- Deutsche Bank's Decades-Long History Of Compliance Failures Exposed
Christmas just came early for Maxine Waters and Adam Schiff.
As the leaders of the House Financial Services Committee and House Intelligence Committee ramp up an investigation into Deutsche Bank’s lending relationship with the Trump Organization (the first round of subpoenas has already been sent and Waters has said that DB is cooperating in the probe), Bloomberg has handed them a gift in the form of an extensive report chronicling a culture of chronic compliance failures at the bank’s US unit. At first glance, the story appears to support Waters’ claim that Deutsche is “one of the biggest money laundering banks in the country, or maybe the world.”
The report describes Deutsche’s US unit, which is headquartered inside a gleaming Wall Street tower, making it one of the few Wall Street banks still situated on Wall Street, as a “kind of legal mirage”. For years, the leaders of the US subsidiary were merely puppets, with little real power, influence or knowledge about the subsidiary’s operations. Even the distribution of bonuses was outsourced to the headquarters in Frankfurt, BBG said. Top executives couldn’t answer questions about the bank’s operations, and they had little influence over personnel decisions.
This lack of authority helped foster an atmosphere of lax compliance and AML controls, which endured even after US regulators demanded that changes be made.
After DB expanded its US presence by buying out the floundering Bankers Trust, which was mired in a scandal involving sales of shady derivatives products. But DB swiftly established a shady track record of its own:
From 1999 through 2006, it handled almost $11 billion in U.S. dollar transactions for customers in nations under sanctions: Iran, Syria, Libya, Burma and Sudan. Later, it helped rich Russians move $10 billion from their country using “mirror trades” – simultaneous stock trades in separate jurisdictions that bypassed customary hoops for transferring money.
And those were just the cases where the bank was accused of wrongdoing. Here’s a roundup of other incidents where the bank managed to escape regulatory scrutiny.
- Russia’s Sberbank PJSC while the government-controlled bank was involved in a years-long scheme that funneled millions to a man in the U.S. who admitted to smuggling $65 million worth of potential nuclear technology to Russia, according to federal prosecutors;
- Kenyan fraudsters who scammed U.S. income tax refunds using identities stolen from Indiana sex offenders;
- and a Colombian drug cartel that received payments from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration as part of an undercover operation.
- The payments, disguised as profits from auto-parts sales, were transferred into a Deutsche account and exhibited what a DEA undercover agent called “obvious red flags.”
Through interviews with more than a dozen former employees, as well as a review of hundreds of pages of court documents, a picture emerged of why Deutsche Bank waited so long to break off its correspondent banking relationship with Danske Bank’s Estonian branch, the epicenter for one of the biggest money laundering scandals in European banking history. JPM broke off its relationship with the unit in 2013, while BofA waited until early 2016. DB didn’t sever its ties until late in 2016.
Internal documents, court records and interviews with dozens of people – including more than 20 current and former employees of the troubled German lender – show that its U.S. unit largely resisted strict money-laundering compliance for years. The insider accounts help explain why Deutsche’s U.S. subsidiary kept handling Danske’s business after competitors quit.
Although U.S. executives routinely promised regulators they’d get tough, former staffers say such efforts were often disregarded in favor of cozy relationships with overseas customers. The suspicious billions kept flowing — not just from Danske’s Estonian branch, but from various clients that would eventually be snared in other global money-laundering scandals.
And what’s worse, the bank failed to act even after managers in the bank’s Jacksonville, Fla. office, its second-largest in the US, where most of its compliance workers were stationed, confronted executives about their concerns after more than $150 billion in suspicious funds flowed through Deutsche’s correspondent banking unit. How did the executives respond?
They told the compliance workers to shut up and worry about the work in front of them.
Years before regulators learned about what may be one of the biggest money-laundering pipelines in history, low-level bank employees in Jacksonville, Florida, sounded repeated alarms.
Compliance workers for Deutsche Bank AG flagged some of at least $150 billion in transactions that the bank’s U.S. subsidiary handled for a tiny Estonian unit of Danske Bank A/S, according to a former compliance officer.
It’s not clear how urgently the Florida team warned executives at Deutsche Bank Trust Co. Americas. But when workers sought broader scrutiny of certain clients, they got a familiar response from some higher-ups, the officer said: Shut up, focus on the transaction in front of you, file your paperwork and move on.
Moving on, BBG discussed how the leaders of the bank’s US unit repeatedly broke promises to regulators to reform the bank’s AML controls. During the 2000s, the unit was led by Seth Waugh, who was later called out by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York for making “no progress” on improving the bank’s AML controls.
Employees said Waugh’s failure wasn’t surprising. They recalled how during conversations about bank operations, Waugh often couldn’t answer questions because the real decisions were made in Europe.
When that money flow began, the chief of the German lender’s US business was Seth Waugh, a perpetually tanned executive who wore his graying hair a bit long by bankers’ standards.
Waugh pledged to regulators in 2005 that he’d overhaul the bank’s money-laundering protections. But in a 2013 letter that served as a scathing review of his tenure, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York concluded that “no progress was made” on concerns first raised in 2002.
Waugh, widely described as affable and approachable, had only limited influence over staff members’ bonuses or other personnel matters – or even key points of Deutsche’s U.S. balance sheet, according to several former colleagues. Employees say he often couldn’t answer questions about bank operations or regulatory matters because the real decision-makers were sitting in Europe.
One New York executive recalled visiting Waugh’s 46th-floor office to tell him about bonus-hungry co-workers who ignored danger signs to chase risky accounts. Waugh seemed sympathetic but said he wasn’t sure what he could do, the executive recalled.
In a sign of just how much value Deutsche placed on compliance, the bank hired a former one-star general with no investment banking experience to run the locus of its compliance operations – effectively killing two birds with one stone: Showing its peers that it was serious about hiring veterans, and hamstringing its compliance operation. In a shareholder lawsuits brought against the bank in 2016, an executive who was deposed by the investors’ lawyers said compliance staff were treated as “one step above janitors.”
In 2010, Brigadier General Michael Fleming of the Florida Army National Guard began talking to Deutsche about a new career, running its veteran-recruitment program. He got a bigger job instead: running its new outpost in North Florida.
“I really didn’t have any corporate investment banking experience at that point,” the one-star general told Fox Business Network in 2013. Fleming, who left Deutsche Bank in 2014, didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Former employees said he wasn’t a hands-on leader. Before his arrival, Deutsche executives had transferred some bank functions, including anti-money-laundering efforts, to the main Jacksonville site, several low-slung concrete buildings that surround a man-made pond in a suburban office park. It grew to become the bank’s second-largest office in the U.S., with approximately 2,000 employees working in various operations. Former compliance workers there describe a disregard for their work that emanated from New York.
Throughout Deutsche Bank, compliance staff members were considered to be “one step above the janitors,” an unnamed former executive told lawyers who filed a 2016 lawsuit against the bank. The suit, in which investors claimed Deutsche Bank misled them about the effectiveness of its anti-money-laundering efforts, was later dismissed.
But in what was perhaps the most humorous detail from the story, BBG reported on how DB’s correspondent bank would hand out “excellence awards” to clients who raised the fewest number of red flags from the bank’s automated compliance system. A Cypriot bank later accused of laundering money for terrorists received one of the awards, though DB wasn’t accused of wrongdoing.
