Nov 30

Today’s News 30th November 2017

  • US Coast Guard Operates Secret Floating Prisons In Pacific Ocean

    Last week, Seth Wessler wrote a story for the New York Times, in which he described “terror on the high seas”: an expansion of the maritime war on drugs, the U.S. Coast Guard is operating a fleet of secret floating prisions in the Pacific Ocean. Coined “floating Guantanamos”, Coast Guard cutters have been deployed as far as 3,000 miles miles away from the nearest U.S. port, to international waters from Central America to South America in a bid to bust drug smugglers.

    Wessler writes about a number of men who were detained by the U.S. Coast Guard and imprisoned on the cutters for weeks or months at a time. The practice of capturing smugglers and turning them back to their governments changed in 2012, when the Defense’s Southern Command, tasked with leading the war on drugs in the Americas, launched a multinational military campaign called Operation Martillo, or “hammer.” Post 2012, Coast Guard cutters cruise around the Pacific picking up smugglers who will then be admitted to U.S. courts.

    According to Wessler, the U.S. Coast Guard never intended to operate floating prisions, but thanks to U.S. marintime law, drug smuggling in international waters is considered a crime against the U.S (even if there is no proof), making the possibility of floating prisions legal. Once detained, conditions for the smugglers are quite rough, often kept on US vessels for weeks or months on end– chained to anything, usually on the ships’ decks exposed to the bare elements.

    The Coast Guard has a humanitarian public image, celebrated in local newspapers for rescuing pleasure boaters off Montauk or hurricane survivors in Florida. But as the lone branch of the military that serves as a law-enforcement agency, the 227-year-old service has also long been in the business of interdicting contraband, from Chinese opium smugglers to Prohibition rumrunners. For centuries, Coast Guard operations waited to arrest smugglers once they crossed into U.S. territorial waters. Then, in the 1970s, as marijuana trafficking ballooned on the route from Colombia into the Caribbean before arriving in the United States, Justice Department officials argued to Congress that current U.S. law constrained law enforcement’s ability to punish drug smugglers caught on the high seas. While the Coast Guard, then a branch of the Department of Transportation, could chase smugglers into the Caribbean, Justice Department lawyers could rarely hold smugglers caught in the legal gray zone of international waters criminally liable in U.S. courts.

     

    Congress responded by passing a set of laws, including the 1986 Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act, that defined drug smuggling in international waters as a crime against the United States, even when there was no proof that the drugs, often carried on foreign boats, were bound for the United States. The Coast Guard was conscripted as the agency empowered to seek out suspected smugglers and bring them to American courts.

     

    In the 1990s and through the 2000s, maritime detentions averaged around 200 a year. Then in 2012, the Department of Defense’s Southern Command, tasked with leading the war on drugs in the Americas, launched a multinational military campaign called Operation Martillo, or “hammer.” The goal was to shut down smuggling routes in the waters between South and Central America, stopping large shipments of cocaine carried on speedboats thousands of miles from the United States, long before they could be broken down and carried over land into Mexico and then into the United States. In 2016, under the Southern Command’s strategy, the Coast Guard, with intermittent help from the U.S. Navy and international partners, detained 585 suspected drug smugglers, mostly in international waters. That year, 80 percent of these men were taken to the United States to face criminal charges, up from a third of detainees in 2012. In the 12 months that ended in September 2017, the Coast Guard captured more than 700 suspects and chained them aboard American ships.

    Wessler details the extent of his investigation below, which provides an eye-opening view of the extent of America’s secret extraterritorial war on drugs,

    Over the last year, I’ve interviewed seven former Coast Guard detainees, some of whom are still in American federal prison, and received detailed letters, some with pencil renderings of the detention ships, from a dozen others. Most of these men remain confounded by their capture by the Americans, dubious that U.S. officials had the authority to arrest them and to lock them in prison. But it is the memory of their surreal imprisonment at sea that these men say most torments them. Together with thousands of pages of court records and interviews with current and former Coast Guard officers, these detainees paint a grim picture of the conditions of their extended capture on ships deployed in the extraterritorial war on drugs.”  

    PBS NewsHour interviews Seth Wessler, where he speaks about the 700 suspected drug smugglers imprisoned on Coast Guard cutters between September 2016 through 2017.

  • The US Aristocracy's Smear-Russia Campaign: Big Brother At Work

    Authored by Eric Zuesse via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    Billionaires, both liberal and conservative ones, own, and their corporations advertise in and their ‘charities’ donate to, America’s mainstream (and also many ‘alternative news’) media.

    They do this not so as to profit directly from the national ‘news’media (a money-losing business, in itself), but so as to control the ’news’ that the voting public (right and left) are exposed to and thus will accept as being “mainstream” and will reject all else as being “fringe” or even ‘fake news’, even if what’s actually fake is, in fact, the billionaires' own mainstream ’news’, such as their ’news'media had most famously ‘reported’ about ’Saddam’s WMD’ (but the’news’media never changed after that scandal — even after having pumped uncritically that blatant lie to the public). 

