored by Ivan Eland via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    During his campaign for the presidency, Donald Trump touted his nationalist “America First” foreign policy, which implied that he wanted to stay out of foreign brushfire wars. Even before that, he tweeted his disapproval of American involvement of the Afghan War.

    The photograph released by the White House of President Trump meeting with his advisers at his estate in Mar-a-Lago on April 6, 2017, regarding his decision to launch missile strikes against Syria

    Yet now he has delegated the authority to his Secretary of Defense to send several thousand more troops to Afghanistan to join the almost 9,000 that remain there advising and assisting Afghan forces and hunting Islamist terrorists. And that is not the only instance in which the Trump administration has gone against his original inclination or is contemplating it.

    Trump appears to be delegating the troop re-escalation decision for Afghanistan to Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, because the president wants to be able to dodge responsibility in case that policy is ultimately unsuccessful, just as he blamed the botched Special Operations raid in Yemen on the military. Re-escalation is likely to fail, because the administration has no strategy for turning the already-lost conflict around. Adding 3,000 to 5,000 troops, according to a U.S. military that never wants to admit losing a war, would allow American troops to “advise” Afghan troops in battlefield areas, instead of remaining at higher headquarters, and also to call in U.S. air and artillery strikes in support of those local forces.

    Yet the Afghan War is the longest conflict in American history, and no conception of “success” can be realistically imagined. How can an augmented force of 13,000 or 14,000 American advisers have success helping a still pathetic Afghan military (even after 16 years of U.S. training), when 100,000 much more potent U.S. combat troops could not defeat the Taliban during all those prior years of conflict?

    And if the Taliban’s gains on the battlefield aren’t enough, the continued U.S. military presence in Afghanistan has caused some Islamist militants to pledge allegiance to the even more radical and brutal ISIS group. One can easily see that when the 3,000 to 5,000 troops have little effect on the battlefield, which is the probable outcome, the military will begin demanding a more sizeable re-escalation of the endless conflict.

    Should we give the U.S. military a blank check for perpetual war until it comes up with a face-saving way to exit with honor? Such a ruse didn’t fool anyone in the Vietnam War.

    India’s Interests

    The original U.S. enemy, Al Qaeda, is already a spent force in that part of the world. In addition, the Indian government is assisting Afghanistan economically and Afghan forces militarily and would have an incentive to do much more if the United States withdrew from the fight. India doesn’t want its arch rival Pakistan’s support of the Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan to result in a Taliban-controlled or influenced Afghan government that will augment Pakistan’s power in the South Asian region. Thus, the United States could let India, which has greater strategic interest in this local war than does the United States these days, take over countering the Taliban and ISIS in the region.

    Army CH-47 Chinook helicopter pilots fly near Jalalabad, Afghanistan, April 5, 2017.  (Army photo by Capt. Brian Harris)

    In addition to re-escalating an already unsuccessful Afghan War, some in the Trump administration want to ramp up the fight in Syria and assistance to the Saudi Arabian-led coalition against the Houthi rebels in Yemen, who are loosely aligned with Saudi-rival Iran.

    Trump, seemingly only to prove he was tougher than President Obama was in Syria, mounted a for-show cruise missile attack on a Syrian air base after an alleged chemical weapons attack by the Bashar al-Assad regime. Before the U.S. attack, the Trump administration warned the Russians and the thus the Syrians that it was coming, thus severely mitigating its effect.

    Lately, however, some in the Trump administration want to widen the war against ISIS in Syria to include Iranian-sponsored militias that are also fighting ISIS. Yet the perils of escalation in Syria became apparent when a Syrian government plane dropped bombs near U.S.-sponsored rebels, U.S. aircraft shot down the plane, and then the Russians declared that any American aircraft flying over Syrian government-controlled areas would be tracked as potential targets. Russian downing of an American aircraft or vice versa would be an unneeded and dangerous escalation between two nuclear-armed great powers over the outcome of a civil war in a country that is not strategic to the United States.

    The desire of some Trump administration officials to go after Iranian-sponsored militias in Syria is part of a larger Trump inclination to support Saudi Arabia in its regional rivalry with Iran in the Persian Gulf. That regional rivalry is also playing out in the destitute country of Yemen, with the United States selling the despotic Saudis a fresh batch of expensive military equipment, some of which will probably be used to kill Houthis in Yemen, including lots of civilians. Yet if Syria is not strategic to the United States, the poor nation of Yemen is certainly not either.

