- US Challenges China's Belt And Road With New Global Infrastructure Scheme
US Challenges China’s Belt And Road With New Global Infrastructure Scheme
The Trump administration has spent the last several years, bashing China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and calling it a ‘debt trap’ and urging countries around the world to resist allowing China to build infrastructure projects in their respected countries. The motive behind US officials attempting to discredit the BRI is because of Washington’s new plan to launch a similar infrastructure scheme.
High standards deliver high impact!
Unveiled today, #BlueDotNetwork will set the standard for global #infrastructure development. 🏗️
How the U.S. is collaborating with partners like @dfat to foster free, open, & prosperous societies: https://t.co/SZMJF0LRNQ #IndoPacificBizForum pic.twitter.com/RqFqwdKztp
— OPIC.gov (@opicgov) November 4, 2019
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
The US Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), and Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC) have unveiled on Monday the American-led Blue Dot Network, a global “sustainable infrastructure development in the Indo-Pacific region and around the world,” read an OPIC press release.
“The development of critical infrastructure—when it is led by the private sector and supported on terms that are transparent, sustainable, and socially and environmentally responsible—is foundational to widespread economic empowerment,” said OPIC’s David Bohigian. “Through Blue Dot Network, the United States is proud to join key partners to fully unlock the power of quality infrastructure to foster unprecedented opportunity, progress, and stability.”
“This endorsement of Blue Dot Network not only creates a solid foundation for infrastructure global trust standards but reinforces the need for the establishment of umbrella global trust standards in other sectors, including digital, mining, financial services, and research,” said US Department of State Under Secretary for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment Keith Krach. “Such global trust standards, which are based on respect for transparency and accountability, sovereignty of property and resources, local labor and human rights, rule of law, the environment, and sound governance practices in procurement and financing, have been driven not just by private sector companies and civil society but also by governments around the world.”
“Australia is committed to promoting high-quality infrastructure, inclusive approaches, and facilitating private sector investment in the Indo-Pacific region,” said DFAT Deputy Secretary Richard Maude. “I’m pleased that this commitment is shared by East Asia Summit Leaders, and we look forward to working closely with our regional partners to develop Blue Dot Network to take action on this commitment.”
“Blue Dot Network is an initiative that leads to the promotion of quality infrastructure investment committed by G20 countries,” said Maeda. “As JBIC has a long history of infrastructure finance all over the world, JBIC is pleased to share such experience and contribute to further development of Blue Dot Network.”
Wilbur Ross, the US commerce secretary, told the Financial Times ahead of the launch: “Each blue dot is meant to be a dot on the map that will be a safe place for companies to operate if they are interested in sustainable infrastructure projects…The point is to show seriousness about the sustainability of projects.”
The Blue Dot Network is being developed by the Trump administration to be a direct competitor to China’s BRI.
The Lowry Institute’s Asia Power Index shows the US remains the top power in Asia. Still, there are troubling signs that China is quickly gaining ground, likely to displace the US in the coming decade.
“The US remains an important, but not the primary economic player in Asia,” said Hervé Lemahieu, head of Lowy’s Asian Power and Diplomacy Programme. “They’ve got to get used to that.”
Washington’s role in the world has diminished in the last decade since China launched BRI in more than 152 countries in Asia, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas.
The next big fight across the world is BRI versus The Blue Dot Network. The world economy is being fractured — this will only create heightened volatility in the years ahead.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 11/05/2019 – 01:00 - American Conspiracies & Cover-Ups
American Conspiracies & Cover-Ups
Authored by Douglas Citignano via Off-Guardian.org,
In today’s world, the phrase “conspiracy theory” is pejorative and has a negative connotation. To many people, a conspiracy theory is an irrational, over-imaginative idea endorsed by people looking for attention and not supported by the mainstream media or government.
History shows, though, that there have been many times when governments or individuals have participated in conspiracies. It would be naïve to think that intelligence agencies, militaries, government officials, and politicians don’t sometimes cooperate in covert, secretive ways.
Following are five instances when it’s been proven that the government engaged in a conspiracy.
THE GULF OF TONKIN RESOLUTION
On August 4, 1964, Captain John J. Herrick, the commander of the USS Maddox, a US Navy vessel that was on an intelligence-gathering mission in the Gulf of Tonkin, reported to the White House and Pentagon that North Vietnamese patrol boats had fired torpedoes at his ship, and, so, the Maddox had fired back.
Two days later, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara testified to the Congress that he was certain that the Maddox had been attacked. On August 7, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was passed, the Congressional act that allowed President Johnson free reign to commence war; Johnson immediately ordered air strikes on North Vietnam and the Vietnam War—which would eventually kill fifty-eight thousand Americans and two million Asians—was underway.
Since then, it has been shown and proven that no North Vietnamese boats ever fired on the Maddox, and that McNamara had been untruthful when he testified before Congress. According to the official publication of the Naval Institute,
…once-classified documents and tapes released in the past several years, combined with previously uncovered facts, make clear that high government officials distorted facts and deceived the American public about events that led to full US involvement in the Vietnam War.”
In the weeks prior to the Gulf of Tonkin incident, South Vietnamese ships had been attacking posts in North Vietnam in conjunction with the CIA’s Operation 34A. According to many inside sources, the Johnson administration wanted a full-scale war in Vietnam and through Operation 34A was trying to provoke North Vietnam into an attack that would give Johnson an excuse to go to war. But when McNamara was asked by the Congress on August 7 if these South Vietnam attacks had anything to do with the US military and CIA, McNamara lied and said no.
Within hours after reporting that the Maddox had been attacked, Captain Herrick was retracting his statements and reporting to the White House and Pentagon that “in all likelihood” an over-eager sonar man had been mistaken and that the sonar sounds and images that he originally thought were enemy torpedoes were actually just the beat of the Maddox’s own propellers.
Herrick reported that there was a good probability that there had been no attack on the Maddox, and suggested “complete reevaluation before any action is taken.”
McNamara saw these new, updated reports and discussed them with President Johnson early in the afternoon of August 4. Even though this was so, on the evening of August 4, President Johnson went on national television and announced to the American public that North Vietnam had engaged in “unprovoked aggression” and, so, the US military was retaliating.
A few days after the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, Johnson remarked, “Hell, those damn stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish.”
Recently, new documents related to the Gulf of Tonkin incident have been declassified and according to Robert Hanyok, a historian for the National Security Agency, these documents show that the NSA deliberately “distorted intelligence” andand “altered documents” to make it appear that an attack had occurred on August 4.
When President Lyndon Johnson misrepresented to the American public and said he knew that North Vietnam had attacked a US ship, and when Defense Secretary Robert McNamara lied to the Congress and said he was sure that the Maddox had been attacked and that the CIA had nothing to do with South Vietnam aggression, and when NSA officials falsified information to make it appear that there had been an attack on the Maddox, that was a government conspiracy.
OPERATION NORTHWOODS
In 1962, the most powerful and highest ranking military officials of the US government, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, felt strongly that the communist leader Fidel Castro had to be removed from power and, so, came up with a plan to justify an American invasion of Cuba.
The plan, entitled Operations Northwoods, was presented to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on March 13, 1962, and was signed by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Lyman L. Lemnitzer.
Operations Northwoods was a proposal for a false flag operation, a plan in which a military organizes an attack against its own country and then frames and blames the attack on another country for the purpose of the purpose of initiating hostilities and declaring war on that country.
The proposal was originally labeled Top Secret but was made public on November 18, 1997, by the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board. The complete Operation Northwoods paper was published online by the National Security Archive on April 30, 2001, and this once-secret government document can now be read by anyone.
The actions that General Lemnitzer and the other chiefs wanted to d to take under Operations Northwoods are shocking. According to the plan, CIA and military personnel and hired provocateurs would commit various violent acts and these acts would be blamed on Castro to “create the necessary impression of Cuban rashness and irresponsibility” and “put the United States in the apparent position of suffering defensible grievances.”
One of the most ambitious plans of Operation Northwoods was to blow up a plane in midflight. The strategy was to fill a civilian airplane with CIA and military personnel who were registered under fake ID’s; an exact duplicate plane—an empty military drone aircraft—would take off at the same exact time.
The plane of fake passengers would land at a military base but the empty drone plane would fly over Cuba and crash in the ocean, supposedly a victim of Cuban missiles. “Casualty lists in US newspapers” and conducting “fake funerals for mock-victims” would cause “a helpful wave of national indignation” in America.
The Operation Northwoods proposal also states: “We could blow up a US ship and blame Cuba.” Whether the ship was to be empty or full of US soldiers is unclear. The document also says: “Hijacking attempts against US civil air and surface craft should be encouraged.”
Some of the recommendations of Operation Northwoods would have surely led to serious injuries and even deaths of Cuban and American civilians. The plan suggests:
We could sink a boatload of Cubans on route to Florida (real or simulated).”
And:
We could foster attempts on lives of anti-Castro Cubans in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized…We could explode a few bombs in carefully chosen spots.”
Lemnitzer and the chiefs wanted many of these staged terrorist attacks to be directed at the Guantanamo Bay United States Naval Base in Cuba. The plans were:
-
“Start riots near the entrance to the base”
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“lob mortar shells from outside the base to inside the base”
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“blow up ammunition inside the base; start fires”
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“burn aircraft on airbase (sabotage)”
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“sabotage ship in harbor; large fires—napalm.”
When Secretary of Defense McNamara was presented with the Operation Northwoods plan, he either stopped and rejected the plan himself or passed it on to President Kennedy and JFK then rejected it. But if Kennedy and McNamara had agreed with the plan, then the Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted to begin enacting Operation Northwoods “right away, within a few months.”
Even though Operation Northwoods was never initiated, when the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the other highest-ranking military officials of the United States Government planned to organize violent attacks on Americans and anti-Castro Cuban citizens, knowing those attacks could severely injure and kill those citizens, and when they planned to blame those attacks on Cuba and then use that as an excuse to invade Cuba, that was a government conspiracy.
FBI AND THE MAFIA
In March 1965, the FBI had the house of New England organized crime boss Raymond Patriarca wiretapped and overheard two mobsters, Joseph Barboza and Vincent Flemmi, asking Patriarca for permission to kill another gangster, Edward Deegan. Two days later, Deegan’s blood-soaked body was found dead in a Boston alley.
Within days, an official FBI report confirmed that Joseph Barboza and three other mobsters were the murderers. Instead of those men going to prison for murder, though, three years later a man named Joseph Salvati was brought to trial for the murder of Edward Deegan. At that trial Joseph Barboza testified and lied that Salvati was one of the murderers. On the basis of Barboza’s testimony, Joseph Salvati was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison.
At that time, in the mid 1960s, the FBI was being pressured more and more to do something to stop organized crime. The bureau began using members of the mafia—criminals and murderers—to inform against fellow mafia members. Joseph Barboza was one of these FBI-protected, paid informants. The FBI didn’t want Barboza to go to prison for the murder of Deegan because they wanted him to continue infiltrating the mafia and testifying against other mafia members.