    Have America’s numerous foreign coups and outright military invasions (including Iraq 2003) been the result of fake-news that was published by the mainstream ’news'media, or only by some of the ‘alternative news’ sites that mirror what the mainstream ones have been ‘reporting’ (passing along the Government’s lies just like the mainstream ones do)? Obviously, the catastrophic fake news — the fake news that ‘justified’ America’s invading and destroying Iraq, Libya, and many other countries — was all published in the mainstream ’news’media. That’s where to go for the really dangerous lies: it’s the mainstream ’news’media. If those media, and their Government (whose lies they stenographically report to the public) will now censor the Internet, such as is increasingly happening not only in the US but in its allies including the European Union, then the only ‘information’ that the public will have access to, at all, will be the billionaires’ lies. Have we already almost reached 1984, finally, in 2017?

    Two typical examples of this coordinated mass-deception-operation happened to be showing at the top of the magazine-pile at an office recently and struck my attention there, because of the ordinariness of the propaganda that was being pumped.

    One of them was the cover of TIME magazine, dated “July 24, 2017” and with the cover headlined “RED HANDED: The Russia Scandal Hits Home”, overprinting onto the face of Donald Trump Jr., as their menacing-looking cover-image. That cover-story, as published inside, was titled “How Donald Trump Jr.'s Emails Have Cranked Up the Heat on His Family”, and it used such phrases as “potentially treasonous” and “Russia is the one country that could physically destroy America” (as if it weren’t also the case that US is the one country that could physically destroy Russia, and very much the case also that possession of the weaponry isn’t any indication of being evil, such as this particular propagandist was implicitly assuming). Hillary Clinton’s V.P. running-mate was reported to be “saying that these fresh revelations move the Russia investigation into the realms of 'perjury, false statements and even, potentially, treason.'” 

    These mere speculations, with slimy inferences of evil, with no real facts that back them up, were the front-cover ‘news’, in TIME. The facts were thin, but the speculations were thick, and the only thing really clear from it was that almost all of America’s billionaires and centi-millionaires want Trump ousted, and want Vice President Mike Pence to become America’s President as soon as possible — before Trump’s term is up. Democratic ones certainly do, and many of the Republican ones apparently do as well. Perhaps Trump isn’t hostile enough toward Russia to suit their fancy. At least Pence would be predictable — predictably horrible, in precisely the way that the controllers of the ‘news’media overwhelmingly desire.

    The other example was the cover of The New Republic magazine, dated “December 2017” and it simply headlined in its center, “HOW TO ATTACK A DEMOCRACY”, and the opening page of the article inside was bannered “WEAKEN FROM WITHIN” and below that in the printed edition (the December physical issue of the magazine) was:

    “Russian manipulation of American social media in the 2016 presidential election took the United States by surprise. But Moscow has been honing an information-age art of war — through fake news, disinformation, leaks, and trolling — for more than a decade. How can these societies protect themselves?”

    The online version of that article (which was dated 2 November 2017) opened almost the same: “Moscow has been honing an information age art of war — through fake news, disinformation, leaks, and trolling — for more than a decade. How can free societies protect themselves?”

    The unspoken assumption in this article is that the US CIA hasn’t been doing the same thing — and doing it even worse than the old (and thankfully expired) KGB ever did. (And the CIA, even after the end of communism as its supposed enemy until 1991, still does far worse to other countries than Russia’s FSB does or ever did.)

    Underlying both the TIME article and the TNR article are unstated speculations about the American situation, which are based upon thin facts such as that "at least $100,000 in ads purchased through 470 phony Facebook pages and accounts” were "using Facebook to incite anti-black hatred and anti-Muslim prejudice and fear while provoking extremism”, and that supposedly somehow (they never say how) such puny expenses threw the multi-billion-dollar 2017 US Presidential election to Trump. How is a case such as that, to be viewed by an intelligent reader as constituting anything but propaganda for the weapons-making firms such as Lockheed Martin, who benefit from such international anti-Russia hate-spewing to NATO countries, which are those firms’ major markets (other than Saudi Arabia, and the other fundamentalist-Sunni kingdoms that together constitute the Gulf Cooperation Council or “GCC” nations, which hate Shiite Iran as much as the US regime hates Russia)?

    Also among the underlying and unstated speculations in the background here is the older mass-media allegation about Russia’s allegedly having spied and swayed the US election by ‘hacking’ it, which is likewise being pumped by Democrats and other opponents of Mr. Trump, alleging that ‘Russia hacked the election’.

    And, so, for an example of the flimsiness of those allegations, one of the two main ‘authorities’ who are the source of that, the Bush and Obama Administration’s James Clapper, was headlined at Politico on 7 July 2017, "Clapper: No evidence others besides Russia hacked US election”. Mr. Clapper happens to be a military-industrial-complex revolving-door ‘intelligence’ ‘professional’ whom, on 10 February 2011, even Politico was reporting to be “backing away from comments he made Thursday calling Egypt's branch of the Muslim Brotherhood movement 'largely secular’,” and who had also covered-up George W. Bush’s lies about ‘WMD in Iraq’ so as to protect the liars. On 29 October 2003, the New York Times stenographically passed along his deception about the non-existent WMD by headlining, "WEAPONS SEARCH; Iraqis Removed Arms Material, US Aide Says” and reported, "The official, James R. Clapper Jr., a retired lieutenant general, said satellite imagery showing a heavy flow of traffic from Iraq into Syria, just before the American invasion in March, led him to believe that illicit weapons material 'unquestionably' had been moved out of Iraq.” No evidence ever existed that Saddam Hussein still had any WMD after the U.N. monitors (UNSCOM) destroyed the last of them in 1998; but Clapper ‘unquestionably’ ‘knew’ to the contrary — though no evidence was ever made available to the contrary of UNSCOM’s reports, and lots of evidence existed that Bush simply lied about the entire matter.