    In the Syrian civil war, the United States should sit back and watch its adversaries fight each other — ISIS and other radical Sunni Islamists versus Iran, Iranian-sponsored militias, the autocratic Syrian government, and Russia.

    In the internecine conflict in Yemen, the Saudi coalition, which has already killed many civilians, is hardly better than Iran.

    In the Afghan civil war, the United States should accept defeat, withdraw its forces — instead of re-escalating the war — and let India fully take over assisting the Afghan military in its fight against the Taliban and ISIS.

    In sum, Trump should avoid getting co-opted by the U.S. military and honor his campaign rhetoric, which implied staying out of non-strategic brushfire wars.

  • Al-Shabaab Propaganda Video Bashes "Brainless Billionaire" Trump As "Stupidest President A Country Could Have"

    Since taking office, President Donald Trump has stepped up US military strikes against al-Shabaab, the ISIS-affiliated terrorist group based primarily in Somalia, despite promises to avoid more foreign entanglements. In May, a Navy SEAL died during a mission targeting a compound of al-Shabaab militants, becoming the first US soldier to die in Somalia since 1993, when 18 US service members were killed in what became known as the battle of Mogadishu, later memorialized in the film “Black Hawk Down.” In June, the US killed 8 militants during a drone strike against what US officials described as one of the group’s primary training camps and bases.

    While al-Shabaab lacks the resources to launch an effective counterattack against the US, the group instead opted to mock Trump in a new propaganda video. In it, the group responds to Trump’s violent escalation by calling him a “brainless billionaire” and criticizing US voters for electing “arguably the most stupid president a country could ever have" – echoing sentiments commonly expressed by left-leaning voters in metropolitan hubs like New York City.

    Trump, the militants claim, is "making the United States the greatest joke on Earth and is now propelling it further to its eventual defeat and destruction," according to Russia Today, which cited the Associated Press and the SITE Intelligence Group.

    In addition to authorizing more drone strikes against Somalian while also categorizing parts of the country’s south as an area where active hostilities are taking place, Somalia was included as one of six countries in the Trump administration’s travel ban.  

    The group also criticized its neighbor Kenya, which has declared a new offensive against the extremists, sending in troops to take part in a multinational African Union force. Al-Shabaab has claimed responsibility for a number of terror attacks inside Kenya, including the 2015 shooting at a mall in Nairobi.

    “Your military’s invasion of Somalia will continue to destabilize your country,” the video states.

     

    “When we do strike, your government will not be able to protect you.”

    The group has also vowed to carry out more attacks against Somalia's recently elected government.

    According to RT, this isn’t the first time the group has referenced Trump in its propaganda. In a recruitment video released early last year, the group included inflammatory sound bites from then-candidate Trump, including his notorious call for a “complete and total shutdown” of Muslims entering the US. Since being pushed out of the capital Mogadishu in 2011, al-Shabaab has lost control of most of Somalia's cities and towns. But it still retains a strong presence in swathes of the south and center and still carries out major gun and bomb attacks. The group killed more than 4,200 people in 2016, according to the Pentagon-supported Africa Center for Strategic Studies.
     

  • Google Is The Biggest Lobbying Spender In Tech

    The fact that many major tech companies are headquartered in Silicon Valley doesn’t mean they don’t have a voice in Washington as well. As Statista’s Feliz Richer notes, according to documents filed in accordance with the Lobbying Disclosure Act, companies such as Google, Facebook and Amazon spend millions every year trying to legally influence D.C. lawmakers.

    The following chart shows how the lobbying expenditure of Google,
    Apple, Facebook and Amazon has developed over the past few years. For
    additional information please refer to the official database.

    Infographic: Google Is the Biggest Lobbying Spender in Tech | Statista

    You will find more statistics at Statista

    Interestingly, the quarterly filings not only reveal how much the companies spend on their lobbying efforts, they also provide us with information on which issues these efforts are related to.

    Take Google for example: in the second quarter of 2017, the search giant spent $5.9 million on lobbying with respect to issues ranging from more obvious ones such as regulation of online advertising and immigration of highly skilled individuals to more surprising ones such as wind power and unmanned aerial systems technology.