The bureau, apparently, did want a conviction in the Deegan murder case, though, and, so, let Barboza lie under oath and let a man they knew to be innocent, Joseph Salvati, go to prison.
The Witness Protection Program was first created for Joseph Barboza, and Barboza was the first mafia informant to be protected under the program. After helping to convict a number of mobsters, Barboza was sent off to live in California. While under the Witness Protection Program, Barboza committed at least one more murder, and probably more.
On trial for a murder in California, FBI officials showed up for Joseph Barboza’s trial and testified on his behalf, helping Barboza to get a light sentence.
Joseph Salvati ended up serving thirty years in prison for a murder that he was innocent of. During that thirty-year period, lawyers for Salvati requested documents from the FBI that would have proved Salvati’s innocence, but the bureau refused to release them.
Finally, in 1997, other evidence came forth suggesting Salvati’s innocence and the governor of Massachusetts, William Weld, granted Salvati’s release. A few years later, the FBI was ordered to release all its reports on the case; hundreds of documents showed the FBI knew that Barboza was a murderer, that he had murdered Edward Deegan, and that Joseph Salvati had had nothing to do with the crime.
Salvati was exonerated in a court of law, and was eventually awarded millions of dollars in a civil lawsuit against the government. (Three other defendants were also exonerated. At the 1968 trial, Joseph Barboza had testified that three other men—men who were also not guilty—had participated in Deegan’s murder. These three innocent men were, with Salvati, also sent to prison.)
Perhaps the most shocking thing that the FBI documents showed, though, was that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover himself knew Salvati was innocent and that Barboza had killed Deegan.
Hoover was working closely, almost daily, with the agents handling Joseph Barboza, and it was probably Hoover directing the operation. The congressional committee that investigated the case was the House Committee on Government Reform and Congressman Dan Burton was the chairman.
When asked by CBS’s 60 Minutes journalist Mike Wallace “Did J. Edgar Hoover know all this?” Burton replied:
“Yes . . . It’s one of the greatest failures in the history of American justice…J. Edgar Hoover knew Salvati was innocent. He knew it and his name should not be emblazoned on the FBI headquarters. We should change the name of that building.”
Congressman Burton claimed there was evidence that there were more cases when the FBI did the same sorts of things they did in the Joseph Salvati case; when Burton and his committee requested the files on these cases, the Attorney General and the White House refused to release them.
When FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and top FBI officials let a known murderer lie and perjure himself in a courtroom, when they let four men they knew to be innocent suffer in the hell of a prison cell for thirty years, and when they deliberately covered that up for decades, that was a government conspiracy.
THE MANHATTAN PROJECT
In 1939, Albert Einstein and two other European physicists sent a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt informing Roosevelt that the German government was working on developing the science that could lead to the creation of a nuclear bomb. FDR immediately formed a committee to look into the idea of the US government making an atomic bomb.
In 1942, the Manhattan Project, the United States program to build a nuclear bomb, headed by General Leslie R. Groves of the US Army Corps of Engineers, was formed.
The program existed from 1942–1946, spent two billion dollars, had plants and factories in thirty cities, and employed 130,000 workers. But virtually no one knew about it. The Manhattan Project is considered the “Greatest Secret Ever Kept.”
The US government wanted to keep the Project a secret lest Germany or one of America’s other enemies found out about it and built—more quickly—a larger, better bomb. In the early 1940s, when American scientists began working on splitting atoms and nuclear fission, US government officials asked the scientists to not publish any reports on the work in scientific journals. The work was kept quiet.
In 1943, when newspapers began reporting on the large Manhattan Project construction going on in a few states, the newly formed United States Government Office of Censorship asked newspapers and broadcasters to avoid discussing “atom smashing, atomic energy, atomic fission . . . the use for military purposes of radium or radioactive materials” or anything else that could expose the project. The press kept mum. The government didn’t talk about the Manhattan Project, the press didn’t report on it, and the public knew nothing about it.
Not even the 130,000 Manhattan Project laborers knew they were building an atom bomb.
In 1945, a Life magazine article wrote that before Japan was attacked with a-bombs, “probably no more than a few dozen men in the entire country knew the full meaning of the Manhattan Project, and perhaps only a thousand others even were aware that work on atoms was involved.”
The workers were told they were doing an important job for the government, but weren’t told what the job was, and didn’t understand the full import of the mysterious, daily tasks they were doing. The laborers were warned that disclosing the Project’s secrets was punishable by ten years in prison, and a hefty financial fine.
Whole towns and cities were built where thousands of Manhattan Project workers lived and worked but these thousands didn’t know they were helping to build nuclear bombs.
The Manhattan Project finally became known to the public on August 6, 1945, when President Harry Truman announced that America had dropped a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.
Truman, himself, had not been informed of the Manhattan Project until late April 1945.
When the government kept the purpose of the Manhattan Project a secret from the press, from the public, from America’s enemies, from Harry Truman, and even from the 130,000 laborers who worked for the Manhattan Project, that was a government conspiracy.
THE CHURCH COMMITTEE INVESTIGATION
In the early 1970s, after the Watergate affair and investigative reports by the New York Times, it became apparent that the CIA and other US intelligence agencies might be engaging in inappropriate and illegal activities. In 1975, the Church Committee, named after the Committee’s chairman Senator Frank Church, was formed to investigate abuses by the CIA, NSA, FBI, and IRS.
The Church Committee reports are said to constitute the most extensive investigations of intelligence activities ever made available to the public. Many disturbing facts were revealed. According to the final report of the Committee, US intelligence agencies had been engaging in “unlawful or improper conduct” and “intelligence excesses, at home and abroad” since the administration of President Franklin Roosevelt.
The report added that “intelligence agencies have undermined the Constitutional rights of citizens” and “checks and balances designed by the framers of the Constitution to assure accountability have not been applied.”
One of the most well-known revelations of the Committee was the CIA’s so-called “Family Jewels,” a report that detailed the CIA’s misdeeds dating back to Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency. The committee also reported on the NSA’s SHAMROCK and MINARET programs; under these programs the NSA had been intercepting, opening, and reading the telegrams and mail of thousands of private citizens.
The Church Committee also discovered and exposed the FBI’s COINTELPRO program, the bureau’s program to covertly destroy and disrupt any groups or individuals that J. Edgar Hoover felt were bad for America. Some of the movements and groups that the FBI tried to discredit and destroy were the Civil Rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and individuals such as Martin Luther King Jr.
The most alarming thing that the Church Committee found, though, was that the CIA had an assassination program. It was revealed that the CIA assassinated or had tried to assassinate Dinh Diem of Vietnam, Raphael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, General Rene Schneider of Chile, Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, and other political leaders throughout the world.
The Committee learned about the different ways the CIA had developed to kill and assassinate people: inflicting cancer, inflicting heart attacks, making murders look like suicides, car accidents, boating accidents, and shootings. At one point, CIA Director William Colby presented to the Committee a special “heart attack gun” that the CIA had created. The gun was able to shoot a small poison-laden dart into its victim. The dart was so small as to be undetectable; the victim’s death from the poison would appear to be a heart attack, so no foul play would be suspected.
In response to the Church Committee report, in 1976 President Gerald Ford signed Executive Order 11,905, which forbade employees of the US government from engaging in or conspiring to engage in political assassinations.
In that same year, the Senate approved Senate Resolution 400, which established the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the committee responsible for providing vigilant oversight over the intelligence agencies.
Many former CIA employee-whistleblowers and other people, though, claim that US intelligence agencies are still acting in improper ways. In 2008, it was revealed that the CIA had hired Blackwater, a private company made up of ex-Navy Seals, to track down and assassinate suspected terrorists.
Later in the 2000s, when the Congress formed a committee to investigate if CIA waterboarding and other methods of interrogation constituted torture, congressmen complained that they couldn’t get to the bottom of the matter because CIA officials and the CIA director were lying to the congressional committee.
Forty-five years after the revelations of the Church Committee, it seems US intelligence agencies are still engaging in covert and improper conduct.
When US intelligence agencies and the CIA plot to influence the affairs of foreign nations, when the CIA plots assassinations and assassinates foreign leaders and political dissidents, when the CIA develops new ways to kill and assassinate and interrogate and torture, and when the CIA keeps all that from Congress, the press, and the public, that’s a government conspiracy.
* * *
If these five instances of government engaging in conspiracies have been proven to be true—and they have been—isn’t it logical to assume that government agencies may have engaged in other conspiracies? It is the very nature of intelligence agencies and militaries to act in secretive, conspiratorial ways.
The phrase “conspiracy theory” shouldn’t have a negative connotation. Politics always plays out with backroom handshakes. It is the suggestion of American Conspiracies and Cover-Ups that government agencies and officials and the special interests that influence them are often engaging in conspiratorial actions, and that conspiracies have been behind some of the most iconic and important events of American history.
A conspiracy theorist was regaling a friend with one conspiracy theory after another. Finally, the friend interrupted and said, “I bet I know what would happen if God Himself appeared out of the sky right now, looked down at us, and said, ‘There is no conspiracy.’ I bet you would look up and say, ‘So the conspiracy goes higher than we thought.’”
Perhaps if the Almighty appeared to inform us that politicians and governments and government officials don’t act in secretive, covert, conspiratorial ways, then we could accept that.
But when the evidence indicates otherwise….
Theories questioning if multiple people might have shot at JFK, or if interior bombs brought down the World Trade Center, or if somebody was able to rig the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections can make for dramatic, sensational storytelling.
But it is not the purpose of American Conspiracies and Cover-Ups to be sensational; the purpose of this book is to talk about “conspiracy realities” that can hopefully give us a deeper and more meaningful understanding of politics.
If elements in the intelligence agencies participated in assassinating President Kennedy, then how can the intelligence agencies be better controlled? If elements in the government allowed or caused 9/11 to happen to give us an excuse to go to war in the Middle East, then how much of the War on Terror is disinformation and propaganda?
If presidential elections can be rigged, then how can we have fairer, uncorrupted elections? If secretive influences behind the scenes, a Deep State, are controlling our social, political, and financial systems for their own selfish purposes, then it would benefit us to expose who and what these secretive influences are.
American Conspiracies and Cover-Ups may give us a glimpse into the way that government and politics work.
Or don’t work.
* * *
This is an extract from American Conspiracies and Cover-Ups, by Douglas Cirignano published by Simon&Schuster. It can be purchased in hard copy, digital and audio-book form through Amazon and other booksellers.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 11/05/2019 – 00:10 -
- Turning Japanese? Growth In $9BN US Adult Diaper Market Explodes, Topping Baby Diapers
Turning Japanese? Growth In $9BN US Adult Diaper Market Explodes, Topping Baby Diapers
Looking for a way to hedge against the economic damage likely to be wrought by the looming ‘demographic timebomb’ (note: that’s what economists and journalists call it)?
Here’s one idea.
