Mar 15

Today’s News 15th March 2019

  • Italians Outraged After Court Rules Woman 'Too Ugly' To Be Raped

    The Italian Justice Ministry has ordered a preliminary investigation into an appeals court ruling by all-female judges which overturned a rape verdict by arguing in part that the woman who was attacked was too ugly to be a credible rape victim, according to The Star.

    The ruling has sparked outrage in Italy, prompting a flash mob Monday outside the Ancona court, where protesters shouted “Shame!” and held up signs saying “indignation.”

    The appeals sentence was handed down in 2017 — by an all-female panel — but the reasons behind it only emerged publicly when Italy’s high court annulled it on March 5 and ordered a retrial. The Court of Cassation said Wednesday its own reasons for ordering the retrial will be issued next month. –The Star

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Two Peruvian men were initially convicted in 2015 of raping a 20-year-old Peruvian woman in Ancona – however the Italian appeals court overturned the verdict, absolving the men. In their decision, the judges ruled that the men “didn’t find her attractive,” and that “she was too masculine.“

    A lawyer for the victim, Cinzia Molinaro, said that the woman’s appeal to the Court of Cassation cited the “absolute unacceptability” of the Italian court’s decision to refer to the victim’s physical appearance. 

    The appeals court quoted one of the suspects as saying he had listed the woman as a “Viking” on his cellphone, adding that the “photograph present in her file would appear to confirm this.”

    The woman, who has since returned to Peru, required 14 stitches in her vagina after the attack. 

    “She had confused memories of what exactly happened during the night because she was drugged,” said Molinaro, adding that doctors had confirmed the presence of a “date rape” drug in her blood. 

    “I don’t remember how it all started, but I remember I shouted ‘enough, enough'” the woman reportedly told police. 

    In 2016, one of the accused rapists was originally sentenced to five years in prison for the rape, while the other was sentenced to three years for standing guard. While the ruling was overturned in 2017, the reasons for the acquittal only became known last week after the Italian supreme court annulled the appeal and ordered a retrial. 

  • The Trump Phenomenon As Seen From Europe

    Authored by Philip Giraldi via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    President Donald Trump is frequently seen through the prism of an American media that despises him and wants to discredit him so that he can either be impeached soon or defeated in 2020. To a certain extent the foreign media has picked up on that depiction of Trump, emphasizing his boorish qualities and narcissism while neglecting what he has or has not accomplished while in office. To be sure there have been major missteps which have driven the Europeans and others crazy, including the withdrawal from the international climate treaty and the nuclear agreement with Iran, but Trump, to his credit, has also recognized the futility of Washington’s Asian wars and is serious in his intent to reduce the American footprint in places like Syria and Afghanistan. He is also an enemy of what is seen as the Establishment in global policymaking, choosing instead to promote national interests rather than international treaties and obligations.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    My wife and I recently spent a week in Venice for the Carnival that precedes the beginning of Lent. It was quite an experience as the event attracted literally tens of thousands of visitors from all over the world. On the Sunday preceding Ash Wednesday there were so many tourists crammed into the vast Piazza San Marco that it was impossible to move, but everyone was having fun and both my wife and I remarked on how polite and well behaved the crowds were. And the food was wonderful!

    In the course of the week we managed to speak to many of the co-celebrants, primarily those from Italy, Germany and Britain and the conversations inevitably turned to the subject of Donald Trump and what he is doing. I fully expected that I would receive an earful, but what actually developed was quite a surprise. Nearly everyone had good things to say about the American president, though there were suggestions that he might be more than just a little bit pazzo, verrückt, or bonkers.

    Their arguments went something like this:

    …world government has proven to be a disaster for most of the ordinary people in most developed countries. Wealth has been concentrated in the hands of the few who constitute the Establishment in each country and benefit primarily from globalism.

    Examples cited by the Europeans included the Clintons, who have become de facto billionaires, and Tony Blair, who is well on his way to doing the same. In Europe, the Common Market, which started out as a free trade and labor zone, has now morphed into a European Union and become a government that is far more heavy-handed and intrusive than the national governments that it has to a large extent replaced. The disastrous creation of a unified currency has crushed weaker national economies, but somehow the elites in each country seem to continue to thrive amidst all the damage being done to ordinary people.

    As a response, an increasing number of Europeans are entertaining following the Brexit model of either leaving the European Union altogether or abandoning the currency union while also reducing the power of the European Parliament. Nationalism is on the rise as Europeans realize that any aspiration to create something like a United States of Europe was from the start an illusion. Today, the Europeans continue to be betrayed by their elected leadership and the time has come to put a stop to it, which is why they admire Trump as they see him serving as a wrecking ball demolishing the entrenched Establishment and the globalism that it has promoted. People are demanding change and the last election in Italy, the repudiation of the policies of Angela Merkel in Germany, and the unrest in France demonstrate that the problem is not going to go away.

    There were some other lessons learned from Carnival. Post-Christian Europe is continuing to hang on to some vestiges of the Ancient Faith. I was amazed when the speaker at the final ceremony on Martedi Grasso introduced the finalists for Carnival Queen as being young women exemplary for their “Christian virtues and beauty.” I turned to my wife and commented how much I would like to hear similar words once in a while in the United States at a public gathering.

    We also encountered many recent refugees from South Asia and the Middle East, working in shops and restaurants. Most of them spoke excellent Italian and were clearly fully accepted by their Italian colleagues. As Venice has a huge tourism economy, it was not exactly a model for dealing with the waves of immigrants in parts of Europe where there is no work, but it was refreshing to see how people will come together if they are just allowed to cooperate without a whole lot of interference from the government and the loud agenda driven groups that proliferate on the political left of center.

    Finally, it was difficult being in Venice and not noticing that the largest group of foreigners in the city was Chinese, numbering certainly in the thousands, possibly as many as ten thousand. While Washington wastes its money on weapons and endless wars the Chinese are making deals and expanding both their personal and economic presence. Many shops in Venice and elsewhere in Italy are now owned by the Chinese. In Venice they sell their own cheap glass products to compete with the high-quality local Murano glass and they find plenty of buyers. As long as the Chinese glass is labeled “Made in China” it is perfectly legal, as much as the Venetians themselves hate it. We went into one shop that had an Italian salesperson. He told us not to buy anything as it was all Chinese junk.

    The Chinese, to their credit, have been promoting the so-called Belt and Road Initiative or BRI plan, which aims to establish a trade link connecting China by sea and land with southeast and central Asia, the Middle East, Europe and Africa using a network of roads and both rail and sea connections. It is not unlike the ancient Silk Road which spanned Asia and penetrated into Europe by way of the Italian merchant republics, most notably Venice. Northern Italy is seen as a key component or even the European hub for the new venture and Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte is prepared to sign an agreement with Beijing to develop the initiative further. Conte is doing so over objections from Washington, of course.

    As Mark Twain put it, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” Indeed.

  • US Airstrike Wipes Out Allied Afghan Base In 'Friendly Fire' Incident

    In the latest bizarre story to come out of the US “endless war” in Afghanistan, American warplanes obliterated an allied Afghan military post in an act of “self defense” on Wednesday. 

    The incident took place in the tribal Uruzgan province of south-central Afghanistan and reportedly began when a joint convoy of US troops and Afghan Special Forces came under fire by another unit of Afghan ground troops in what appears a major instance of accidental friendly fire resulting in a devastating two dozen total casualties on the Afghan side.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    US DoD file photo: coalition jets in operation over Afghanistan. 

    The incident is under investigation, but US mission spokesman Bob Purtiman appeared to excuse US actions in a statement on Thursday: “We are operating in a complex environment where enemy fighters do not wear uniforms and use stolen military vehicles to attack government forces,” he said.

    American forces indicate they came under attack by an unknown entity. US planes flying overhead then destroyed the Afghan army post (described by the Pentagon as a “checkpoint”), which killed at least six soldiers and wounded nine others at the small base which housed a total of 17.

    The US side reported no deaths or injuries, though the Pentagon would likely not release such information until a full investigation is concluded. 

    The US Department of Defense confirmed the incident on Wednesday, which it described as a mistaken “example of the fog of war”. Pentagon Spokesperson Sgt. First Class Debra Richardson told The New York Times: “The U.S. conducted a precision self-defense airstrike on people who were firing at a partnered U.S.-Afghan force.”

    Ironically US officials described the aerial bombing of the allied Afghan post as a “precision airstrike,” per the AP: 

    The soldiers were killed by friendly fire Wednesday in what was supposed to be a precision airstrike by U.S. forces supporting Afghan soldiers battling insurgents near the city of Tarin Kot in Uruzgan province.

    It was the second major incident to cause Afghan casualties following a prior fight with Taliban: “For the second time in a few days, an Afghan Army base was destroyed on Wednesday — but this time by American airstrikes that followed a firefight between the Afghans and Americans, Afghan officials said,” the NYT report noted. 

    Last year the Pentagon acknowledged that war in Afghanistan is costing American taxpayers $45 billion per year, with a number of public studies putting the total figure at over $1 trillion since the US war began nearly two decades go. 

    The “endless war” has become more expensive, in current dollars, than the Marshall Plan, which was the reconstruction effort to rebuild Europe after World War II.

  • Whistleblowers Say NSA Still Spies On American Phones In Hidden Program

    Authored by Nafeez Ahmed via Medium.com,

    Meanwhile, the bulk of the NSA’s surveillance and “offensive” information warfare capabilities remain completely unknown…

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    On Monday 4th, the New York Times reported that the National Security Agency has “quietly” shut down a controversial phone records surveillance program revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013.

    The claim was made by a senior Republican congressional aide who told the newspaper that the Trump administration had stopped using the program, which analyses the domestic call and text logs of American citizens, due to technical problems.

    On Twitter Snowden hailed the news as a “victory”, while Intercept journalist Glen Greenwald, who broke the Snowden story to international acclaim, took the story at face value. Neither of them raised the obvious question  –  is the “shut down” of this program merely a smokescreen to continue spying on American phones under new or different secretive programs?

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Since then, further doubt was cast on the NYT report when NSA chief General Paul Nakasone refused to confirm or deny the story. But he did tell a major security conference on Wednesday that the agency was still “in a deliberative process” about whether to use a revamped version of the vast database of American phone records.

    All of this, however, is an elaborate ruse. According to two former top NSA officials interviewed by INSURGE, there is no credible reason to believe that NSA phone surveillance has truly been shut down.

    What shut down?

    When the NYT story broke, I reached out to two former senior NSA officials, Russ Tice and Thomas Drake, to find out what they thought.

    Both of them told me that the NSA’s shut down of this particular program did not imply an end to domestic phone record surveillance, but quite the opposite — that the program had been superseded by superior technology.

    According to Russ Tice, a former senior NSA intelligence analyst who had previously worked with the US Air Force, Office of Naval Intelligence and Defense Intelligence Agency, the latest claim that the NSA was rolling up phone surveillance beggared belief.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    “Why would anyone believe a bloody word of what NSA says about their mass domestic surveillance programs?” said Tice, who was the first NSA whistleblower who exposed unlawful surveillance and wiretaps of American citizens as early as May 2005.

    “They have lied repeatedly in the past and they are likely lying now. They have been collecting meta data and content, word-for-word, both voice and text, for some time now.”

    I asked Tice how certain he was that the NSA was still conducting phone surveillance of Americans in the United States. “Of course NSA is still conducting phone and computer comms surveillance and yes, ‘wider programs’ go on and a new massive program that is more efficient is likely to have already been implemented,” he told me.

    The real reason the current program has become defunct is because there is now better technology for more advanced surveillance.

    “If anything, they no longer need this particular program to parse the card catalog — meta data — and can mine the content data directly with enhanced algorithms and processing and strapping. And when there is no pushback capability, congress is at the mercy of NSA to inform them on NSA’s abuses.”

    Hidden programs under secret interpretations of different laws

    Thomas Drake, a former senior executive of the NSA who blew the whistle on illegal mass surveillance, waste and mismanagement at the agency several years before Snowden’s revelations, agreed that NSA phone surveillance “continues in other forms” in spite of the closure of this particular program.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Much has been made of the impending expiry of the USA Freedom Act of 2015, due this December, under which the current phone surveillance program is run. But Drake told me that the NSA simply doesn’t need the Freedom Act to authorise continued warrantless phone surveillance of American citizens in the homeland.

    Surveillance can still continue, he said, “under yet other special, exigent, exceptional authorities and programs — including Section 702 and Executive Order 12333 — hiding in secret.”

    Drake acknowledged that the NSA was also shifting toward adapting to widespread the changes in technology use, which could well have made the old program less than useful. “Communications using traditional land line and cell phone numbers and regular cellular text messaging is increasingly taken place on other messaging apps,” he added. “With respect to other authorities and cut outs, there are yet still other surveillance players and actors, too.”

    In a series of tweets about the subject, Drake warned that the NSA’s recent history hardly vindicated the agency’s claims:

    “All these domestic spying programs fundamentally violated the Constitution, FISA & 4th Amendment on a mass scale, then went under cover of secret FISC approval, secret interpretations of law & then passage of unconstitutional ex post facto laws to make them ‘legal’.”

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Tice and Drake’s views corroborate an independent analysis by The Register, which observes that the association of the Freedom Act’s Section 215 program with phone metadata could be advantageous for the agency:

    “If the NSA offers to give up its phone metadata collection voluntarily, it opens up several opportunities for the agency. For one, it doesn’t have to explain what its secret legal interpretations of the law are and so can continue to use them. Second, it can repeat the same feat as in 2015 — give Congress the illusion of bringing the security services to heel. And third, it can continue to do exactly what it was doing while looking to everyone else that it has scaled back.

    Here’s one thing we are sure of: the NSA has already figured out how to get all the information that was gathered through the metadata part of Section 215. It will be through a different law under a different secret legal interpretation.”

    A history of subversion

    According to Tice, illegal NSA surveillance was targeted across the federal government in order to secure political leverage. He describes this use of surveillance as a counter-democratic tool allowing the agency to pressure elected leaders across the House and Senate.

    Between 2002 and 2005, he said, he discovered that the NSA had been targeting all communications of Congress, FISA, the Supreme Court, senior Pentagon officials, the media, and even future presidential prospects.

    The NSA was essentially “collecting fodder for their lists of dirt for blackmailing all levels of top government officials”, said Tice. The idea was “to ensure they had leverage with those that could conduct oversight.”

    But NSA surveillance extends far beyond this to offensive capabilities which remain undisclosed to this day.

    Tice said that due to his role at the NSA, he was aware of a highly classified program of activity which has never been revealed before, concerning ‘Special Access Program (SAP) Offensive Information Warfare’.

    SAP refers to what Tice describes as the “black world”, an arena of completely unaccountable projects to develop technologies with frightening reach and power. “These programs go very far beyond just collecting communications — they can reach out and touch you, and cause great, even grave, tangible harm.”

    “I am talking hardcore offense. The Title 10 and Title 50 restriction did not apply to my world. As I was once told at an after action briefing when I brought up some collateral damage we had caused, ‘We are above the laws and any form of oversight, we do a we please. So just chill out Russ’. I was thinking, holy shit, we are out of control. Then later I was even more horrified to realize he was correct, we had no controls on us.”

    When I asked Tice to provide further detail on these offensive information warfare capabilities, he said that he declined to elaborate.

    But he did emphasise that Snowden’s revelations on mass surveillance represent a tiny tip of the iceberg on what the NSA has been doing. He claims that a whole black world of secret programs exists, largely funded by the trillions of dollars that have gone missing from the US Department of Defense. These have gone to “black programs that are hidden, in many cases, from Congress.”

    ‘Ghost’ black programs

    There are three different forms of SAP, Tice said: acknowledged, unacknowledged, and “Ghost” black programs. ‘Acknowledged’ programs are known to Congressional and Senate representatives sitting on the defense and intelligence committees.

    In contrast, ‘unacknowledged’ black programs are known to a select number of representatives — the top majority and minority chairs and members in the defense and intelligence committees. On rare occasion, a single select member of the House might come to know by invitation only.

    Then there are ‘Ghost’ black programs which the Pentagon and intelligence agencies “hide from all of Congress,” said Tice. “Many of these programs involved cutting edge technologies that are extremely expensive. I was an advanced technology analyst for many of these programs that included applications in space technology.”

    During Tice’s tenure, these programs were only operational outside the United States. “The real question is whether the NSA has now begun to subject the citizens of the USA to their formidable black world offensive information warfare capabilities. There will be no recourse against Big Brother when it wields NSA’s weapons domestically against us all.”

    Twelve years ago, Tice testified before the House Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations. He told the committee that although the NSA’s Special Access Program might have violated the Constitutional rights of millions of American citizens, neither the committee members nor even the NSA inspector general had the necessary security clearances to be told about the programs, let alone reviewing them more formally.

    Tice was scheduled to testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee a week later about a “different angle” of NSA surveillance, but this never happened. Tice said that at the time the Pentagon and NSA had “told Congress they could not talk to me because they did not have the proper security clearances.”

    In short: don’t believe the chorus of headlines implying that the NSA is shutting down its bulk surveillance program. Far from it. The agency is merely evolving and recalibrating, and as usual, very few in the press, Congress and US government are asking the awkward questions that urgently need to be asked.

    *  *  *

    Published by INSURGE INTELLIGENCE, a crowdfunded investigative journalism project for people and planet. Please support us to keep digging where others fear to tread.

  • What Happens In An Internet Minute In 2019?

    During an average workday, a single minute might seem negligible.

    If you’re lucky, a minute might buy you enough time to write a quick email, grab a coffee from the break room, or make small talk with a coworker.

    But, as Visual Capitalist’s Jeff Desjardins notes, in other situations, a minute can also be quite extraordinary. Imagine being a quarterback in the Superbowl in overtime, or finding yourself in a life-and-death situation in which every second counts towards the outcome.

    Visualizing an Internet Minute

    When it comes to gauging the epic scale of the internet, it would seem that each minute leans closer to the extraordinary side of the spectrum.

    Today’s infographic from @LoriLewis and @OfficiallyChadd aggregates the online activity of billions of people globally, to see what an internet minute looks like.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    How is it possible that 188 millions of emails are sent every minute? How does Google process 3.8 million search queries in such a short span of time?

    Simply put, the number of actions packed into just 60 seconds is extraordinary.

    A Side-by-Side Comparison

    The internet is incredibly dynamic, which means there are always new and interesting segments that are emerging out of the internet’s ether.