  • Russia's Real Endgame

    Authored by James Rickards via The Daily Reckoning,

    Russia’s Putin has never taken his eye off the ball. His ambition is not global hegemony or European conquest. Putin seeks what Russia has always sought: regional hegemony and a set of buffer states in eastern Europe and central Asia that can add to Russia’s strategic depth.

    It is strategic depth – the capacity to suffer massive invasions and still survive due to an ability to retreat to a core position and stretch enemy supply lines – that enabled Russia to defeat both Napoleon and Hitler. Putin also wants the modicum of respect that would normally accompany that geostrategic goal.

    Understanding Putin is not much more complicated than that.

    In the twenty-first century, a Russian sphere of influence is not achieved by conquest or subordination in the old Imperial or Communist style. It is achieved by close financial ties, direct foreign investment, free trade zones, treaties, security alliances, and a network of associations that resemble earlier versions of the EU.

    Russian military intervention in Crimea and eastern Ukraine is best understood not as a Russian initiative, but as a Russian reaction. It was a response to U.S. and U.K. efforts to attack Russia by pushing aggressively and prematurely for Ukraine membership in NATO. This was done by deposing a Putin ally in Kiev in early 2014.

    This is not to justify Russia’s actions, merely to put them in a proper context. The time to peel off Ukraine for NATO was 1999, not 2014.

    The Russian-Ukraine situation is a subset of the broader U.S.-Russian relationship. Here, the opposition comes not just from domestic opponents but from the globalist elite.

    The Globalist Roots of Today’s Brewing Conflict

    Globalization emerged in the 1990s as a consequences of the end of the Cold War and the reunification of Germany. For the first time since 1914, Russia, China and their respective empires could join the U.S., Western Europe and their former colonies in Latin America and Africa in a single global market.

    Globalization relied on open borders, free trade, telecommunications, global finance, extended supply chains, cheap labor and freedom of the seas. Globalization as it existed from 1990 to 2007 made steady progress under the Bush-Clinton duopoly of power in the U.S. and like-minded leaders elsewhere. The enemy of globalization was nationalism, but nationalism was nowhere in sight.

    The financial crisis of 2007–2008, caused by the elites’ own greed and inability to grasp the statistical properties of risk that was covered in Strategic Intelligence, put an end to the easy gains from globalization.

    Ironically, globalization gained in the short-run despite financial calamity. The same elites who created disaster were empowered to “fix” the situation under the auspices of the G20 Leaders’ Summit. This global rescue began with the first G20 summit hastily organized by George W. Bush and Nicolas Sarkozy, then the President of France, in November 2008.

    Despite the financial bailouts and central bank easy money of the decade following the crisis, robust self-sustaining growth in line with pre-crisis trends never returned. Instead the world suffered through a ten-year depression (defined as depressed below-trend growth), which continues to this day.

    What little growth emerged was captured mostly by the wealthy, which led to the greatest income inequality levels seen in over 80 years.

    Discontent was palpable in middle-class and working class populations in the world’s major developed economies. This discontent morphed into political action. The result was the U.K. decision to leave the EU, called “Brexit,” the election of Donald Trump, and the rise of politicians such as Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and Marine Le Pen in France, among others.

    Nationalism Strikes Back at the Global Elites

    What unites these politicians and political movements is nationalism. This can be defined as a desire to put national interests ahead of globalization. Nationalism can mean closing borders, restricting free trade to help local employment, fighting back against cheap labor and dumping with tariffs and trade adjustment assistance, and rejecting multilateral trade deals in favor of bilateral negotiations.

    This brings us to the crux of the U.S.-Russia relationship.

    Simply put, Putin and Trump are the two most powerful nationalists in the world. Any rapprochement between Russia and the U.S. is an existential threat to the globalist agenda.

    This explains the vitriolic, hysterical, and relentless attacks on Trump and Putin. The globalists have to keep Trump and Putin separated in order to have any hope of reviving the globalist agenda.

    Just as Trump and Putin are the champions of nationalism, President Xi Jinping of China and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany have emerged as the champions of the globalist camp. Understanding this dynamic requires consideration of the paradoxical roles of Xi and Merkel.