According to one recent study, fully one-fifth of the world’s population will be of retirement age by 2070. This phenomenon is largely due to trends in the developed world: as the costs of education, housing and survival skyrocket, many are choosing to have fewer babies, delay family formation, or simply skip that whole mess altogether.
We’ve been over the repercussions of an aging society particularly as it relates to the economy (more job openings, slower economic growth). For better or worse, the world already has a model for how these trends might impact us, at least in the early stages. And that model is Japan, a country that already has more citizen over the age of 80 than under the age of 10.
As demographic issues create new and unforeseen challenges, Reuters reported on an easily-overlooked issue: the revolution in the consumer-products space that will need to take place in the coming years. As the population of the elderly explodes, the need for hygiene products like adults diapers will likely see a commensurate surge (and many of the companies that make these products are publicly-traded consumer staples).
The market is already growing, and last year, it expanded by 9%, to hit $9 billion.
The time may not be far off when more adults need diapers than babies as the population grows older, potentially a huge opportunity for manufacturers of incontinence products – if they can lift the stigma that has long constrained sales.
The market for adult diapers, disposable underwear and absorbent pads is growing fast, up 9% last year to $9 billion, having doubled in the last decade, according to Euromonitor.
As more senior citizens grapple with their weak bladders, Reuters’ sources said the battle for market share will likely be won and lost by the marketing department, as products that emphasize discretion and independence, as well as successfully rebranding them as essential “personal care” products, instead of “baby products.”
Advertising campaigns will also need to be launched to help “normalize” the use of “diapers” by adults.
But manufacturers like market leaders Essity and Kimberly-Clark Corp reckon only half of the more than 400 million adults likely to be affected by weak bladders, are buying the right products, because they are too embarrassed.
Companies are trying various methods to change attitudes, including making products more discreet, avoiding terms like diapers or nappies, and placing items in the personal care aisle, next to deodorants and menstrual pads, rather than in the baby products section.
Resigning adult diapers so that they can be worn more discreetly will be critical (something that some US companies are already working on), as all of those hipster grandpas try to maneuver around in their tight pants and diapers.
In the U.S., market leader Kimberly-Clark has this year given its 35-year-old Depend brand a makeover, introducing thinner, softer and more fitted products that can be worn discreetly, in an effort to make them more acceptable.
The changes are just the latest in a decade-long attempt to win over consumers, which started with manufacturers dropping the ‘diaper’ label, to loosen the association older customers might have with a loss of control in their life.
Yet it is still difficult for companies to persuade people they should buy specially made incontinence products.
“People keep the fact that they have incontinence secret from their loved ones, from their husbands, brothers and sisters – this is a deep secret for many consumers and yet it’s just a fact of life, it’s a physiological reality,” said Fiona Tomlin, who leads Kimberly-Clark’s adult and feminine care division.
Consumer products companies are also trying to “normalize” discussions on the subject via advertising. The market leader in Japan has resorted to clever catch-phrases to try and make problems like incontinence seem trivial.
In Japan, where adult incontinence products have outsold baby diaper sales since around 2013 due to a rapidly ageing population, market leader Unicharm Corp has adopted the phrase “choi more” in its advertising, which translates as “lil’ dribble,” to make light of the problem.
“What we are doing is trying to let people know that incontinence, even among young people, is normal,” said Unicharm spokesman Hitoshi Watanabe.
Incontinence is one of those problems that people keep secret from their friends and loved ones out of shame. But it’s also surprisingly common, even in relatively young adults. Many women who have more than one child struggle with it, creating another branding opportunity.
That is, so long as packaging designers follow a golden rule: Nothing should be associated with aging.
Sweden’s Essity, the global industry leader, is also trying to reach a younger audience with its TENA brand and a new line of black, low-rise disposable underwear called Silhouette Noir.
The advert’s tagline reads: ‘secret’s out: 1 in 3 women have incontinence’.
Around 12% of all women and 5% of men experience some form of urinary incontinence, although conditions vary from mild and temporary to serious and chronic, according to the Global Forum on Incontinence, which is backed by Essity.
Essity said it tries to package and market its products in a way that avoids associations with ageing.
“Designing products and packaging it as feminine and discreet as possible for females and as masculine and discreet as possible for men helps,” said Ulrika Kolsrud, president of Essity’s health and medical solutions.
Getting the message across to potential customers can sometimes be a tricky path to tread. A few years ago, SCA – from which Essity was spun off in 2017 – mailed samples of its products to Swedish men above 55, only to receive a barrage of complaints.
As the countdown continues, the demographic timebomb looks set to hit the West and Japan especially hard. But in the PROC, where a one-child policy kept births down for multiple consecutive generations, the numbers are simply staggering. It’s a problem that’s already starting to hit, as China’s working age population shrinks for the first time – and one that could have serious repercussions for the global economy.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/04/2019 – 23:50 - Drunk-Driving And Fake-Science
Drunk-Driving And Fake-Science
Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The American Institute for Economic Rsearch,
Almost everyone I know has a story to tell about themselves, a friend, a friend’s friend. It’s about the abusiveness of the police in the enforcement of drunk-driving laws. I’ve known people who were quite sure that they were not over the legal limit but suddenly found themselves cuffed in the back of the police car.
I know a guy who was arrested out of his own driveway, having driven home perfectly safely. I’ve seen lives ruined and wrecked by a system that presumes everyone is guilty and then proves it was scientific machines that claim to be accurate to three decimal points. The level of paranoia on this subject in American life is palpable.
So it’s actually mind blowing – or maybe once you hear this it will seem incredibly obvious – that the New York Times has published a massive investigation that shows that the science behind the breathalyzer is bogus. Tens of thousands of arrests have been wrong. Cases are being thrown out around the country. The company that makes the machines for the police stations won’t share its technology or submit to a serious scientific review of its technology. Lives are being ruined even as the evidence piles up that vast numbers of arrests for “drunk driving” are wholly bogus.
Quoting the Times:
A million Americans a year are arrested for drunken driving, and most stops begin the same way: flashing blue lights in the rearview mirror, then a battery of tests that might include standing on one foot or reciting the alphabet.
What matters most, though, happens next. By the side of the road or at the police station, the drivers blow into a miniature science lab that estimates the concentration of alcohol in their blood. If the level is 0.08 or higher, they are all but certain to be convicted of a crime.
But those tests — a bedrock of the criminal justice system — are often unreliable, a New York Times investigation found. The devices, found in virtually every police station in America, generate skewed results with alarming frequency, even though they are marketed as precise to the third decimal place.
Judges in Massachusetts and New Jersey have thrown out more than 30,000 breath tests in the past 12 months alone, largely because of human errors and lax governmental oversight. Across the country, thousands of other tests also have been invalidated in recent years.The machines are sensitive scientific instruments, and in many cases they haven’t been properly calibrated, yielding results that were at times 40 percent too high.
The story adds another several thousand words of horror stories about the use of fake science in the service of the machinery of compulsion and coercion that has entrapped millions of Americans and vexes all non-teetotallers on the road today.
It turns out that these expensive machines, both the ones carried by cops and the larger machines at police headquarters, are provided by only a few companies in the world and they are unwilling to open up their guts to serious peer review. They are poorly maintained and yet the numbers are invoked in court daily. The police have every incentive to allow them to be wrong so long as the results end in conviction.
The few times in which states mandated tests of the tests have resulted in shocking results. Something called the Intoxilyzer 8000 was tested in Vermont in 2005 and produced inaccurate results in “almost every test.” As it turns out, the only scientific way to determine blood-alcohol content is with blood tests. There are too many variables to make the breath alone reliable and yet breathing tests are the whole basis of drunk-driving enforcement.
The rounding-up problems and inflated numbers alone are raising questions about 45,000 convictions in Massachusetts and New Jersey. The trouble is that once the fake science is part of the court records, the accused has no viable option but to plead guilty and face a jail sentence and fines and ruined driving record, even if the person knows for sure that he or she was not drunk. When it’s the state armed with fake science vs. an individual motorist who had a couple of beers, everyone knows who wins.
This is a classic case of the dangers of scientism in the service of state-based justice. Put on the lab coat, sell the government a fancy machine, harass people with unending intimidation, and the result is vast injustice based on bad science. Citizens themselves have no recourse. This has been going on for decades in the United States and yet we are only now finding out about it.
There was always a potential for injustice at the heart of the rule against drunk driving since enforcement would always be based not on evidence of reckless driving but rather on the content of one’s blood. It was that which was being criminalized. In fact, there are many reasons one might drive dangerously: texting, physical exhaustion, sleep deprivation, bad day at work, fight with a lover, and so on. Nor is it the case that having a few necessarily and always results in endangerment of others. The only real sensible approach, then, is for the police to enforce the traffic rules, ticketing and arresting based on what the driver actually does.
The anti-drunk driving regime in this country was not based on that. Rather, it criminalized something that required a fancy scientific test to discover complete with black-box machines out of science fiction. Even if you are driving perfectly well, complying with all rules, endangering absolutely no one, you would be subjected to brutality at the hands of the police solely upon the discovery of a chemical in your blood, which, as it turns out, cannot be reliably determined based on any existing technology.
Think about this. The whole world is horrified by Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos’s claim that it could detect diseases via a tiny pin prick on the finger. That this company raised billions on an unverified claim has been the subject of vast outrage and criminal investigations. And yet we have what appears to be the exact same situation with the detection of drunk driving and yet it’s gone on for decades without much in the way of incredulity putting any damper on the arrest-and-jail machinery of the state.
Why is this? I would say the following. Theranos was subjected to a market test. Breathalyzers and Alcotests and so on exist within the apparatus of the state and have thereby been shielded from serious scrutiny. It has taken the New York Times and its intrepid reporters to blow the cover, and yet, realistically, it will be years before anyone can put a damper on the machinery of personal destruction that is currently in operation even in your hometown.
There are lessons here. The combination of state power and pseudoscience is a dangerous one. Criminalizing something that depends on the scientific accuracy of some secret test rather than observable behavior is itself fraught with dangers. The state cannot be trusted to police its own application of science in service of itself. It will always face an incentive to exaggerate to gain more money and more convictions.
Now is the time seriously to rethink the entire machinery of drunk-driving enforcement.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/04/2019 – 23:30 - Pork Pile-Up Continues: Bacon Levels In US Cold Storage Surge To 48-Year High
Pork Pile-Up Continues: Bacon Levels In US Cold Storage Surge To 48-Year High
Cold storage facilities across the U.S. have just hit record-high levels of pork bellies, the cut of the pig used to make bacon, reported Bloomberg. Much of the oversupply problem stems from farmers’ increasing herd sizes ahead of a possible trade deal that was expected to occur earlier this year.
Farmers in 1H20 across Central and Midwest regions were desperately trying to increase herd sizes and or fields planted of corn and soybean because President Trump kept touting imminent trade deal in the press. What the farmers didn’t realize is that there was no trade deal at the time, and the impending trade deal comments were only to boost the stock market. What this created was massive misguidance by the government that has led to shocking oversupplied conditions.