    To get a sense of this, take a look at the comparison of last year’s version of this graphic with the more recent entry:

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Platforms such as Instagram and Netflix continue to grow at a blistering pace, while new categories such as smart speakers are quickly building a strong foundation for the future.

    Last year, for example, only 67 voice-first devices were being shipped per minute – and in 2019, there are now 180 smart speakers being shipped in the same window of time.

    What will this look like in 2020?

    Going Sideways or Backwards

    Interestingly, even as more and more people gain access to the internet around the world each year, there are still parts of the web that are plateauing or even shrinking in size.

    You’ll see that Facebook logins and Google searches both increased only incrementally from last year. Further, the amount of emails getting sent is also quite stagnant, likely thanks to to the rise of workplace collaboration tools such as Slack.

    Snap is another story altogether. In the last year, the app saw a decrease in millions of users due to the infamous redesign that helped torpedo the app’s rising popularity.

    Regardless, we’re certain that by this time next year, an internet minute will have changed significantly yet again!

  • North Korea Mulls Suspending Nuclear Talks, Kim To Announce Decision Shortly

    Shortly after a de minimus reaction to the Bank of Japan’s economic downgrade, JPY surged against the dollar on headlines from Russian news agency Tass that North Korea is mulling suspending denuclearization talks with the US.

    TASS reports, citing Deputy Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui at a press conference in Pyongyang, that North Korea is mulling suspending denuclearization talks with the US.

    “We have no intention to make concessions to the US requirements [put forward at the Hanoi summit] in any form, much less the desire to conduct such negotiations,” said Choi Son-Hee.

    North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un will make an announcement on his decision about the nation’s further plans after the failed talks in Vietnam, Tass says.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    At the same time as these headlines hit, Reuters reports that Chinese Premier Li Keqiang , coincidentally, called for “patience in dealing with Korean peninsula issues,” adding that “China’s stance on denuclearization in North Korea is unchanged.”

    Li urges “promoting dialogue between North Korea and the U.S. toward eventual outcome that all parties would like to see.”

    Coordinated?

    Safe-haven bid for Yen as carry traders derisk (perhaps as first in line of any missile tests)…

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    And cue the “fire and fury” tweet from President Trump.

     

  • US Officials Offered My Friend Cash To Take Down Tehran’s Power Grid

    Authored by Sharmine Narwani, commentator and analyst of Mideast geopolitics based in Beirut

    It took a country-wide power outage in Venezuela, whispers of a cyberattack, and smug tweets from US officials to make me suddenly recall the cloak-and-dagger story of a close Iranian-American friend nine years ago.

    My friend, an engineer  —  who I will not name for obvious reasons and who I will call ‘Kourosh’ for the purpose of this article  —  revealed to me in 2010 that he was approached by two “State Department employees” who offered him $250,000 to “do something very simple” during his upcoming trip to Tehran.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Kourosh was freaking out because he didn’t know how these guys knew he was going to Iran in the first place, and how they knew he was “cash-strapped,” in the second.

    He wasn’t a particularly political person, though he had participated in some DC protests in the aftermath of the hotly contested 2009 presidential elections. He was just one of thousands of Iranian-American engineers in the Washington-Maryland-Virginia technology belt looking to make a decent living.

    Kourosh told the US officials that he was not interested, that if Iran needed to make changes, Iranians inside the country were the only ones who should do it.

    I begged him to let me write this story, but he was very nervous and declined. Over the next year or two, I pushed some more and he gave me further information, but wouldn’t budge on its publication.

    Here’s what he revealed: The State Department guys had since approached him a second time. They offered him further details about the job. They wanted him to disable Tehran’s power grid in exchange for the $250k. They needed someone with technical skills, but said the job was a simple one. He would have to go to a specific location in the Tehran area with a laptop or similar communication device and punch in a code.

    Kourosh even told me the code. Said he had memorized it and could recite it in his sleep. Here it is: 32-B6-B10–40-E (symbol for epsilon).

    Okay, that’s not the actual code, but it looks exactly like that  —  same format, same sequence and amount of numbers and letters. I don’t feel comfortable publishing the code in case it is still relevant  —  sorry. If anyone knows what this code could be, please comment below.

    A colleague with an engineering background has this to say about it:

    “This could be a password for power grids or any equipment that is governed by an electronic or computer system. Manufacturers have codes they use for de-bugging or resetting a system. Control systems are all electronic and sometimes for any reason (like an earthquake) something is triggered and the system goes off. And then you reset it within the vicinity of the system usually and feed in the new code. You don’t have to physically be there if you can hack into it, but that’s of course harder. If they (the Americans) needed to have someone physically there during the sabotage attempt, it probably means they didn’t have remote access to the system.”

    I don’t actually know why Kourosh received that level of detail unless he was willing to go through with this act of sabotage on behalf of the US government, but he assured me he would never consider it — that he was just “curious” during the second meeting. “No way,” he told me. “Imagine it I did it and someone’s grandmother or father died because their life support machine switched off.”

    I remember these details because I discussed it with a number of people in and around 2010, without disclosing Kourosh’s name. Today, I dug up the old Facebook message I sent to Iranian-American author and activist Trita Parsi of the DC-based National Iranian-American Council (NIAC), a fellow Huffington Post blogger at the time. Trita gave me permission to post screenshots here:

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Disclosure: My Iranian-American husband and I ran an internet company in the telecommunications industry in Washington years ago and I was a founding member of the Iranian-American Technology Council, so I knew a lot of engineers and technology folks from that very background.

    I recall writing to Trita precisely because he was so keyed into the political heart of this community. It would be extremely dangerous for myself and colleagues in my industry if the US government was recruiting Iranian-American civilian engineers as saboteurs in third countries.

    This deep-dive by investigative journalist Whitney Webb into Venezuela’s power outage reveals some interesting details about a Bush administration cyberattack plan against Iran. Exposed by the New York Times in 2016, the “Nitro Zeus” plan — which involved the US Cyber Command — would, among other things, target crucial parts of Iran’s electricity grid.

    Take note, however, that US officials asked Kourosh to sabotage Tehran’s power grid during the Obama administration. Obviously aspects of the Nitro Zeus plan remained on the table despite a switch in government, political parties and policies.

    Back to Venezuela

    It’s been a grueling week for Venezuelans dealing with the nationwide blackout that has brought the country to a standstill. Last Thursday an “accident” at the Guri Dam power plant in Bolivar state — which generates around 80% of the country’s electricity — left at least 20 out of 23 Venezuelan states without electricity.

    As power started to flood back to central states, a second “cyber attack” on Saturday plunged the country back into darkness. Government authorities have charged US officials with launching the attack on Venezuela’s electricity infrastructure and say they will present evidence of this to the United Nations and other international organizations.

    The US has countered, blaming the power outage on corruption and infrastructure neglect by the government of President Nicolás Maduro — against whom Washington has been staging a rather unsuccessful coup effort these past months.

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    But in the midst of this to-and-fro between longtime adversaries, insightful news reports and analysis are starting to emerge, suggesting that a US cyberattack against Venezuela’s power grid is actually a very possible — even likely — scenario.

    Says Forbes Magazine‘s Kalev Leetaru:

    “In the case of Venezuela, the idea of a government like the United States remotely interfering with its power grid is actually quite realistic. Remote cyber operations rarely require a significant ground presence, making them the ideal deniable influence operation.”

    “Widespread power and connectivity outages like the one Venezuela experienced last week are also straight from the modern cyber playbook. Cutting power at rush hour, ensuring maximal impact on civilian society and plenty of mediagenic post-apocalyptic imagery, fits squarely into the mold of a traditional influence operation,” he continues.

    For those of us who have spent years covering US irregular warfare in the Middle East, infrastructure targets are part and parcel of these wars — sometimes via direct strikes, other times via proxies and sabotage operations.

    I’m not just talking about cyberattacks like the US/Israeli-made Stuxnet virus that destroyed hundreds of centrifuges at Iranian nuclear facilities.

    In Syria, for instance, the US military specifically targeted major economic infrastructure under the guise of ‘fighting ISIS.’ These include but are not limited to oilfields, wells and facilities, electrical transformer stations, gas plants, bridges, canals, a number of vital dams and reservoirs in the country’s northern agricultural belt — and power generation facilities.

    And US-backed proxies  —  part of the Pentagon and CIA’s ‘irregular army’ in Syria  — targeted bread factories, wheat silos and flour mills to deprive a population of basic food staples.

    As opposed to conventional wars, US irregular warfare seeks to covertly use influence ops to turn the largest part of a country’s population, the “uncommitted middle,” into supporting regime-change. Destroying infrastructure, creating shortages, unleashing political violence, propaganda dissemination — these are all steps outlined in the US military’s Special Forces Unconventional Warfare manual to create a disgruntled population that will turn on its government.

    And cyber warfare is the newest theater of engagement for the Pentagon, which is now openly ramping up its investment in “lethal cyber weapons,” regardless of the civilian casualties these attacks will leave in their wake.

    So far in Venezuela around 20 people are reported dead due to the blackouts, though I’ve seen some opposition sources place that number north of 70.

    Is Venezuela’s blackout part of US cyber warfare against a Latin American adversary? Has the US engaged in cyber warfare against Iranian infrastructure?

    Does a duck quack?

    Follow me on Twitter and Facebook if you like. All my work is archived on my website Mideast Shuffle.

  • Citadel May Scrap Plan For New York Headquarters After Amazon Fiasco

    Shortly after it was revealed that Citadel’s billionaire founder, Ken Griffin, purchased a New York penthouse for the record price of $240 million in January confirming once and for all that frontrunning retail orders really does pay, speculation grew that the Chicago-based hedge fund was relocating from the Windy City to the Big Apple. However, following Amazon’s recent close encounter with New York socialists which prompted Bezos to scrap plans for a Long Island City HQ2, Griffin may stick to frontrunning the CME instead of the NYSE.

    In an interview with David Rubenstein on Bloomberg TV, Griffin said he’s less likely to move Citadel’s headquarters to New York City in the wake of Amazon.com’s decision to abandon plans to expand into Queens.

    “Amazon opting out of New York is heartbreaking,” Griffin said, noting that he had been contemplating shifting his main office from Chicago and making New York his primary home when he spent a quarter billion dollars for a modest pied-a-terre near central park.

    Griffin’s purchase came two years after Citadel signed a lease to become the anchor tenant in a skyscraper at 425 Park Avenue (which will be completed in 2020), eight-tenths of a mile from Griffin’s new apartment (vertical travel not included). Griffin reportedly bought the place because he needed somewhere to stay when in town.

    However, Griffin said he has been discouraged by the political climate in the city that resulted in Amazon Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos’s decision in February to reverse plans to make Long Island City the retail giant new hub.

    “The Amazon event has been a huge backtrack in our internal planning,” Griffin told Bloomberg after the broadcast interview. “The current climate in New York has dramatically reduced our interest in moving our headquarters here. Successful firms develop talent. That creates success within those firms and then some people leave to start other businesses or drive other success stories. That’s why Silicon Valley is so remarkable.”

    Griffin said Amazon’s decision was “a loss for everybody.”

    There may be another reason why Griffin may be having a case of record buyer’s remorse: In the wake of his splashy apartment purchase, New York lawmakers promptly floated the idea of levying a tax on non-resident owners of luxury units to help finance $40 billion in upgrades to the regional transit system. The so-called “pied-à-terre tax” could raise as much as $9 billion, according to Robert Mujica, the budget director for Governor Andrew Cuomo.

    Is is unclear how much of a discount Griffin would have to offer to a prospective buyer it he wishes to engage in some “high frequency” flipping of his 220 Central Park South apartment.

    Separately, in his interview for “The David Rubenstein Show: Peer-to-Peer Conversations” on Bloomberg TV, Griffin said his outlook for the U.S. economy is bright and that the nation is seeing “real wage growth we haven’t seen in a decade.” Echoing views he made in an investor letter in February, he said Italy is headed for “a debt dynamic that’s unsustainable.” Regarding Brexit, the single biggest issue gripping the U.K. is indecision, he said. “Until they pick a path, it deters capital investment,” he said. “Politicians don’t appreciate when they create uncertainty it kills the willingness to invest.”

    Watch the full interview below.

  • Media Hit-Job Continues As Colbert Ambushes Tulsi Gabbard

    Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

    Hawaii Congresswoman and Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard recently appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, where instead of the light, jokey banter about politics and who she is as a person that Democratic presidential candidates normally encounter on late night comedy programs, the show’s host solemnly ran down a list of textbook beltway smears against Gabbard and made her defend them in front of his audience.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Normally when a Democratic Party-aligned politician appears on such a show, you can expect jokes about how stupid Trump is and how badly they’re going to beat the Republicans, how they’re going to help ordinary Americans, and maybe some friendly back-and-forth about where they grew up or something. Colbert had no time to waste on such things, however, because this was not an interview with a normal Democratic Party-aligned politician: this was a politician who has been loudly and consistently criticizing US foreign policy.

    After briefly asking his guest who she is and why she’s running for president, Colbert jumped right into it by immediately bringing up Syria and Assad, the primary line of attack employed against Gabbard by establishment propagandists in American mainstream media.

    Colbert: Do you think the Iraq war was worth it?

    Gabbard: No.

    Colbert: Do you think that our involvement in Syria has been worth it?

    Gabbard: No.

    Colbert: Do you think that ISIS could have been defeated without our involvement and without our support of the local troops there?

    Gabbard: There are two things we need to address in Syria. One is a regime change war that was first launched by the United States in 2011, covertly, led by the CIA. That is a regime change war that has continued over the years, that has increased the suffering of the Syrian people, and strengthened groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS, because the CIA was using American taxpayer dollars to provide arms and training and equipment to these terrorist groups to get them to overthrow the government. So that is a regime change war that we should not have been engaging.

    Colbert: So, but if it is someone like Bashar al-Assad, who gasses his own people, or who engages in war crimes against his own people, should the United States not be involved?

    Gabbard: The United States should not be intervening to overthrow these dictators and these regimes that we don’t like, like Assad, like Saddam Hussein, like Gaddafi, and like Kim Jong Un. There are bad people in the world, but history has shown us that every time the United States goes in and topples these dictators we don’t like, trying to end up like the world’s police, we end up increasing the suffering of the people in these countries. We end up increasing the loss of life, but American lives and the lives of people in these countries. We end up undermining our own security, what to speak of the trillions of dollars of taxpayer money that’s spent on these wars that we need to be using right here at home.

    Like I said, this is not a normal presidential candidate. How often do you see a guest appear on a network late night talk show and talk about the CIA arming terrorists in Syria and the fact that US military interventionism is completely disastrous? It just doesn’t happen. You can understand, then, why empire propagandist Stephen Colbert spent the rest of the interview informing his TV audience that Tulsi Gabbard is dangerous and poisonous.

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Colbert: You got some heat for meeting with Bashar al-Assad. Do you not consider him a war criminal? Why did you meet with that man?

    Gabbard: In the pursuit of peace and security. If we are not willing to meet with adversaries, potential adversaries, in the pursuit of peace and security, the only alternative is more war. That’s why I took that meeting with Assad. In pursuit of peace and security.

    Colbert: Do you believe he is a war criminal? Do you believe he gassed his own people or committed atrocities against his own people?

    Gabbard: Yes. Reports have shown that that’s a fact.

    Colbert: So you believe the intelligence agencies on that. Because I heard that you did not necessarily believe those reports.

    The reason I call Colbert a propagandist and not simply a liberal empire loyalist who happens to have been elevated by billionaire media is because these are carefully constructed narratives that he is reciting, and they weren’t constructed by him.

    Trying to make it look to the audience as though Gabbard is in some way loyal to Assad has been a high-priority agenda of the mainstream media ever since she announced her presidential candidacy. We saw it in her recent appearanceon The View, where John McCain’s sociopathic daughter called her an “Assad apologist” and demanded that Gabbard call Assad an enemy of the United States. We saw it in her recent CNN town hall, where a consultant who worked on Obama’s 2008 campaign was presented as an ordinary audience member to help CNN’s Dana Bash paint Gabbard’s skepticism of intelligence reports about an alleged chemical weapons attack by the Syrian government as something that is weird and suspicious, instead of the only sane position in a post-Iraq invasion world. We saw it in her appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe last month, where the entire panel piled on her in outrage that she wouldn’t call Assad an enemy of the United States. It’s such a common propaganda talking point that the New York Times’ Bari Weiss famously made a laughingstock of herself by repeating it as self-evident truth on The Joe Rogan Experience without having the faintest clue what specific facts it was meant to refer to, just because she’d heard establishment pundits saying it so much.

    This is an organized smear by the mass media attempting to marry Gabbard in the eyes of the public to a Middle Eastern leader whom the propagandists have already sold as a child-murdering monster, and Colbert is participating in it here just as much as the serious news media talking heads are. It’s been frustrating to watch Gabbard fold to this smear campaign by acting like it’s an established fact that Assad “gases his own people” and not the hotly contested empire-serving narrative she knows it is. Gabbard is being targeted by this smear because she challenges US political orthodoxy on military violence (the glue which holds the empire together), so no amount of capitulation will keep them from trying to prevent the public from trusting her words.

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    “I don’t know whether America should be the policemen of the world,” Colbert said after Gabbard defended her position.

    “It is my opinion that we should not be,” Gabbard replied, causing Colbert to launch into a stuffy, embarrassing sermon on the virtues of interventionism and US hegemony that would make Bill Kristol blush.

    “If we are not, though, nature abhors a vacuum, and if we are not involved in international conflicts, or trying to quell international conflicts, certainly the Russians and the Chinese will fill that vacuum. And we will step away from the world stage in a significant way that might destabilize the world, because the United States, however flawed, is a force for good in the world in my opinion. Would you agree with that?”

    Again, this is a comedy show.

    Gabbard explained that in order to be a force for good in the world the United States has to actually do good, which means not raining fire upon every nation it dislikes all the time. Colbert responded by reading off his blue index card to repeat yet another tired anti-Gabbard smear.

    “You’ve gotten some fans in the Trump supporter world: David Duke, Steve Bannon, and, uh, Matt, uh, Gaetz, is that his name? Matt Gaetz? What do you make of how much they like you?”

    This one is particularly vile, partly because Gabbard has repeatedly and unequivocally denounced David Duke, who has a long-established and well-known history of injecting himself into the drama of high-profile conversations in order to maintain the illusion of relevance, and partly because it’s a completely irrelevant point that is brought up solely for the purpose of marrying Tulsi Gabbard’s name to a former Ku Klux Klan leader. Colbert only brought this up (and made Newsweek totally squee) because he wanted to assist in that marrying. The fact that there are distasteful ideologies which also happen to oppose US interventionism for their own reasons does not change the undeniable fact that US military interventionism is consistently disastrous and never helpful and robs the US public of resources that are rightfully theirs.