    Xi positions himself as the leading advocate of globalization. The truth is more complex. President Xi is the most nationalist of all major leaders. He continually puts China’s long-term interests first without particular regard for the well-being of the rest of the world.

    But, China’s military and economic weakness, and potential social instability, require it to cooperate with the rest of the world on trade, climate change, and supply-chain logistics in order to grow. Xi is in a paradoxical position of being nationalist to the core, yet wearing a globalist veneer in order to pursue the nationalist long game.

    Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany is also in a paradoxical position — but the opposite of Xi’s role. Merkel knows Germany must embrace globalism both because of its unique historical burden of being the source of three major wars (Franco-Prussian, World War I, and World War II), and the necessity of German integration with the EU and Eurozone. At the same time, Merkel has advanced her globalist agenda by promoting German interests through exports and cheap foreign labor.

    For the globalists, the world breaks down into Manichean struggle between the nationalists, Trump and Putin, and the globalists, Xi and Merkel. Globalists may be playing a two-sided game of nationalists versus globalists, but they need to widen the aperture to see that the world today is really a three-party game.

    There are really only three superpowers in the world today — Russia, China and the U.S. All other nations are secondary or tertiary powers who may be aligned with a superpower, neutral or independent, but who otherwise lack the ability to impose their will on others.

    Some analysts may be surprised to see Russia on the superpower list, but the facts are indisputable. Russia is the twelfth largest economy in the world, has the largest landmass, is one of the three largest energy producers in the world, has abundant natural resources other than oil, has advanced weapons and space technology, an educated workforce and, of course, has the largest arsenal of nuclear weapons of any country.

    Russia has enormous problems including adverse demographics, limited access to oceans, harsh weather, and limited fertile soil. Yet, none of these problems negate Russia’s native strengths.

    Notwithstanding the prospect of improved relations, Putin remains the geopolitical chess master he has always been. His long game involves the accumulation of gold, development of alternative payments systems, and ultimate demise of the dollar as the dominant global reserve currency.

  • "Time Is Running Out" – China Is Planning For A Crisis Along North Korean Border

    Despite Chinese officials reassurance that "military means shouldn’t be an option," WSJ reports that China has been bolstering defenses along its 880-mile frontier with North Korea and realigning forces in surrounding regions to prepare for a potential crisis across their border, including the possibility of a U.S. military strike.

    While all eyes in America are once again distracted by "Russia"-related narratives and the dismal GOP efforts to replace, repeal, re-who-knows-what Obamacare, the threat of North Korea has not gone away… and neither has China's preparations. As President Trump stepped up the rhetoric, pressuring China to do more to 'solve' the North Korean problem, and threatening military action to halt Kim's nuclear weapons program ambitions, it is clear that China has used this crisis to not just prepare for potential problems with North Korea but to reinforce military forces elsewhere.

    The Journal writes that a review of official military and government websites and interviews with experts who have studied the preparations show that Beijing has implemented many of the changes in recent months after initiating them last year.

    Recent measures include establishing a new border defense brigade, 24-hour video surveillance of the mountainous frontier backed by aerial drones, and bunkers to protect against nuclear and chemical blasts, according to the websites.

     

    China’s military has also merged, moved and modernized other units in border regions and released details of recent drills there with special forces, airborne troops and other units that experts say could be sent into North Korea in a crisis.

     

    They include a live-fire drill in June by helicopter gunships and one in July by an armored infantry unit recently transferred from eastern China and equipped with new weaponry.

    China’s Defense Ministry didn’t respond directly when asked if the recent changes were connected to North Korea, saying only in a written statement that its forces “maintain a normal state of combat readiness and training” on the border.

    While Chinese authorities have been preparing for North Korean contingencies – including economic collapse, nuclear contamination, or military conflict – according to U.S. and Chinese experts who have studied Beijing’s planning, perhaps more intriguing, as Mark Cozad, a former senior U.S. defense intelligence official for East Asia, now at the Rand Corp, explains..

    China’s contingency preparations “go well beyond just seizing a buffer zone in the North and border security."

    In other words, China is not letting a good crisis go to waste. Coad goes to note:

    “Once you start talking about efforts from outside powers, in particular the United States and South Korea, to stabilize the North, to seize nuclear weapons or WMD, in those cases then I think you’re starting to look at a much more robust Chinese response."