According to new U.S. government data published last week, there are more than 40 million pounds of pork bellies in cold storage facilities across the U.S. The levels are so high that some cold storage facilities could run out of space. The last time storage facilities saw this much pork belly was 1971.
Hog producers, listening to every trade headlines from the Trump administration, quickly expanded herds through spring and summer with the anticipation of an imminent trade deal with China. U.S. herd levels rose to 7.7 million heads as of Sept. 1, a level not seen since 1943.
While the massive overhang of pork bellies could be short-lived due to the anticipation of a “Phase 1” trade deal could be signed imminently between the U.S. and China, the lesson to be seen is that fake trade news has consequences, such as disrupting free markets and creating imbalances.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/04/2019 – 23:10 - Sjursen: Trump Will Live To Regret Sending Troops To Saudi Arabia
Sjursen: Trump Will Live To Regret Sending Troops To Saudi Arabia
Authored by US Army Major (ret.) Danny Sjursen via AntiWar.com,
What is Trump really up to? It’s almost unknowable. At the same time that the president was pulling (some) troops out of Northeast Syria, giving an antiwar speech, and then sending other troops back into Syria to “secure the oil,” he also quietly sent another 1800 service members into Saudi Arabia. What little Trump did say about it consisted of a peculiar defense of his actions. Faced with the obvious question from a reporter:
“Mr. President, why are you sending more troops to Saudi Arabia when you just said it’s a mistake to be in the Middle East?”
Trump argued that there was no contradiction in his policy because, well, the Saudis “buy hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of merchandise from us,” and have “agreed to pay us for everything we’re doing to help them.”
It seems the U.S. military is going full mercenary in the Gulf.
While I’ve noted that Trump’s recent antiwar remarks were profound – though largely unfulfilled – these words will amount to nothing if followed by a military buildup in Saudi Arabia that leads to a new, far more bloody and destabilizing, war with Iran.
Nothing would please the “three Bs” – Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, and former National Security Adviser John Bolton – more than a US military strike on the Islamic Republic, cost and consequences be damned.
It’s just that an Iran war isn’t the only risk associated with basing majority-Christian, foreign American troops in the land of Islam’s two holiest cities. And a brief historical review of US presence in Saudi Arabia demonstrates quite clearly the potential transnational terrorist “blowback” of Washington’s basing decisions.
In fact, Trump’s latest deployment constitutes at least the third time the US military has been stationed on the Arabian peninsula.
It’s rarely ended well, and, in a paradox stranger than fiction, often linked Washington and Riyadh’s dollars with the Bin Laden family. It’s almost enough to make one understand the propensity of some Americans to buy into some degree of 9/11 “truth.”
The strange saga began in the 1930s when a US oil conglomerate, Aramco, built a settlement at Dhahran in the desert near the little town of Khobar. Local workers did the construction, including a rather talented Yemeni bricklayer named Mohamed Bin Laden. Though illiterate and with only one eye, he and his brother then started their own construction company: Mohamed and Abdullah, Sons of Awadh bin Laden.” When, in 1945, the US military decided to lease a sizable air base at Dhahran, the Bin Laden brothers got the contract. The firm made a fortune on the American taxpayers’ dime. After that, the Bin Laden’s became the builders of choice for the spendthrift Saudi royal family, by then flush with oil profits.
Nonetheless, the devoutly Muslim Saudi people were horrified by the Western presence and the king ended the first US military lease in 1962. Still, the Bin Laden company continued to do business with the American government and corporate entities, so much so, in fact, that it retained an agent in New York City. After the elder Bin Laden died in 1967, his sons took over the family business. One, Osama, had a particular knack for construction.
He was also devoutly religious, and, despite his family business’ close connections with the Americans, virulently opposed to foreign intervention in the Greater Middle East. So, with tons of his firm’s heavy construction equipment in tow, he headed off to Afghanistan to fight with the mujahideen against the Soviet Army occupation of that country. Though he and his fellow Arab volunteers played only a small role in the Soviet’s eventual defeat, Osama Bin Laden dug tunnels, built roads, and crafted a genuine mountain base for his fighters in Afghanistan. He even named his new organization to direct the jihad Al Qaeda, or “the base,” and learned a life-altering lesson from the Soviet war. As he reflected, “The myth of the superpower was destroyed not only in my mind but also in the minds of all Muslims.”
Thus, when Saddam Hussein’s massive Iraqi Army swallowed up Kuwait and threatened the Saudi Kingdom in 1990, Bin Laden thought he could recruit a new mujahideen army and single-handedly defeat the invaders. He offered his services to the king, but was rebuked, in favor of an invitation to the US military to instead defend Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden never forgave the king or the American “occupiers” of his holy homeland. The American troopers flooded into a reopened base at Dhahran, the Iraqis were swiftly defeated by the US military coalition, Bin Laden later declared war on the United States, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Terror attacks on the Khobar Towers Air Force barracks, two US African embassies, and the Navy’s USS Cole followed, and then New York and Washington were struck in the worst terrorist incident in American History. Bin Laden got the war he sought, lured the US military into countless quagmires in the Mideast and, despite his eventual death at the hands of American Navy SEALs, succeeded beyond probably even his wildest imagination.
All that brief history ought to remind American policymakers and people alike of the inherent dangers of military basing in Saudi Arabia in this, the third, such instance. Washington, as has been proven time and again since the end of the Second World War, reaps what it sows across the world. So, when Trump’s latest addition to the tragic US history of building bases and stationing troops on the Arabian Peninsula backfires, when a new Bin Laden of sorts takes the war to a major American city, I’ll be one of the few voices saying I told you so…
Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/04/2019 – 22:50 - Turkish-Backed Jihadists Filmed Using CIA-Supplied Missiles Against Syrian Kurds
Turkish-Backed Jihadists Filmed Using CIA-Supplied Missiles Against Syrian Kurds
The Libertarian Institute’s Scott Horton captioned the below video accurately when he bluntly stated:
CIA’s former(?) “moderate” jihadist terrorists blast DoD’s Kurdish YPG friends with U.S. TOW missile.
TFSA hitting a YPG/SDF vehicle (Humvee?) with a likely originally US-supplied BGM-71 TOW ATGM.
Rather rare to get footage from this side. pic.twitter.com/nrywMgkTBR
— Cᴀʟɪʙʀᴇ Oʙsᴄᴜʀᴀ🍂 (@CalibreObscura) November 2, 2019
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This is exactly what it shows. The CIA previously introduced BGM-71 TOW anti-tank missiles to the Syrian battlefield, handing the advanced weaponry off to the so-called ‘moderate rebels’ of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) in order to accomplish regime change against Assad as part of operation ‘Timber Sycamore’ (which failed).
Critics of CIA efforts in Syria were quick to point out that such American hardware would inevitably go straight to the jihadists of ISIS and al-Qaeda. As even the mainstream media and pundits were forced to document, this is precisely what happened, given Washington ultimately sought to use Sunni jihadists to overthrow the Syrian government.
Photo of ISIS deploying CIA-supplied TOW missiles near Palmyra in 2015, documented by Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ (FDD) Long War Journal. And now the Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army (TFSA), more commonly known as the Syrian National Army, is deploying the very same CIA-supplied TOW missiles against America’s current proxy in Syria, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), as part of Erdogan’s ‘Operation Peace Spring’.
It’s been well-documented that the Turkey invasion forces of Syrian National Army are stacked with former ISIS, Nusrah, and FSA jihadists… who clearly brought their CIA toys with them.
“US Military May Be Targeted by Its Own Missiles in Middle East,” warned Newsweek earlier this year. Well, yes…
U.S. Military May Be Targeted by Its Own Missiles in Middle East | @ShaolinTom @Newsweek https://t.co/JZFuNIONmx pic.twitter.com/oYlfvlZcg7
— RealClearDefense (@RCDefense) January 6, 2019
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This means American Green Berets and other special forces advisers still embedded with Kurdish SDF units around the oil fields in Deir Ezzor and Hasakah province could find themselves on the receiving end of US-supplied missiles, ironically enough.
Just another day in Washington’s long-term covert war in Syria, and yet another example of what many of us years ago warned would happened, once again coming to exact fruition. And yet Washington is still addicted to its regime change wars in the Middle East.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/04/2019 – 22:30 - 'Do Your Job!': Rand Paul Slams MSM And GOP Over Whistleblower Horsepucky
‘Do Your Job!’: Rand Paul Slams MSM And GOP Over Whistleblower Horsepucky
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) slammed the media for refusing to publish the name of the Trump-Ukraine whistleblower, despite it being one of the biggest open secrets in the Beltway. The Kentucky Republican also shot barbs at his GOP colleagues in Congress for not taking enough action to defend the president against the Democratic-led impeachment, according to the Washington Examiner.
“President Trump has great courage,” Paul said during a Monday evening Trump rally. “He faces down the fake media every day. But Congress needs to step up and have equal courage to defend the president.”
“We also now know the name of the whistleblower,” he added. “The whistleblower needs to come before Congress as a material witness because he worked with Joe Biden at the same time Hunter Biden was getting money from corrupt oligarchs. I say tonight to the media, ‘Do your job and print his name!‘ And I say this to my fellow colleagues in Congress, to every Republican in Washington, ‘Step up and subpoena Hunter Biden and subpoena the whistleblower!“
The whistleblower was outed by RealClearPolitics‘ Paul Sperry last week as 33-year-old CIA employee Eric Ciaramella, whose attorneys would “neither confirm nor deny” that it was him.
Watch:
Last month House Democrats launched impeachment proceedings against Trump based on Ciaramella’s second-hand whistleblower complaint alleging that the president abused his office by asking Ukriane to investigate former VP Joe Biden and his son Hunter, along with other matters.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/04/2019 – 22:10 - SoftBank's 'Conglomerate Discount' Balloons To $130 Billion As Investors Bet Worst Is Yet To Come
SoftBank’s ‘Conglomerate Discount’ Balloons To $130 Billion As Investors Bet Worst Is Yet To Come
After a suite of marquee investments blew up in the company’s face over the summer, SoftBank, the Japanese telecoms giant with a massive VC arm attached, is preparing to face its first real ‘day of reckoning’ this week when it reports Q2 earnings, according to the FT and Nikkei Asian Review. The results will be released after the close of Japanese markets on Wednesday.
Masayoshi Son
Most analysts expect a grim showing: In the span of a few months, SoftBank Chairman Masayoshi Son’s reputation as one of the world’s most successful momentum investors has been totally eviscerated. The company’s stake in ride-share darling Uber has generated an on-paper loss of 30%. What’s worse, Son has insisted on throwing even more money at WeWork parent ‘The We Company’ in a desperate attempt to stave off an imminent bankruptcy, which would have stuck SB with losses in the billions of dollars.
In the latest indication of just how little faith investors’ have in the company, Nikkei points out that SoftBank’s ‘valuation discount’, the gap between its valuation in public markets and its net asset value, has swollen to $130 billion.