Still, some aspects of the bank’s approach raise questions. Like other correspondent banks, it relies on a largely automated system called “straight-through processing,” or STP. That system checks names and places against government risk lists and other factors. For years, executives have bestowed an “STP Excellence Award” on customers that successfully move money through Deutsche’s system while raising the fewest red flags. The awards have sometimes gone to questionable recipients.
Cyprus-based FBME Bank Ltd. won eight of them through 2013, according to news releases. The Treasury Department later accused that bank of having weak money-laundering controls that allowed customers to conduct more than $1 billion in suspicious transactions through various correspondent accounts, including one with Deutsche Bank’s U.S. unit, from 2006 to 2014. Treasury officials said FBME helped organized crime and terror groups move money, evade sanctions and develop banned weapons. Deutsche Bank wasn’t accused of wrongdoing in the case.
Ironically, though it apparently had no problem offering banking services to criminals, terrorists and sanctioned governments, DB drew the line in 2016 when it opted not to lend more money to the Trump Organization over fears of being associated with such a controversial candidate, as well as worries about being put in the awkward position of seizing assets from the president should his company default while in office.
In summary, terrorists and criminals good, Trump bad.
- China's Han Superstate: The New Third Reich
Authored by Gordon Chang via The Gatestone Institute,
More than a million people, for no reason other than their ethnicity or religion, are held in concentration camps in what Beijing calls the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and what traditional inhabitants of the area, the Uighurs, say is East Turkestan. In addition to Uighurs, ethnic Kazakhs are also held in these facilities.
Families in this troubled area, shown on maps as the northwestern portion of the People’s Republic of China, are being torn apart. The children of imprisoned Uighur and Kazakh parents are “confined” to “schools” that are separated from the outside by barbed wire and heavy police patrols. They are denied instruction in their own language, forced to learn Mandarin Chinese. The controls are part of a so-called “Hanification” policy, a program of forced assimilation. “Han” is the name of China’s dominant ethnic group.
Because Uighurs and Kazakhs are dying in the camps in considerable numbers, Beijing is building crematoria to eradicate burial traditions while disposing of corpses.
More than a million people, for no reason other than their ethnicity or religion, are held in concentration camps in what Beijing calls the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. Picture: Chinese police clash with ethnic Uighur women during a protest in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, on July 7, 2009. (Photo by Guang Niu/Getty Images)
The camps, a crime against humanity, are spreading. China is now building similar facilities, given various euphemistic names such as “vocational training centers,” in Tibet, in China’s southwest.
At the same time, Beijing is renewing its attempt to eliminate religion country-wide. Christians have come under even greater attack across China, as have Buddhists. China’s ruler, Xi Jinping, demands that the five recognized religions — official recognition is a control mechanism — “Sinicize.” The Chinese, as a part of this ruthless and relentless effort, are destroying mosques and churches, forcing devout Muslims to drink alcohol and eat pork, inserting Han officials to live in Muslim homes, and ending religious instruction for minors.
These attempts, which have antecedents in Chinese history, have been intensified since Xi became the Communist Party’s general secretary in November 2012.
At the same time, Xi, far more than his predecessors, has been promoting the concept of a world order ruled by only one sovereign, a Chinese one.
In broad outline, Xi’s vision of the world is remarkably similar to that of the Third Reich, at least before the mass murders.
The Third Reich and the People’s Republic share a virulent racism, in China politely referred to as “Han chauvinism.” The Han category, which is said to include about 92% of the population of the People’s Republic, is in truth the amalgamation of related ethnic groups.
Chinese mythology holds that all Chinese are descendants of the Yellow Emperor, who is thought to have ruled in the third millennium BCE. The Chinese consider themselves to be a branch of humanity separate from the rest of the world, a view reinforced by indoctrination in schools, among other means.
Chinese scholars support this notion of Chinese separateness with the “Peking Man” theory of evolution, which holds the Chinese do not share a common African ancestor with the remainder of humankind. This theory of the unique evolution of the Chinese has, not surprisingly, reinforced racist views.
As a result of racism, many in China, including officials, “believe themselves to be categorically different from and impliedly superior to the rest of the humankind,” writes Fei-Ling Wang, author of The China Order: Centralia, World Empire, and the Nature of Chinese Power.
The racism, therefore, is institutionalized and openly promoted. That was painfully evident last year in the 13-minute skit on China Central Television’s Spring Festival Gala, the premier television show in China. In “Let’s Celebrate Together,” a Chinese actress in blackface played a Kenyan mother, who had an enormous bosom and ridiculously large buttocks. Worse, her sidekick was a human-size monkey. The combination of the monkey and the woman was an echo of the Hubei Provincial Museum exhibit, “This is Africa,” which in 2017 displayed photographs of Africans flush next to images of primates.
In recent years, there have been many ugly portrayals of Africans in Chinese media, and although the skit last year was not the worst, it was striking because the main state broadcaster, by airing it to about 800 million viewers, made it clear Chinese officials think of Africans as both objects of derision and subhuman. In these circumstances, it is a safe assumption that these views are shared by the Beijing leadership, which, alarmingly, is making more frequent race-based appeals to Chinese people — and not only those in China.
This century’s master race has a problem, however. China, now the world’s most populous state, faces rapid demographic decline. Last year’s birth rate was the lowest since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. The country’s population will peak in 2029, according to the World Population Prospects 2017, published by the United Nations Population Division. But the high-point could in fact come in just the next couple years, as the U.N. numbers are based on Beijing’s overly optimistic assumptions. China’s official demographers, for instance, did not foresee the near-collapse of the birthrate last year.
In 2024, another momentous event will occur. Then, for the first time in at least 300 years — and maybe for the first time in recorded history — China will not be the world’s most populous society. That honor will go to a country the Chinese generally both detest and fear, India. When India peaks in 2061, it will have a population 398,088 million larger than China’s.
Once China begins to shrink, it will shrink fast. In 2018, China’s population was 4.3 times larger than America’s. By 2100, China is projected to have a population only 2.3 times larger.
China’s demographic path is set for decades, and it will have momentous — and extremely adverse — consequences for Chinese society and the country’s “comprehensive national strength.” Perhaps that is why Beijing looks as if it may be trying to compensate for collapsing demography by laying the groundwork for a race of superhuman Chinese.
He Jiankui of Shenzhen’s Southern University of Science and Technology announced in November that he had used CRISPR to edit human embryos that produced live births, in this case twin
sgirls. He claimed he was making the babies resistant to HIV, but there is speculation he was also trying to enhance intelligence. In any event, the announcement evoked Nazi eugenics experiments, especially because there is evidence that the Chinese government had backed He’s “world’s first” experiment, considered unethical and dangerous.Certainly dangerous is Xi Jinping. “Mao Zedong may have played on the Third World’s racial resentments when trying to unite former colonial peoples against white imperialists, but he thought that Communism was a global phenomenon that would eventually find a home everywhere and Mao’s utopia was in the future,” the Hudson Institute’s Charles Horner told Gatestone. “Xi Jinping’s Chinese Communist Party is not global or utopian in this way; instead, it seems in thrall to an essential ‘Chinese-ness.'”