     

    “If you’re going to make me place bets on where I think the U.S. and China would first get into a conflict, it’s not Taiwan, the South China Sea or the East China Sea: I think it’s the Korean Peninsula.”

    As The Journal further notes, Beijing also appears to be enhancing its capability to seize North Korean nuclear sites and occupy a swath of the country’s northern territory if U.S. or South Korean forces start to advance toward the Chinese border, according to those people. That, they say, would require a much larger Chinese operation than just sealing border, with special forces and airborne troops likely entering first to secure nuclear sites, followed by armored ground forces with air cover, pushing deep into North Korea. It could also bring Chinese and U.S. forces face to face on the peninsula for the first time since the war there ended in 1953 with an armistice – an added complication for the Trump administration as it weighs options for dealing with North Korea.

    China has long worried that economic collapse in North Korea could cause a refugee crisis, bring U.S. forces to its borders, and create a united, democratic and pro-American Korea. But as WSJ's Ben Kesling  reports, China’s fears of a U.S. military intervention have risen since January as Pyongyang has test-fired several missiles, including one capable of reaching Alaska. In a notably outspoken article written in May, retired Maj. Gen. Wang Haiyun, a former military attaché to Moscow now attached to several Chinese think tanks, made his view clear (while carefully noting he did not speak for the PLA)…

    China should “draw a red line” for the U.S.: If it attacked North Korea without Chinese approval, Beijing would have to intervene militarily.

     

    “Time is running out,… We can’t let the flames of war burn into China.”

     

    China should demand that any U.S. military attack result in no nuclear contamination, no U.S. occupation of areas north of the current “demarcation line” between North and South, and no regime hostile to China established in the North, his article said.

     

    “If war breaks out, China should without hesitation occupy northern parts of North Korea, take control of North Korean nuclear facilities, and demarcate safe areas to stop a wave of refugees and disbanded soldiers entering China’s northeast,” it said.

    Beijing’s interests “now clearly extend beyond the refugee issue” to encompass nuclear safety and the peninsula’s long-term future, said Oriana Skylar Mastro, an assistant professor at Georgetown University who has studied China’s planning for a North Korean crisis.

    “China’s leaders need to make sure that whatever happens with (North Korea), the result supports China’s regional power aspirations and does not help the United States extend or prolong its influence,” Ms. Mastro said.

    In other words, China may appear to be preparing for a North Korean crisis… but is really building its capabilities should President Trump decide the time is right for more international distractions.

  • Banks Are Scheming To Dominate A Future Cashless Society

    Authored by Shaun Bradley via TheAntiMedia.org,

    Visa recently announced its new Cashless Challenge program, which offers $10,000 to restaurants willing to transition into accepting only digital payments.  As the largest credit card processor in the U.S., it’s no surprise Visa is spearheading this campaign.

    Under the guise of increasing transparency and efficiency, they’ve partnered with governments around the world to help convert financial systems into cashless models, but their real incentive is the billions of dollars in extra transaction fees it would generate.

    “We are declaring war on cash,” Visa spokesman Andy Gerlt proudly proclaimed after the program was announced.

    The food-based small businesses Visa is targeting are among those that benefit most from accepting cash from customers. When transactions are for amounts less than $10, the fees charged cut significantly into profits. Only 28% of food trucks currently accept credit card payments because of the huge losses they incur from them. The bribe from Visa may seem appealing up front but will be mostly paid back to them over the next few years in fees alone.

    Liz Garner, Vice President of the Merchant Advisory Group, which represents over 100 of the largest businesses in the U.S., explained some of the hurdles faced when dealing with card networks:

    “For many businesses – both large and small – the cost of accepting plastic cards and other forms of electronic payments is one of their highest operating costs. Most business owners have no qualms about paying reasonable fees for business services, and they do so every day for items such as cleaning services, security systems, Wi-Fi, and other basic needs. However, they have the ability to negotiate for those services in a fair and transparent marketplace, which they do not with the two major credit and debit card networks….Credit card and debit card fees are dictated directly by Visa and MasterCard and are imposed on the majority of merchants in a take-it-or-leave-it fashion. Most businesses feel that failing to accept these major card brands is not a competitive option so they continue accepting electronic payments even though the costs are squeezing their business, and the inflexible acceptance rules fly in the face of free market enterprise,”

    This ongoing push for a cashless society in Europe, Asia, and the Americas is about much more than just phasing out paper money — it’s about central planners solidifying control over the public’s wealth. This ongoing merger of corporate and government interests is the definition of crony capitalism. Regardless of the blatant collusion, the choices individuals make will still ultimately decide the direction for the future. Buying material goods on credit has become a lifestyle for millions, but the long-term costs of those decisions must be understood if there’s any chance for progress.