Take the group’s net debt figure of $45 billion (which excludes 10 trillion yen of debt held in subsidiaries and is the figure that Son prefers to use), add that to SoftBank’s market capitalization of $81 billion, and its enterprise value is $126 billion. This is essentially the all-in cost of buying the company.
Against that, however, SoftBank has around $191 billion of quoted assets on its balance sheet, the largest of which is a 26% stake in Alibaba Group Holding, the Chinese e-commerce giant. It also owns U.K. chip designer Arm, which SoftBank has on its books at $25 billion, and another $8 billion of assorted assets it classifies as “others.” Add it all up, and SoftBank owns around $224 billion of assets.
In addition, however, there are over 80 tech companies in the Vision Fund – such as ride-hailing giants Didi Chuxing and Grab, Indian hotel startup Oyo, and Chinese social media company ByteDance. SoftBank estimates its one-third share of these are worth $32 billion.
Add all these assets together and the total comes to $256 billion – or $130 billion more than the company is worth on the market. This is the “conglomerate discount,” and it appears to have widened since Son railed about it in the past.
SoftBank and Son are still desperately trying to court Saudi Arabia and convince Crown Prince MbS to commit to backing a planned second iteration of its Vision Fund (which Saudi Arabia backed to the tune of $45 billion from its sovereign wealth fund). However, even before WeWork’s valuation imploded, leading to the scrapping of its planned IPO and an embarrassingly public rescue that involved the ouster of co-founder and CEO Adam Neumann, there was talk that the Saudi’s would sit this one out.
Courtesy of the FT
As SoftBank sees it, the Saudis owe it another chance: In the aftermath of Jamal Khashoggi’s murder inside a Saudi consulate in Istanbul, SoftBank stood by the kingdom, even as Wall Street executives and other business leaders in the West cancelled plans to attend last year’s Future Investment Initiative (better known as MbS’s “Davos in the Desert”) while publicly contemplating whether to sever all business ties to the kingdom, according to the FT.
One year later, those grievances appear to have been forgotten. But sparse attendance at Son’s speech at this year’s FII was seen as emblematic of the reputational hit that Son had taken in the aftermath of the WeWork blowup.
Analysts quoted by Nikkei said that unless SoftBank can pull off the turnaround at WeWork, reviving its valuation will be difficult.
“It cannot be helped that SoftBank’s [WeWork] investment is seen as a failure,” said Mitsunobu Tsuruo, analyst at Citigroup Global Markets Japan. “Investors are worried whether [it] will be the last negative material to affect SoftBank and its shares.”
“We believe that unless the WeWork episode is resolved, SoftBank improves disclosure and clarifies its strategy, there is no solid anchor” to its net asset value, said Atul Goyal, analyst at Jefferies Securities.
On the other hand, another analyst argued that the double-digit slump in SoftBank’s share price this year has completely priced in the WeWork fiasco, and that the SoftBank shares have nowhere to go but up from here.
“We think the impact of this [WeWork] event is now priced in and expect the shares to rebound,” SMBC Nikko Securities wrote in an Oct. 25 report.
A successful IPO from one of the Vision Fund’s 80 other portfolio companies could provide exactly the catalyst that the company needs. A listing for TikTok owner ByteDance in Hong Kong could accomplish this. Whatever happens, a successful offering will almost certainly need to happen outside of the US, since American markets have repeatedly shown this year that they have little appetite left for richly valued unicorns following a nearly uninterrupted string of IPO flops, from Uber & Lyft, to Slack, Peloton and others.
A successful IPO would certainly help, after WeWork’s failed share float. ByteDance, the owner of social media app TikTok, which was valued at $75 billion in an October 2018 fundraising led by SoftBank, is reportedly considering a listing in Hong Kong.
Then again, one IPO might not be enough; many professional asset managers now see Vision Fund backing as an obvious counter-indicator, as one hedge fund manager told the FT. After all, when it comes to valuing its portfolio companies, SoftBank has been so wrong, so many times, that rebuilding trust and faith in its abilities could prove to be an impossible task.
“If SoftBank says this is the value, how much of that should you believe?” says Kirk Boodry, a tech analyst at Redex Holdings who publishes on research platform Smartkarma. One hedge fund investor says backing from the Vision Fund is “an immediate cue to sell.”
And though SoftBank has scored several huge wins in recent years (it still owns a massive stake in Alibaba), investors in the Vision Fund largely missed out on those wins.
According to the FT, Vision Fund executives are counting on a $30 billion investment from Saudi Arabia for V2. But MbS has reportedly told advisors and other insiders that, while he would like to reward Son’s loyalty, his advisors are vehemently against it.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/04/2019 – 21:50 - Steve Bannon Set To Testify Against Roger Stone, Report
Steve Bannon Set To Testify Against Roger Stone, Report
Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,
Former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon is set to testify against Roger Stone by claiming Stone was in contact with Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, according to sources close to the trial.
The information was uncovered by reporters on the scene of Stone’s pre-trial.
Bannon testifying against Stone is an act of revenge for Stone’s role in having him ousted from the Trump administration.
Stone wrote an article that was published by the Daily Caller headlined ‘Bannon’s Time Is Up’ the day before Bannon left the White House, although Bannon asserts his departure was by mutual consent.
In the article, Stone accused Bannon of paving the way for ‘Never Trumpers’ and neo-cons like Rex Tillerson, Dina Powell and Fiona Hill.
Soon after Bannon left, he was swept under the wing of Robert Mueller’s investigation. Since that time Bannon has been working behind the scenes to undermine Stone, as well as Infowars host Alex Jones and Donald Trump Jr.
Bannon also reportedly sought dirt and information on Jones at the peak of Mueller’s investigation into Infowars. Jones also asserts that he was subsequently the victim of a dirty tricks campaign that attempted to frame him for Russian collusion, which Jones reported to the FBI.
Stone is charged with lying to Congress, trying to obstruct a congressional inquiry and intimidating a witness. He faces 20 years in prison.
Prosecutors claim Stone attempted numerous times to contact WikiLeaks via intermediaries and leaked information about upcoming WikiLeaks disclosures to the Trump campaign and then lied about this to Congress.
Stone claims that he only had tentative knowledge of WikiLeaks via radio host Randy Credico and did not meet with Assange.
Russiagate, which failed to claim any significant scalps and turned out to be exactly as President Trump asserted all along – a witch hunt – now appears to rest on Bannon’s betrayal of Stone.
* * *
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Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/04/2019 – 21:30 - Abenomics Update: New Car Sales In October Plunge 24.9% In Japan
Abenomics Update: New Car Sales In October Plunge 24.9% In Japan
It appears that Abenomics continues to fail in Japan, as a worldwide global recession in automobile sales combined with Typhoon Hagibis, which pummeled the Kantō region of Japan during October, both contributed to a huge drop off in new car sales for the month. Japan’s recent increase in its consumption tax was also cited as a potential drag on sales.
Sales of new cars in Japan (including minicars) fell 24.9% year over year, according to the Japan Automobile Sales Association, Nikkei writes.
Sales of registered vehicles fell 26.4% during the month, to 192,504 units. Honda saw its numbers plunge by 40.5%, Toyota fell by 21.7% and Nissan fell 36.9%.
Vendors attributed the drop off to the typhoon and “other weather factors and disasters” during the month.
Minicar sales fell by 22.3% to 122,280 units, the first decrease in 3 months. Sales from Suzuki fell 6.2% and the numbers from Daihatsu plunged 26.3%.
“It cannot be said that there was no impact from the consumption tax hike, but it is necessary to check the trend of several months,” a spokesperson from the Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association said.
Recall, the country raised its sales tax from 8% to 10% at the beginning of October. The new rate applies to nearly all goods and services, including vehicles, and excludes most food.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/04/2019 – 21:10 - China Services PMI Drops To 12-Month Low, Hong Kong Business Activity Crashes Most On Record
China Services PMI Drops To 12-Month Low, Hong Kong Business Activity Crashes Most On Record
Despite China’s surprise surge in Caixin Manufacturing PMI (to its highest since Dec 2016), Services were expected to show a modest decline which it did (down from 51.3 to 51.1).
Note that the only one of the four PMIs to rise was the Caixin manufacturing index – massively bucking the trend of the rest…
Source: Bloomberg
Commenting on the China General Services PMI™ data, Dr. Zhengsheng Zhong, Director of Macroeconomic Analysis at CEBM Group said:
“The Caixin China General Services Business Activity Index dipped to 51.1 in October from 51.3 in the previous month, marking the slowest expansion in eight months amid subdued market conditions.
1) Demand across the services sector grew at a reduced pace, with the gauge for new business falling to the lowest level since February. The measure for new export business picked up slightly.
2) While the job market expanded at a weaker clip, with the employment gauge falling from the previous month’s recent high, the measure for outstanding business rose further into expansionary territory. This implied a mismatch between labor supply and demand.
3) Both gauges for input costs and prices charged by service providers edged down, but they remained in positive territory, reflecting relatively high pressure on costs, including those of workers, raw materials and fuel.
4) The measure for business expectations dropped to the lowest point in 15 months, indicating depressed business confidence.
Additionally, the Caixin China Composite Output Index inched up to 52 in October from 51.9 in the month before, amid an improvement in manufacturing, but a softer service sector performance.
Source: Bloomberg
“The employment gauge dipped into contractionary territory, indicating renewed pressure on the labor market, which was likely due mainly to structural unemployment. The measure for backlogs of work climbed to the highest level since early 2011, highlighting bottlenecks in production capacity and inventories due to weak business confidence.
“China’s economy continued to recover in general in October, thanks chiefly to the performance of the manufacturing sector. Domestic and foreign demand both improved. However, business confidence remained weak, constraining the release of production capacity. Structural unemployment and rising raw material costs remained issues. The foundation for economic growth to stabilize still needs to be consolidated.”
But then again, it could be worse – it could be Hong Kong, which saw its PMI crash to 39.3 in October – the lowest since November 2008 with business activity crashing at the fastest pace in the survey’s 21-year history. So much for the bounce in August that everyone declared as the bottom…
Commenting on the latest survey results, Bernard Aw, Principal Economist at IHS Markit, said:
“Hong Kong’s private sector remained mired in one of its worst downturns for the past two decades during October, with the latest PMI survey signalling a deepening economic malaise.
“The ongoing political unrest and impact of trade tensions saw business activity fall at the sharpest pace since the survey started over 21 years ago. Anecdotal evidence revealed that the retail and tourism sectors remained particularly affected.
“As new orders continued to fall sharply, led by a record decline in demand from mainland China, firms were becoming increasingly pessimistic about the outlook.”
Which doesn’t sound like a picture of ‘recovery’ or bottoming for the Chinese economy as a whole.