    This interview was easily Colbert’s most blatant establishment rim job I’ve ever seen, surpassing even the time he corrected his own audience when they cheered at James Comey’s firing to explain to them that Comey is a good guy now and they’re meant to like him. Colbert’s show is blatant propaganda for human livestock, and the fact that this is what American “comedy” shows look like now is nauseating.

    When Tulsi Gabbard first announced her candidacy I predicted that she’d have the narrative control engineers scrambling all over themselves to kill her message, and it’s been even more spectacular than I imagined. I don’t agree with everything she says and does, but by damn this woman is shaking up the establishment narrative matrix more than anybody else right now. She’s certainly keeping it interesting.

    *  *  *

    Thanks for reading! My articles are entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of my sweet merchandise, buying my new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone, or my previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Digest powered by RSS Digest

Mar 14

Today’s News 14th March 2019

  • Watch Norwegian F-35 Stealth Jet Test Fire First Air-to-Air Missile

    A Norwegian fifth-generation F-35 stealth fighter jet assigned to 332 Squadron of the Royal Norwegian Air Force conducted the first air launch of an AIM-120 Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile (AMRAAM) in Norway, according to the Defence Blog.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Norway joined the F-35 program in 2008 to replace its F-16 fleet. The first two stealth jets were delivered for Norway to Luke Air Force Base, Arizona, in late 2015, where they were used to train Norwegian pilots. The first Norwegian F-35s arrived in-country for permanent basing at Ørland Air Base in November 2017.

    The Norwegian government funded the procurement of 40 of 52 F-35s, expected to mostly arrive in the early 2020s.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Norwegian Armed Forces published the F-35 firing the AMRAAM missile on March 09.

    “The shooting was carried out by 332 squadrons in cooperation with the TTT squadron (testing, training, and tactics) and the maintenance and logistics organization and was the first of its kind with F-35 in Norway,” the video’s description read.

    Defense Blog said the AMRAAM missile is operational on all F-35 variants (the F-35A conventional takeoff and landing (CTOL) variant, the F-35B short takeoff/vertical landing (STOVL) variant, and the F-35C carrier variant (CV)). It’s the only radar-guided, air-to-air missile cleared to air-launch from the fifth-generation fighter.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    The AMRAAM air-to-air missile is capable of all-weather day-and-night operations. With more than two decades of design, upgrades, testing, and production, the AIM-120 missile continues to be the best weapon for dogfights.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Raytheon is the main defense contractor that makes the missile. The weapon’s advanced active guidance section provides pilots with high hit rates.

    Procured by 37 countries including the U.S., the AMRAAM missile is now integrated on the F-35 and has been used on F-15, F-16, F/A-18, F-22, Typhoon, Gripen, Tornado, and Harrier.

    More importantly, the Pentagon is creating an F-35 friends circle around Russia and China, and with the stealth jets armed with new AMRAAM missiles, it seems like the preparation for conflict is more obvious than ever.

  • Bulgaria Is A New Battleground In The New Cold War

    Authored by Andrew Korybko via Oriental Review,

    Russian Prime Minister Medvedev traveled to Bulgaria last week.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    The Russian premier’s visit was intended to explore the possibility of extending the TurkStream gas pipeline to the Balkan country and then onwards to Serbia and Central Europe, which is dependent on Sofia securing firm legal guarantees from Brussels in order to avoid a repeat of the South Stream fiasco that gave rise to the current project in the first place.

    The timing of his trip also coincided with his host’s Liberation Day celebrations when Bulgaria remembers how it fought for freedom against the Ottoman Empire with Russian assistance, making this a very somber occasion and the perfect moment for any Russian leader to visit. Ties between the two Slavic countries have traditionally been close, though they’ve nevertheless had their fair share of problems as well, most notably during the two World Wars when they found themselves on opposite sides.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    The complexity of Russian-Bulgarian relations explains why it’s a lot easier said than done to propose TurkStream’s extension to Bulgaria, especially given the recent context of the Balkan state becoming a joint US and EU protectorate and all but functioning as one of their vassals. That said, it speaks to the sincere desire of the Bulgarian authorities to advance their nation’s interests that they’re even trying to go forward with this possibility anyhow. The EU obviously needs the energy, and while they’d prefer to diversify more fully from their Russian supplier for political reasons or at the very least retain pipeline transit through Ukraine, they might be willing to accept TurkStream since they don’t have any other realistic options available to them under the circumstances. Bulgaria’s American ally, however, is clearly against this since it intends to sell more costly LNG to the continent instead.

    It can therefore be said that a struggle for influence is taking place in Bulgaria nowadays.

    The EU could leverage its economic and institutional weight in the country to promote TurkStream’s extension to “mainland Europe” from Turkey while the US could lean on its military influence through NATO and the national authorities under its sway to try to stop this from happening. Amidst all of this, there are evidently some Bulgarian decision makers who – despite their political faults and loyalty to one or another patron – nevertheless still care about their national interests and understand how important it is for their country that this Russian initiative succeeds, hence why some headway has already been made in that direction thus far. It’ll remain to be seen who comes out on top in this struggle for influence, but Bulgaria just became an important New Cold War battleground.

  • While Everyone Sleeps, The Courts Are Abolishing All Immigration Enforcement

    Authored by Daniel Horwitz via ConservativeReview.com,

    Congress could never get away with creating constitutional rights for illegal aliens to remain here, yet a single lower court just did so on Thursday. And where Congress would face deep reprisal in the next election, faceless judges will never feel the heat.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Conservatives fear that extreme Democrats might actually abolish ICE and all immigration enforcement, but the lower courts are already systematically abolishing ICE’s authority, nullifying immigration enforcement statutes, violating separation of powers, and constantly increasing the wave of bogus asylum-seekers that they originally spawned with other radical rulings. The latest ruling from the Ninth Circuit demonstrates that unless Republicans and the president begin pushing back against these radical judges and delegitimizing their rulings, Democrats will get everything they want without ever facing electoral backlash or even the need to win elections.

    It’s truly hard to overstate the outrageously harmful effects of Thursday’s Ninth Circuit ruling. For the first time in our history, the courts have fabricated a constitutional right for those denied asylum to appeal to federal courts for any reason.

    Here’s the background.

    Hundreds of thousands of migrants are flooding our border, claiming the formula of “credible fear” of persecution. They get to stay indefinitely while they ignore their court dates in immigration court. Because of an amalgamation of several prior activist court rulings, mainly by this very circuit, roughly 90 percent of credible fear claims are approved by asylum officers and the claimants shielded from deportation, even though asylum status is ultimately rejected almost every time by an immigration judge. Unfortunately, by that point it’s too late for the American people, who are stuck with the vast majority of these claimants remaining indefinitely in the country. Yet rather than ending this sham incentive, the Ninth Circuit drove a truck through immigration law by asserting that there is now a constitutional right for even the few who are denied initial credible fear status and are placed in deportation proceedings to appeal their denials, not just to an administrative immigration judge but to a federal Article III judge for any reason.

    In past cases, the courts merely twisted statutes and contorted their plain meaning. In this case, for the first time ever and in direct contrast to a ruling by the Third Circuit in 2016, the Ninth Circuit ruled that the immigration statute that denies the federal courts jurisdiction to hear such appeals is unconstitutional under the constitutional requirement of habeas corpus, thereby giving 7.8 billion people in the world habeas corpus access to our courts. This will allow numerous illegal aliens, including the brand-new ones entering now, to stay indefinitely while they litigate themselves into status. The ACLU, which of course led this lawsuit on behalf of a Sri Lankan migrant denied asylum, wasn’t kidding when it proclaimed, “The historical and practical importance of this ruling cannot be overstated.”

    This is one of many recent violations of sovereignty doctrine, known as “plenary power doctrine.” This long-standing principle in the courts is that while aliens have due process rights against criminal punishment, they have no rights to litigate against deportation, which is a mere extension of sovereignty, other than the process laid out by Congress. This principle “has become about as firmly embedded in the legislative and judicial tissues of our body politic as any aspect of our government,” not “merely” by “a page of history … but a whole volume” (Galvan v. Press). The concept is “inherent in sovereignty,” consistent with “ancient principles” of international law, and “to be exercised exclusively by the political branches of government.” (Kleindienst v. Mandel).

    What is so outrageous about this case is that Congress explicitly stripped the courts of any jurisdiction to hear such claims. The reason why the district judge, who was an Obama appointee, refused to even hear this case is because 8 U.S.C. §1252(e)(2) prohibits the federal courts (not to be confused with DOJ administrative courts) from hearing habeas corpus claims against expedited removal of those denied their credible fear claims unless of course they have a claim that they are a citizen or a legal permanent resident. In this case, the three Clinton appointees of this Ninth Circuit panel, Wallace Tashima, Margaret McKeown, and Richard Paez, ruled for the first time that this provision is unconstitutional and that the district court must hear the case.

    The court used the Boumediene v. Bush decision, which created a right to habeas corpus for enemy combatants being held at Guantanamo Bay, as the basis for its decision. That decision in itself was an egregious warping of the Constitution, a decision that Scalia angrily predicted that “the Nation will live to regret.” However, the important distinction is that Boumediene was a case of indefinite detention, whereas this is a case where we are enforcing our sovereignty and getting rid of the person, who can live freely wherever he wants. Applying habeas corpus to deportation is bonkers even by the Boumediene standard.

    Now that there is a circuit split on this revolutionary idea, court watchers on all sides predict the Supreme Court will take up the case. While conservatives are fairly confident that this will be added to the endless list of Ninth Circuit reversals by SCOTUS (although I have my concerns about Gorsuch in this case), conservatives need to realize the factors creating an emergency with sovereignty and the lower courts:

    • We’ve seen over and over again how lower courts create a legal, political, and policy momentum for creating new rights. If they are not nipped in the bud and delegitimized immediately, they wind up growing and eventually being codified, even if initially reversed by the Supreme Court. This has happened with almost every phantom right created by the courts and has already begun with immigration law. We are at the cusp of the courts doing with immigration what they did with abortion and gay marriage, even though it took years for the Left to win in those cases. All of the justices except for Clarence Thomas succumb to pressure to varying degrees and will eventually go along with much of the anti-sovereignty doctrine building in the lower courts.

    • Many conservatives are suggesting that we “fix” our immigration laws to stop the asylum fraud, among other problems at the border. What this case demonstrates is that courts are so radical they are not just twisting the wording of statutes, they are downright invalidating them by creating new constitutional rights to immigrate. They are even brazenly invalidating statutes that block the courts from hearing cases, as we saw with the TPS amnesty case. Keeping out and deporting aliens as well as defining court jurisdiction are two of the most unquestionable and categorical powers of Congress, and they are backed by case law dating back to our Founding. This is no longer about any one statute. There is no statute to fix. Remember, we already fixed our immigration laws in 1996. Many of the things we want to do, including kicking the courts out of these cases, were already done in 1996, including the statute at issue here. This law passed the Senate unanimously! Passing more laws while continuing to legitimize lower court supremacy won’t help. If we continue to agree that lower courts rule over immigration, no amount of congressional changes could help, because the courts will rule the changes unconstitutional. This is why it’s time to grab the bull by the horns and attack the notion of judicial jurisdiction over these issues to begin with. The Trump administration needs to begin pushing back against the courts.

    • There is something much bigger occurring here. Putting aside particular smaller areas of immigration law, the legal profession has now pulled the trigger on a long-standing goal of what they refer to as “applying constitutional norms” to foreign nationals, not just in terms of criminal proceedings, but in the context of immigration claims themselves.

    Justice Robert Jackson, the great champion of due process and the dissenter in the Japanese internment case, described it this way: “Due process does not invest any alien with a right to enter the United States, nor confer on those admitted the right to remain against the national will.” Due process for aliens in the context of immigration decisions is whatever Congress says it is. As the court said in Lem Moon Sing v. United States, “The decisions of executive or administrative officers, acting within powers expressly conferred by Congress, are due process of law.” Liberals have been trying to attack this for decades and ensure that even the aliens we successfully deport expeditiously (increasingly a small number) can remain here indefinitely and tie up our courts with lawsuits. If we allow this game to continue, the flow at our border will make what Europe is dealing with look like child’s play.

    Every week, we cede another piece of our sovereignty to unelected courts who are actually violating longstanding Supreme Court precedent. The conservative movement needs to push this administration to stand up and put the Supreme Court on notice to guard its own precedents and doctrines and that if it fails to rein in its own quite inferior courts, the administration will certainly not regard those decisions as superior to our own laws. Trump has no other choice.

  • China's Leadership More Popular Globally Than U.S. Counterpart

    It’s been a fact since 2017: The Chinese leadership has higher median approval ratings around the world than its U.S. counterpart. While the gap was miniscule in 2017, Statista’s Katharina Buchholz notes that it widened in the previous year to three percentage points, as reported by Gallup.

    Infographic: China's Leadership More Popular Globally Than U.S. Counterpart | Statista

    You will find more infographics at Statista

    The last time the U.S. was this unpopular around the world was during the financial crisis in 2008. But even then, the U.S. leadership’s approval rating was higher than any of those of the current Trump cabinet, which assumed office in early 2017. China has earned high ratings in Africa, where the country has invested large sums in the past decade.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Approval ratings in its home region were on par with the median global result of 34 percent and were somewhat lower in Europe and the Americas.

    Yet, Mexican citizens, whose country has been at loggerheads with the Trump administration over trade deal NAFTA and the construction of a border wall, also rated China significantly higher in the past year, as did citizens of Venezuela.

  • The Federal Reserve: A Failure Of The Rule Of Law

    Authored by Alexander Salter via The American Institute for Economic Research,

    “Money is power.” We’ve all heard this aphorism many times before. Too often it’s a lazy shorthand dismissal of the finding of mainstream economics, which show that the pursuit and possession of money often entails innocuous or even beneficial consequences for society. Dr. Johnson was right after all: “There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money.”

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    But there are some contexts in which the saying is apt. An obvious case is the Federal Reserve. The Fed has a monopoly on the creation of base money, the fundamental asset underlying the banking and financial system. And over decades, with each instance of financial turbulence, the Fed has become less constrained in how, when, and why it creates base money. Since the Great Recession, the Fed has been able to bestow purchasing power, liquidity, and solvency on just about any financial organization it pleases. If that isn’t power, there’s no such thing.

    The Federal Reserve System was created in 1913. It was intended to be a formalization of the interbank clearing system that then existed in the National Banking System. It was not intended to be a central bank. Even in the early 20th century, economists and politicians had some idea of what central banks did and how they behaved, and the existence of such an institution was widely regarded as inherently un-American, in the sense that it could not be reconciled with a self-governing society. That’s why so many proponents of the Federal Reserve System bent over backward to insist they were not advocating the creation of a central bank. And at the time, their repudiations were reasonable; there was no reason the Federal Reserve System had to acquire the powers it did.

    But then the US entered the First World War. Wars have a way of eroding society’s long-established institutions. And the political process has a logic of its own. These forces combined to transform the Fed into what its critics feared it might become: a genuine central bank.

    The Fed began supporting the market for US government debt during the First World War using techniques that were the forerunners of modern monetary policy. Once the Fed got a taste for tinkering with credit and money markets, it insisted benign monetary management was consistent with its mandate. And it’s been tinkering ever since, often to the detriment of millions of workers who have no control over the Fed but must suffer the consequences of its errors.

    It’s well accepted in macroeconomics that the Fed bears a large share of the blame for putting the “Great” in Great Depression. The turmoil that gripped not only US but global markets starting in 1929 was so disruptive, in part, because the Fed bungled its handling of the money supply. Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz famously demonstrated this in their much-celebrated Monetary History of the United States. So compelling was their case that in 2002, future Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke admitted, “I would like to say to Milton and Anna:Regarding the Great Depression. You’re right, we did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again.”

    But the Fed did do it again. The 2007-8 crisis was a replay of central bank mismanagement. Bernanke’s Fed focused more on shoring up the balance sheets of politically connected banks and nonbank financial houses than combating the liquidity crunch that characterized the early day of the crisis. The result was many irresponsible banks got bailouts, while financial markets as a whole were left scrambling for liquidity. The reverberations of this misdiagnosis were not limited to financial markets: as the spike in unemployment and the precipitous decline in output demonstrate, the Fed’s actions had dire consequences for those far removed from the financial sector.

    But through various rounds of loaning banks money on unsound collateral, such as the now-infamous mortgage-backed securities, as well as outright purchases of bad assets to prop up banks’ balance sheets, the Fed has de facto acquired the authority to allocate credit to preferred banks and other financial institutions. Before the crisis, the Fed’s tinkering could still, with some mental gymnastics, be reconciled with the view that the central bank can be and should be a financial-market referee. But now, with its powers to allocate credit in a manner that much more resembles fiscal policy than monetary policy, the Fed has stepped into the game as a player, and one that plays by an entirely different set of rules.

    More than a decade after the financial crisis, we’re left grappling with the Fed as an organization with incredible power but subject to minimal responsibility. History shows that the Fed is eager to expand its own powers with each macroeconomic snafu. From clearinghouse to monetary tinkerer to direct allocator of purchasing power, each real or perceived crisis has been used by the Fed to move one step further on the road to monetary central planning. At no time has this process been approved through any of the institutions of collective action Americans recognize as lawful. Nor can it be justified by circumstances, since the only durable beneficiaries of the Fed’s transformation are politically connected bankers and would-be monetary policy makers. 

    In the case of the Fed, money is indeed power, and power of the most pernicious kind. There’s no reason to continue to put up with this lawless market manipulator. Free societies require any who would wield power on the public’s behalf to submit themselves to the rule of law. It’s long past time we demanded that of the Fed.

  • Dick's Chops Off Revenue From Gun Enthusiasts Amid Shrinking Sales

    Despite shrinking sales following their last anti-gun corporate decision, Dick’s Sporting Goods has announced it is scaling back its gun business yet again.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    During its Tuesday earnings call, CEO Edward Stack said that the sporting goods retailer would no longer carry firearms at 125 locations – roughly 17% of US stores. The company will replace the firearms sections with other categories such as clothing and shoes. Of note, the retailer is beefing up its private-label strategy in a bid to become less reliant on wholesale partners such as Under Armour and Nike. 

    Of note, net income for the quarter fell to $102.6 million from $116 million during the same period last year, per Marketwatch. Adjusted same store sales fell 3.1% y/y for the 12 month period ending Feb 2. 