Horner sees disconcerting similarities between Xi’s China and 1930s Imperial Japan. “Like Imperial Japan then,” Horner said, “Xi and the Party look backward to a mythologized past when a benign Emperor brought the whole world together to bask in his glory and share his munificence.”
Concentration camps, racism, eugenics, ambitions of world domination. Sound familiar?
There is a new Third Reich, and it is China.
- USAF Reveals Skyborg Combat Drone In The Sky By 2023
The Air Force office of Strategic Development Planning and Experimentation (SDPE) at the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) is developing a prototype autonomous, unmanned combat air vehicle testing platform with an operational capability as soon as 2023, the service announced Tuesday.
“Skyborg is a vessel for AI [artificial intelligence] technologies that could range from rather simple algorithms to fly the aircraft and control them in airspace to the introduction of more complicated levels of AI to accomplish certain tasks or subtasks of the mission,” AFRL Aerospace Systems Directorate engineer Matt Duquett said.
Earlier this month, SDPE issued a capability request for information (CRFI) to private industry to gain insight into commercially available technology that can meet the requirements of the Skyborg program.
“Low cost, attritables, unmanned air vehicles are one way to bring mass to the fight when it comes to addressing potential near-peer engagements in the future,” according to Ben Tran, Skyborg program manager.
“We also know there is heavy investment by our near-peer adversaries in artificial intelligence and autonomy in general. We know that when you couple autonomy and AI with systems like low-cost attritables, that can increase capability significantly and be a force multiplier for our Air Force and so the 2023 goal line is our attempt at bringing something to bear in a relatively quick time frame to show that we can bring that kind of capability to the fight,” said Tran.
Although Skyborg will not be integrated into an airframe this year, the CRFI highlights the “importance of an open systems architecture, having modularity in the system, not only from a sensing capabilities standpoint, but overall mission systems, as well as the autonomy associated with the mission capability for the platform,” said Tran.
“We’ve partnered with the 412th Test Wing at Edwards Air Force Base, California, and specifically an organization called the Emerging Technologies Combined Test Force and we’re working with them beginning with small, fast-moving UAVs to test the current state of the art in AI and autonomy in those airplanes and the ability for them to autonomously team and collaborate in flight,” Tran said.
Maj. Ryan Carr, from AFRL’s Aerospace Systems Directorate, said machine learning algorithms have rapidly progressed in the last several years, and program personnel is very excited to incorporate this technology into an existing airframe.
“We expect that technology will continue to mature fairly rapidly. What we really need to understand is, ‘How do you take that and do something like bring it to the real world and fly with it for example?’ The thing we’re trying to get at early on is how to do that safely. We’re talking about run-time assurance, working hand-in-hand with the flight test community who have a very long record of safe flight testing. That’s really what we want to focus our attention on in this early period,” Carr said.
“We want to do this in a way that builds trust in the system as you go along so that when you get to that EOC, you will have established a baseline of trust so that operational youth will believe what the system will do or believe it’s safe. It’s not just that end-state capability, it’s the trust as you go along,” he added.
Before operational AI software is integrated into an airframe, the Air Force is expected to deploy a new combat drone; however, no such drone was mentioned in the release.
Earlier this month, we documented a likely candidate of the Skyborg program in a never before seen video of the Kratos XQ-58 Valkyrie, an unmanned combat air vehicle, which completed its first flight on March 5, 2019, at Yuma Proving Ground, Arizona.
- The Delusional Futurism Of 'Liberal World Order' Academics
Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,
Perhaps this is an overly broad generalization, but I feel there is an almost universal feeling among the public that there is something intrinsically annoying about academia. The source of this annoyance is up for debate, but I believe it stems from the image academics project versus the reality of their personal character and intent. Your average university approved academic will say that some people find them distasteful because they are “so smart”, and this makes others envious. I would say it’s the opposite – the average academic is actually quite ignorant, but brandishes a false image of being a genius. This is why I often refer to them as “academic idiots”.
Fake intelligence and faux wisdom are like sandpaper to people’s exposed nerves, and the average person is not as dumb as academics think they are.
At the top of the fraudulent academic totem pole are what I would call the “academic philosophers”; the gatekeepers, the people who pontificate regularly on the meaning of life and society while living the most charmed life one can imagine. These are people who in most cases come from upper class backgrounds. They have been provided for every waking moment of their existence. They have had every door opened for them by someone else on the path to success, and have experienced little to no struggle or suffering in the whole of their time on this Earth. And yet, they somehow deem themselves expertly qualified to comment on the human condition.
It should come as no surprise that the ideas these academics develop tend to deny concrete reality. They seek to pursue agendas that are fanciful at best and would be ultimately destructive if ever applied in the real world.
I find this to be common with many philosophers, not just today but throughout history. The venerated Plato was such a person; the youngest son of wealthy aristocratic parents who was required to do very little in early life but ponder. The trials surrounding his friend Socrates aside, Plato never abandoned the notion of elitist rule over society. Plato’s Republic is a shrine to the elitist model, imagining a world governed essentially by academics – People born with superior intellectual abilities and who were destined to rule over the rest of us as benevolent demigods.
It’s a funny coincidence that supposedly objective elitist academics always come to the conclusion that THEY are the best equipped people to manage society.
The academic cabal is not entirely naive, however. They have realized over time that their sales pitch of an intellectual priest class and Utopian pyramid schemes are not very effective, and they have opted to switch narratives. The new narrative is one of inevitability; the inevitability of socialism, the inevitability of globalism and the inevitability of algorithmic automation.
In other words, globalism will be the apex social structure and artificial intelligence will govern the daily machinations of that structure, regardless of what the public wants. The elites won’t rule the world directly, but their ilk will create the algorithms and the policies that will rule the world by virtue of social and technological evolution. Like Jean-Luc Godard’s French New Wave film, Alphaville, the idea is that the elites can simply sit back and let the dark “logic” of algorithmic governance do the dirty work. For, after all, how can we possibly argue with a computer?
An example of one of the academic elitists of which I speak is Yuval Noah Harari. His editorials are getting a lot of play in the mainstream media lately and they focus on the necessity of globalism as well as the need for humans to quickly adapt to technocracy lest they find themselves obsolete. Harari is a prototypical academic philosopher, regurgitating old concepts of aristocracy and feudalism thinly veiled in futurist imagery. His arguments are the type that other lesser academics absorb and endlessly parrot as if they are profound.
For those not familiar with the ideas behind futurism, I suggest reading my article ‘The Meaning Of Good And Evil In Perilous Times’. To summarize, futurists consistently endorse the notion that old methodologies must be erased to make way for new methodologies. Traditions and ideals of the past are considered a prison which holds humanity back from progress and a better tomorrow. They believe that the solution to the imbalances and tragedies of today is to aggressively dismantle the existing system and rebuild it in a new and original way. This includes morals and guiding principles, which they see as stifling and relative.
Futurism was founded in the early 20th century in Europe with sister groups in Russia and is considered a precursor to early socialist movements including fascism and communism. To clarify, there are no new ideas under the sun, only old ideas with a slightly different spin. Socialism precedes globalism, which is one of the oldest ideas; the idea of total empire.
Like most modern academic philosophers, Yuval Harari displays futurism and globalism in spades. He is associated with the globalist Carnegie Council For Ethics In International Affairs. Once known as the Church Peace Union, the group helped push Woodrow Wilson into involving the US in WWI and also helped promote the establishment of the UN.