And finally, both attempts to juice stocks today on US-China trade deal talk have failed…
Better keep tweeting.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/04/2019 – 20:52 - Conservative Californians Leaving In Droves For "America First, Law And Order" Red States
Conservative Californians Leaving In Droves For “America First, Law And Order” Red States
California conservatives are leaving the state in droves over what the LA Times describes as their “disenchantment with deep-blue California’s liberal political culture,” not to mention “high taxes, lukewarm support for local law enforcement, and policies they believe have thrown open the doors to illegal immigration.“
Just over half of California’s registered voters have considered leaving the state, according to a UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll conducted for the Los Angeles Times. Republicans and conservative voters were nearly three times as likely as their Democratic or liberal counterparts to seriously have considered moving — 40% compared with 14%, the poll found. Conservatives mentioned taxes and California’s political culture as a reason for leaving more frequently than they cited the state’s soaring housing costs. –LA Times
Former Californians Richard and Judy Stark had no regrets as they left their Modesto home, towing a U-Haul trailer with their Volkswagen SUV 1,300 miles to Amarillo, Texas. After finding the website Conservative Move, the Starks put their home up for sale around six months ago and bought a newly constructed three-bedroom home in the suburb of McKinney for around $300,000. According to Stark, a similar home in California would cost around twice as much.
“We’re moving to redder pastures,” said the 71-year-old. “We’re getting with people who believe in the same political agenda that we do: America first, Americans first, law and order.“
According to new Census Bureau migration data for 2018, 691,145 Californians left for other states last year, according to the San Jose Mercury News.
Where they’re going (via the Mercury News)
• Top destinations: In raw terms of people moving, the top spot for Californians is Texas, which got 86,164 Californians in 2018. Next came Arizona (68,516), Washington (55,467), Nevada (50,707), and Oregon (43,058). All told, California had the most exits among the state and that wave grew by 4% in a year.
• Largest net gain: Texas also had the largest “net gain” from California — more ins than outs — with 48,354. Next was Arizona (34,846), Nevada (28,274), Oregon (19,008), and Washington (17,460).
• Greatest ratio of ins to outs: Or look at the comings and goings as a ratio of ins to outs. Idaho wins this race with 497 arrivals from the Golden State for every 100 former Potato State residents who moved to California. Next was South Carolina (247 ins per 100 out); Texas (228); Nevada (226); and Arizona (203).
***
That said, the LA Times also notes that California is gaining people with higher incomes – most of whom have migrated to the Bay Area.
Over the last decade, the Legislative Analyst’s Office report said, the state added about 100,000 residents with household incomes of $120,000 or higher. About 85% of these higher-income earners moved to the Bay Area counties of Alameda, Contra Costa, San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara. –LA Times
The three-member Bailey family moved from California to Prosper, Texas in 2017 to get away from Southern California’s steep housing prices. Bailey and her husband Scott owned a home in Orange County, while renting in El Segundo to be closer to Scott’s work in Santa Monica.
“To buy a house there [El Segundo] is insane,” said Marie. “It’s like $1 million. Why are we working our butts off for a fixer-upper in El Segundo? We’re just working, working, working — and for what?”
Bailey launched a Facebook group for people struggling with the same problems – “Move to Texas From California!“, which boasts over 14,000 members. She says that most members are conservatives like her, though not all. As such, one of her rules is “no insulting or going overboard with political conversations.”
“I wouldn’t be one to put up a Trump sign, even here,” said the 40-year-old Bailey. “But in your town Facebook, people would be like, ‘We know who the Trump supporters are.’ I had friends who voted for Trump and went to work the next day and pretended they didn’t.”
Bailey says she helped around 40 families migrate to Texas over the last year.
“There are hundreds more who made the move who didn’t use my real estate services but are in the group,” she said. “Tons and tons of families are moving all the time. People are posting photos of their families waving goodbye.”
Nicole Rivers and her husband put their Clovis home on the market in April, and hope to close escrow soon. They plan on flying to Texas to look for a place to rent in the eastern part of the state, near Tyler, coming back to California and then driving to their new home.
Rivers, who recently quit her job as a medical assistant and phlebotomist, said the cost of living is so much lower in the Tyler area that she can afford to stop working and dedicate herself to being a stay-at-home mom.
Her husband works in the oil fields, she said, and was already splitting his time between his job in Pennsylvania and family in California. When he had the chance to transfer to Texas full time, they jumped on it.
The 37-year-old said she wants to live in a town where the family can save money and her husband can retire sooner.
“It’s just too expensive here in California,” said Rivers, a California native. The state’s politics have “really gotten out of hand,” she added. She doesn’t support the state’s restrictive gun laws, she said, or the controversial sex education framework California approved despite protests earlier this year. –LA Times
Between earthquakes, seasonal fires, high taxes, poo-covered streets, the worst homeless crisis in the nation, and transgender summer camp for children as young as four, what’s not to love?
Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/04/2019 – 20:37 - Burisma Pressured Obama Admin Weeks Before Joe Biden Got Ukrainian Prosecutor Fired
Burisma Pressured Obama Admin Weeks Before Joe Biden Got Ukrainian Prosecutor Fired
Authored by John Solomon via John Solomon Reports
(emphasis ours)
Hunter Biden and his Ukrainian gas firm colleagues had multiple contacts with the Obama State Department during the 2016 election cycle, including one just a month before Vice President Joe Biden forced Ukraine to fire the prosecutor investigating his son’s company for corruption, newly released memos show.
During that February 2016 contact, a U.S. representative for Burisma Holdings sought a meeting with Undersecretary of State Catherine A. Novelli to discuss ending the corruption allegations against the Ukrainian firm where Hunter Biden worked as a board member, according to memos obtained under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. (I filed that suit this summer with the help of the public interest law firm the Southeastern Legal Foundation.)
Just three weeks before Burisma’s overture to State, Ukrainian authorities raided the home of the oligarch who owned the gas firm and employed Hunter Biden, a signal the long-running corruption probe was escalating in the middle of the U.S. presidential election.
Hunter Biden’s name, in fact, was specifically invoked by the Burisma representative as a reason the State Department should help, according to a series of email exchanges among U.S. officials trying to arrange the meeting. The subject line for the email exchanges read simply “Burisma.”
“Per our conversation, Karen Tramontano of Blue Star Strategies requested a meeting to discuss with U/S Novelli USG remarks alleging Burisma (Ukrainian energy company) of corruption,” a Feb. 24, 2016, email between State officials read. “She noted that two high profile U.S. citizens are affiliated with the company (including Hunter Biden as a board member).
“Tramontano would like to talk with U/S Novelli about getting a better understanding of how the U.S. came to the determination that the company is corrupt,” the email added. “According to Tramontano there is no evidence of corruption, has been no hearing or process, and evidence to the contrary has not been considered.”
At the time, Novelli was the most senior official overseeing international energy issues for State. The undersecretary position, of which there are several, is the third-highest-ranking job at State, behind the secretary and deputy secretary. And Tramontano was a lawyer working for Blue Star Strategies, a Washington firm that was hired by Burisma to help end a long-running corruption investigation against the gas firm in Ukraine.
Tramontano and another Blue Star official, Sally Painter, both alumni of Bill Clinton’s administration, worked with New York-based criminal defense attorney John Buretta to settle the Ukraine cases in late 2016 and 2017. I wrote about their efforts previously here.
Burisma Holdings records obtained by Ukrainian prosecutors state the gas firm made a $60,000 payment to Blue Star in November 2015.
The emails show Tramontano was scheduled to meet Novelli on March 1, 2016, and that State Department officials were scrambling to get answers ahead of time from the U.S. embassy in Kiev.
The records don’t show whether the meeting actually took place. The FOIA lawsuit is ongoing and State officials are slated to produce additional records in the months ahead.
But the records do indicate that Hunter Biden’s fellow American board member at Burisma, Devon Archer, secured a meeting on March 2, 2016 with Secretary of State John Kerry. In addition to serving on the Burisma board, Archer and Hunter Biden were partners at an American firm known as Rosemont Seneca.
“Devon Archer coming to see S today at 3pm – need someone to meet/greet him at C Street,” an email from Kerry’s office manager reads. “S” is a shorthand frequently used in State emails to describe the Secretary of State. The memos don’t state the reason for the meeting.
Tramontano, a lawyer for Hunter Biden, Archer and Joe Biden’s campaign did not return messages seeking comment on Monday.
In an interview with ABC News last month, Hunter Biden said he believed he had done “nothing wrong at all” while working with Burisma but “was it poor judgment to be in the middle of something that is…a swamp in — in — in many ways? Yeah.”
Whatever the subject of the Archer-Kerry meeting, its existence is certain to spark interest. That’s because Secretary Kerry’s stepson, Christopher Heinz, had been a business partner with both Archer and Hunter Biden at the Rosemont Seneca investment firm in the United States.
Heinz, however, chose not to participate in the Burisma dealings. In fact, he wrote an email to his stepfather’s top aides in May 2014, pointedly distancing himself from the decision by Hunter Biden and Devon Archer to join Burisma’s board.
Heinz’s spokesman recently told The Washington Post that Heinz ended his relationship with Archer and Hunter Biden partly over the Burisma matter. “The lack of judgment in this matter was a major catalyst for Mr. Heinz ending his business relationships with Mr. Archer and Mr. Biden,” Heinz spokesman Chris Bastardi told the newspaper
A person who assisted Blue Star and Buretta in settling the Burisma matters in Ukraine told me in an interview that the late February 2016 overture to State was prompted by a dramatic series of events in Ukraine that included when that country’s top prosecutor escalated a two-year probe into Burisma and its founder, the oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky.
Zlochevsky’s gas firm hired Hunter Biden and Archer as board members for Burisma Holdings in spring 2014, around the time that British officials opened corruption investigations into Zlochevsky’s gas firm for actions dating to 2010 before Hunter Biden and Archer joined the firm. Ukraine officials opened their own corruption probe in August 2014.
A firm called Rosemont Seneca Bohai began receiving monthly payments totaling more than $166,000 from Burisma Holdings in May 2014, bank records show. The records show Devon Archer was listed as a custodian for the Rosemont Seneca Bohai firm and that Hunter Biden received payments from it. You can read those bank records here.
In September 2015, then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt gave a speech imploring Ukrainian prosecutors to do more to bring Zlochevsky to justice, according to published reports at the time.
By early 2016 the Ukrainian investigation had advanced enough that then-Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin authorized a court-ordered seizure of Zlochevsky’s home and other valuables, including a luxury car. That seizure occurred on Feb. 2, 2016, according to published reports in Ukraine.
The same day that the Zlochevsky seizure was announced in Ukraine, Hunter Biden used his Twitter account to start following Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken, a longtime national security adviser to Vice President Joe Biden who was promoted to the No. 2 job at State under Secretary John Kerry.
The Feb. 4, 2016 Twitter notification from Hunter Biden to Blinken was captured by State email servers and turned over to me as part of the FOIA release.
Within a few weeks of Tramontano’s overture to Novelli and of Archer’s overture to Kerry, Vice President Joe Biden took a stunning action, one that has enveloped his 2020 campaign for president in controversy.