    The shift away from firearms is the second such step over the last 13 months, after the store decided in late February 2018 to stop selling guns to customers younger than 21 in the wake of the Valentine’s day mass-shooting weeks before at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. The company also pulled intimidating looking assault rifles from their shelves as well as high-capacity magazines from all store locations, along with subsidiary Field & Stream.

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    The company also hired three gun control lobbyists, and announced that it would destroy all of the weapons it had stopped selling. 

    In response to the 2018 corporate decision, gunmakers Springfield Armory and O.F. Mossberg stopped doing business with Dick’s. 

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Sales, meanwhile, dipped nearly 4 percent as of November 2018 amid vows by gun rights activists to never patronize the sporting goods chain. During Wednesday’s call, Stack noted that the company had continued to see “double-digit declines” in its gun business, and that they expect the trend to continue. 

  • Study Shows Migrants Use Almost Twice The Welfare Benefits As Native-Born Americans

    Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

    New research has discovered that foreign non-citizens use nearly two times the amount of welfare as native-born Americans. Both legal and illegal aliens fall into the category of foreigners who take from the welfare system.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    According to a report by Breitbart, in recently released research by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), analysts discovered that about 63 percent of non-citizen households, those who live legally and illegally in the U.S., use some form of public welfare while only about 35 percent of native-born American households are on welfare.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    California and Texas have the most expansive welfare-dependent immigration. For example, more than 7-in-10 non-citizen households in California use at least one form of welfare compared to just 35 percent of native-born American households that use welfare in the state.

    In Texas, nearly 70 percent of non-citizen households use welfare. Similar to California, only 35 percent of native-born American households are on welfare.-Breitbart

    In an exclusive interview with Breitbart News earlier this week, President Donald Trump said he wanted an end to all welfare-dependent legal immigration that burdens American taxpayers with the costs.

    “I don’t like the idea of people coming in and going on welfare for 50 years, and that’s what they want to be able to do – and it’s no good,” Trump said. 

    And it is an obvious burden.  For what one receives without working for, another must work for without earning.  It’s a vicious and immoral practice to steal money from some in order to give it to others.

    The Trump administration is considering a new regulation this year that would limit immigrants’ ability to live off the producers (taxpayers). It would effectively ban legal immigrants from permanently resettling in the U.S. if they are a burden on American taxpayers. This would be a net win for those being stolen from (“taxpayers”).

    Legal immigration controls suggested by the government would be equal an annual $57.4 billion tax cut – the amount taxpayers spend every year on paying for the welfare, crime, and schooling costs of the country’s mass importation of 1.5 million new, mostly low-skilled legal immigrants.

  • Yuan Slides After China Jobless Rate Spikes, Industrial Production Growth Tumbles

    After January’s record surge, February saw China’s credit growth unexpectedly collapse prompting notable downgrades in expectations for tonight’s macro data bonanza.

    Chinese central bank reported that in February, aggregate financing increased by a paltry 703 billion yuan, roughly half the expected 1.3 trillion…

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    … and the lowest print on record in the recently revised series. Additionally, growth in China’s broad money supply, or M2, once again slumped and after a modest rebound in January, in February M2 Y/Y growth dropped back to 8.0%, the lowest print in series history.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    The February collapse in credit creation following January’s extravagant print likely means that just like most other Chinese data in the pre-New Year period, this too was distorted by the Lunar New Year, and as a result the January surge, far from indicative of a major new reflationary boost may simply suggest that China will maintain a prudent approach to overall economic leverage, which however will be bad news for the stock market which in the second half of February went all in on bets that China has doubled-down on reflating both its, and the global economy.

    And China’s credit impulse has weakened back after January’s rebound:

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Heading into the data, Chinese macro data has been extremely weak despite endless streams of stimulus:

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    But, as Bloomberg reports, the latest PMI figures out of China have suggested some stabilization in an economic slowdown that hit last year. Though the blow from the trade war to exports and production probably hasn’t fully hit as yet.

    So what did February’s data look like:

    • China Industrial Production YoY MISS +5.3% vs +5.6% exp and +6.2% prior

    • China Retail Sales YoY MEET +8.2% vs +8.2% exp and +9.0% prior

    • China Fixed Asset Investment YoY MEET +6.1% vs +6.1% exp and +5.9% prior

    • China Property Investment YoY BEAT +11.6% vs +9.5% prior

    • China Surveyed Jobless Rate WEAKER 5.3% vs 4.9% prior

    This is the weakest Industrial Production growth since March 2009 and Retail Sales growth is hovering near its weakest since May 2003. But perhaps the most worrisome for Chinese officials is the surge in the surveyed jobless rate to 5.3%, the highest since Feb 2017.

    Graphically:

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Of course, all of this comes with a warning that figures for this time of year can be volatile due to the lunar new year holiday in China, when factories and offices are significantly affected by a week-long break. The timing of the holiday shifts. Early February 2019, mid-February 2018 and late January to early February 2017, for example. So it really distorts the Jan/Feb data.

    Offshore yuan was fading into the data (and ChiNext was extending its losses from the last two days) and extended its losses after the data disappointment…

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    The soft reading on industrial output is probably the key takeaway from these numbers, opening the big question of whether this is reflective of a deeper downturn than anticipated as the trade war effects start to bite in earnest (or if it can be blamed on the Lunar New Year effect)?

  • CIA Is Conspiring With ISIS, Turning Syrian Refugee Camps Into ISIS Hotbeds

    Submitted by SouthFront

    The CIA is conspiring with ISIS commanders in northeastern Syria supplying them with fake documents and then transferring them to Iraq, according to reports in Turkish pro-government media.

    About 2,000 ISIS members were questioned in the areas of Kesra, Buseira, al-Omar and Suwayr in Deir Ezzor province and at least 140 of them then received fake documents. Some of the questioned terrorists were then moved to the camps of al-Hol, Hasakah and Rukban, which are controlled by US-backed forces. The CIA also reportedly created a special facility near Abu Khashab with the same purpose.

    Israeli, French and British special services are reportedly involved.

    An interesting observation is that the media of the country, which in the previous years of war, used to conspire with ISIS allowing its foreign recruits to enter Syria and buying smuggled oil from the terrorists, has now become one of the most active exposers of the alleged US ties with ISIS elements.

    Another issue often raised in Turkish media is the poor humanitarian situation in the refugee camps controlled by US-backed forces. These reports come in the course of other revelations. According to the International Rescue Committee, about 100 people, mostly children, died in combat zones or in the al-Hol camp controlled by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces just recently.

    In its turn, the Russian Defense Ministry released a series of satellite images revealing the horrifying conditions in the al-Rukban camp. The imagery released on March 12 shows at least 670 graves, many of them fresh, close to the camp’s living area. The tents and light constructions used to settle refugees are also located in a close proximity to large waste deposits.

    A joint statement by the Russian and Syrian Joint Coordination Committees for Repatriation of Syrian Refugees said that refugees in al-Rukban are suffering from a lack of water, food, medication and warm clothing, which is especially important during winter. According to the statement, members of the US-backed armed group Maghawir al-Thawra disrupt water deliveries to the camp, using this as a bargaining chip for blackmailing and profiteering purposes.

    Tensions are once again growing between Syria and Israel. Earlier in March, Syrian Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad submitted an official letter to the head of the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO) Kristin Lund that Damascus ”will not hesitate to confront Israel” if it continues refusing  to withdraw from the Golan Heights.

    Israeli media and officials responded with a new round of allegations that Hezbollah is entrenching in southern Syria therefore justifying a further militarization of the Golan Heights.

Digest powered by RSS Digest

Mar 13

Today’s News 13th March 2019

  • Where Are The Landmines?

    Due to their indiscriminate and devastating effects, the long-lasting threat posed by their presence and the painstaking efforts required to remove them, anti-personnel landmines have rightfully been prohibited by the United Nations since 1997 – a treaty joined by over 150 countries.

    Nevertheless, as Statista’s Martin Armstrong notes, there is still an alarmingly large number of them contaminating countries across the world.

    This infographic presents facts and figures from the Landmine and Cluster Munition Monitor, shedding light on the places landmines still threaten life, the countries with the largest stockpiles and the progress being made in the fight to clear the contaminated areas.

    Infographic: Where are the Landmines? | Statista

    You will find more infographics at Statista

  • Germany's Über Hypocrisy Over Venezuela

    Authored by Finian Cunningham via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    Germany has taken the lead among European Union member states to back Washington’s regime-change agenda for Venezuela. Berlin’s hypocrisy and double-think is quite astounding.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Only a few weeks ago, German politicians and media were up in arms protesting to the Trump administration for interfering in Berlin’s internal affairs. There were even outraged complaints that Washington was seeking “regime change” against Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government.

    Those protests were sparked when Richard Grenell, the US ambassador to Germany, warned German companies involved in the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline with Russia that they could be hit with American economic sanctions if they go ahead with the Baltic seabed project.

    Earlier, Grenell provoked fury among Berlin’s political establishment when he openly gave his backing to opposition party Alternative for Germany. That led to consternation and denunciations of Washington’s perceived backing for regime change in Berlin. They were public calls for Grenell to be expelled over his apparent breach of diplomatic protocols.

    Now, however, Germany is shamelessly kowtowing to an even more outrageous American regime-change plot against Venezuela.

    Last week, the government of President Nicolas Maduro ordered the expulsion of German ambassador Daniel Kriener after he greeted the US-backed opposition figure Juan Guaido on a high-profile occasion. Guaido had just returned from a tour of Latin American countries during which he had openly called for the overthrow of the Maduro government. Arguably a legal case could be made for the arrest of Guaido by the Venezuelan authorities on charges of sedition.

    When Guaido returned to Venezuela on March 4 he was greeted at the airport by several foreign diplomats. Among the receiving dignitaries was Germany’s envoy Daniel Kriener.

    The opposition figure had declared himself “interim president” of Venezuela on January 23 and was immediately recognized by Washington and several European Union states. The EU has so far not issued an official endorsement of Guaido over incumbent President Maduro. Italy’s objection blocked the EU from adopting a unanimous position.

    Nevertheless, as the strongest economy in the 28-member bloc, Germany can be seen as de facto leader of the EU. Its position on Venezuela therefore gives virtual EU gravitas to the geopolitical maneuvering led by Washington towards the South American country.

    What’s more, the explicit backing of Juan Guaido by Germany’s envoy was carried out on the “express order” of Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, according to Deutsche Welle.

    “It was my express wish and request that Ambassador Kriener turn out with representatives of other European nations and Latin American ones to meet acting President Guaido at the airport,” said Maas.

     “We had information that he was supposed to be arrested there. I believe that the presence of various ambassadors helped prevent such an arrest.”

    It’s staggering to comprehend the double-think involved here.

    Guaido was hardly known among the vast majority of Venezuelans until he catapulted on to the global stage by declaring himself “interim president”. That move was clearly executed in a concerted plan with the Trump White House. European governments and Western media have complacently adopted the White House line that Guaido is the legitimate leader while socialist President Maduro is a “usurper”.

    That is in spite of the fact that Maduro was re-elected last year in free and fair elections by a huge majority of votes. Guaido’s rightwing, pro-business party boycotted the elections. Yet he is anointed by Washington, Berlin and some 50 other states as the legitimate leader.

    Russia, China, Turkey, Cuba and most other members of the United Nations have refused to adopt Washington’s decree of recognizing Guaido. Those nations (comprising 75 per cent of the UN assembly) continue to recognize President Maduro as the sovereign authority. Indeed, Russia has been highly critical of Washington’s blatant interference for regime change in oil-rich Venezuela. Moscow has warned it will not tolerate US military intervention.

    Russia’s envoy to the UN Vasily Nebenzia, at a Security Council session last month, excoriated the US for its gross violation of international law with regard to Venezuela. Moscow’s diplomat also directed a sharp rebuke at other nations “complicit” in Washington’s aggression, saying that one day “you will be next” for similar American subversion in their own affairs.

    Germany’s hypocrisy and double-think is, to paraphrase that country’s national anthem, “über alles” (above all else).

    German politicians, diplomats and media were apoplectic in their anger at perceived interference by the US ambassador in Berlin’s internal affairs. Yet the German political establishment has no qualms whatsoever about ganging up – only weeks later – with Washington to subvert the politics and constitution of Venezuela.

    How can Germany be so utterly über servile to Washington and the latter’s brazen criminal aggression towards Venezuela?

    It seems obvious that Berlin is trying to ingratiate itself with the Trump administration. But what for?

    Trump has been pillorying Germany with allegations of “unfair trade” practices. In particular, Washington is recently stepping up its threats to slap punitive tariffs on German auto exports. Given that this is a key sector in the German export-driven economy, it may be gleaned that Berlin is keen to appease Trump. By backing his aggression towards Venezuela?

    Perhaps this policy of appeasement is also motivated by Berlin’s concern to spare the Nord Stream 2 project from American sanctions. When NS2 is completed later this year, it is reckoned to double the capacity of natural gas consumption by Germany from Russia. That will be crucial for Germany’s economic growth.

    Another factor is possible blackmail of Berlin by Washington. Recall the earth-shattering revelations made by American whistleblower Edward Snowden a few years back when he disclosed that US intelligence agencies were tapping the personal phone communications of Chancellor Merkel and other senior Berlin politicians. Recall, too, how the German state remarkably acquiesced over what should have been seen as a devastating infringement by Washington.

    The weird lack of action by Berlin over that huge violation of its sovereignty by the Americans makes one wonder if the US spies uncovered a treasure trove of blackmail material on German politicians.

    Berlin’s pathetic kowtowing to Washington’s interference in Venezuela begs an ulterior explanation. No self-respecting government could be so hypocritical and duplicitous.

    Whatever Berlin may calculate to gain from its unscrupulous bending over for Washington, one thing seems clear, as Russian envoy Nebenzia warned: “One day you are next” for American hegemonic shafting.

  • Putin Now Thinks Western Elites Are "Swine"

    Authored by Dmitry Orlov via Russia Insider,

    An article I published close to five years ago, “Putin to Western elites: Play-time is over”, turned out to be the most popular thing I’ve written so far, having garnered over 200,000 reads over the intervening years. In it I wrote about Putin’s speech at the 2014 Valdai Club conference. In that speech he defined the new rules by which Russia conducts its foreign policy: out in the open, in full public view, as a sovereign nation among other sovereign nations, asserting its national interests and demanding to be treated as an equal. Yet again, Western elites failed to listen to him.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Instead of mutually beneficial cooperation they continued to speak the language of empty accusations and counterproductive yet toothless sanctions.

    And so, in last month’s address to Russia’s National Assembly Putin sounded note of complete and utter disdain and contempt for his “Western partners,” as he has usually called them. This time he called them “swine.”

    The president’s annual address to the National Assembly is a rather big deal. Russia’s National Assembly is quite unlike that of, say, Venezuela, which really just consists of some obscure nonentity named Juan recording Youtube videos in his apartment. In Russia, the gathering is a who’s-who of Russian politics, including cabinet ministers, Kremlin staffers, the parliament (State Duma), regional governors, business leaders and political experts, along with a huge crowd of journalists. One thing that stood out at this year’s address was the very high level of tension in the hall: the atmosphere seemed charged with electricity.

    It quickly became obvious why the upper echelon of Russia’s state bureaucracy was nervous: Putin’s speech was part marching orders part harangue. His plans for the next couple of years are extremely ambitious, as he himself admitted. The plank is set very high, he said, and those who are not up to the challenge have no business going near it. Very hard work lies ahead for almost everyone who was gathered in that hall, and those of them who fail at their tasks are unlikely to be in attendance the next time around because their careers will have ended in disgrace.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    The address contained almost no bad news and quite a lot of very good news. Russia’s financial reserves are more than sufficient to cover its entire external debt, both public and private. Non-energy-resource exports are booming to such an extent that Russia no longer needs oil and gas exports to maintain a positive balance of trade. It has become largely immune to Western sanctions. Eurasian integration projects are going extremely well. Russian government’s investments in industry are paying dividends.

    The government has amassed vast amounts of capital which it will now spend on domestic programs designed to benefit the people, to help Russians live longer, healthier lives and have more children. “More children—lower taxes” was one of the catchier slogans.

    This was what most of the address was about: eradication of remaining poverty; low, subsidized mortgage rates for families with two or more children; pensions indexed to inflation above and beyond the official minimal income levels (corrected and paid out retroactively); high-speed internet for each and every school; universal access to health care through a network of rural clinics; several new world-class oncology clinics; support for tech start-ups; a “social contract” program that helps people start small businesses; another program called “ticket to the future” that allows sixth-graders to choose a career path that includes directed study programs, mentorships and apprenticeships; lots of new infrastructure projects such as the soon-to-be-opened Autobahn between Moscow and St. Petersburg, revamped trash collection and recycling and major air pollution reductions in a dozen major cities; the list goes on and on.

    No opposition to these proposals worth mentioning was voiced in any of the commentary that followed on news programs and talk shows; after all, who could possibly be against spending amassed capital on projects that help the population?

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Perhaps the most ambitious goal set by Putin was to redo the entire system of Russia’s government regulations, both federal and regional, in every sphere of public life and commerce. Over the next two years every bit of regulation will be examined in order to determine whether it is necessary and whether it responds to contemporary needs and if it isn’t or doesn’t it will be eliminated. This will significantly ease the burden of regulatory compliance, lowering the cost of doing business.

    Another goal was to continue growing the already booming agricultural export sector. Last year Russia achieved self-sufficiency in wheat seed stock, but the overall goal is to achieve complete self-sufficiency in food and to become the world’s provider of ecologically clean foodstuffs. (As Putin pointed out, Russia remains the only major agricultural producer in the world that hasn’t been contaminated by American-made GMO poisons.) Yet another goal is to further grow Russia’s tourism industry, which is already booming, by introducing electronic tourist visas that will be much easier to obtain.

    Last year’s address surprised the world with its second part, in which Putin unveiled a whole set of new Russian weapons systems that effectively negate every last bit of US military superiority. This year, he added just one new system: a supersonic cruise missile called “Zirkon” with a 1000 km range that flies at Mach 9. But he also provided a progress report on all the others: everything is going according to plan; some new armaments have already been delivered, others are going into mass production, the rest are being tested. He spoke in favor of normalized relations with the EU, but accused the US of “hostility,” adding that Russia does not threaten anyone and is not interested in confrontation.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Putin’s sharpest words were reserved for the US decision to abandon the INF treaty. He said that the US acted in bad faith, accusing Russia of violating the treaty while they themselves violated it, specifically articles 5 and 6, by deploying dual-use launch systems in Romania and Poland which can be used for both air defense and for offensive nuclear weapons which the treaty specifically prohibits. Nuclear-tipped Tomahawk cruise missiles, which the US could deploy in Poland and Romania, would of course pose a risk, but would not provide the US with anything like a first-strike advantage, since these cruise missiles are obsolete to the point where even Syria’s Soviet-era air defenses were able to shoot down most of the ones the US lobbed at them as punishment for the fake chemical weapons attack in Douma.