He is an adequate model for my debunking of what these people often refer to as the “liberal world order”, which is just another brand of futurism. As a reference point I am using two of Harari’s articles, one published for the Guardian on the future of automation and the robots displacing humanity, and the other published for the Rothschild owned magazine The Economiston the need for globalism and the end of nationalism. I will be summarizing his arguments and views, but I welcome readers to examine his articles linked above.
Let’s get to it…
AI Will Replace Most Humans…And This Is A Good Thing
This is becoming a mainstay narrative from the globalist establishment and their academia for a number of reasons. The argument that AI dominance is an inevitability is much like the argument that globalism is an inevitability; both are based on self fulfilling prophecy.
Harari imagines what he calls a “world without work”, a development only 20-30 years in the future in which algorithmic machines replace human beings as the primary source of labor. There are two sides to this piece of propaganda; first it is meant to frighten the public into demanding centralization and global governance. Harari asserts that without global governance and a “universal basic income”, AI will make most people without technological savvy into instant paupers, which he labels “the useless class”. And here we see the trick.
As I outlined in my article ‘The Real Reason Why Globalists Are So Obsessed With Artificial Intelligence’, globalist entities like DARPA, the UN and the World Economic Forum have been highly aggressive in pushing AI to the forefront of the mainstream and have engaged in promotional campaigns to counter public distrust of the technology. At the same time, these globalist organizations have been arguing that without their increased oversight, AI could be abused by nation states or could destroy whole economies.
So, globalists tell you that AI dominance is an inevitable consequence of progress while they expend vast sums of capital and man-hours to make their prediction a reality. They then tell you AI will be a threat to your livelihood and your children’s livelihoods. Then, they tell you that the only answer is to give them more power to regulate the problem that they created.
The second part of this propaganda is the claim that the dangers of AI could be turned into Utopian benefits. If the “world without work” is the stick, then universal basic income is the carrot. The fantasy promise of the futurists goes back to the early days of communism, and always includes a tomorrow-land where all people will live a leisurely existence; a society where all necessities are provided without labor. Usually flying cars and floating cities are offered in there somewhere….
Harrari insinuates in his article for The Guardian that sloth is a natural state for most of mankind, and that the majority of people would remain mentally comfortable with having no purpose in life as long as they were given a virtual existence as a means of distraction. He cites the example of basement dwelling adult-children that, if allowed, subsist on their parent’s generosity and a life in video games. But rather than pointing out that it is destructive to encourage such behavior, Hariri suggests that it should be a mainstay of our society.
What Hariri ignores is a key issue in why many people settle for such a life. It is not necessarily because they enjoy being part of the “useless class”; many of them desperately want to find a sense of purpose and accomplishment as this desire is ingrained in the psyche of most people at birth. It’s just that they have no idea how, and have lived in an environment that seems increasingly designed to impair their independence.
I would note that elites in aristocracy for centuries exploited the crutch of universal basic income as a means to control the behavior of their children. The progeny of elites were often treated as property, and were kept in line through infantilization and income dependence. For these children, following a personal dream or setting out on one’s own was almost unthinkable because they had been isolated from any and all practical skill sets. To walk away from the system was to invite poverty and potential death.
So the plan is this: Prevent people from becoming self reliant, ensure you are their only source of income, then lord over them using that income as if they owe you like a child owes a parent. Hariri is calling for this kind of control measure for the entire world.
Human Experience Is All In Our Heads And Means Nothing
Much like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Hariri’s “world without work” relies on opiates, but in this case, the technological opiates of virtual reality. He claims that this is nothing new, and that humans have long participated in virtual reality games through their participation in religion as well as the acquisition of property. I fail to see the logic in his comparison, and it appears that he uses the odd tangent merely as an opportunity to meander into an unoriginal atheistic and socialistic rant.
However, this rant does give us more insight into another globalist propaganda meme, which is that all experience is a matter of perception and that all conclusions are relative, including moral conclusions. I have written dozens of articles on the issue of globalism and moral relativism and why it is built on lies and disinformation. I feel it is one of the most vital debates of our era or any era because it determines the survival of our humanity.
For someone who views all experience as a pointless game that people make up to entertain themselves until they eventually die, Hariri sure seems overly concerned with how we are all governed while we LARP our way through existence. If there is no point and there is no design to the universe or humanity, then why seek to centralize control over the game at all?
Of course, this is elitist nonsense, and I’m not sure that they even believe the garbage that they are selling. As I’ve noted in past articles, numerous scholars have presented considerable evidence of inherent human psychological qualities, including inborn conscience and moral compass, as well as archetypal dualities which give us the inherent gift of choice. From Carl Jung, to Joseph Campbell to Steven Pinker, etc.., REAL scientists and researchers have undertaken decades of experimentation, data collection and observation to support their conclusions. This is something that academic philosophers like Hariri have no concept of. They think that if they state a viewpoint with enough arrogant bravado this is all they need to solidify it as fact.
The reason why globalists in particular are so fond of the relativism narrative is because in vindicates their behavior in the pursuit of their centralization goals. This behavior is usually based in an “ends justify the means” approach, and is contrary to our inherent voice of empathy and conscience. If human experiences are all a matter of perception and delusion, then how the elites abuse or subjugate other humans to subsidize their own virtual reality no longer matters.
Globalism Good, Nationalism Bad
Global centralization is called many things by elitist academics: The new world order, the multipolar world order, the global reset, the global commons, the liberal world order, etc. Globalists spend most of their time attempting to repackage the marketing behind globalism to make it more palatable to the masses. This is usually a dishonest process because it requires them to falsely attribute the failings of globalism to free markets and nationalism.
Hariri makes a point to proclaim the “liberal world order” a success in improving the planet over several generations economically and geopolitically, but then argues that nation states are beginning to “undermine” that stability. We also constantly hear from globalists that “capitalism” is the cause of most of the world’s ills, yet the truth is socialist-style interference has created corporatism and the oppression of free markets for the past century.
So, globalism saved us from free market capitalism, but capitalism is destroying everything? How can both things be true?
This is the overarching script of the globalists today – That globalism works, nationalism and independent economies don’t, and to take a step backwards is suicide. That is to say, they consider the “populist” movements of today a suicidal step backwards.
What academic elites like Hariri gloss over are the numerous problems our world suffers today because of interdependency and centralization. He proudly observes that any nation that attempts to function outside of the globalist system would fall into economic disarray, but doesn’t acknowledge that in 2008 the world fell into disarray exactly because nations were far too interdependent, with trade mechanism so ingrained that the collapse of one major economy dragged down the next which dragged down the next. This was a cancerous weakness triggered by globalism, not isolationism or nationalism. And, it is a weakness that persists in 2019.
Yet, the solution is always the same – more globalism. The lack of self sufficiency and redundancy in national economies is not something that should be celebrated, but something that should be rectified. It does not have to be that way; globalists made it that way.
Fooling The Masses Into Loving Globalism
As Harari notes in his article for The Economist, creating a “global identity” in which the masses replace loyalty for a nation or tribe with loyalty to their species and to the Earth need not be difficult. All that is required is a common enemy, and what better enemy than the threat of nuclear war, the threat of climate change, and the threat of artificial intelligence?