By his own admission in a 2018 speech, Joe Biden used the threat of withholding $1 billion in U.S. aid to strong-arm Ukraine into firing Shokin, a prosecutor that he and his office knew was investigating Burisma.
Biden has said he forced Shokin’s firing because he and Western allies believed the prosecutor wasn’t aggressive enough in fighting corruption.
Shokin disputes that account, telling both me and ABC News that he was fired specifically because he would not stand down from investigating Burisma. In fact, Shokin alleges, he was making plans to interview Hunter Biden about his Burisma work and payments when he got the axe.
Ukraine prosecutors have said they do not believe the Bidens did anything wrong under Ukraine law. But some of the country’s prosecutors made an effort in 2018 to get information about Burisma to the U.S. Justice Department because they believed American prosecutors might be interested in some activities under U.S. law. You can read about that effort here.
Some experts and officials have been quoted in reports saying Joe Biden’s actions created the appearance of a conflict of interest, something all U.S. government officials are supposed to avoid. The questions about conflicts were previously raised in a 2015 article by the New York Times and the 2018 book Secret Empires by author Peter Schweizer.
The new evidence of contacts between Burisma, Hunter Biden and Archer at State are certain to add a new layer of intrigue to the debate. Those contacts span back to at least spring 2015, the new memos show.
On May 22, 2015, Hunter Biden emailed his father’s longtime trusted aide, Blinken, with the following message: “Have a few minutes next week to grab a cup of coffee? I know you are impossibly busy, but would like to get your advice on a couple of things, Best, Hunter.”
Blinken responded the same day with an “absolutely” and added, “Look forward to seeing you.”
The records indicate the two men were scheduled to meet the afternoon of May 27, 2015.
The State Department records also indicate Hunter Biden met Blinken in person for lunch on July 22, 2015, when State officials gave the name of a person to meet to help him enter the building. “He has the VIP pin and can escort you upstairs for your lunch with Tony,” the email said.
The emails don’t indicate whether the meeting had to do with Burisma or one of Hunter Biden’s other interests.
But they clearly show that Hunter Biden, his business partner and Burisma’s legal team were able to secure contacts inside the State Department, including to one of his father’s most trusted aides, to Secretary Kerry and to the agency’s top energy official.
The question now is: Did any of those contacts prompt further action or have anything to do with Joe Biden’s conduct in Ukraine in March 2016 when he forced Shokin’s firing?
***
Email shows Hunter Biden started following Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken, a longtime national security adviser to Vice President Joe Biden, just as Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin announced a raid on the home of Burisma’s founder https://t.co/WhSorRgeqX pic.twitter.com/c0nvoNiYzl
— Matt Wolking (Text TRUMP to 88022) (@MattWolking) November 5, 2019
Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/04/2019 – 20:30 - US Issues $20M Reward For Return Of US Agent, "Longest Held" Hostage In Iran
US Issues $20M Reward For Return Of US Agent, “Longest Held” Hostage In Iran
A flurry of US-Iran related activity on the 40th anniversary of the American hostage crisis and the Islamic revolution that sparked it: after Iran earlier on Monday announced it took steps to double its uranium enrichment capacity via new advanced centrifuges, Washington has answered by slapping new sanctions on Mojtaba Khamenei, the second son of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, as well as eight advisers of Iran’s top cleric, including the head of judiciary Ebrahim Raisi, and Iran’s Armed Forces General Staff and its chief, General Mohammad Bagheri.
Crucially, the United States Treasury also announced a $20 million reward for info on the return of Bob Levinson, who is believed to have been held hostage by the Iranian government since his disappearance from Iran’s Kish Island in 2007.
Levinson is the longest held American hostage inside the Islamic Republic, and multiple efforts to free him or gain knowledge of his whereabouts have come up empty over the years. It’s believed he came under suspicion of Iran’s intelligence agencies due to his being a former Drug Enforcement Administration and FBI agent.
For over 12 years Bob’s family and loved ones have waited; for over 12 years, the Iranian regime has failed to cooperate.
Up to $20 million possible for information leading to his safe location, recovery, and return.
Bring Bob and all Americans home. pic.twitter.com/ZKeajanPaJ
— Rewards for Justice (@Rewards4Justice) November 4, 2019
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Indeed years ago it was revealed that he was likely working as a contractor for the CIA. According to a recent Newsweek profile of Levinson:
Levinson, an ex–FBI agent well into a second career as a private detective, had disappeared over a decade earlier from a hotel on Iran’s Kish Island. He had been seen only twice since then, first in a hostage video his family received from unknown intermediaries in 2010, then in photos three years later, showing the then-63-year-old increasingly haggard and begging for help.
At first, the U.S. government claimed it had no knowledge of why Levinson, an expert on Russian organized crime, had gone to Iran. The Iranian regime denied it was holding him. But in 2013, the Associated Press and other news outlets revealed that the ex-agent had gone to Kish on an off-the-books CIA mission to probe high-level Iranian money laundering.
The United States has reportedly long been engaged in secretive efforts to secure his release, but little is as yet known of his status.
Concerning the new sanctions announced Monday, the US Treasury stated in its press release that it is targeting “Iran’s inner circle responsible for advancing regime’s domestic and foreign oppression,” or what it also describes as “Khamenei’s network”.
This follows broader economic sanctions on Iran’s energy, auto, banking, and other major sectors after the May 2018 Trump administration pullout of the 2015 nuclear deal.
Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader via AP. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said of the new sanctions: “The designation seeks to block funds from flowing to a shadow network of Khamenei’s military and foreign affairs advisers who have for decades oppressed the Iranian people, supported terrorism, and advanced destabilizing policies around the world.”
“While the Iranian regime’s decision to jail our diplomats has cast a 40-year shadow over our relations, the United States knows that the longest-suffering victims of the Iranian regime are the Iranian people,” he added, referencing the 40th anniversary of the 1979 crisis, which went for 444 days.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/04/2019 – 20:30 - China Is Weaponizing Water And Worsening Droughts Across Asia
China Is Weaponizing Water And Worsening Droughts Across Asia
Authored by Brahma Chellaney, op-ed via Nikkei Asian Review,
Asia, the world’s driest continent in per capita terms, remains the center of dam construction, with more than half of the 50,000 large dams across the globe. The hyperactivity on dams has only sharpened local and international disputes over the resources of shared rivers and aquifers.
A night view of China’s Three Gorges Dam: Asia can build a harmonious, rules-based water management regime only if China gets on board, which does not seem likely. © Visual China Group/Getty Images
The focus on dams reflects a continuing preference for supply-side approaches, which entail increased exploitation of water resources, as opposed to pursuing demand-side solutions, such as smart water management and greater water-use efficiency. As a result, nowhere is the geopolitics over dams murkier than in Asia, the world’s most dam-dotted continent.
Improving the hydropolitics demands institutionalized cooperation, transparency on projects, water-sharing arrangements and dispute-resolution mechanisms. Asia can build a harmonious, rules-based water management regime only if China gets on board. At least for now, that does not seem likely.
Last summer, water levels in continental Southeast Asia’s lifeline, the 4,880-kilometer Mekong River, fell to their lowest in more than 100 years, even though the annual monsoon season stretches from late May to late September. Yet, after completing 11 mega-dams, China is building more upstream dams on the Mekong, which originates on the Tibetan Plateau. Indeed, Beijing is also damming other transnational rivers.
China is central to Asia’s water map. Thanks to its annexation of the water-rich Tibetan Plateau and the sprawling Xinjiang province, China is the starting point of rivers that flow to 18 downstream countries. No other country in the world serves as the riverhead for so many countries.
By erecting dams, barrages and other water diversion structures in its borderlands, China is creating an extensive upstream infrastructure that arms it with the capacity to weaponize water.
To be sure, dam-building is also roiling relations elsewhere in Asia. The festering territorial disputes over Kashmir and Central Asia’s Ferghana Valley are as much about water as they are about land. Across Asia, states are jockeying to control shared water resources by building dams, even as they demand transparency and information on their neighbors’ projects.
A serious drought presently parching parts of the vast region extending from Australia to the Indian peninsula has underscored the mounting risks from the pursuit of dam-centered engineering solutions to growing freshwater shortages.
Asia’s densely populated regions already face a high risk that their water stress could worsen to water scarcity. The dam-driven water competition is threatening to also provoke greater tensions and conflict.
In the West, the building of large dams has largely petered out. The construction of large dams is also slowing in Asia’s major democracies, such as Japan, South Korea and India, because of increasing grassroots opposition.
Shrunken Varuna River in Phoolpur, India, picuterd on June 8: a serious drought has underscored the mounting risks from the pursuit of dam-centered engineering solutions to growing freshwater shortages. © NurPhoto/Getty Images
It is the construction in non-democracies that has made Asia the global nucleus of dam-building. China remains the world’s top dam-builder at home and abroad. In keeping with its obsession to build the tallest, largest, deepest, longest and highest projects, China completed ahead of schedule the world’s biggest dam, Three Gorges, touting it as the greatest architectural feat in history since the building of the Great Wall.
It is currently implementing the most ambitious interbasin and inter-river water transfer program ever conceived in human history.
Among its planned new dams is a massive project at Metog, or Motuo in Chinese, on the world’s highest-altitude major river, the Brahmaputra. The proposed dam, close to the disputed, heavily militarized border with India, will have a power-generating capacity nearly twice that of the Three Gorges Dam, whose reservoir is longer than the largest of North America’s Great Lakes.
Several of the Southeast Asian dam projects financed and undertaken by Chinese companies, like in Laos and Myanmar, are intended to generate electricity for export to China’s own market.
Indeed, China has demonstrated that it has no qualms about building dams in disputed territories, such as Pakistan-administered Kashmir, or in areas torn by ethnic separatism, like northern Myanmar.
Ever since China erected a cascade of giant dams on the Mekong, droughts have become more frequent and intense in the downriver countries. This has created a serious public-relations headache for Beijing, which denies that its upriver dams are to blame.
Indeed, seeking to play savior, it has promised to release more dam water for the drought-stricken countries. But this offer only highlights the newfound reliance of downriver countries on Chinese goodwill — a dependence that is set to deepen as China builds more giant dams on the Mekong.
With water woes worsening across Asia, the continent faces a stark choice — stay on the present path, which can lead only to more environmental degradation and even water wars, or fundamentally change course by embarking on the path of rules-based cooperation.
The latter path demands not only water-sharing accords and the free flow of hydrological data but also greater efficiency in water consumption, increased use of recycled and desalinated water, and innovative conservation and adaptation efforts.
None of this will be possible without the cooperation of China, which thus far has refused to enter into water-sharing arrangements with any downstream neighbor. If China does not abandon its current approach, the prospects for a rules-based order in Asia could perish forever. Getting China on board has thus become critical to shape water for peace in Asia.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/04/2019 – 20:10 - Malaysia PM: Protectionism Will Fail, Free Trade Will Triumph
Malaysia PM: Protectionism Will Fail, Free Trade Will Triumph
The 35th Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Business Advisory Council (ASEAN BAC) was held over the weekend at the IMPACT Exhibition Center in Muang Thong Thani, Nonthaburi Province, a northern suburb of Bangkok, Thailand.