     

    The other main source for the allegation that ‘Russia hacked the election’ is the Obama Administration’s John Brennan, whom Glenn Greenwald exposed as a fraud back on 7 January 2013, headlining “John Brennan's extremism and dishonesty rewarded with CIA Director nomination”. 

    Both of the official ‘experts’ who are promoting the Russiagate charges, are longtime, and repeatedly, exposed liars – but that’s the best they can do, always assuming that the public don’t know that these people are propagandists for the military-industrial complex, not real ‘public servants’ at all.

    This isn’t to say that Trump isn’t also a liar — just that the ‘news’ in America is full of conflicting lies — and that they constantly are coming from the fake ‘news’media that are the mainstream ones who are now trying to censor out, and ultimately to obliterate, the few small news-operations (some of which, unlike any of the mainstream ones, actually are good, and authentic journalistic operations, no mere PR hackery) that are constantly exposing the fraudulence of the mainstream ones, which want to impose their dictatorship — the mainstream lies — even more rigorously than they already do. After all, the mainstream Western media still haven’t yet reported US President Obama’s bloody racist-fascist coup that in February 2014 replaced the democratically elected President of Ukraine (and his supporters in the legislature) by a racist-fascist or ideologically nazi regime that’s rabidly hostile toward its neighboring nation of Russia. Even now — nearly four years after the event. It’s already solidly documented history, but the mainstream US-and-allied press still hasn’t reported it.

    The fake-news masters are certainly the mainstream ‘news’media themselves – and they, and the billionaires and centi-millionaires who own and control them, are the real megaphones by which the US dictatorship constantly fools the American people (and the publics in its allied nations), to keep in line, for the aristocracy.

  • Mapping The Fiscal Burden Of Illegal Immigration On Each State

    Via HowMuch.net

    There’s a lot of confusion and misunderstanding out there around the economic impact of illegal immigration in the United States. We decided to bring some clarity around the issue by mapping new numbers on the estimated costs of illegal immigration on a state-by-state basis.

    Our viz takes data from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) about how much illegal immigration costs in each state. FAIR takes into account a variety of different expenditures, like healthcare, education and refundable tax credits. We mapped these numbers across the United States according to a color-coded scale. Purple and dark red states have comparatively high expenditures, but the pink and blue states spend relatively less money because of illegal immigrants.

    There are two interesting trends you can see from looking at the data in this way.

    • First, states that spend the most on illegal immigration tend to be located close to Mexico. Looking at out map, the two states with the highest expenditures are California ($23B) and Texas ($11B), both sharing long borders with Mexico. In fact, there’s a cluster of dark red states stretching along the Southwest. States closest to the phenomenon pay the most as a result.
    • Second, states with higher population levels tend to spend more than their less populated counterparts. You can see a group of high-expenditure states clustered around the Northeast, not to mention Illinois and Florida. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, California and Texas are also the two most populous states in the country. High population levels and proximity to Mexico act like a double-whammy for illegal immigration expenses.

    Now take a look at the places with relatively low levels of expenditures for illegal immigration, the light blue states. They are all located far away from the U.S.-Mexico border with relatively small population levels. West Virginia is perhaps an exceptional state, seeing that it is surrounded by red and dark red. We can speculate that this is likely due to the fact that West Virginia has a struggling economy which actually contracted last year.

    We should add that the source for the numbers in our viz come from a partisan outfit. The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) advocates for legislation designed to decrease immigration, and you can poke holes in their methodology. For example, suppose immigrants really are paying less in income taxes because of their illegal status. Forbes estimates that granting them amnesty would actually boost their state tax contributions by $2.1 billion. That’s the exact opposite conclusion than what FAIR would like you to believe.

    That being said, here’s a list breaking down the States with the highest expenditures for illegal immigration according to FAIR.

    1. California – $23,038,125,353

    2. Texas – $10,994,614,550

    3. New York – $7,489,141,357

    4. Florida – $6,290,429,108

    5. New Jersey – $4,466,838,574

    6. Illinois – $3,220,767,517

    7. Georgia – $2,487,719,503

    8. North Carolina – $2,437,965,113

    9. Maryland – $2,378,996,947

    10.   Arizona – $2,314,131,964

    Remember, these numbers only look at the net expenditures that states spend on illegal immigration, and they say nothing about other contributions to the economy. Any way you cut it though, whenever states are spending billions of dollars on something, it’s worth taking a hard look at where the money is going and why.

  • Bitcoin, Nuclear War, And The "Real World Use" Argument

    Authored by Tom Luongo,

    I received a comment this morning challenging my contention that Bitcoin should be thought of as a foundational asset for the crypto-based monetary system.

    With Bitcoin topping $11,000, arguments like this continue to be made by gold-bugs (of which I’m one) and hard-asset enthusiasts because they make fundamental errors in their analysis of Bitcoin.