The use of external threats (some of them fabricated) to herd the public towards an intended mindset is the bread and butter of elites. Man-made climate change stands as a fabricated threat, consistently debunked and the data exposed as rigged to present predetermined findings. AI is a threat which globalists have actively engineered (DARPA being a primary source). The threat of nuclear war has existed for decades and I hardly expect global elites to dismantle such weapons once they get their clutches on global government.
And here we discover the underlying fallacy of Hariri’s debate and the globalist position in general. The elites conjure terrible visions of what will happen if nation states and tribalism are allowed to endure, but the disasters they predict, including war, genetic tampering, weaponization of AI, mass immigration crises, economic collapse – all of these things are being caused by the elites already. And, there would be absolutely nothing stopping them from continuing to cause such problems in the future if they get what they want, which is total global governance.
I fail to see why globalist institutions should be considered more trustworthy than national governments, let alone local tribes. Hariri is an Israeli professor who has obviously benefited from the tribalism of that culture while at the same time admonishing it. Globalists act as though they are loyal to humanity, but they are really only loyal to their own parasitic ideology, and their own tribe – the globalist tribe.
To elevate globalism to something more akin to a religion than just a political philosophy, Hariri pulls one last classic Utopian apparition from his bag of tricks; the promise of godhood. This idea is featured more prominently in his books than in his articles, but it reaffirms the suspicions I discussed in my article ‘Luciferianism: A Secular Look At A Destructive Globalist Belief System’. Namely, that globalism rests on a foundation very similar to luciferian ideology, and that globalist technocracy is motivated by the obsession of narcissistic sociopaths to become godlike.
They sell this future to the public as a lure, but I’m guessing that the liberal world order will not be gifting the “useless class” with deity status. As in every elitist vision, only the elites get to be rulers and gods. The rest of us get to be cogs in the machine, if we are lucky, and deemed expendable if we are unlucky.
* * *
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- Army Awards First Submachine Gun Contract In Over 50-Years
The Army has selected its first subcompact weapon in more than 50-years.
Brügger & Thomet’s APC9-K (Advanced Police Carbine) was chosen over Sig Sauer and four other firearm manufactures that submitted their prototypes last year to the Prototype Opportunity Notice (PON), which asked companies for a “highly concealable [Sub Compact Weapon] system capable of engaging threat personnel with a high volume of lethal force while accurately firing at close range with minimal collateral damage.”
The APC9-K uses standard 9×19mm and .45 ACP (Automatic Colt Pistol) rounds. It is already in use with law enforcement around the country.
The submachine gun can fire in both semi- and full-automatic modes, has a collapsible stock and Picatinny rail for laser sights.
A Production-Other Transaction Agreement (P-OTA) worth $2,575,811.76 was awarded to Brügger & Thomet for 350 guns and accessories such as spare parts, slings, and manuals. The Army has the option to purchase 1,000 additional weapons under the terms of the contract.
“The P-OTA is awarded based upon successful completion of the prototype project proposed by B&T USA LLC. in response to Sub Compact Weapon (SCW) Prototype Opportunity Notice: W15QKN-18-R-032M, evaluation of testing results, and subsequent updated proposal request letter for Follow-on Production Award. The purpose of this P-OTA is to purchase 350 SCWs, with an option for additional quantities of up to 1,000 SCWs, with slings, manuals, accessories, and spare parts.”
Here is a diagram of the APC9-K, and other variant models:
Brügger & Thomet confirmed their selection to Army Times but noted that they weren’t at liberty to comment beyond the information published on FedBizOpps.
The Army previously stated that the contract fulfillment period starts five to seven months after the award date (April 1), which means the service could receive their first submachine gun in more than five decades this coming fall.
- The CIA Takeover Of America In The 1960s Is The Story Of Our Time
Authored by Edward Curtin via The Unz Review,
A Lie Too Big To Fail: The Real History of the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, by Lisa Pease
“‘We’re all puppets’, the suspect [Sirhan Sirhan] replied, with more truth than he could have understood at that moment.”
– Lisa Pease, quoting from the LAPD questioning of Sirhan
When Senator Robert Kennedy was assassinated on June 5, 1968, the American public fell into an hypnotic trance in which they have remained ever since. The overwhelming majority accepted what was presented by government authorities as an open and shut case that a young Palestinian American, Sirhan Sirhan, had murdered RFK because of his support for Israel, a false accusation whose ramifications echo down the years. That this was patently untrue and was contradicted by overwhelming evidence made no difference.
Sirhan did not kill Robert Kennedy, yet he remains in jail to this very day. Robert Kennedy, Jr., who was 14 years old at the time of his father’s death, has visited Sirhan in prison, claims he is innocent, and believes there was another gunman. Paul Schrade, an aide to the senator and the first person shot that night, also says Sirhan didn’t do it. Both have plenty of evidence. And they are not alone.
There is a vast body of documented evidence to prove this, an indisputably logical case marshalled by serious writers and researchers. Lisa Pease is the latest. It is a reason why a group of 60 prominent Americans has recently called for a reopening of, not just this case, but those of JFK, MLK, and Malcom X. The blood of these men cries out for the revelation of the truth that the United States national security state and its media accomplices have fought so mightily to keep hidden for so many years.
That they have worked so hard at this reveals how dangerous the truth about these assassinations still is to this secret government that wages propaganda war against the American people and real wars around the world. It is a government of Democrats, Republicans, and their intelligence allies working together today to confuse the American people and provoke Russia in a most dangerous game that could lead to nuclear war, a possibility that so frightened JFK and RFK after the Cuban Missile Crisis that they devoted themselves to ending the Cold War, reconciling with the Soviet Union, abolishing nuclear weapons, reining in of the power of the CIA, and withdrawing from Vietnam. That is why they were killed.
The web of deceit surrounding the now officially debunked Democratic led Russia-gate propaganda operation that has strengthened Trump to double-down on his anti-Russia operations (a Democratic goal) is an example of the perfidious and sophisticated mutuality of this game of mass mind-control.
The killing of the Kennedys and today’s new Cold War and war against terror are two ends of a linked intelligence operation.
Moreover, more than any other assassination of the 1960s, it is the killing of Bobby Kennedy that has remained shrouded in the most ignorance.
It is one of the greatest propaganda success stories of American history.
In her exhaustive new examination of the case, A Lie Too Big To Fail, Lisa Pease puts it succinctly at the conclusion of her unravelling of the official lies that have mesmerized the public:
The assassination of the top four leaders of the political left in the five year period – President John Kennedy in 1963, Malcolm X in 1965, and Martin Luther King, Jr. and Senator Robert Kennedy in 1968 – represented nothing less than a slow-motion coup on the political scene.
If anyone wishes to understand what has happened to the United States since this coup, and thus to its countless victims at home and throughout the world, one must understand these assassinations and how the alleged assassins were manipulated by the coup organizers and how the public was hoodwinked in a mind-control operation on a vast scale. It is not ancient history, for the forces that killed these leaders rule the U.S. today, and their ruthlessness has subsequently informed the actions of almost all political leaders in the years since. A bullet to the head when you seriously talk about peace and justice is a not so gentle reminder to toe the line or else.