The theme of the business investment summit was empowering ASEAN countries (Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore, Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, Brunei, Cambodia, Myanmar (Burma), and Laos in the 21st century.
There was also another theme at the summit, and that was the trade war and how protectionism will be short-lived.
Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad told attendees at the summit, that the rapid surge of protectionism seen by the US-China trade war will not last long, and free trade will triumph at the end, who was quoted by The Straits Times.
“Popularism is mounting in Europe and America where there are talks about limiting trade, about trade wars and applying higher taxes for imports. But I think this will not last very long because they will understand that if they cut themselves off from the new producers, they tend to lose a lot. They cannot really stop trade from expanding and becoming multilateral,” Mohamad said.
“There is a fear now that competition this time would benefit the countries in the East, rather than the developed countries from the West. That is why now there is a lot of resistance expressed openly by the people. And the politicians have responded, listening to the people, their worry about their jobs, about their growth, etc, and they like to now restrict trade, rather than have free trade, because now they understand that they are at the wrong end,” he added.
President Trump skipped out on the summit this weekend, was seen at UFC 244 at Madison Square Garden in New York City on Saturday night.
Donald Trump is at UFC 244 pic.twitter.com/JF3pDGmbKx
— Dan Gelston (@APgelston) November 3, 2019
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Mohamad called President Trump “not a very nice man” and criticized US protectionist policies that were leading the world towards a trade recession.
“People will come to their senses one day. At the very worst, this is going to go on for another five years, if he wins. When you limit the presidency to two terms, then the damage done will be much less,” Mohamad said.
With President Trump absent, China was seen leading the ASEAN summit and vowed to strengthen economic ties with neighboring countries.
”If you go alone, you will be bullied. We don’t want to go into trade war but sometimes when they do things that are not nice to us, we have to be unnice to them,“ says Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad of US protectionism. https://t.co/CAh3RhwjFE
— Rappler (@rapplerdotcom) November 2, 2019
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ASEAN countries were striving towards new trade deals with six other nations: China, Japan, India, Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea. None of the trade deals included in the US.
Mohamad better hope President Trump doesn’t win a second term in 2020, otherwise, if he does, protectionism will continue to soar.
The US is rapidly decoupling from the Eastern Hemisphere. The global economy is being fractured between the West and the East. This will produce a decade of financial market volatility and elevated geopolitical risks if not corrected in the near term.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/04/2019 – 19:50 - Peter Schiff: It's Not A 'Great Economy' Driving Stocks; It's The Fed!
Peter Schiff: It’s Not A ‘Great Economy’ Driving Stocks; It’s The Fed!
The Nasdaq and the S&P 500 closed on record highs Friday after a stronger than expected jobs report. But in his podcast, Peter Schiff said that the stock markets aren’t surging because of a great economy. They’re surging because of bad monetary policy.
The economy added 128,000 jobs in October, according to the Labor Department. That beat the expectation of 98,000. Trump economic advisor Larry Kudlow called it a great jobs report and a sign of a strong economy. In fact, Trump tweeted last week that we have the strongest economy in American history.
But Peter said the jobs report wasn’t really all that great, despite the fact that it beat expectations. And there was other economic data that came out weaker than expected last week. Peter called it a mixed bag. And the Atlanta Fed actually revised its Q4 GDP estimate down from 1.5 to 1.1.
So hardly the strongest economy in history. And yet the markets and President Trump are certainly celebrating like the economy was strong.”
Peter said the underlying economy is weak despite the job numbers. The real reason the markets are rising is because of the Fed. As Peter discussed in his previous podcast, the Fed cut rates for the third time this year last week. More significantly, Fed chair Jerome Powell indicated that it would take a “really significant” and “persistent” move up in inflation before considering rate hikes. Basically, Powell conceded that the Fed wasn’t going to be vigilant about inflation.
Rate hikes are the furthest thing from their mind. They’re not even considering raising rates right now. So, the only thing that they’ll do is cut rates or leave them alone … This is a very dovish stand for the Fed to take. Probably the most dovish stance I’ve ever seen the Fed take with respect to its supposed tolerance for inflation. Because, in the past, the Fed always pretended it would be vigilant and it would be more proactive when it came to inflation — that it wouldn’t wait to see the whites of inflation’s eyes. I mean, it would fire if it believed there was an inflation threat, but it didn’t actually believe one existed.”
But now the Fed is basically saying it’s going to wait until inflation is clearly a problem.
This is a green light to the stock market. ‘Hey, don’t worry. The Fed has got your back. We’ve got the Powell Put in place. Buy stocks.’”
And of course, it’s not just the rate cuts. It’s QE4.
The Fed can deny that they’re doing quantitative easing. But they can’t hide the numbers. They can’t hide their balance sheet.”
[ZH: And in case you wondered what the real role of central banks was/is…]
Source: Bloomberg
In fact, the balance sheet rose by 51.1 billion last week alone. The balance sheet is now above $4 trillion. It has grown by $250 billion over the last seven weeks.
That is a lot of quantitative easing. The Fed is expanding its balance sheet right now at about twice the pace that it was expanding its balance sheet when it was doing QE3. So QE4, whether they admit it or not, is much, much bigger than QE3, and it’s going to continue, and it is going to accelerate. And that is what is driving the stock market. Despite the fact that the economic data is deteriorating. Despite the fact that corporate earnings are falling, it is the Fed that is pushing this market to new highs by cutting interest rates, by indicating to the markets that they don’t have to worry about rate hikes no matter what happens with inflation. The Fed’s not going to raise interest rates. Oh, and by the way, they’re doing quantitative easing, and they’re going to print as much money as they have to keep the markets going up and to keep the economy propped up.”
Peter goes on to ponder an interesting question: what would things look like if the Fed hadn’t expanded its balance sheet by $250 billion? Obviously, it bought something with all that money.
They are buying new highs in the stock market.”
The Fed isn’t solving the problems. It’s just papering over the problems.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/04/2019 – 19:30 - The Incredible Shrinking Overton Window
The Incredible Shrinking Overton Window
Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,
“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”
~ Noam Chomsky
The plutocrat-owned narrative managers of the political/media class work constantly to shrink the Overton window, the spectrum of debate that is considered socially acceptable.
They do this by framing more and more debates in terms of how the oligarchic empire should be sustained and supported, steering them away from debates about whether that empire should be permitted to exist at all.
They get people debating whether there should be some moderate changes made or no meaningful changes at all, rather than the massive, sweeping changes we all know need to be made to the entire system.
They get people debating whether they should elect a crook in a red hat or a crook in a blue hat, rather than whether or not they should be forced to elect crooks.
They get people debating violations of government secrecy laws, not whether the government has any business keeping those secrets from its citizenry in the first place.
They get people debating how internet censorship should take place and whom should be censored, rather than whether any internet censorship should occur.
They get people debating how and to what extent government surveillance should occur, not whether the government has any business spying on its citizens.
They get people debating how subservient and compliant someone needs to be in order to not get shot by a police officer, rather than whether a police officer should be shooting people for those reasons at all.
They get people debating whether or not a group of protesters are sufficiently polite, rather than debating the thing those protesters are demonstrating against.
They get people debating about whether this thing or that thing is a “conspiracy theory”, rather than discussing the known fact that powerful people conspire.
They get people debating whether Tulsi Gabbard is a dangerous lunatic, a Russian asset, a Republican asset gearing up for a third party run, or just a harmless Democratic Party crackpot, rather than discussing the fact that her foreign policy would have been considered perfectly normal prior to 9/11.
They get people debating whether Bernie Sanders is electable or too radical, rather than discussing what it says about the status quo that his extremely modest proposals which every other major country already implements are treated as something outlandish in the United States.
They get people debating whether Jeremy Corbyn has done enough to address the Labour antisemitism crisis, rather than whether that “crisis” ever existed at all outside of the imaginations of establishment smear merchants.
They get people debating whether Joe Biden or Elizabeth Warren would win against Trump, rather than whether either of those establishment lackeys is a worthy nominee.
They get people debating whether politicians should have corporate sponsors, rather than whether corporations should be allowed to interfere in the electoral process at all.
They get people debating if the US should be pursuing regime change in Iran or Syria, rather than whether the US has any business overthrowing the governments of sovereign nations to begin with.
They get people debating how many US troops should be in Syria, rather than whether that illegal invasion and occupation was ever legitimate in the first place.
They get people debating whether to kill people slowly by sanctions or kill them quickly with bombs, rather than whether they should be killed at all.
They get people debating whether or not some other country’s leader is an evil dictator, rather than whether it’s any of your business.
They get people debating the extent to which Russia and Trump were involved in the Democratic Party’s 2016 email leaks, rather than the contents of those leaks.
They get people debating what the response should be to Russian interference in the election, rather than whether that interference took place at all, and whether it would really matter if it did.
They get people debating how much government support the poor should be allowed to have, rather than whether the rich should be allowed to keep what they’ve stolen from the poor.
They get people debating what kind of taxes billionaires should have to pay, rather than whether it makes sense for billionaires to exist at all.
They get people impotently debating the bad things other countries do, rather than the bad things their own country does which they can actually do something about.
They get people debating what should be done to prevent the rise of China, rather than whether a multipolar world might be beneficial.
They get people debating whether western cold war escalations against the Russian Federation are sufficient, rather than whether they want the horrors of the cold war to be resurrected in the first place.
They get people debating what extent cannabis should be decriminalized, rather than whether the government should be allowed to lock anyone up for deciding to put any substance whatsoever in their own body.
They get people debating whether or not US troops should be withdrawn from Afghanistan, rather than whether or not there should be any US troops outside of the US.
They get people debating whether or not Julian Assange is “a real journalist”, rather than whether or not they should set legal precedents that necessarily criminalize acts of journalism.
They get people debating the subtle details of bail protocol, political asylum, embassy cat hygiene and leaking rather than whether it should ever be legal to imprison a publisher for exposing government war crimes.
They get people debating what the punishment should be for whistleblowers, not what the punishment should be for those they blow the whistle on.
They get people debating whether Fox or MSNBC is the real “fake news”, rather than whether the entirety of mainstream media is oligarchic propaganda.
They get people debating about how the things everyone is freaking out over Trump doing were previously done by Obama, rather than discussing why all US presidents do the same evil things regardless of their parties or campaign platforms.
They get people debating what should be done with money, not whether the concept of money itself is in need of a complete overhaul.
They get people debating what should be done with government, not whether the concept of government itself is in need of a complete overhaul.
They get people debating whether the status quo should be reinforced or revised, rather than whether it should be flushed down the toilet where it belongs.
They get people angrily debating things they can’t change, rather than constructively working on the things that they can.
They get people shoving against each other in opposite directions, while they swiftly build a cage around us all.
* * *
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Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/04/2019 – 18:50
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