    And it’s important, in my mind, to counter those arguments to help the community refine its response to them rather than simply dismiss them.

    The Bitcoin/Gold Conundrum

    Like gold, Bitcoin should sit at the bottom of the crypto-version of John Exter’s inverted pyramid which describes the monetary system.

    The comment can be found here in full.  The commenter means well, but misses a fundamental point that most hard asset enthusiasts miss about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general.

    I’m going to break it down step by step because I believe it’s a perfect illustration of how one wrong assumption can lead to a wrong conclusion.

    Comment: Why do you think gold belongs to the bottom of exter’s pyramid and diamonds/gemstones are found near the top…?

    First, gold belongs at the bottom of Exter’s Pyramid because it is the only asset in that mix that has zero counter-party risk.  Everything else is secondary.

    So, to begin the argument in earnest, do Bitcoins have counter-party risk?  No.

    No one can issue Bitcoins that someone else, by Bitcoin’s very nature, has a claim to.

    You may pledge your Bitcoins as collateral for some other transaction, but that transaction, say a loan denominated in Bitcoins, is what has counter-party risk, not the Bitcoin itself.  Just like gold.

    So, it could qualify as a reserve asset like gold.  Okay, step #1 completed.

     [Comment continues:] …that is because gold has certain physical properties that are intrinsic to its values while diamonds/gemstones don’t have… from ancient times until modern times… the properties of gold like good conductivity of heat and electricity… resistance to corrosion and oxidation… high malleable.. it makes physical gold to be ACTUALLY useful… diamonds and gemstones don’t have all these properties.. although diamonds is still useful for making into extremely strong diamond cutters…

    However, many things have zero counter-party risk, for example diamonds. But diamonds are terrible mediums of exchange, as he points out.  The rest of this portion of the comment does a credible job of explaining gold’s rise as money and satisfying Mises’ Regression Theorem.

    But the diamond-cutter argument applies to gold.  Gold is more fungible than diamonds. But gold is not fungible compared to the dollar or Bitcoin.

    Money is liquid.  You can receive it now and immediately exchange it for something else.

    Property that isn’t money has time-risk. Finding a buyer of your non-money property is the risk of losing value in the transaction.

    This is the fundamental problem with barter.  It’s why gold no longer satisfies, except in specific situations, as a good medium of exchange.

    Bitcoin has tremendous liquidity when you realize that 10 minutes to fully clear a transaction is stupendously fast compared to the three days behind the scenes that the average credit card transaction takes.

    The Digital Road Not Taken

    Now onto the next portion of his argument:

    as for bitcoins… it doesn’t have ACTUAL use… so it is more useless compared to diamonds/gemstones…

    This is where so many hard asset enthusiasts go wrong.  Bitcoin does have actual use.  We wanted something like Bitcoin to use as money before it existed.

    There was latent demand for a digital asset with its properties.  We wanted something better than the dollar, so someone, Satoshi Nakamoto, created it.

    That latent demand for a money like Bitcoin imbued it with value from the moment the software started building the blockchain.

    Bitcoins are encrypted packets of information.

    Do encrypted packets of information traversing the Internet not have use?  Yes.

    If they don’t, then why do we send them?  We wouldn’t.

    If we do, then they must have value.

    So, it follows, that certain types of encrypted packets will potentially have more value than others.  In this case the signed, hashed, confirmed and stored packets represented by the nine-year old Bitcoin blockchain has a lot more value than literally most of the information on the internet.

    So, we have the perception of value, we have zero counter-party risk all we lack is use.

    Does anyone use Bitcoin?  Yes. This is self-evident.

    That is its ACTUAL USE.

    Bitcoin came into existence to solve the very modern problem of centrally-issued debt-based monetary units and the corruption of our society those monetary units engender.

    And it had to do so better than gold.

    The World Bitcoin Could Make

    All of those things make it a foundation for a new monetary system. This is not to say gold will not be part of this system or that there can be only one system.

    In fact, as we move forward I expect to see the nascent crypto-system and the current debt-based one merge.  Gold alongside Bitcoin and other Bitcoin-like coins with strong blockchains and hashing networks will form that foundation.

    Commenter Concludes: in the worst case scenario if we have global nuclear fallout and whatever remaining humans degenerate back into stone age days where we resort to barter trade for survival… then nobody will want bitcoins while gold/silver will STILL survive…

     

    of cos.. the worst case scenario may never happen… or at least not in a few centuries… then bitcoin may well survive all the other kinds of crisis…

     

    so… I don’t agree that bitcoins can substitute gold/silver…

    As for post-Nuclear War, if conditions change that radically then the value of everything changes radically.

    In this case, there is no ‘financial system,’ Exter’s Pyramid or the like. 

    There is survival and not even gold is useful until civilization and the division of labor are sophisticated enough to support such concepts.

    Bitcoin is the money we are choosing to take human society to the next level. If we don’t get there all of this is moot.  QED.

    At which point the cycle starts all over again.

    *  *  *

    I want to thank “wacky” for his thoughtful comment, even if I disagreed with it.  That is the point of forums like this, discussion in order to clarify truths.

  • Killer Millennials: The Era Of Destruction Has Started

    According to Neil Howe, the Fourth Turning is a crisis and it’s happening right now.