“But the way the CIA took over America in the 1960s is the story of our time,” writes Pease, “and too few recognize this. We can’t fix a problem we can’t even acknowledge exists.” Nothing could be truer.
Lisa Pease has long recognized the problem, and for the past twenty-five years, she has devoted herself to shedding light on the CIA’s culpability, particularly in the Robert Kennedy case. Few people possess the grit and grace to spend so much of their lives walking this path of truth. The extent of her research is dazzling, so dazzling in its voluminous detail that a reviewer can only touch on it here and there. She has written a book that is daunting in its comprehensiveness. It demands focused attention and perseverance, for it runs to over 500 pages with more than 800 footnotes. This book will remain a touchstone for future research on the RFK assassination, whether one agrees or disagrees with all of her detailed findings and speculations. For this book is so vast and meticulous in its examination of all aspects of the case that one can surely find areas that one might question or disagree with.
Nevertheless, Pease fundamentally proves that Sirhan did not shoot RFK and that there was a conspiracy organized and carried out by shadowy intelligence forces that did so. These same forces worked with the Los Angeles Police Department, federal, state, and judicial elements to make sure Sirhan was quickly accused of being the lone assassin and dispatched to prison after a show trial. And the mass media carried out its assigned role of affirming the government’s case to shield the real killers and to make sure the cover-up was successful.
No doubt others will investigate this case further. Yet I think no more research is really needed, for as with these other assassinations, additional analyses will only result in pseudo-debates about minutiae. Such debates will only serve to prolong the hallucinatory grip the perpetrators of these crimes have on a day of reckoning, suggesting as they would that we do not really know what happened. This is an old tactic meant to delay forevermore such a day of reckoning.
The facts are clear for all to see if they have the will to truth. All that is now needed is a public tribunal, which is planned for later this year, in which the fundamental, clear-cut facts of these cases are presented to the American public. In the case of Robert Kennedy’s assassination as with the others, a little knowledge goes a long way, and only those who are closed to basic logic and evidence will refuse to see that government forces conspired to kill these men and did so because all were seeking peace and justice that was then, and is now, a threat to the war-making forces of wealth and power that control the American government.
Pease writes:
Anyone who has looked closely and honestly at the evidence has realized that more than one person was involved in Robert Kennedy’s death. So why can’t reporters see this? Why can’t the media explain this? Because the media and the government are two sides of the same coin, and those who challenge the government’s version of history, as numerous reporters have found out, all too often lose status and sometimes whole careers. Kristina Borjesson published an anthology of such stories in her book Into the Buzzsaw, in which journalists describe how they lost their careers when eachof them expressed a truth that the government did not want exposed.
Lisa Pease discloses such truths. I am reporting on her work. Therefore, the mainstream media, except for an extraordinary reporter or two, such as Tom Jackman of The Washington Post, will likely ignore both of us, but the publication where you are reading this is on the side of truth, and in the disclosure of truth lies our hope.
Since more than one person was involved in the killing of RFK, there was – ipso facto – a conspiracy. This is not theory but fact. The fact of a conspiracy. For more than fifty years, mainstream reporters have been cowed by this word “conspiracy,” thanks to the CIA. Many others have been intelligence assets posing as journalists, regurgitating the lies. This is a fact.
The official story is that after giving his victory speech for winning the 1968 Democratic California Primary, Kennedy, as he was walking through a crowded hotel pantry, was shot by Sirhan Sirhan, who was standing to his left between 3-6 feet away. Sirhan’s revolver held eight bullets, and as he was shooting, he was tackled by a group of large men who subdued him. All witnesses place Sirhan in front of Kennedy and all claim he was firing a gun.
Fact: As the autopsy definitively showed, RFK was shot from the rear at point blank range, three bullets entering his body, with the fatal headshot coming upward at a 45-degree angle from 1-3 inches behind his right ear. Not one bullet from Sirhan’s gun hit the Senator. In addition, an audio recording shows that many more bullets than the eight in Sirhan’s gun were fired in the hotel pantry that night. It was impossible for Sirhan to have killed RFK.
Let me repeat: More than one gunman, contrary to the government’s claims, equals a conspiracy. So why lie about that?
What is amazing is that the obvious conclusion to such simple syllogistic logic (Sirhan in front, bullets in the back, therefore…) that a child could understand has been dismissed by the authorities for fifty-one years. The fact that the government authorities – the LAPD, the Sheriff’s Office, the District Attorney, federal and state government officials, the FBI, the CIA – have from the start so assiduously done all in their power to pin the blame on “a lone assassin,” Sirhan, proves they are part of a coordinated cover-up, which in turn suggests their involvement in the crime.
The fact that Robert Kennedy was shot from the back and not the front where Sirhan was standing immediately brings to mind the Zapruder film that shows that JFK was killed from the front right and not from the 6th floor rear where Oswald was allegedly shooting from. That unexpected film evidence was hidden from the public for many years, but when it was finally seen, the case for a government conspiracy was solidified.
While no such video evidence has surfaced in the RFK case, the LAPD made sure that no photographic evidence contradicting the official lies would be seen. As Lisa Pease writes:
Less than two months after the assassination, the LAPD took the extraordinary step of burning some 2,400 photos from the case in Los Angeles County General’s medical waste incinerator. Why destroy thousands of photos in an incinerator if there was nothing to hide? The LAPD kept hundreds of innocuous crowd scene photos that showed no girl in a polka dot dress or no suspicious activities or individuals. Why were those photos preserved? Perhaps because those photos had nothing in them that warranted their destruction.
While “perhaps” is a mild word, the cover-up of “the girl in the polka dot dress” needs no perhaps. Dozens of people reported seeing a suspicious, curvaceous girl in a white dress with black polka dots with Sirhan in the pantry and other places. She was seen with various other men as well. The evidence for her involvement in the assassination is overwhelming, and yet the LAPD did all in its power to deny this by browbeating witnesses and by allowing her to escape.
Sandra Serrano, a Kennedy campaign worker and a courageous witness, was bullied by the CIA-connected police interrogator Sergeant Enrique “Hank” Hernandez. She had been sitting outside on a metal fire escape getting some air when the polka dot dress girl, accompanied by a man, ran out and down the stairs, shouting, “We’ve shot him, we’ve shot him.” When Serrano asked whom did they shoot, the girl replied, “We’ve shot Senator Kennedy.” Then she and her companion, both of whom Serrano had earlier seen ascending the stairs with Sirhan, disappeared into the night. A little over an hour after the shooting Serrano was interviewed on live television by NBC’s Sander Vanocur where she recounted this. And there were others who saw and heard this girl say the same thing as she and her companion fled the crime scene. Nevertheless, the LAPD, led by Lieutenant Manuel Pena, also CIA affiliated, who was brought out of retirement to run the investigation dubbed “Special Unit Senator,” worked with Hernandez and others to dismiss the girl as of no consequence.
Lisa Pease covers all this and much more. She shows how Sirhan was obviously hypnotized, how the trial was a farce, how the police destroyed evidence from the door frames in the pantry that proved more than the eight bullets in Sirhan’s gun were fired, how Officer DeWayne Wolfer manipulated the ballistic evidence, etc. Through years of digging into court records, archives, transcripts, the public library, and doing countless interviews, she proves without a doubt that Sirhan did not kill Kennedy and that the assassination and the cover-up were part of a very sophisticated intelligence operation involving many parts and players. She shows how no matter what route Kennedy took in the hotel that night, the killers had all exits covered and that he would not be allowed to leave alive.