    Speaking of the American dream of a global air defense system, Putin called on the US to “abandon these illusions.” The Americans can think whatever they want, he said, but the question is, “can they do math?” This needs unfolding.

    First, the Americans can think whatever they want because… they are Americans. Russians do not allow themselves the luxury of thinking complete and utter nonsense. Those who are not grounded in fact and logic tend to get the Russian term “likbez” thrown in their faces rather promptly. It literally decodes as “liquidation of illiteracy” and is generally used to shut down ignoramuses. But in the US shocking displays of ignorance are quite acceptable. For an example, you need to look no further than the astonishingly idiotic “Green New Deal” being touted by the freshman congresstwit (how’s that for a gender-neutral appellation?) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. If she were Russian she’d have been laughed right out of town by now.

    “But can they do math?” Apparently not! There is another Russian term—“matchast”—which literally decodes as “material part” but stands for the understanding that can only be achieved through the knowledge of mathematics, the hard sciences and engineering. In Russia, ignoramuses like Ocasio-Cortez, who think that transportation needs can be provided by electric vehicles powered by wind and solar, get shut down by being told to go and study “matchast” while in the US they are allowed to run wild in the halls of congress.

    In this case, if Americans could “do math,” they would quickly figure out that there is no conceivable defensive system that would be effective against the new Russian weapons, that there are no conceivable offensive weapons that would prevent Russia from launching an unstoppable retaliatory strike, and that therefore the “new arms race” (which some Americans have been daft enough to announce) is effectively over and Russia has won. See above: Russia is not spending its money on weapons; it is spending it on helping its people. The US can squander arbitrary amounts of money on weapons but this won’t make an iota of difference: an attack on Russia will be the last thing it ever does.

    Russia does not plan to be the first to violate the ABM treaty, but if the US deploys intermediate-range nuclear weapons against Russia, then Russia will respond in kind, by targeting not just the territories from which it is threatened but the locations where the decisions to threaten it are taken. Washington, Brussels and other NATO capitals would, clearly, be on that list. This shouldn’t be news; Russia has already announced that in the next war, should there be one, will not be fought on Russian soil. Russia plans to take the fight to the enemy immediately. Of course, there won’t be a war—provided the Americans are sane enough to realize that attacking Russia is functionally equivalent to blowing themselves up with nuclear weapons. Are they sane enough? That is the question that is holding the world hostage.

    It is in speaking of them that Putin used the most withering word in his entire address. Speaking of Americans’ dishonesty and bad faith in accusing Russia of violating the ABM treaty while it was they themselves who were violating it, he added: “…and the American satellites oink along with them.” It is rather difficult to come up with an adequate translation for the Russian verb “подхрюкивать”; “oink along with” is as close as I am able to get. The mental image is of a chorus of little pigs accompanying a big swine. The implication is obvious: Putin thinks that the Americans are swine, and that their NATO satellites are swine too.

    Therefore, they shouldn’t expect Putin to scatter any pearls before them and, in any case, he’ll be too busy helping Russians live better lives to pay any attention to them.

  • Making America's Kids Smarter – It's So Easy

    Participation trophies for all has now escalated from the sports arena to public education…

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    via WCNC.com,

    NC lawmakers consider bill that would change school grades

    A new bill under consideration would adjust the current grading scale, making a score of 85 an A and a score of 70 a B.

    RALEIGH, N.C. – The North Carolina General Assembly is considering a bill that would adjust the grading scale used to grade state public schools.

    House Bill 145, which promotes a 15-point grading scale, passed its first reading in the House on Monday and has been referred to the Committee on Education K-12.

    The proposed bill would mean higher grades for lower scores by changing the grading scale as follows:

    • A: 100 to 85 percent

    • B: 84 to 70 percent

    • C: 69 to 55 percent

    • D: 54 to 40 percent

    • F: Anything below 40 percent

    The old scale was a 10 point scale, meaning students would need to score a 90 for an A, 80 for a B, etc. If passed, the new grading scale would go into effect for the 2019-20 school year.

    *  *  *

    Every school and student deserves an A, right? It’s their right! It’s racist otherwise.

    h/t The Burning Platform

  • Venezuela Blackout: Cyber-Attacks, Sabotage, & 'Mighty' Cuban Intelligence

    Via Southfront.org,

    During the past few days, Venezuela was suffering a major blackout that left the country in darkness. The crisis started on March 7 with a failure at the Guri hydroelectric power plant, which produces 80% of the country’s power. Additionally, an explosion was reported at Sidor Substation in Bolivar state.

    Since then, the government has been struggling to solve the crisis with varying success.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    President Nicholas Maduro says that the blackout is the reason of “the electric war announced and directed by American imperialism.”

    According to Maduro, electrical systems were targeted by cyberattacks and “infiltrators”. He added that authorities managed to restore power to “many parts” of the country on March 8, but the restored systems were knocked down after the country’s grid was once again attacked. He noted that “one of the sources of generation that was working perfectly” had been sabotaged and accused “infiltrators of attacking the electric company from the inside.”

    Communication and information minister Jorge Rodriguez described the situation as “the most brutal attack on the Venezuelan people in 200 years”. He also described the situation as the “deliberate sabotage” on behalf of the US-backed opposition.

    In own turn, the US continues to reject claims accusing it of attempts to destabilize the situation in the country. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo even claimed that Washington and its allies would not hurt the “ordinary Venezuelans.” According to him, what’s hurting the people is the “Maduro regime’s incompetence.”

    “No food. No medicine. Now, no power. Next, no Maduro,” Pompeo wrote in Twitter, adding that “Maduro’s policies bring nothing but darkness.” Unfortunately, the top diplomat did not explain how wide-scale economic sanctions imposed to wreck the country’s economic should help the “ordinary Venezuelans”.

    The State Department attitude was expectedly supported by US-proclaimed Venezuelan Interim President Juan Guaido, who recently returned to country after an attempt to get more foreign support for US-backed regime change efforts. Guaido accused the “Maduro Regime” of turning the blackout during the night in a “horror movie” with his “gangs” terrorizing people.

    Another narrative, which recently set the mainstream media on fire, is the alleged Cuban meddling in the crisis.

    According to this very version of the event, “forces of democracy” were not able to overthrow the Venezuelan government because its political elite is controlled by Cuban intelligence services. President Donald Trump even said Maduro is nothing more than a “Cuban puppet.”

    Taking account already existing allegations about the presence of Hezbollah and Russian mercenaries in Venezuela and an expected second attempt to stage US aid delivery provocation on the Colombian-Venezuelan border, it becomes clear that chances of US direct action to bring into power own political puppet are once again growing.

    The February attempt to stage a provocation failed and make a final step toward a regime change by force failed after it was publicly revealed that the US-backed opposition was intentionally burning “aid trucks” to blame the Maduro government. Furthermore, the military backed Maduro, and the scale and intensity of protests across the country were not enough to paralyze the government.

    The blackout in Venezuela was likely meant to bring the country into disorder and draw off army and security forces. Therefore, an attempt to stage a new provocation to justify a foreign intervention to overthrow the Venezuelan government could be expected anytime soon.

  • US Navy’s Stealth Destroyer Departs From San Diego On First Operational Cruise

    U.S.S. Zumwalt (DDG-1000), a 16,000-ton next generation guided-missile destroyer, left its San Diego homeport for its first “operational period at sea,” the U.S. Navy said in a March 8 statement.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    The Navy said the milestone demonstrates the service’s commitment to advancing the lethality of stealth warships through cutting-edge technologies in combat systems, weapons, and engineering plant.

    “Zumwalt is designed for stealth,” said Capt. Andrew Carlson, the ship’s commanding officer.

    “This aids her role as a multi-mission surface combatant and improves the fleet commander’s options for delivery of naval combat power to meet the Navy’s emergent mission requirements.”

    The ship was commissioned in October 2016. Following the commissioning, the Zumwalt was stationed in San Diego where advanced weapon systems were installed. According to the statement, the ship’s crew completed a post-delivery maintenance examination of the destroyer’s electronic, powerplant, and weapons systems before the departure.

    “My crew has been looking forward to continued testing and operations at sea, leveraging the newly installed capabilities of this platform,” said Carlson. “Our primary focus is executing a safe underway, while building both competence and confidence in operating Zumwalt across the spectrum of naval warfare.”

    U.S. Indo-Pacific Command snapped an image of the newly-commissioned @ZUMWALT_DDG1000 departing from San Diego late last week.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    The Zumwalt is about 100 feet longer and 13 feet wider than the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, is powered by two Rolls-Royce turbine generators capable of producing 78 megawatts (105,000 hp), and also has enough power to fire electrically-powered weapons.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Armed with 80 missiles in vertical launch tubes within the hull and two 155-caliber cannons, the vessel is expected to have directed-energy weapons once the technology matures.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    While the Navy provided limited details on the vessels next stop, CTV Vancouver Island said the ship is scheduled to make a port call to Canadian Forces Base Esquimalt on Vancouver Island later this month.

    “While the exact date of the ship’s arrival and duration of its stay remain closely guarded secrets of the U.S. Navy, the ship’s oddly angular design, stealth capabilities and state-of-the-art electric drive system are sure to attract the attention of naval watchers and neophytes alike,” read the report.

  • RussiaGate As Organised Distraction

    Authored by Prof. Oliver Boyd-Barrett, via Organisation for Propaganda Studies,

    For over two years RussiaGate has accounted for a substantial proportion of all mainstream US media political journalism and, because US media have significant agenda-setting propulsion, of global media coverage as well. The timing has been catastrophic.

    The Trump Administration has shredded environmental protections, jettisoned nuclear agreements, exacerbated tensions with US rivals, and pandered to the rich.

    In place of sustained media attention to the end of the human species from global warming, its even more imminent demise in nuclear warfare, or the further evisceration of democratic discourse in a society riven by historically unprecedented wealth inequalities and unbridled capitalistic greed, corporate media suffocate their publics with a puerile narrative of alleged collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    The RussiaGate discourse is profoundly mendacious and hypocritical. It presumes that the US is a State whose electoral system enjoys a high degree of public trust and security. Nothing could be further from the truth. The US democratic system is deeply entrenched in a dystopian two-party system dominated by the rich and largely answerable to corporate oligopolies; it is ideologically beholden to the values of extreme capitalism and imperialist domination. Problems with the US electoral system and media are extensive and well documented.

    US electoral procedures are profoundly compromised by an electoral college that detaches votes counted from votes that count. The composition of electoral districts have been gerrymandered to minimize the possibility of electoral surprises. Voting is dependent on easily hackable corporate-manufactured electronic voting systems.

    Right-wing administrations reach into a tool-box of voter-suppression tactics that run the gamut from minimizing available voting centers and voting machines through to excessive voter identification requirements and the elimination of swathes of the voting lists (e.g. groups such as people who have committed felonies or people whose names are similar to those of felons, or people who have not voted in previous elections).

    Even the results of campaigns are corrupted when outgoing regimes abuse their remaining weeks in power to push through regulations or legislation that will scuttle the efforts of their successors.

    Democratic theory presupposes the formal equivalence of voice in the battlefield of ideas. Nothing could be further from the reality of the US “democratic” system in which a small number of powerful interests enjoy ear-splitting megaphonic advantage on the basis of often anonymous “dark” money donations filtered through SuperPacs and their ilk, operating outside the confines of (the somewhat more transparently monitored) ten-week electoral campaigns.

    Regarding media, democratic theory presupposes a public communications infrastructure that facilities the free and open exchange of ideas. No such infrastructure exists.  Mainstream media are owned and controlled by a small number of large, multi-media and multi-industrial conglomerates that lie at the very heart of US oligopoly capitalism and much of whose advertising revenue and content is furnished from other conglomerates.

    The inability of mainstream media to sustain an information environment that can encompass histories, perspectives and vocabularies that are free of the shackles of US plutocratic self-regard is also well documented.

    Current US media coverage of the US-gestated crisis in Venezuela is a case in point. The much celebrated revolutionary potential of social media is illusory. The principal suppliers of social media architecture are even more corporatized than their legacy predecessors. They depend not just on corporate advertising but on the sale of big data that they pilfer from users and sell to corporate and political propagandists often for non-transparent AI-assisted micro-targeting during ‘persuasion’ campaigns.

    Like their legacy counterparts, social media are imbricated within, collaborate with, and are vulnerable to the machinations of the military-industry-surveillance establishment. So-called election meddling across the world has been an outstanding feature of the exploitation of social and legacy media by companies linked to political, defense and intelligence such as – but by no means limited to – the former Cambridge Analytica and its British parent SCL.

    Against this backdrop of electoral and media failures, it makes little sense to elevate discussion of and attention to the alleged social media activities of, say, Russia’s Internet Research Agency. Attention is being directed away from substantial, and substantiated, problems and onto trivial, and unsubstantiated, problems.

    Moreover, in a climate of manufactured McCarthyite hysteria, RussiaGate further presupposes that any communication between a presidential campaign and Russia is in itself a deplorable thing. Even if one were to confine this conversation only to communication between ruling oligarchs of both the US and Russia, however, the opposite would surely be the case. This is not simply because of the benefits that accrue from a broader understanding of the world, identification of shared interests and opportunities, and their promise for peaceful relations.

    A real politik analysis might advise the insertion of wedges between China and Russia so as to head off the perceived threat to the USA of a hybrid big-power control over a region of the world that has long been considered indispensable for truly global hegemony.

    Even if we address RussiaGate as a problem worthy of our attention, the evidentiary basis for the major claims is weak. The ultimate unfolding of RussiaGate discourse now awaits the much-anticipated report of Special Counsel and former FBI director Robert Mueller. Mueller’s indictments and investigations have to date implicated several individuals for activities that in some cases have no connection whatsoever to the 2016 Presidential campaign.  In some other instances they appear to have been more about lies and obstructions to his investigation rather than material illegal acts, or amount to charges that are unlikely ever to be contested in a court of law.

    The investigation itself is traceable back to two significant but extremely problematic reports made public in January 2017. One was the “Steele dossier” by former MI6 officer Christopher Steele. This is principally of interest for its largely unsupported allegations that in some sense or another Trump was in cahoots with Russia. Steele’s company, Orbis, was commissioned to write the report by Fusion GPS which in turn was contracted by attorneys working for the Democratic National Campaign.

    Passage of earlier drafts of the Steele report through sources close to British intelligence, and accounts by Trump adviser George Papadopoulos concerning conversations he had concerning possible Russian possession of Clinton emails with a character who may as likely have been a British as a Russian spy, were instrumental in stimulating FBI interest in and spying on the Trump campaign.

    There are indirect links between Christopher Steele, another former MI6 agent, Pablo Miller (who also worked for Orbis) and Sergei Skripal, a Russian agent who had been recruited as informer to MI6 by Miller and who was the target of an attempted assassination in 2018. This event has occasioned controversial, not to say highly implausible and mischievous British government claims and accusations against Russia.

    The  most significant matter raised by a second report, issued by the Intelligence Community Assessment and representing the conclusions of a small team picked from the Director of Intelligence office, CIA, FBI and NSA, was its claim that Russian intelligence was responsible for the hacking of the computer systems of the DNC and its chairman John Podesta in summer 2016 and that the hacked documents had been passed to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. No evidence for this was supplied.

    Although the hacking allegations have become largely uncontested articles of faith in the RussiaGate discourse they are significantly reliant on the problematic findings of a small private company hired by the DNC. There is also robust evidence that the documents may have been leaked rather than hacked, and by US-based sources.

    The fact that the documents revealed that the DNC, a supposedly neutral agent in the primary campaign, had in fact been biased in favor of the candidature of Hillary Clinton, and that Clinton’s private statements to industry were not in keeping with her public positions, has long been obscured in media memory in favor a preferred narrative of Russian villainy.

    Why then does the RussiaGate discourse have so much traction? Who benefits?

    First, RussiaGate serves the interest of a (1)corrupted Democratic Party, whose biased and arguably incompetent campaign management lost it the 2016 election, in alliance with with (2)powerful factions of the US industrial-military-surveillance establishment that for the past 19 years, through NATO and other malleable international agencies, has sought to undermine Putin’s leadership, dismember Russia and the Russian Federation (undoubtedly for the benefit of western capital) and, more latterly, further contain China in a perpetual and titanic struggle for the heart of EurAsia.

    In so far as Trump had indicated (for whatever reasons) in the course of his campaign that he disagreed with at least some aspects of this long-term strategy, he came to be viewed as unreliable by the US security state. While serving the immediate purpose of containing Trump, US accusations of Russian meddling in US elections were farcical in the context of a well-chronicled history of US “meddling” in the elections and politics of nations for over 100 years. This meddling across  all hemispheres has included the staging of coups, invasions and occupations on false pretext in addition to numerous instances of “color revolution” strategies involving the financing of opposition parties and provoking uprisings, frequently coupled with economic warfare (sanctions).

    A further beneficiary (3)is the sum of all those interests that favor a narrowing of public expression to a framework supportive of neoliberal imperialism. Paradoxically exploiting the moral panic associated with both Trump’s plaintive wailing about “fake news” whenever mainstream media coverage is critical of him, and social media embarrassment over exposure of their big data sales to powerful corporate customers, these interests have called for more regulation of, as well as self-censorship by, social media.

    Social media responses increasingly involve more restrictive algorithms and what are often partisan “fact-checkers” (illustrated by Facebook financial support for and dependence on the pro-NATO “think tank,” the Atlantic Council). The net impact has been devastating for many information organizations in the arena of social media whose only “sin” is analysis and opinion that runs counter to elite neoliberal propaganda. The standard justification of such attacks on free expression is to insinuate ties to Russia and/or to terrorism.

    Given these heavy handed and censorious responses by powerful actors, it would appear perhaps that the RussiaGate narrative is increasingly implausible to many and the only hope now for its proponents is to stifle questioning. These are dark days indeed for democracy.

  • Stormy Daniels & Lawyer Michael Avenatti Sever Ties "For Undisclosed Reasons"

    It’s over!!