    The United States is in an era of great destruction, as the old institutional way of life created by past generations is being systematically destroyed by the incoming generation i.e. the millennials. This transitional period is cyclical and has happened before – most recently during the Great Crash of 1929. Creative destruction is essential for the nation’s survival, as the millennials are rewriting America’s next journey – much different than before.

    Already, the preferences of millennials’ are killing dozens of industries such as department stores, diamonds, food chains, and real estate. Life decisions such as marriage and a starter home are being delayed or totally abandoned. Millennials are swamped with student- and other forms of toxic-debt in a period of wage stagnation that makes their financial mobility limited.

    They will be the first generation not to achieve the American Dream, along with a lower standard of living than their parents.

    Given the backdrop of America’s transition induced by millennials in a fiat system that is considered late-stage. Cracked provides a 3-minute breakdown of why millennials are killing industries.

    The video focuses on the diamond industry and provides various motives of why millennials aren’t buying the precious stone.

    In particular, the video makes the point millennials are heavily in-debt and cannot afford marriage, thus breaking the long lasting cycle of tying the knot, which usually involves buying a diamond ring. Not anymore, millennials are broke.. And there goes the diamond scarcity that was produced by prior generations who could afford to get married.

    Soon the American Dream will have to be redefined in accordance with the millennials.

    Spoiler alert: there will be no family, goldendoodle, and or white picket fence in the new normal Millennial American Dream. It will be the attempt to go debt-free.

  • How A North Korean EMP Attack Could Kill Millions And Turn America Into A Post-Apocalyptic Wasteland

    Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

    This is why North Korea’s test of an intercontinental ballistic missile is so important.  North Korea had test fired a total of 22 missiles so far this year, but this latest one showed that nobody on the globe is out of their reach.  In fact, General Mattis is now admitting that “North Korea can basically threaten everywhere in the world”, and that includes the entire continental United States.  In addition to hitting individual cities with nukes, there is also the possibility that someday North Korea could try to take down the entire country with an EMP attack. 

    If the North Koreans detonated a single nuclear warhead several hundred miles above the center of the country, it would destroy the power grid and fry electronics from coast to coast.

    I would like you to think about what that would mean for a few moments.  Suddenly there would be no power at home, at work or at school.  Since nearly all of our vehicles rely on computerized systems, you wouldn’t be able to go anywhere and nobody would be able to get to you.  And you wouldn’t be able to contact anyone because all phones would be dead.  Basically, pretty much everything electronic would be dead.  I am talking about computers, televisions, GPS devices, ATMs, heating and cooling systems, refrigerators, credit card readers, gas pumps, cash registers, hospital equipment, traffic lights, etc.

    For the first couple of days life would continue somewhat normally, but then people would soon start to realize that the power isn’t coming back on and panic would begin to erupt.

    The intercontinental ballistic missile that North Korea just launched traveled almost 1,000 kilometers and reached a maximum altitude of 4,500 kilometers.  We have been told for decades that this would never be allowed to happen, but now it has happened…

    This is concerning for one big reason: according to General Mattis, the North Korean ICBM “went higher, frankly, than any previous” and “North Korea can basically threaten everywhere in the world.”

     

    This was confirmed by North Korea missile analyst, Shea Cotton, who cited Allthingsnuclear author David Wright, and who told the BBC that the initial estimates of the ICBM test mean that North Korea can now reach New York and Washington DC.

    If we had been working hard to develop our anti-missile technology all these years, this wouldn’t be a problem.

    But at this point we are way behind the Russians in this regard, and there is a very real possibility that a missile launched by the North Koreans could make it through the very limited anti-missile defenses that we do have.

    Once upon a time, discussions about a North Korean EMP threat were mostly hypothetical, but now that has completely changed.  North Korea has clearly demonstrated that they are able to deliver such an attack, and last September Kim Jong Un publicly admitted that North Korea intended to develop this capability…

    But most reporters missed a key threat that appeared at the bottom of Kim’s public statement, when he bragged that North Korea had harnessed “a multi-functional thermonuclear nuke with great destructive power which can be detonated at high altitudes for super-powerful EMP (electromagnetic pulse) attack according to strategic goals.”

     

    So now we know. Launching an electromagnetic pulse attacks against its enemies is one of North Korea’s strategic goals. And for North Korea, the United States is the top enemy.

    And like I said earlier, all it would take would be a single well placed nuclear detonation to fry electronics from coast to coast.  The following comes from the Daily Mail…

    Theoretically, a sufficiently powerful bomb detonated at an altitude of 249 miles would wipe out all electronics in the US, save the southernmost top of Florida and the easternmost states – as well as affecting Canada and Mexico.

    Without power, nothing would get distributed.  That means that very rapidly there would be no food, no water and no medicine available in your community.  An article posted by Fox News this week used the term “post-apocalyptic” to describe what we would be facing…

    It all starts to sound very post-apocalyptic when you realize this means no lights or other electric-powered devices in homes and businesses, no water filtration, no regional food hubs, no transportation grid – none of the things we take for granted in modern civilization.

    Like I stated earlier, things would be relatively fine for a few days, but then once everyone realizes that the power isn’t coming back on there would be chaos on a scale unlike anything we have ever seen before.  The following comes from an article by Mac Slavo…

    The first 24 – 48 hours after such an occurrence will lead to confusion among the general population as traditional news acquisition sources like television, radio and cell phone networks will be non-functional.