While some of her more speculative points – e.g. that Robert Maheu (Howard Hughes/CIA) was “the most credible high-level suspect for the planner of Robert Kennedy’s assassination,” that Kennedy was shot twice in the head from behind, etc. are open to debate, they do not detract from her fundamentally powerful case that RFK, like his brother John, was assassinated by a CIA-run operation intended to silence their voices of courageous resistance to an expanding secret government dedicated to war, murder, and human exploitation. The U.S. government of today.
When Bobby Kennedy was entering the kitchen pantry, he was escorted by a security guard named Thane Eugene Cesar, a man long suspected of being the assassin. Cesar was carrying a gun that he drew but denied firing, despite witnesses’ claims to the contrary. Conveniently, the police never examined the gun. He has long been suspected of being CIA affiliated, and now Pease says she has found evidence to confirm that. She writes, “It’s hard to overstate the significance of finding a current or future CIA contract agent holding Kennedy’s right arm at the moment of the shooting.”
Yes, it is. As she rightly claims, the CIA takeover of America in the 1960s is the story of our time. And our time is now. None of this is ancient history. That is so crucial to grasp. For those who think that learning the truth about the 1960s assassinations is an exercise in futility reserved for those who are living in the past, they need to think again. Our descent into endless war and massive media propaganda to support it is part of a long-term project that began with the elimination of JFK, Malcom X, MLK, and Robert Kennedy. They were killed for reasons, and those reasons still exist, even if they don’t physically, but only in spirit. Their killers roam the land because they have become far more deeply part of the institutional structure of government and the media.
Pease says:
It was horrible that Robert Kennedy was taken from us far too soon. It is horrible that one man has borne the guilt for an operation he neither planned nor willingly participated in. It’s horrible the conspiracy was so obvious that bullets had to be lost and switched to hide it. And it’s horrible that the mainstream media has never dared to tell the people of this country that the government lied to us about what they really found when they looked into this case. Until the media can deal with the truth of the Robert Kennedy assassination, and until the people can be made aware of the CIA’s role in slanting the truth on topics of great importance, America’s very survival is in jeopardy….We’ve come perilously close to losing democracy itself because of fake, CIA-sponsored stories about our history. Should America ever become a dictatorship, the epitaph of our democracy must include the role the mainstream media, by bowing to the National Security state, played in killing it.
By writing A Lie Too Big To Fail, Lisa Pease has done her valiant part in refuting the lie that is now failing. Now it is up to all of us to spread the word of truth by focusing on the fundamental facts so we can finally take back our country from the CIA.
Then we can say with RFK and his favorite poet Aeschylus:
And even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.
- The Manhattan Housing Market Is On Its Worst Cold Streak In 30 Years
A confluence of factors ranging from stubborn sellers refusing to budge on their asks, the Trump tax plan’s SALT cap, and a glut of luxury apartments prompted sales of Manhattan real estate to drop again in the fourth quarter, according to reports published by a trio of residential brokers. By one broker’s count, Q1 marked the sixth straight quarterly drop in sales volume, the worst streak in at least 30 years.
Per the FT, sales tumbled by 11%, according to broker Stribling & Associates, by 5%, according to Corcoran, and by 2.7% for co-ops and condominium apartments, according to Douglas Elliman and real estate appraisal firm Miller Samuel.
While the average sales price for new developments climbed a staggering 89.4% to $7.6 million, that figure was exaggerated by a single purchase: Ken Griffin’s purchase of a $240 million penthouse at 220 Central Park South, which, according to some, was the most expensive home ever sold in America. But depending on the report, the median sales price ranged from 2% lower to 3.2% higher. And although the entry level market in Manhattan – that is, apartments priced at $1 million and below – had held up for most of the past year, it has recently started to suffer.
“It’s like a layer cake,” Jonathan Miller, CEO of Miller Samuel, told CNBC. “When you have softening at the top, it starts to melt into the next layer and the next layer after that, because those buyers further down have to compete on price.”
According to one broker, sellers with unrealistic expectations are the biggest barrier to sales, because they’re refusing to adjust for the fact that listings have been piling up and sitting on the market for longer periods, giving buyers more room to negotiate, and more options. Inventory has climbed 9% over the past nine months, and there’s a glut in new developments that’s only going to get worse.
And of course, New York City isn’t helping the market by passing an a one-time “mansion tax” on all apartments selling for $1 million or more – which is a large chunk of apartments sold in the borough. But it could have been worse: As one broker put it, the pied-e-terre tax that was briefly considered would have been a “market stopper.”
“The pied-à-terre tax would have been a market stopper, [the mansion tax] is a market dampener,” said Ms Liebman. “I don’t think New York City is acting very friendly right now to the wealthy buyers,” she said, adding that many are opting to buy in Florida and other states with lower taxes than New York.
But although higher taxes are expected to drive more would-be buyers toward rentals, the number of new leases in Manhattan was also down 3% in Q1. Meanwhile, leases climbed a staggering 38% year-over-year in Brooklyn.
As brokers in New York City and other high end markets like Greenwich, Conn. struggle with slowing sales, we imagine brokers in mid-tier markets are watching with a wary eye to see if the weakness spreads.
- After Losing Big On Collusion, Democrats Are Now 'Inventing A Coverup': WSJ
Remember when Hillary Clinton said that it would be a ‘direct threat to democracy‘ if Donald Trump refused to say he’d respect the results of the 2016 election?
Now picture Democrats doing exactly that for over two years, then losing big again when Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his team of “13 angry Democrats” found no collusion with Russia – and then balling their fists up for extra innings in a post-Mueller ‘witch hunt’ led by Democratic Congressmen Jerry Nadler (D-NY) and Adam Schiff (D-CA).
Oh – and you can throw a spineless Richard Burr of North Carolina in there two, as the GOP-controlled Senate Intel Committee he chairs is reportedly planning to continue the Russia investigation according to Tucker Carlson.
Tucker Carlson reports that Senate Intel Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-NC) is continuing the Russia investigation and has sent a subpoena to former Trump adviser Sam Nunberg. pic.twitter.com/3yXqIb7zqL
— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) April 4, 2019
So the new narrative is more or less; ‘maybe Trump didn’t collude, but there’s probably a ton of damaging information in the Mueller report that they’re now covering up.’
In fact, according to the New York Times, an unspecified number of Mueller’s “13 angry Democrats” have privately expressed that Attorney General William Barr failed to adequately portray the findings of the Mueller report. The Times cites “government officials and others familiar with their simmering frustrations.”
Simmering.
Amazingly, it took five reporters from the Times to cobble together an anonymously sourced 1,300-word argument for why Barr is ‘creating the narrative’ which will ‘harden’ Americans’ views before the full report is made public.
In short, Democrats lost, then they lost again, and they continue to refuse to accept the outcome of legitimate government processes.
Keep in mind they now want to add more seats on the Supreme Court, lower the voting age to 16, and let noncitizens vote. In other words, if at first you don’t succeed, and then you keep losing, throw an endless tantrum and move the goalposts.