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Michael Avenatti and Stormy Daniels – the porn actress who alleged she had an affair with President Donald Trump – have severed ties.

    In the last year, the duo rose to become household names in their fight against Trump, dominating cable news shows for months and taunting the president in interviews.

    For posterity, let’s look back at Avenatti and Daniels track-record: (via The Hill)

    Avenatti represented Daniels, whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford, in lawsuits that she filed against President Trump and Michael Cohen, the former personal attorney to Trump.

    Daniels sued Trump and Cohen to void a nondisclosure agreement stemming from an alleged 2006 affair between Daniels and the president. Daniels was paid ahead of the 2016 election to keep quiet about the affair. A judge threw out the lawsuit this month, ruling that it was irrelevant because she had not been held to the terms of the agreement.

    Daniels also filed a defamation suit against both men.

    That lawsuit was dismissed by a federal judge in October.

    But the writing was on the wall that clouds were forming over Stormy and Michael’s ‘relationship’:

    In November, Daniels told the Daily Beast that Avenatti had filed a defamation case against Trump “against my wishes” and alleged that he refused to give her an accounting of the funds collected by her supporters, would not tell her how the money was spent or how much was left in the crowdsourced legal defense fund.

    So Avenatti was 0 for 3 in his representation of Daniels, which is maybe not a total surprise, as AP reports, before Avenatti began representing Daniels in February 2018, he was virtually unknown outside of the California legal community. But in months, he had become known as a no-holds-barred lawyer with a media style parallel to Trump’s. Avenatti had toyed with a 2020 presidential run, but ultimately ruled that out. He’s also been involved in some of America’s biggest cases in the last year, including representing dozens of parents whose children were separated from them at the U.S. border as a result of the Trump administration’s immigration policies. More recently, he’s been representing women who said they were sexually abused by R&B star R. Kelly.

    Daniels has not done quite so well, turning her hand to stand-up most recently…

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    The question is who fired whom? The answer is actually simple:

    Stormy Daniels tweeted at 1112am that “I have retained Clark Brewster as my personal lawyer and have asked him and his firm to review all legal matters involving me.”

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    And Michael Avenatti quickly responded at 1123am claiming that “on February 19, we informed Stormy Daniels in writing that we were terminating our legal representation of her for various reasons that we cannot disclose publicly due to attorney-client privilege… This was not a decision we made lightly and it came only after lengthy discussion, thought and deliberation, as well as consultation with other professionals,” he added. “We wish Stormy all the best.”

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    So why did Avenatti not – in all his any-publicity-is-great-publicity-and-I-may-still-run-for-President blufftardism – relay his severing ties with Daniels in February?

    Bloomberg’s White House correspondent Jennifer Jacobs has the answer – straight from the horse’s mouth (as it were): “To an audience of women at The Wing in DC, she says her ex lawyer, Michael Avenatti, pulled the old “you can’t fire me, I quit” trick.“

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    And just like that, 1000s of media types around the world felt a great disturbance in the farce, cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

  • How Rent Control Harms Those It Hopes To Help

    Authored by Hal Snarr via The Mises Institute,

    The State of Oregon is on the precipice of “solving” its housing shortage with state-wide rent control . It would be the first state to do so. The policy is being sold as a way to make housing more affordable in a state where three of its cities, Eugene, Portland, and Salem, are ranked among the forty most expensive housing markets on the planet.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    To understand how Oregon’s housing solution will harm those it hopes to help, consider the rental market modeled below. The State is not interfering in the voluntary transactions between landlords and tenants. Supply and demand efficiently allocate 100 rental units at $1500 per month.

    The red line represents the demand for rentals. The height of point 1 gives the rent the richest renter is willing to pay ($2500). The height of point 2 gives the rent the poorest renter is willing to pay (under $500). The height of the equilibrium (black point) gives the rent a person of average income is willing to pay ($1500).

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    The blue line represents the supply of rentals. Since some landlords have mortgages and some do not, some units are in large complexes and some are single units, and some complexes have lots of amenities and some have few, this line represents a queue that sorts rentals from least to most expensive to finance and maintain. The rental at point 1 costs its landlord $500 to maintain and finance, while the unit at point 2 costs its landlord over $2500 to finance and maintain.

    Regarding the first rental, its landlord and tenant both benefit from the transaction. The tenant thinks he got the better end of the deal because he is willing to pay $2500 but only pays $1500. The landlord thinks she got the better end of the deal because she is was willing to accept $500 but gets paid $1500. Both sign the lease because both parties are winners in trade.

    All 100 rented units represent win-win transactions. The tenants were willing to pay rents in decreasing order from $2500 to $1500 but each only pays $1500 per month. Relative to the landlords, they all feel like they got the better end of these deals. The pink triangle measures this great feeling. On the other hand, landlords collect $1500 from each tenant but were willing to accept rents in increasing order from $500 to $1500. Relative to their tenants, they feel like they got the better end of these deals. The blue triangle measures this great feeling. Thus, all parties in these trades are winners.

    Some renters have been priced out of the market. They populate the faded section of demand. During high school, I was one of them. I wanted to fly the coop but could not afford to do so. Others included in this group are perhaps older workers with low job skills or singles just out of college and looking for first jobs. These folks, if subletting is illegal, find apartments in nearby low-rent markets. Their exit from this market is why the lower section of demand is faded.

    Housing laws can adversely impact rents and apartments. An Oregon zoning law shrinks the areas where apartment complexes can be constructed. This decreases supply, raises rents, and reduces the number of available units. NYC restricts subletting. That reduces supply and raises rents. Since renters would have had a room in the absence of subletting restrictions, the restrictions result in higher demand as more people search for rooms. That pushes rents up too. In the absence of all restrictions, markets will find creative ways to solve housing shortages. For example, prior to zoning laws, early Americans turned their homes into boarding houses or residential hotels, which are not unlike the no-frills rooms listed on Airbnb.

    When rents get too high, rent control becomes popular among politicians who are either wanting to do the right thing or are shopping for votes. The figure below shows what happens when government sets rental rates (the green line). At the imposed rent, the people who populate the demand line between points 3 and 4 reenter this market to look for apartments. This is why that section of demand is no longer faded. Since the financing and maintenance expenses of the rental units on supply between the blue point and point 3 exceeds the legislated rent, the landlords take these units off the market (e.g., they get listed on Airbnb instead). Thus, the rent ceiling reduces the number of units to 50 but increases the number of people in the market to 150. If subletting is illegal, unsuccessful apartment seekers live in cars or on streets as they wait for tenants to vacate.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Recall that demand represents a queue with the richest renter on the left and the poorest on the right. With the rich owning homes, the upper middle class populates the line between points 1 and 2, the lower middle class populates the line between 2 and 3, and the poor populates the line between 3 and 4. Since the upper middle class are willing and able to pay more than the lower middle and poor classes, they have the most impressive applications or can afford the largest bribes. Thus, the renters with the 50 highest incomes get the 50 apartments that are offered in the market. Those in the lower middle class, who had apartments prior to rent control, are now without homes. The poor were not homeless prior to rent control, as they had low-rent units in nearby neighborhoods. But now they are homeless.

    Though rent control is sold as a policy that is intended to help the poor, it induced homelessness among the poor and lower middle classes. It also increased the spoils of trade accruing to renters with the highest incomes. Their spoils increased from what it was prior to rent control (the light pink area) to what is after rent control (the light and dark pink areas).

    The consequences of rent control are well understood by economists, from one end of the political spectrum to the other. Given this rare consensus in economics, it is surprising that states like Oregon are on the verge of voluntarily wrecking their housing markets.

Digest powered by RSS Digest

Mar 12

Today’s News 12th March 2019

  • Where Cash Is King In Europe

    How much cash do you have with you at the moment?

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    As Statista’s Martin Armstrong explains,  the answer to this question will probably depend, not only on your bank balance, but also on the country in which you live.

    As figures from the Access to Cash Review show, there are significant cultural differences in the use of cash in Europe.

    Infographic: Where Cash is King in Europe | Statista

    You will find more infographics at Statista

    In Greece and Spain, the vast majority of in-person purchases are made with cash – 88 and 87 percent respectively. While in Sweden, Denmark and the UK, most items are paid for digitally.

    In the report, which focuses on the UK, despite the relatively low share of people relying on cash in their everyday lives, it was found that over 8 million adults – about 17 percent of the population – would struggle to cope in a cashless society.

  • Could Brexit Trigger The Demise Of Sterling As A Reserve Currency? – Part Two

    Authored by Steven Guinness,

    In part one of this series we looked briefly into the history of sterling crises that originated after the end of World War II.

    Two important aspects were highlighted. The first is that over the past seventy years, a depletion of international sterling reserves has routinely coincided with exchange rate crises, whilst the second indicates that a slew of sterling downturns since 1945 have weakened substantially its role as a reserve currency.

    We will now examine why Britain leaving the European Union through a ‘hard‘ Brexit may prove a harbinger for the first major sterling crisis of the 21st century.

    In 2018 the media began publishing what mutated into incessant warnings about the dangers of leaving the EU with no withdrawal agreement. The majority were and continue to be focused on possible disruptions to food and medical supplies, the UK’s beleaguered car industry and the prospect of a Brexit induced recession.

    What has not been given the same degree of analysis is the impact a no deal scenario could have on the position of sterling as a reserve currency. Ever since the post referendum decline of the pound, it generally only attracts attention if its value against the dollar rises significantly above daily fluctuations, or declines a percentage point or more amidst fears of a ‘disorderly‘ exit.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Let’s briefly summarise the few occasions where the pound’s reserve status has been called into question since 2016, as well as matters interconnected with the subject.

    May 2016

    A month before the referendum, ratings agency Standard and Poor’s issued a warning that sterling could cease to be a reserve currency if the UK left the EU. They also declared that Britain’s triple A credit rating could come under pressure. The line was that national governments might seek alternatives to the pound as a store of value should a leave vote materialise. As for why they could do this, a breakdown in existing trading arrangements, a depreciation of sterling and an increasing current account deficit were all cited as reasons by S&P.

    July 2016

    With S&P having stripped the UK of its triple A credit rating (as they suggested would happen following a leave vote), Reuters reporter Jamie McGeever penned an article which detailed how the decline of sterling since the referendum had so far been the biggest of any of the world’s four major currencies since the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in the early 1970s.

    The day after the vote (June 24th) saw sterling’s value drop by 8%, marking the largest one day fall in the pound since the introduction of free-floating exchange rates following the collapse of Bretton Woods.

    October 2016

    Five months before Article 50 was invoked, Standard and Poor’s issued a new warning about the pound’s reserve status.  Ravi Bhatia, the director of sovereign ratings for Britain, was reported by The Independent as saying a ‘hard‘ Brexit eventuality could jeopardise sterling’s reserve currency role. Bhatia summarised reserve status as countries having trust in a currency, with governments and traders content to hold assets in a particular denomination.

    At the time of S&P’s latest intervention, the pound was down 17% against the dollar since June 2016.

    S&P were at it again later in the month, with the Financial Times detailing that pronounced falls in sterling could end up ‘reducing confidence and eventually threaten its role as a global reserve currency.’ They added that sterling would no longer be considered a reserve currency by the S&P if its share of reserves dropped below 3%. They currently stand at 4.49%.

    On top of this, S&P warned of further cuts to Britain’s credit rating should they ‘conclude that sterling will lose its status as a reserve currency or if public finances or GDP per capita weaken markedly beyond our current expectations‘.

    November 2016

    Reuters Jamie McGeever followed up his article from July 2016 by questioning the pound’s position in global foreign exchange reserves. Here, McGeever linked sterling’s role as a reserve currency to the UK’s current account deficit, which to this day remains one of the largest in the world. He pointed out that this particular deficit requires hundreds of billions of overseas capital inflows every year to balance Britain’s books. According to McGeever, central bank demand for sterling reserves are a vital and stable source of these inflows. He went on to report that the amount the UK needs to attract in order to balance its books is around £100 billion a year.

    S&P’s fellow ratings agency Moody’s were credited by McGeever as warning about the danger of ‘substantial and persistent‘ capital outflows, and how this would raise serious doubts about the pound’s reserve status.

    McGeever also quoted Brad Setser, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and former economist at the U.S. treasury, as saying that a fall in reserve share to 3% would be sterling ‘punching a little below its weight‘.

    August 2018

    As no deal Brexit coverage gathered momentum in the press, an article again published by Reuters on sterling’s future as a reserve currency gained next to no attention. This time it was the turn of Bank of America Merrill Lynch (BAML), who made a connection between the UK leaving the EU with no withdrawal agreement and central banks selling the pound in response. BAML estimated that a 1% decline in sterling’s share of international reserves would equate to upwards of £100 billion of selling. This calculation was based on the pound’s average share of 3.6% of reserves since 1995. Should banks re-denominate their holdings in line with this long term average, the theory goes that this would point to over a £100 billion reduction in reserves.

    BAML stressed that this potential scenario would be off the back of a no deal exit from the EU. ‘Central bank flows are an important source of flow which could determine whether sterling succumbs to a more protracted current account crisis‘.

    December 2018

    As demonstrated above, both Jamie McGeever at Reuters and Bank of America Merrill Lynch have touched on the subject of Britain’s current account deficit. Latest figures released in December showed that the deficit in the third quarter of 2018 was the highest in two years at £ – 26.5 billion (4.9% of GDP).

    When you look at how this was interpreted within the financial media, the link back to sterling’s position as a reserve currency – although not raised directly – lingers in the background. The current account deficit has not only called into question its sustainability, but also whether foreign investors will continue to finance the deficit to the same level by purchasing UK assets after Brexit.

    Other noteworthy data released at the same time as the current account numbers included a cut in investment by firms of 1.1% from July to September. This represented three consecutive quarters of cuts, the first time this has occurred since 2008-2009. Households were shown as net borrowers for the eighth straight quarter – the biggest stretch since the 1980s. Lastly, the UK’s household savings fell to 3.8%, the lowest on record.

    Conclusions

    Looking back on the EU referendum of 2016, my perspective is that the depreciation of sterling in the aftermath cannot be construed as a crisis. Before the result was confirmed, the pound was trading as high as $1.50. Once the reality of the leave vote had dawned, an initial sharp drop of 8% was followed by further declines leading to a low of $1.19 recorded in January 2017. In seven months, sterling had shed as much as 20% of its value (for a limited time at least).

    The reason why this is not befitting of a crisis is due to global reserves of sterling remaining consistent throughout the period. Indeed, international reserves of the pound grew in 2018 amidst the rising uncertainty of the Brexit withdrawal process.

    At no stage so far have the Bank of England acted to defend the currency from speculators or central banks adapting their compositions. Their initial reaction post referendum was to cut interest rates by 0.25% and expand quantitative easing by £60 billion.

    Fifteen months later, with inflation running at over 3% and the value of sterling remaining suppressed, the BOE raised interest rates for the first time in a decade. They followed this up with another quarter point hike in August 2018.

    It is logical to think that the impact of a ‘hard‘ Brexit on sterling would precipitate a far steeper decline than witnessed three years ago. Consider that the fall witnessed then was simply off the back of a referendum result. Nothing material had changed in the relationship between the UK and EU.

    I believe it is also logical to surmise that in response to a renewed depreciation, not only would inflation pick up once more, but the Bank of England would defy conventional wisdom and raise interest rates. The bank themselves have indicated that the most likely ramifications of a no deal Brexit would be inflationary. They continue to state publicly that the response to such a scenario would likely be to tighten rather than loosen monetary policy.

    However, this does not account for what would happen to global reserves of sterling. Historically, exchange rate crises have seen a depletion in reserves of the pound. Whereas inflationary pressures take time to feed through the system, a run on sterling can materialise in a matter of minutes. Therefore, it is conceivable that the Bank of England could raise interest rates in response to try and stabilise the currency, a measure entirely separate to their mandate of 2% inflation.

    Allied to this measure would likely see the BOE convert foreign currency holdings into sterling to counteract international holders dumping the pound.

    As documented in part one, the BOE hold close to $150 billion in foreign currency total reserves. Total reserve assets amount to around $180 billion. The majority of these assets are denominated in dollars and euros.

    How sustained any selling could be is impossible to gauge at this stage, as is the scale of damage which may be inflicted on sterling reserves.

    If warnings issued by Standard and Poor’s and Bank of America Merrill Lynch are taken at face value, the pound is in danger of diminishing to the level of no longer being a global reserve currency should a ‘disorderly‘ Brexit happen. Only if this does occur would we be able to assess the validity of their warnings.

    Anyone who regularly follows communications emanating from national central banks, the IMF and the Bank for International Settlements will have seen a developing narrative of ‘money in the digital age‘ and how currencies in future could be provided. The combination of a possible ‘hard‘ Brexit and an escalation in the ‘trade war‘ between the United States and China may not only put sterling at risk, but also the role of the dollar as world reserve currency. Brexit is one strand of what I have suspected for some time is an attempt by globalists (think the IMF and the BIS) to administer institutional reforms in the manner of a currency framework, which would mean a realignment in currency compositions with the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights part of this process.

    As ever, to achieve this scale of reform globalists would require sustained crises events to distract away from what are long held intentions. Will Brexit and actions stemming from the Trump administration prove to be to their benefit? 2019 will surely begin to answer that question.

  • Yellow Vests Ransack Masonic Lodge 

    A group of Yellow Vest protesters ransacked a Masonic lodge in the French village of Tarbes during the 17th straight weekend of anti-government demonstrations, according to La Dépêche. 

    After around 450 protesters gathered in Tarbes, a small group split off around midnight – reportedly shouting “We’re going to be freemasons!” – as they threw rocks at the lodge and broke down the door of the secretive organization’s meeting place. 

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    The group flipped over furniture and generally made a mess, however it does not appear they defaced any of the lodge’s wall hangings.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Four ceremonial swords were stolen, however they were later returned. 

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    In a statement, the Grand Lodge of France condemned the “unspeakable acts that are part of a context of surreptitious threats and hate speech against Freemasons.”

    French interior minister Christophe Castaner reacted over Twitter on Sunday, writing: “After the Jews, the Freemasons … When stupidity competes with intolerance the worst.”

  • Is The Boeing 737 Max Crisis An Artificial Intelligence Event?

    Authored by James Thompson via The Unz Review,

    Conventional wisdom is that it is too early to speculate why in the past six months two Boeing 737 Max 8 planes have gone down shortly after take off, so if all that follows is wrong you will know it very quickly. Last night I predicted that the first withdrawals of the plane would happen within two days, and this morning China withdrew it. So far, so good. (Indonesia followed a few hours ago).