     

    Within a matter of days, once people realize the power might not be coming back on and grocery store shelves start emptying, the entire system will begin to delve into chaos.

     

    Within 30 days a mass die off will have begun as food supplies dwindle, looters and gangs turn to violent extremes, medicine can’t be restocked and water pump stations fail.

    So what kind of a “mass die off” would we be talking about?

    Well, some of the top experts in the field believe that “up to 90 percent of all Americans” could end up dead if the power outage lasted long enough…

    William Graham, chairman of the former EMP commission and its former chief of staff, Peter Vincent Pry, warned the hearing that such an attack could “shut down the US electric power grid for an indefinite period, leading to the death within a year of up to 90 percent of all Americans.“

    Others believe that the figure would be lower, but pretty much everyone agrees that the death toll would be in the millions.

    This is one of our greatest strategic vulnerabilities, and our power grid could be hardened against an EMP attack for just a few billion dollars.  This is something that I am pushing very hard for, but right now it is just not a priority for our leaders in Washington.

    In fact, they have actually pulled funding from the commission that was looking into the EMP threat…

    On Sept. 30, the Congressional Commission to Assess the Threat of Electromagnetic Pulse to the United States of America shut its doors after a failure to secure funding from Congress.

    Sometimes I find it difficult to come up with the words to describe how incredibly foolish Congress is being.

    An EMP attack is a greater threat than ever before, and yet Congress didn’t even want to come up with a little bit of funding for the commission that was working on a plan to protect us.

    This is yet another example that shows that we need new leadership on Capitol Hill, because right now the people that we have “representing” us in Washington seem to be completely and utterly clueless about almost everything.

    *  *  *

    Michael Snyder is a Republican candidate for Congress in Idaho’s First Congressional District, and you can learn how you can get involved in the campaign on his official website. His new book entitled “Living A Life That Really Matters” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.

  • Nervous About Traffic Stops? I Am. You Should Be, Too

    Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

    We’ve all been there before.

    You’re driving along and you see a pair of flashing blue lights in your rearview mirror. Whether or not you’ve done anything wrong, you get a sinking feeling in your stomach.

    You’ve read enough news stories, seen enough headlines, and lived in the American police state long enough to be anxious about any encounter with a cop that takes place on the side of the road.

    For better or worse, from the moment you’re pulled over, you’re at the mercy of law enforcement officers who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to “serve and protect.”

    This is what I call “blank check policing,” in which the police get to call all of the shots.

    So if you’re nervous about traffic stops, you have every reason to be.

    Trying to predict the outcome of any encounter with the police is a bit like playing Russian roulette: most of the time you will emerge relatively unscathed, although decidedly poorer and less secure about your rights, but there’s always the chance that an encounter will turn deadly.

    For instance, it was just a year ago, in the early morning hours of Dec. 1, 2016, when Gregory Tucker, a young African-American man, was pulled over by Louisiana police for a broken taillight.

    What should have been a routine traffic stop became yet another example of police brutality in America.

    According to the lawsuit that was filed in federal court by The Rutherford Institute, Tucker was thrown to the ground by police, beaten, arrested and hospitalized for severe injuries to his face and arm, allegedly in retaliation for “resisting arrest” by driving to a safe, well-lit area before submitting to a traffic stop for a broken tail light.

    Mind you, this young man complied with police. He just didn’t do it fast enough to suit their purposes.

    If this young man is “guilty” of anything, he’s guilty of ticking off the cops by being cautious, concerned for his safety, and all too aware of the dangers faced by young black men during encounters with the police.

    Frankly, you don’t even have to be young or black or a man to fear for your life during an encounter with the police.

    Just consider the growing numbers of unarmed people are who being shot and killed just for standing a certain way, or moving a certain way, or holding something—anything—that police could misinterpret to be a gun, or igniting some trigger-centric fear in a police officer’s mind that has nothing to do with an actual threat to their safety.

    At a time when police can do no wrong – at least in the eyes of the courts, police unions and politicians dependent on their votes—and a “fear” for officer safety is used to justify all manner of police misconduct, “we the people” are at a severe disadvantage.

    Add a traffic stop to the mix, and that disadvantage increases dramatically.

    According to the Justice Department, the most common reason for a citizen to come into contact with the police is being a driver in a traffic stop.

    On average, one in 10 Americans gets pulled over by police.

    Indeed, police officers have been given free range to pull anyone over for a variety of reasons.

    This free-handed approach to traffic stops has resulted in drivers being stopped for windows that are too heavily tinted, for driving too fast, driving too slow, failing to maintain speed, following too closely, improper lane changes, distracted driving, screeching a car’s tires, and leaving a parked car door open for too long.

    Motorists can also be stopped by police for driving near a bar or on a road that has large amounts of drunk driving, driving a certain make of car (Mercedes, Grand Prix and Hummers are among the most ticketed vehicles), having anything dangling from the rearview mirror (air fresheners, handicap parking permits, troll transponders or rosaries), displaying pro-police bumper stickers, having acne, appearing nervous or driving with a stiff posture.

    In other words, drivers beware.

    Traffic stops aren’t just dangerous. They can be downright deadly.