To that end, the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board has opined on sore losers, moved goalposts and how the Trump DOJ is now inventing a cover up.
Via the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board
Trolling the Mueller Report
Democrats lost on collusion. Now they’re inventing a coverup.
Democrats are still reeling from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s conclusion that the Trump campaign did not collude with Russians in 2016. But they’ve now hit upon a political comeback strategy: Accuse Attorney General William Barr of a coverup.
That’s the context for Wednesday’s decision by House Democrats to authorize subpoenas, on a partisan vote, demanding that Mr. Barr immediately hand over the entire Mueller report and its supporting evidence. This is intended to give the impression, abetted by a press corps that was fully invested in the collusion story, that Mr. Barr is somehow lying about Mr. Mueller’s real conclusions.
That’s preposterous, since Mr. Barr’s four-page letter quotes directly from Mr. Mueller’s report. The AG surely understood on releasing the summary of conclusions last week that he would be open to contradiction by Mr. Mueller if he took such liberties. Mr. Barr also knew he’d be called to testify before Congress once the rest of the report is released.
Mr. Barr has committed to releasing as much of the report as possible subject to Justice Department rules. He’s working with the special counsel’s office to make redactions required by grand-jury rules of secrecy, intelligence sources and methods, ongoing investigations, and “the personal privacy and reputational interests of peripheral third parties.”
Under Justice rules relating to special counsels, Mr. Barr has no obligation to provide anything beyond notifying Congress when an investigation has started or concluded, and whether the AG overruled a special counsel’s decisions. Mr. Barr’s notice to Congress that Mr. Mueller had completed his investigation said Mr. Mueller was not overruled.
Congress has no automatic right to more. The final subparagraph of DOJ’s rule governing special counsels reads: “The regulations in this part are not intended to, do not, and may not be relied upon to create any rights, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or equity, by any person or entity, in any matter, civil, criminal or administrative.”
Mr. Barr has made clear that he appreciates the public interest in seeing as much of Mr. Mueller’s report as possible. Yet his categories of information for review aren’t frivolous or political inventions. The law protecting grand-jury secrecy is especially strict, as even Democrats admit.
House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff recently tweeted that “Barr should seek court approval (just like in Watergate) to allow the release of grand jury material. Redactions are unacceptable.” This is an acknowledgment that the government must apply to a judge for permission to disclose grand-jury proceedings.
A judge can grant release in certain circumstances—namely to government attorneys who need the information for their duties. None of the secrecy exceptions permit disclosure to Congress or the public. The purpose of this secrecy is to protect the innocent and encourage candor in grand-jury testimony.
It’s true that in 1974 the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a federal judge’s decision to release a grand jury report to the House Judiciary Committee that was investigating Watergate. Such a sealed report—which juries can choose to produce—is different from raw grand-jury testimony, which is what Democrats are demanding now. The Supreme Court has never ruled on such a disclosure, so Democrats could be facing a long legal battle if Mr. Barr resists their subpoenas.
Mr. Barr should release as much of the report as possible, and on close calls he should side with public disclosure. But no one should think that Democrats are really worried about a coverup. They want to see an unredacted version before the public does so they can leak selected bits that allow them to use friendly media outlets to claim there really was collusion, or to tarnish Trump officials.
The nation is entitled to the Mueller facts in their proper context, not to selective leaks from Democrats trying to revive their dashed hopes of a collusion narrative that the Mueller probe found doesn’t exist.
Appeared in the April 4, 2019, print edition.
- American Farmers On Verge Of Disaster
Submitted by Grant’s Almost Daily
It’s been a tough road for the U.S. farming industry, which is seemingly beset on all sides. Agricultural commodity prices remain low, with spot corn and soybean currently fetching $3.62 and $8.99 per bushel, respectively, each roughly 22% below their respective 10-year average prices.
Meanwhile, the ongoing Sino-American trade war continues to crimp overseas demand, as the U.S. Department of Agriculture reports that soybean deliveries to China fell more than 80% year-over-year since September. That helped push soybean stocks to a record 3.7 billion bushels as of year-end 2018.
By the same token, the USDA forecast Friday that corn plantings will rise 4.1% in 2019 to 92.8 million this year, an unwelcome development considering that “American silos are already bulging with the grain,” according to Bloomberg. Adding insult to injury, devastating floods have afflicted large swaths of the Midwest during the heart of spring planting season.
The USDA estimates that net farm incomes plunged 16% year-over-year in 2018 to $63.1 billion, down from more than $120 billion as recently as 2013. Rising operating costs play a prominent role in that shrinkage. According to the All Farms Index tabulated by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, the prices received component fell to 84.9 in January from 95.1 in June, while prices paid registered 109.3 and has remained north of 100 since 2011.
Things are particularly grim in Minnesota and surrounding states. The Minneapolis Fed reports that in-state farmers have seen total input costs for seed, fertilizer, pesticides, fuel and electricity rise by 50% since 2006, after adjusting for CPI-measured inflation. As a result, Minnesota farmers reported real median net income of $26,055 last year, down 8% from 2017 and the lowest figure since the early 1980’s, per an estimate from Dale Nordquist with the University of Minnesota’s Center for Farm Financial Management.
Unsurprisingly, that one-two punch is leading to increasing distress. The Minneapolis Fed reports that the ninth district (encompassing Minnesota, Wisconsin, North and South Dakota and Montana) has seen farm bankruptcies rise to more than 100 in the 12 months ended in December, up from 46 in calendar 2015.
As farmers struggle under the weight of low prices, bulging stockpiles and the wrath of mother nature, Grant’s asked grains expert and paid-up subscriber Keith Bronstein whether a supply disruption could augur better days ahead:
The flooding is currently a localized disaster for those producers in areas affected.
Can this become sufficiently widespread to have a true impact on U S production of row crops? The answer is a resounding yes, but it is too soon to make that statement. Early planting is a boon to yields and, given relatively depressed prices, it is easy to imagine farmers making extensive use of crop insurance policies if things get very late. I think we need to revisit this in 2.5 weeks to see how conditions have changed (or not) as snow melt and runoff and rain or lack thereof play themselves out over this period.
In summary, some notable areas are experiencing great misfortune but it is not yet a “national” story.
One farm commodity that has decisively broken higher is hogs. The emergence of African swine fever in China has led to the culling of an estimated 100 million hogs, a figure that compares to the U.S. inventory of 74.3 million hogs as of the first quarter. That sudden shortage of Chinese supply has spurred a major change in world fundamentals. Arlan Suderman, chief commodities analyst at INTL FCStone, Inc., estimates that “hog feeding in China is down by more than 30%, while some estimates coming out of China are much higher than that.” The Farm Journal notes that replacing a 31% decline in Chinese output “would require all of the annual production of Canada, the U.S., Mexico and Brazil.”
That supply swing is already having a major impact, as lean hog prices have jumped to $84 a pound, up 58% since Feb. 22. Bronstein observes:
China will be an increasingly aggressive buyer of pork around the world yet is not the only place experiencing the spread of this particular disease. . . China is restricting imports from Vietnam to try and preclude a more aggressive disease spread.
North America, probably thanks to distance and very advanced containment regimens, seems pretty safe now. North America should have an expanding hog population and expanding exports. With cheap feed, it’s a pretty good business to be in.
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