    Americans have made a huge mistake by running up a staggering $1 trillion dollars in credit card debt with an average interest rate of over 16%. Thanks to the Federal Reserve system, companies like Mastercard, Discover, and American Express can issue bonds paying extremely low-interest rates to the investors while simultaneously lending that money out to credit card holders at sky high rates. Companies will always take advantage of opportunities to increase profits, but the people’s willingness to keep borrowing from them is at the core of the problem.

    Access to cheap capital has been extended to the largest corporations for over a decade, but when it comes to small businesses or individuals there is a completely different set of standards. The pressure to consistently increase revenues and stock prices has led to an unnatural parasitic relationship between these companies and their customers. Cash is one of the last options that allows people a way to avoid dealing with this kind of shakedown.

    More than 30% of all payments in the U.S. are still conducted in cash, but financial intermediaries that charge processing fees are joining with the State and central banks to ensure the public has no room to innovate. Credit and debit cards have been the most convenient way to make purchases for over a decade, but emerging competition is slowly making them irrelevant.

    Bitcoin and smart contract platforms have introduced an entirely new marketplace for businesses and individuals outside the dominion of the old financial vanguard. Dozens of large corporations have founded the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance to build support for other developing alternative blockchain technologies aside from Bitcoin. This ongoing evolution towards peer-to-peer payments will eventually doom companies like Visa to the same fate as Blockbuster. Those in power may champion the benefits of going cashless, but going bankless may be the only way out of this extortion matrix.

    The efforts by governments and the financial industry to eliminate cash are only going to intensify. Those who adapt to the new paradigm of peer-to-peer payments will thrive, while those who don’t will have their hard earned money extracted to support a failing system. The illusion of banks being safe should have been shattered after the 2008 crisis, but eventually, the reality of how unstable the current institutions are will become apparent. Educating entrepreneurs and businesses on the benefits of Bitcoin and other decentralized options is the only way to shift this economy away from the control of central planners and towards a free and voluntary market.

  • Trump-Bezos War Escalates: "Is WaPo 'Lobbyist Weapon For Amazon' Against Congress?"

    After a quiet few hours contemplating the National Scout Jamboree, President Trump just unleashed ‘hell’ once again at Jeff Bezos, The Washington Post, and Amazon.com.

    President Trump took his first shot at what appears to be referencing an article about his decision to end a CIA program that backed Syrian rebels. The Post reported last week that Trump shuttered a CIA program to support Syrian rebels in the fight against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in a major victory for Russia. Russian officials had reportedly seen the program as an attack on the country’s interests…

    //platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Which seemed to stir him up even more, taking a shot at CNN and once again reminding his followers of Amazon’s tax position…

    //platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Which then rapidly escalated to what could – by some – be seen as a threat…

    //platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    It is not the first time that Trump has suggested that Amazon should be paying more than it currently does in taxes. In a speech outlining his 100-day action plan last October in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, Trump remarked that “Amazon, which through its ownership controls the Washington Post, should be paying massive taxes but it’s not paying. It’s a very unfair playing field and you see what that’s doing to department stores all over the country.”

    It’s unclear exactly what tax issue Trump was referring to in his criticism of Amazon, the e-commerce giant has been collecting sales taxes in all states that have a sales tax since April 1. States are generally barred from requiring remote sellers to collect sales taxes unless they have a physical presence in the state under a 1992 Supreme Court ruling. The issue has split Republicans in Congress, with some supporting legislation that would give states more collection authority and others pushing to codify the Supreme Court ruling.

    With Jeff Bezos now a few ticks away from becoming the richest man in the world, one wonders if the only chance a relatively ‘poor’ Donald Trump has is under the guise of government to go after the serial propagandist newspaper.

Digest powered by RSS Digest