    Why should I stick my neck out with further predictions?

    First, because we must speculate the moment something goes wrong. It is natural, right and proper to note errors and try to correct them.(The authorities are always against “wild” speculation, and I would be in agreement with that if they had an a prior definition of wildness).

    Second, because putting forward hypotheses may help others test them (if they are not already doing so).

    Third, because if the hypotheses turn out to be wrong, it will indicate an error in reasoning, and will be an example worth studying in psychology, so often dourly drawn to human fallibility. Charmingly, an error in my reasoning might even illuminate an error that a pilot might make, if poorly trained, sleep-deprived and inattentive.

    I think the problem is that the Boeing anti-stall patch MCAS is poorly configured for pilot use: it is not intuitive, and opaque in its consequences.

    By the way of full disclosure, I have held my opinion since the first Lion Air crash in October, and ran it past a test pilot who, while not responsible for a single word here, did not argue against it. He suggested that MCAS characteristics should have been in a special directive and drawn to the attention of pilots.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    I am normally a fan of Boeing. I have flown Boeing more than any other plane, and that might make me loyal to the brand. Even more powerfully, I thought they were correct to carry on with the joystick yoke, and that AirBus was wrong to drop it, simply because the position of the joystick is something visible to pilot and co-pilot, whereas the Airbus side stick does not show you at a glance how high the nose of the plane is pointing.

    Pilots are bright people, but they must never be set a badly configured test item with tight time limits and potentially fatal outcomes.

    The Air France 447 crash had several ingredients, but one was that the pilots of the Airbus A330-203 took too long to work out they were in a stall. In fact, that realization only hit them very shortly before they hit the ocean. Whatever the limitations of the crew (sleep deprived captain, uncertain co-pilot) they were blinded by a frozen air speed indicator, and an inability to set the right angle of attack for their airspeed.

    For the industry, the first step was to fit better air speed indicators which were less likely to ice up. However, it was clear that better stall warning and protection was required.

    Boeing had a problem with fitting larger and heavier engines to their tried and trusted 737 configuration, meaning that the engines had to be higher on the wing and a little forwards, and that made the 737 Max have different performance characteristics, which in turn led to the need for an anti-stall patch to be put into the control systems.

    It is said that generals always fight the last war. Safety officials correct the last problem, as they must. However, sometimes a safety system has unintended consequences.

    The key of the matter is that pilots fly normal 737s every day, and have internalized a mental model of how that plane operates. Pilots probably actually read manuals, and safety directives, and practice for rare events. However, I bet that what they know best is how a plane actually operates most of the time. (I am adjusting to a new car, same manufacturer and model as the last one, but the 9 years of habit are still often stronger than the manual-led actions required by the new configuration). When they fly a 737 Max there is a bit of software in the system which detects stall conditions and corrects them automatically. The pilots should know that, they should adjust to that, they should know that they must switch off that system if it seems to be getting in the way, but all that may be steps too far, when something so important is so opaque.

    What is interesting is that in emergencies people rely on their most validated mental models: residents fleeing a burning building tend to go out their usual exits, not even the nearest or safest exit. Pilots are used to pulling the nose up and pushing it down, to adding power and to easing back on it, and when a system takes over some of those decisions, they need to know about it.

    After Lion Air I believed that pilots had been warned about the system, but had not paid sufficient attention to its admittedly complicated characteristics, but now it is claimed that the system was not in the training manual anyway. It was deemed a safety system that pilots did not need to know about.

    This farrago has an unintended consequence, in that it may be a warning about artificial intelligence. Boeing may have rated the correction factor as too simple to merit human attention, something required mainly to correct a small difference in pitch characteristics unlikely to be encountered in most commercial flying, which is kept as smooth as possible for passenger comfort.

    It would be terrible if an apparently small change in automated safety systems designed to avoid a stall turned out have given us a rogue plane, killing us to make us safe.

  • More Desperate Hong Kongers Are Living Illegally In Steel Shipping Containers

    Though it recently entered correction territory following the longest streak of falling prices since 2016, Hong Kong’s housing market remains one of – if not the most – unaffordable in the world.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>Cheaper

    And as struggling locals look for somewhere – anywhere – to live for a relatively modest price, more are turning to an innovative, if illegal, solution. According to Bloomberg, the latest housing trend in the New Territories, a region of Hong Kong that is mostly wetlands, parks and mountains, is building illegal houses out of prefabricated steel boxes.

    Locals call them container homes. And while they’re growing in popularity, almost all of them are illegal, having been built on land not zoned for housing, and/or without the government approval necessary to ensure it meets standards for ventilation and fire-safety.

    After walking through a deserted plot of rural land on an unevenly paved road, Gilbert Wong arrives at a metal-fenced gate that looks like the entrance to a warehouse, or maybe a car park – ubiquitous in Hong Kong’s New Territories.

    But behind this seemingly hostile facade is Wong’s humble home: a prefabricated steel box that looks a lot like a basic shipping container. Such dwellings, dubbed container homes, have become an increasingly popular option for residents squeezed out of the world’s least affordable property market.

    The vast majority are also illegal.

    “Of all the prefabricated homes in the style of a container that I have seen in ads or online, I can tell you 99.9 percent aren’t in compliance with the law,” said Vincent Ho, a managing director at surveying and property consultancy firm Freevision Ltd.

    Estimating the number of container homes is difficult because they’re usually tucked away in far-flung areas across the territory, but orders for containers have doubled since 2016, with 40% built specifically for dwelling purposes, according to Ivan Chan, a director of portable building manufacturer Markbox. Chan’s company is producing about 200 containers for living every year. The most popular costs about $19,000 – roughly half of the down payment for an apartment.

    The low-cost of container homes has attracted some government interest, with the city authority launching a project to build 90 legal container homes to be placed in the city’s poorest districts, where they will be a “stop-gap” option for people waiting for public housing.

    But already, the average waiting time for the program – which was launched in 2012 – has more than doubled to five-and-a-half years.

    Even middle-class Hong Kongers are opting to try the container home life, despite the longer commute times they face from living in more remote parts of the territory. And the downsides like leaks during severe weather.

    Wong, 30, didn’t have a container home in mind when he and his girlfriend started to look for a place to live last year. But they quickly realized apartment rents were way out of their budget.

    It took the couple about a month to settle on their current 19-square meter home that rents for HK$4,500 a month. To rent just one room of a similar size in a nearby apartment costs roughly 20 percent more than that.

    The couple like the cheap cost and the air quality is better than on Hong Kong Island. There are downsides, however. Container homes aren’t built to withstand extreme weather, so when Typhoon Mangkhut hit last September, there were leaks. The remote location also means the couple spend more time, and money, commuting.

    Wong said he didn’t ask whether the home was a legal residential property when he moved in, and doesn’t plan to. He admits there’s a chance the land it sits upon hasn’t been zoned for residential use.

    But until circumstances change, Wong plans to stay put.

    “Home prices will definitely remain high,” he said. “There’s a mentality among Hong Kong people that one must own an apartment, and that pushes up prices.”

    And though the average home price fell more than 10% by the end of 2018 from its peak in August, sheer supply-demand dynamics suggest that the city will remain extremely unaffordable for the forseeable future, virtually guaranteeing a niche for the container home market.

  • The Sharing Economy Was Always A Scam

    Authored by Susie Cagle via OneZero.Medium.com,

    ‘Sharing’ was supposed to save us. Instead, it became a Trojan horse for a precarious economic future…

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Founded in 2014, Omni is a startup that offers users the ability to store and rent their lesser-used stuff in the San Francisco Bay Area and Portland. Backed by roughly $40 million in venture capital, Omni proclaims on its website that they “believe in experiences over things, access over ownership, and living lighter rather than being weighed down by our possessions.”

    If you’re in the Bay Area, you can currently rent a copy of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo from “Lan” for the low price of $1 per day; “charles” is renting a small framed lithograph for $10 a day; and “Tom” is renting a copy of the film Friends With Benefits (68 percent on Rotten Tomatoes) on Blu-ray for just $2 a day. Those prices don’t include delivery and return fees for the Omni trucks traversing the city, which start at $1.99each way.

    In 2016, Omni’s CEO and co-founder Tom McLeod said that “lending enables Omni members to put their ‘dormant’ belongings to good use in their community.” That same year, Fortune said Omni “could create a true ‘sharing economy.’” For a while, the tenets of the sharing economy were front and center in Omni’s model: It promised to activate underutilitized assets in order to sustain a healthier world and build community trust. In 2017, McLeod said, “We want to change behavior around ownership on the planet.”

    Just three years later, those promises seem second to the pursuit of profit. In 2019, the Omni pitch can be summed up by the ads emblazoned on its delivery trucks: “Rent things from your neighbors, earn money when they rent from you!”

    For years, the sharing economy was pitched as an altruistic form of capitalism — an answer to consumption run amok. Why own your own car or power tools or copies of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up if each sat idle for most of its life? The sharing economy would let strangers around the world maximize the utility of every possession to the benefit of all.

    In a 2010 TED Talk, sharing economy champion and author Rachel Botsman argued that the tech-enabled sharing economy could “mimic the ties that used to happen face to face but on a scale and in a way that has never been possible before.” Botsman quoted a New York Times piece in saying, “Sharing is to ownership what the iPod is to the eight track, what solar power is to the coal mine.” In 2013, Thomas Friedman proclaimed that Airbnb’s true innovation wasn’t its platform or its distributed business model: “It’s ‘trust.’” At a 2014 conference, Uber investor Shervin Pishevar said sharing was going to bring us back to a mythical bygone era of low-impact, communal village living.

    More than 10 years since the dawn of the sharing economy, these promises sound painfully out of date. Why rent a DVD from your neighbor, or own a DVD at all, when you can stream your movies online? Why use Airbnb for a single room in your home when you can sublease an entire apartment and run a lucrative off-the-books hotel operation? Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb — startups that banked on the promises of the sharing economy — are now worth tens of billions, with plans go public. (Lyft filed for an IPO on March 1.) These companies and the pundits who hyped them have all but abandoned the sharing argument that gave this industry life and allowed it to skirt government regulations for years. Sharing was supposed to transform our world for the better. Instead, the only thing we’re sharing is the mess it left behind.

    The first glimpses of the sharing economy emerged years before the term came into popular use. In 1995, Craigslist mainstreamed the direct donation, renting, and sale of everything from pets and furniture to apartments and homes. Starting in 2000, Zipcar let members rent cars for everyday errands and short trips with the express goal of taking more cars off the road. And CouchSurfing, launched as a nonprofit in 2004, suddenly turned every living room into a hostel. This first wave of sharing was eclectic and sometimes even profitable, but before the mass adoption of the smartphone, it failed to capture the public’s imagination.

    Though its origin is vague, many credit the introduction of the term “sharing economy” into the broader tech lexicon to Lawrence Lessig, who wrote about sharing in his 2008 book Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. The Great Recession was just setting in, and the sharing economy was touted as a new DIY social safety net/business model hybrid. The contours of the term were never particularly clear. It was used loosely to describe peer-to-peer projects and tech-enabled rental markets but also included old barter, co-op, and casual carpooling models. The sharing economy was a broad, eclectic movement with ambitious if utopian goals. The online magazine Shareable launched in 2009 to document this “movement of movements.”

    Sharing would help reduce overconsumption and our impact on the environment. Venture capitalist and tech trend spotter Mary Meeker saidAmericans were moving from an “asset-heavy lifestyle to an asset-light existence” with the sharing economy leading the charge. Environment and politics researcher Harald Heinrichs suggested the sharing economy was a “potential new pathway to sustainability.” Greenpeace’s Annie Leonardframed sharing in opposition to consuming: The sharing economy, she wrote, would “conserve resources, give people access to stuff they otherwise couldn’t afford, and build community.”

    Sharing also promised social benefits. It would be the instrument by which we’d be able to know one another again, a counterbalance to the alienation of a burgeoning tech dystopia. Sharing economy expert April Rinne said sharing would recreate the social fabric of tight-knit communities. “Engaging in collaborative consumption — and getting used to it — lowers the trust barrier over time,” she wrote at Shareable. New startups like TrustCloud would gather all of our disparate platform ratings and social trails from across the web and compile them into a new kind of social credit score that would enable trust and accountability in the sharing economy.

    The new opportunities to earn money by freelancing part-time as a handyman, innkeeper, or taxi driver would bridge the wealth gap and ameliorate global inequality. In 2013, CNN contributor Van Jones said that sharing could lead us to “a more sustainable, prosperous future.”

    Adam Werbach was president of the Sierra Club and a corporate sustainability consultant before he co-founded the used goods sharing marketplace Yerdle in 2012. A sort of proto-Omni, Yerdle’s original tagline was, “Stop buying. Start sharing.” The site incentivized renters to rent their own things by rewarding them with credits and keeping used goods recycling in the Yerdle community.

    “There was a mix of venture-backed companies, social-benefit companies, and nonprofits all in the space, all fighting for it. And all of the companies were small, and all the founders hung out — it was a community,” Werbach says of those heady early times.

    “I had hoped this would be the taming of capitalism.”

    Janelle Orsi, attorney, co-founder, and executive director of the Sustainable Economies Law Center, used to call herself a sharing lawyer, which, she says now, “a lot of people thought was a joke.” Orsi helped set up small workers cooperatives and worked on cottage food legislation to make it possible for people in California to sell food they cooked at home on a small scale both on and off digital platforms.

    For Orsi, the sharing pitch had some value in selling an idea that was uncomfortable at the time. “It took a certain kind of community-oriented person willing to take a risk and book an Airbnb or get in an Uber early on,” says Orsi. For her, and likely for many of the early sharing adopters, truly cleaner, lighter living through platform technology was seductive and incredibly promising. But that innocence was short-lived.

    “I had a very grassroots community-based vision of it,” she says.

    “And then all of a sudden, here comes the big tech companies. It was totally hijacked.”

    Perhaps no company is as emblematic of the sharing economy sector and its rapid evolution as Lyft. Zimride, Lyft’s original parent company, was a service that focused on college campuses and long-distance rides in areas with few other transit options. Co-founder Logan Green told reporters he was inspired by the slow grind of Los Angeles traffic, thick with single-occupant cars. If he could find a way to entice more people to carpool, Green reasoned, there would be less traffic on the road.

    In 2012, Zimride launched Lyft to service shorter rides in cities. Lyft advertised “friendly rides,” encouraging passengers to sit up front alongside the driver and pay a suggested donation if they felt like it. The company argued that because the platform only acted to connect riders and drivers, with payment optional, it couldn’t be regulated as a taxi service provider. But just a year after it was spun out, Lyft instituted set ride fares and had already raised $83 million in financing. It was a sharing economy success story: In 2015, Lyft was recognized by the Circulars economy awards at Davos for “helping to decongest roads.”

    Over the first half of the 2010s, the so-called sharing economy evolved into a powerful new multibillion-dollar economic model. At about the same time, the definition of “sharing” began to shift. Sharing still referred to the peer-to-peer model of leveraging underutilized assets — sharing our goods with each other — but it was also increasingly applied to more traditional centralized rental models.

    Seemingly everything was a part of this new economy: bike-sharing sponsored by multinational banks, apps that allowed people to rent parking spaces on public streets, and platforms that allowed for the peer-to-peer sale of used clothes. Sharing was the donor-funded nonprofit Wikipedia, and it was the massive unicorn WeWork. When the Avis Budget Group bought short-term car-rental service ZipCar in 2013, investor Steve Case said it was an indicator of the sharing economy’s growing potential. “Sharing is not a passing fad,” he wrote in the Washington Post. “Fasten your seatbelts: It’s just the beginning.”

    Even though the term “sharing” was quickly being drained of any meaning, industry insiders still touted its social benefits. In 2014, Airbnb global head of community Douglas Atkin told a sharing economy conference, “The sharing economy deserves to succeed. There’s a decentralization of wealth and control and power. That’s why this economy is a better economy.”

    Bythe mid-2010s, the narrative around the innovative, cure-all sharing economy had started to sour. As platforms banking on “collaborative consumption” edged toward multibillion-dollar valuations, sharing began to feel naive.

    “I sort of observed the shift happening beginning in 2016,” says labor attorney Veena Dubal, who was working with freelance taxi drivers in San Francisco before sharing hit the road. “There was a moment of novelty but then a realization that these were the same things. Just much cheaper and unregulated.”

    Three years ago, in a piece co-authored with entrepreneur and model Lily Cole, Adam Werbach also suggested that corporations had hijacked sharing. “Whilst modern rental platforms offer enormous value… they do not reflect the sentiment of sharing that has defined communities as communities for thousands of years.” They offered another word instead: rent.

    In some instances, the sharing economy appeared to inflame the very problems it purported to solve. The supposed activation of underutilized resources actually led to more, if slightly different, patterns of resource consumption. A number of studies have shown that the ease and subsidized low cost of Uber and Lyft rides are increasing traffic in cities and apparently pulls passengers away from an actual form of sharing: public transportation. Students at UCLA are reportedly taking roughly 11,000 rides each week that never even leave campus. In putting more cars on the road, ride-hail companies have encouraged would-be drivers to consume more by buying cars with subprime loans or renting directly from the platforms themselves.

    Alongside making it easy to rent out spare rooms, vacation rental platforms encouraged speculative real estate investment. Whole homes and apartment buildings are taken off the rental market to act as hotels, further squeezinghousing markets in already unaffordable cities.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Early sharing champions were ultimately correct about technology enabling a shift away from an ownership society, but what came next wasn’t sharing. The rise of streaming services, subscription systems, and short-term rentals eclipsed the promise of nonmonetary resource sharing. The power and control wasn’t decentralized; it was even more concentrated in the hands of large and valuable platforms.

    Why go through the trouble of swapping your own DVDs for a copy of Friends With Benefits, after all, when you can stream it through Amazon Prime Video for $2.99? The idea of paying for temporary access to albums rather than outright owning them may have been galling at first, but we’re increasingly comfortable with renting all our music, along with our software, and our books. Downloading and sharing the materials that live on these streamed resources is impossible, illegal, or both.

    The new trust never materialized. Government regulation typically plays an important role in mediating consumer relationships with corporate firms and for good reason. Peer-to-peer platforms can make discrimination easier, and they often claimed limited or zero liability when things went wrong. New social media reputation tools couldn’t prevent inevitable problems, especially when sharing companies did not institute background checks for their freelance workers or inspect homes and vehicles for safety.