    From the moment those lights start flashing and that siren goes off, we’re all in the same boat.

    Survival is the key.

    Technically, you have the right to remain silent (beyond the basic requirement to identify yourself and show your registration). You have the right to refuse to have your vehicle searched. You have the right to film your interaction with police. You have the right to ask to leave. You also have the right to resist an unlawful order such as a police officer directing you to extinguish your cigarette, put away your phone or stop recording them.

    However, there is a price for asserting one’s rights. That price grows more costly with every passing day.

    If you ask cops and their enablers what Americans should do to stay alive during encounters with police, they will tell you to comply, cooperate, obey, not resist, not argue, not make threatening gestures or statements, avoid sudden movements, and submit to a search of their person and belongings. 

    The problem, of course, is what to do when compliance is not enough.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, every day we hear about situations in which unarmed Americans complied and still died during an encounter with police simply because they appeared to be standing in a “shooting stance” or held a cell phone or a garden hose or carried around a baseball bat or answered the front door or held a spoon in a threatening manner or ran in an aggressive manner holding a tree branch or wandered around naked or hunched over in a defensive posture or made the mistake of wearing the same clothes as a carjacking suspect (dark pants and a basketball jersey) or dared to leave an area at the same time that a police officer showed up or had a car break down by the side of the road or were deaf or homeless or old.

    Frankly, the only truly compliant, submissive and obedient citizen in a police state is a dead one.

    If you’re starting to feel somewhat overwhelmed, intimidated and fearful for your life and the lives of your loved ones, you should be.

    You should be very afraid.

    I am.

     

  • Millennials Saved Thanksgiving Weekend

    While online spending surged, the overall picture for Thanksgiving weekend spending was more mixed as the traditional “bricks and mortar” retailers continued to struggle. Nevertheless, overall spending was about 4% higher. The National Retail Foundation (NRF) estimated that 174 million Americans shopped online or in stores over the period (Thursday to Monday), versus 164 million the previous year, although the latter excluded Cyber Monday. According to Bloomberg.

    “The big takeaway here is: Gone are the days you could measure the success of this weekend by looking at a single metric,” NRF Chief Executive Officer Matthew Shay said on a conference call.

    It’s also difficult to tell from the NRF data how e-commerce sales compared with brick-and-mortar shopping. But other surveys have indicated that physical chains saw smaller crowds this year. The research firm ShopperTrak found that shopper visits declined 1.6 percent combined on Thanksgiving and Black Friday.

    Overall spending in the holiday season is expected to rise as much as 4 percent from last year, helped by low unemployment and rising home values. The purchases will amount to about $680 billion in November and December, the Washington-based NRF has estimated.

    However, there is no doubt about the strength of the online sector and mobile in particular.

    The Thanksgiving shopping season was record-breaking measured by the total level of online spending and the big shift towards mobile to both browse and buy. Adobe, which measures 80% of online transactions from 100 major US retailers, estimated that $5.03 billion was spent on Black Friday, $2.82 billion on “Small Business Saturday” and $6.59 billion on Cyber Monday – the largest ever online sales day in history and 16.8% higher than a year ago. According to Adobe, mobile devices accounted for between 46% and 54% of all site visits, and between 30% and 37% of all sales, on those days, the biggest proportion yet.

    In part, as Bloomberg notes, the strength in online and mobile shopping reflects the growing spending power of “older millennials” in the 25-34 age range.

    The kickoff to the holiday shopping season brought mixed results to retailers, with traffic falling at many stores. But don’t blame older millennials. Shoppers in that age group, which ranges from 25 to 34, were the biggest spenders during the long Thanksgiving weekend, according to the National Retail Federation. Older millennials shelled out $419.52 during the five-day stretch, 25 percent more than the overall average.

    The survey findings reflect the growing clout of millennials in their 20s and 30s, especially as more of them form families and enter prime spending years. Still, their higher profile is a mixed blessing for retailers. Such shoppers are more likely to buy online — often using their phones — meaning brick-and-mortar storefronts won’t see as much of a traffic bump.

    The trade group’s survey, conducted by Prosper Insights & Analytics, found that 64.6 million Americans shopped both online and in stores. That compares with 58.4 million who shopped online and 51.6 million on who only went to stores.

    In terms of product categories, clothing was the biggest over the holiday weekend followed by toys, books and electronics. Despite the hollowing out of America’s traditional retail sector, the NRF has a positive spin on the industry’s evolution.

    “We were very encouraged that what we saw was strong engagement across the board, both in stores an online,” Shay said. “That validates the investment retailers are making to reach customers in multiple ways.”

    Since peak spending normally occurs between the years of 45-48 years old, we hope that "older millennials" are not exhausting their buying power prematurely due to their online and mobile addictions.

  • Fed's Kashkari Responds To Zero Hedge: "The Fed's Job Is Not To Protect Investors"

    Former Goldmanite and current Minneapolis Fed president, Neel Kashkari, conducted another #AskNeel session on Twitter where the dovish FOMC voter (he was the only one to dissent to the Fed’s rate hike decision earlier this year) received numerous questions. Among them was the following one from Zero Hedge:

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    His response:

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    The answer echoed a similar response from back in March, when he claimed that he doesn’t “care about stock market fall itself. Care abt potential financial instability. Stock market drop unlikely to trigger crisis.”

    Needless to say, Kashkari’s answer was token, superficial and condescending: while he is right that the tech bubble bursting didn’t cause a crisis, the Fed’s dramatic easing in response to the bursting of the tech bubble bursting lay the foundations for the housing and credit bubble; in other words, the Fed responded to one bubble by creating an even bigger bubble, and the bursting of that bubble in 2007/2008 did cause a crisis: the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression to be precise. And, in turn, the bursting of the current global financial bubble – in which the Fed has been joined by all other central banks to inject $20 trillion in global liquidity, or a third of global GDP – and is the biggest in history, will have a far more disastrous outcome than the last one.

    Kashkari also said that “we don’t see leverage building across the economy the way it did in housing run-up”, which of course is a surprisingly naive way of looking at leverage, especially following last night’s explanation from Fasakanara that when one takes into account ehe world’s vol-sellers, it’s all just one giant, $22 trillion position shorting volatility with record gama and all-time high leverage, both explicit and synthetic.  Which also makes his next statement that the Fed needs “to worry about what would trigger a real crisis” especially bizarre: we now live in a world in which the market itself, thanks to QE and NIRP, has become systemic risk (see “”It’s All One Single, Giant $22 Trillion Position”: How Market Risk Became Systemic Risk“).

    The fact that, as Kashkari confirms, the Fed is completely oblivious to its footprint and impact in the market should be terrifying to anyone. Well, anyone but not traders because despite what Kashkari also claimed, namely that “If stocks correct – fine“, one thing we can be certain of is that the moment stocks have a 5-10% swoon, the Fed will be right back assuring traders that it will ease back on its tightening, if not launch QE4 (right, James Bullard?)

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    But wait, it gets better, because in the very next question, immediately after stating that the Fed’s job is not to protect investors, in response to a question whether the Fed creates moral hazard by keeping rates extra low, Kashkari answers that “If we raised interest rates to drive down the stock market, how does that help workers/wages/employment?” Or investors, for that matter. But the point is that the Fed quite clearly is intent on keeping stocks high.

    The punchline: his very next statement: “If Greenspan had acted on his irrational exuberance call the economic costs may have been high.”

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    Here’s a thought: if Greenspan had acted on his “irrational exuberance” call, there would have been pain, yes, but there would never be a tech bubble, and there would never be a global financial crisis, Lehman, AIG or trillions and trillions in central bank liquidity keeping the global financial system propped up now. In fact, Kashkari’s statement once again demonstrates just how utterly clueless the “macroprudential regulators” at the Fed truly are.

    * * *

    There were some other tangential, but notable insights from the Minneapolis Fed president. One was his accurate observation that the Fed’s constantly wrong dot plots have destroyed the Fed’s credibility:

    I’m not a fan of the dot plot. Forward guidance is a wonderful tool. Forward misguidance may do harm and undermine our credibility.  I would rather only give guidance when we are pretty sure about the path forward

    In response to whether the Fed’s ZIRP was responsible for “zombie companies” in the shale patch and the record glut of oil inventory, the former Goldmanite was non-commital:

    I think low interest rates brought down costs for people and businesses to invest – across sectors. That is what they were designed to do. But commodity markets always have cycles of under and overinvestment.

    When asked how US investors are supposed to compete with foreign buyers of US stocks, including such buyers as the Swiss National Bank which is price-indescriminate as it creates money out of thin air, Kashkari’s response:

    It is a global market for investors.  I don’t think US economic growth would be stronger if we forbade foreign investment.  If we can get job and wage growth up, that will help regular Americans make ends meet and save for their futures.

    That Kashkari explicitly ignored the stated implication, namely that foreign central banks buying US stocks has led to a giant asset bubble, was one more warning either how clueless or how devious and premeditated this entire asset reflation experiment truly is.

    Kashkari was also asked if the Fed would “ever consider forgiving the Treasury debt on its books?” to which the answer– sadly for the Magic Money Treers who have no grasp of elementary finance –  was “No. That would violate our independence and likely cause high inflation as people lost confidence in the Fed’s independence.“

    Among the other interesting exchanges was a question if the Fed plans on using blockchain in the future, where the response was that “researches around the Fed System are looking at it (and other fintech developments).  Too soon to know how and if it will be used by the Fed.”

    Kashkari also touched on inflation price targeting: when asked “What level of inflation would be a reason to ‘tap the brakes’?” He responded that, as price targeting would suggest, “2% core PCE on a 12-month basis would be a good place to start. We’ve been 1.3% for 5+ years so we should be comfortable at 2.7% for 5+ years. That’s what we are saying when we call it a target and not a ceiling.” In other words, Kashkari supports doubling the rate of core inflation for the next 5 years.

    Finally when asked “at what point does the flattening of the Treasury curve become a concern for the Fed?” Kashkari responded that “it’s a concern now. We r raising rates, driving the front end up, meanwhile inflation expectations r low keeping the long end anchored. The more we commit to driving rates higher (regardless of data), the more we risk pressuring inflation expectations to the downside.” He has good reason to be concerned: the flatter – and eventually inverted – the curve gets, the more the market is telling the Fed what should be obvious to everyone, if not Kashkari: that the Fed has lost control, as Citi warned last week.

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