    Sharing didn’t deliver broad financial stability either. The jobs eventually created by the sharing economy were poorly regulated and hastened the broader growth of contract labor, pushing down already low wages for freelancers and employees alike. A few frequently quoted studies have claimed that soon, most of us will be freelancers. But most of that freelance work appears to be extremely part-time and merely supplemental income, and ride-hail driver turnover in particular is high.

    Sharing doesn’t have the positive market power it wielded 10 years ago. Since 2016, tech entrepreneurs and their promoters in the press seem to have largely ditched the language of sharing. It’s now about “platforms,” “on-demand services,” or, most recently, “the gig economy.”

    Labor attorney Dubal is not thrilled with the new “gig” language either. The term may seem honest — it places the precarious nature of the contract labor front and center — but it doesn’t assuage broader structural concerns. “Even people who’ve stopped using the ‘sharing economy’ haven’t necessarily seen the light in terms of what kinds of work the company has propagated more broadly,” Dubal says. “They’ve normalized unregulated business.”

    Some of sharing’s earliest, most outspoken champions have distanced themselves from the term. Originally launched in 2013 as “a grassroots organization to support the sharing economy movement,” the nonprofit Peers purported to “grow, mainstream, and protect the sharing economy,” essentially acting as a corporate lobby firm for sharing, on-demand, and gig startups. Peers’ partners included Lyft, Airbnb, TaskRabbit, Getaround, and dozens of other mostly for-profit companies. The organization said the bulk of its funding came from “mission-aligned independent donors” and foundations, but it also had investment from Airbnb.

    By 2016, Peers had pivoted to portable benefits — an infrastructure to sustain gig workers as they labored without an employment safety net. Peers became “an organization for people working in new ways,” and it merged with the newly created Indy Worker Guild. Peers co-founder Natalie Foster went on to co-found the Economic Security Project, which lobbies for a new solution to help struggling gig workers and job-havers alike: universal basic income.

    In 2018, April Rinne, who previously pushed the sharing economy’s promise of a “tighter social fabric,” acknowledged “the dark side” of the sharing economy but wrote that “the challenges faced by the sharing economy today are largely a result of its success.” Rachel Botsman, who argued that sharing would allow us to trust one another again, now writes about how technologyand the concentration of power on large centralized platforms has led to “an erosion of trust.”

    The demand for Botsman’s mythical community-shared power drill never seemed to materialize. Neighborly goods-sharing platforms Crowd Rent, ThingLoop, and SnapGoods are all many years dead, and meal-sharing Josephine ended long ago. CouchSurfing has gone for-profit, with venture capital investment.

    It turns out sharing “is not really a mass-market idea, which is sort of depressing,” says Werbach, who’s pivoted Yerdle into a logistics firm for large brands interested in re-selling their used goods. “Kindergarten teachers are interested in that, but consumers are really interested in what’s in it for them.”

    Some of the early, true sharing believers have decamped for the growing platform cooperative movement. “Now there’s a whole consortium of platform cooperatives,” says Orsi of the Sustainable Economies Law Center.

    And these companies don’t bank on sharing. Organizations like Loconomics, Fairbnb, and Stocksy see their efforts at cooperative consumption and production less as altruism and more as collectively owning the means of production.

    Sharing tapped into economic anxiety, isolation, and frustration with contemporary U.S. middle-class life in a unique and ultimately profitable way. It was another iteration of Silicon Valley’s excruciating trope of changing the world by way of disruption, wrapped in a soft packaging of eco-friendly, feel-good liberalism. We were encouraged to give companies like Lyft and Airbnb a chance, to nurture them and help them along for the greater good. If we didn’t believe in sharing, we weren’t just cynics but enemies of progress.

    Many of the corporations and the pundits who sold us on the promises of sharing stopped using the term because consumers no longer found it believable or attractive. But it was consumers who really did sharing in. A true sharing economy is full of friction and discomfort, and the margins — if there are any to speak of — are paper thin. Real sharing is time-consuming and not particularly profitable for anyone.

    In order to make money, especially the kind of money that tech investors expect, venture-backed companies couldn’t just activate underutilized resources — they had to make more. For-profit businesses demand growth, and platforms demand scale. More than a decade into the sharing experiment, we’ve been able to fully assess the costs. Capitalism wasn’t tamed, as Werbach had hoped — it was stoked.

    “Now it’s just a transaction,” Werbach says.

    “It doesn’t need to be dressed up in any language about changing the world or whatever.”

    And though sharing is largely dead, other tech-driven models have taken its place: VC-backed enterprises that still skate on the promise of solving inequality, promoting justice, fixing broken systems, and doing what regulators and big, old businesses have failed to do for decades.

    These days, it’s not a shared drill that’s redefining trust and supplanting institutional intermediaries; it’s the blockchain. Botsman now says that the blockchain is the next step in shifting trust from institutions to strangers.

    “Even though most people barely know what the blockchain is, a decade or so from now, it will be like the internet,” she writes. “We’ll wonder how society ever functioned without it.”

    The ambitious promises all sound very familiar.

  • DHS Facial Recognition Scanners To Be Deployed At Top 20 Airports By 2021

    The Department of Homeland Security is rushing to implement a March 2017 executive order issued by President Trump mandating the use of facial recognition to identify “100 percent of all international passengers” – including American citizens, according to BuzzFeed. 

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Originally signed into law by President Obama in 2015, Trump’s EO accelerates the program, which will be implemented by US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in 20 top US airports by 2021 (Of note, seventeen international airports already use facial recognition, including “Atlanta, New York City, Boston, San Jose, Chicago, and two airports in Houston”).  

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Many major airlines are on board with the idea — Delta, JetBlue, British Airways, Lufthansa, and American Airlines. Airport operations companies, including Los Angeles World Airports, Greater Orlando Aviation Authority, Mineta San Jose International Airport, Miami International Airport, and the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, are also involved. –BuzzFeed

    According to a 346-pages of “as-yet-unpublished” documents obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center and reviewed by BuzzFeed News, US Customs and Border Protection is furiously rushing to meet the deadline for this “biometric entry-exit system” – which will use facial recognition technology on more than 100 million passengers in as little as two years, or roughly 16,300 flights per week. 

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    As BuzzFeed notes, the biometric systems are being implemented “despite questionable biometric confirmation rates and few, if any, legal guardrails.”

    What’s more, there are no limits to how airlines can use facial recognition data. 

    These same documents state — explicitly — that there were no limits on how partnering airlines can use this facial recognition data. CBP did not answer specific questions about whether there are any guidelines for how other technology companies involved in processing the data can potentially also use it. It was only during a data privacy meeting last December that CBP made a sharp turn and limited participating companies from using this data. But it is unclear to what extent it has enforced this new rule. CBP did not explain what its current policies around data sharing of biometric information with participating companies and third-party firms are, but it did say that the agency “retains photos … for up to 14 days” of non-US citizens departing the country, for “evaluation of the technology” and “assurance of the accuracy of the algorithms” — which implies such photos might be used for further training of its facial matching AI. –BuzzFeed

    “CBP is solving a security challenge by adding a convenience for travelers,” said an agency spokesperson in an email to BuzzFeed. “By partnering with airports and airlines to provide a secure stand-alone system that works quickly and reliably, which they will integrate into their boarding process, CBP does not have to rebuild everything from the ground up as we drive innovation across the travel experience.” 

    Meanwhile, it appears that CBP has simply skipped part of the “rulemaking process” – foregoing public feedback prior to implementing the technology. Beyond “privacy, surveillance and free speech implications,” this is worrisome according to BuzzFeed, which notes that last summer the ACLU reported that Amazon’s facial recognition technology falsely matched 28 members of congress with arrest mugshots. 

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    According to a Homeland Security OIG report, CBP was able to provide biometric confirmation for just 85% of passengers processed, while mexican and Canadian citizens were “particularly problematic” reports BuzzFeed. 

    “The low 85-percent biometric confirmation rate poses questions as to whether CBP will meet its milestone to confirm all foreign departures at the top 20 US airports by fiscal year 2021,” said the audit – while a spokesperson said that the rate has risen to 98.6% since the report. 

    “I think it’s important to note what the use of facial recognition [in airports] means for American citizens,” said Jeramie Scott – director of EPIC’s Domestic Surveillance Project. “It means the government, without consulting the public, a requirement by Congress, or consent from any individual, is using facial recognition to create a digital ID of millions of Americans.” 

    “CBP took images from the State Department that were submitted to obtain a passport and decided to use them to track travelers in and out of the country,” said Scott. 

    “Facial recognition is becoming normalized as an infrastructure for checkpoint control,” said ACLU senior policy analyst Jay Stanley. “It’s an extremely powerful surveillance technology that has the potential to do things never before done in human history. Yet the government is hurtling along a path towards its broad deployment — and in this case, a deployment that seems quite unjustified and unnecessary.”

    CBP has suggested that privacy concerns are overblown, and that “CBP is committed to protecting the privacy of all travelers and has issued several Privacy Impact Assessments related to [its biometric entry-exit program], employed strong technical security safeguards, and has limited the amount of personally identifiable information used in the transaction,” according to an agency spokesperson. 

    “THE MOST OPERATIONALLY FEASIBLE AND TRAVELER-FRIENDLY OPTION”

    According to CBP’s Concept of Operations document released in June 2017, “Airlines, airports, TSA, and CBP are facing fixed airport infrastructure with little opportunities for major investment, increased national security threats with pressures for solutions, and increased traveler volume.”

    “Collectively, this is a status quo that is not sustainable for any of the main stakeholders, and failure to change will ultimately result in increases in dissatisfied customers, use of alternative modes of travel, and vulnerability to serious threats.”

    In June 2016, CBP began its first pilot for facial recognition technology in airports at the Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport. Once a day, for a flight from Atlanta to Tokyo, Japan, passengers’ passport photos were biometrically matched to real-time photographs. Before travelers proceeded to the passenger loading bridge to board their flight, CBP officers told passengers to scan their boarding passes, then a camera snapped a digital image of the traveler’s face; a CBP-developed back-end system called the Departure Information System used facial recognition to automatically compare photos during boarding against a photo gallery. Everyone between the ages of 14 and 79 was expected to participate. –BuzzFeed

    CBP says that the stated goal is to “identify any non-U.S. citizens subject to the exit requirements who may fraudulently present” travel documents, and that the agency has “no plans to biometrically record the departure of U.S. citizens.”

    That said, the CBP also says that it “does not believe there is enough time to separate U.S. citizens from non-U.S. citizen visitors prior to boarding” … “therefore, facial images will be collected for U.S. citizens as part of this test so that CBP can verify the identity of a U.S. citizen boarding the air carrier.”

    Once a traveler is identified and confirmed as a US citizen, the CBP claims their image is deleted. 

    Three months after the 2016 pilot, CBP switched to monitoring a daily flight from Atlanta to Mexico City. By the end of November that year, the test was being run on approximately seven flights per week. 

    The result of these tests? “CBP concluded that facial recognition technology … was the most operationally feasible and traveler-friendly option for a comprehensive biometric solution,” according to a DHS Inspector General audit of the government’s facial recognition biometrics program. 

    As the system expanded, in June 2017 CBP replaced it’s Departure Information System with a more advanced automated matching system known as “Traveler Verification Service” (TVS) which could “[operate] in a virtual, cloud-based infrastructure that can store images temporarily and operate using a wireless network.” Once a passenger boarded a plane, TVS transmits confirmation of a biometric match across other DHS systems, according to BuzzFeed. 

    CBP says it allows U.S. citizens to decline facial verification and to instead have their identities confirmed through the usual manual boarding process. “CBP works with airline and airport partners to incorporate notifications and processes into their current business models, including signage and gate announcements, to ensure transparency of the biometric process,” an agency spokesperson said in an email to BuzzFeed News. But of 12 flights observed by OIG during its audit in 2017, only 16 passengers declined to participate.

    According to Delta, less than 2% of its weekly 25,000 passengers going through the Atlanta airport’s Terminal F, which features “curb to gate” facial recognition systems, opt out of using the tech. –BuzzFeed

    Meanwhile, CBP is allowing people wearing “religious headwear” to pass through security checkpoints at the discretion of airport personnel.  

    Read the rest of the report here. 

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  • Schlichter: Has Nervous Nancy Lost Control Of Her Crazy Party?

    Authored by Kurt Schlichter, op-ed via Townhall.com,

    The only thing that should keep you from roaring in laughter as Nancy Pelosi freaks out trying to keep a lid on the freak show that is the Democratic caucus is the knowledge that the freshmen freakettes giving her fits would impose an ideology of tyranny and murder if given the chance. But you can still allow yourself a good giggle as you watch Nancy’s dreams of a Democrat majority die on the altar of anti-Semitism, taking away your health insurance, and banning cheeseburgers.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    This was on display as the Democrats struggled to find a way to publicly pretend to condemn their superstar bigot’s hatred of Jews without annoying all the Democrats for whom hatred of Jews is a key component of their intersectional web of leftist prejudices. Nancy essentially tried to excuse it by explaining that Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Berlin) is too stupid to know she’s anti-Semitic which, to be fair, is plausible.

    She could only get her caucus to agree to condemning all prejudice, sort of, including the tsunami of prejudice against Pacific Islanders that we all see around us so much in our daily lives. Take that, people who hate Pacific Islanders.

    Of course, the Democrats never named the actual bigot because the Democrat base is affirmatively pro-bigotry. They hate Jews, Christians, white people, dissident non-white people, men, women who like men, and people who blaspheme against the creepy climate cult, among others. The list of Bad People Who Are Bad goes on and on – the key element of intersectionality is that it always intersects with ugly prejudices against groups that leftists see as insufficiently supportive of their sick ideology.

    Which is Nancy’s problem, because she won the House back last year by hiding the left-wing evil bubbling under the surface of her party’s collective dogma. She defeated the feckless Paul Ryan – what a loser – by running candidates in largely purple suburban districts who promised that if the voters tossed out the squishy Republican incumbent, the sensible Democrat moderate challenger would not go to Washington and do anything kooky. And, of course, the Lucy’s football phenomena was in full effect as these Nanchurian Candidates trooped up Capitol Hill and promptly got sucked into the crazy. 

    Suddenly, instead of playing the fake moderate game, Nancy’s minions had to suck up to a bunch of braying bimbos from safe blue seats. All the nonsense Reps. Talib, Omar, and Ocasio-Cortez spewed on social media and MSNBC thrilled the Democrat base. But what Normal people heard was, “We hate Israel. We hate the idea that you can have cars. We hate you.”

    And the fact that these commie-come-latelys are so inept is icing on the cake. Rep. Omar couldn’t help but run her fool mouth about what she really thought of the Jews. Rep. Ocasio-Cortez could not manage to let fly with her Green New Deal without making the rookie mistake of telling the people what was actually in it. Free money for those unwilling to work? Maybe that dog hunts among the simpletons in her New York City district, but in America, not so much.

    Not only does it rile up Nancy because these clumsy radicals have stolen the spotlight and made it immeasurably harder to pull off her “We’re sensible” scam on the swing seat suckers but it rankles because none of these debutantes have paid their dues. Nancy and the rest of her leadership worked for years and years accumulating power, rising through the ranks, and when they finally regained power suddenly these newbies who paid no dues but have a lot of Twitter followers showed up and took over the Democrat agenda.

    That’s got to be infuriating, and you can see it when Nancy talks about them – she can’t say it out loud, but you know what’s running through her mind is, “Who the hell do these upstarts think they are?”

    Well Nancy, they seem to be your party’s future.

    The thing is that the Democrat base loves them. These radicals are out of the moderate closet and letting their freak flags fly. Death to Israel! Death to borders! Death to private property. Death to Big Macs!

    Nancy could barely manage to applaud (while staying seated) the idea that America will never be socialist. These radicals are now forcing her to stop hiding the party’s real objectives far too soon. The truth was only supposed to come out after they had hold of total power, not so early that we Normals could wake up and stop the onslaught. But now, 2020 is going to provide a whole bunch of great questions to smart Republican candidates, in the off chance there are any:

    Do you support the Democrat plan to ban cars and planes?

    Do you support the Democrat plan to take away your private insurance and force you onto government healthcare?

    Do you support the Democrat plan to abandon Israel?

    Do you support the Democrat plan for open borders?

    Do you support the Democrat plan for illegal alien voting?

    Do you support the Democrat plan to allow doctors to kill babies?

    Even the wimps in the purple districts, the gooey mommies who found Trump icky and their Fredocon hubbies who said “Yes, dear” to wifey’s command to vote against the part of Bad Orange Man last November, are going to think twice about backing these nutty Dem plays. It’s all fun and games until Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez shows up and tells you that you gotta lose the SUV you use to cart Kaden and Ashleigh to soccer practice.

    The moderate Dems will have to turn on the radicals or get turned out. It already happened once as a couple dozen Dems joined Republicans to add an amendment to a gun grab bill that mandated reporting illegal aliens to ICE if they tried to buy a firearm. Ocasio-Cortez and her group opposed it. In fact, the Lil’ Kommissar even threatened to put these rebels on a list to be terminated (via primary now) for daring to *squints real hard* want to report to immigration authorities any illegal aliens trying to illegally buy guns. 

    Do it, AOC. DO IT!

    Nothing like intra-pinko cannibalism. Turn the Democrat Party into the Donner Party. While you consume each other, I’ll be here gobbling cruelty-free, carbon neutral popcorn.

    But, of course, there is always a chance that things don’t go the way we hope, and that there are enough historically ignorant suckers in the big blue cities to allow these freaks to take over the levers of power. Sure, the Democrats’ pain is hilarious, but the fact that a major political party has surrendered itself to the zealots of an ideology that has murdered 100 million people is not so hilarious. Maybe if the socialists get in charge here, they won’t bring misery and murder. Maybe the ones in Congress now are so smart and competent that they can actually make this blood-splattered ideology work. But it’s going to be a hard sell for the Dems to get us to bet our lives on it.

    *  *  *

    I write about an America split apart into red and blue in my novels People’s Republic, Indian Country and Wildfire, and if we let these psychos prevail, then we’ll be lucky if that’s the worst thing that happens. 

  • JFK Canvas Bought for $16,900 Set to Sell For $50 Million

    A major upcoming auction of a painting by Robert Rauschenberg is set to “prime the market” for the late artist, according to a new Bloomberg report. And the early signs of what his work will fetch look to be optimistic, to put it lightly. The artist’s 1964 work “Buffalo II” is set to be auctioned off by Christie’s on May 15 and is estimated to be offered for $50 million. That’s triple the artist’s auction record and 300,000% more than what the original buyers of the work paid.

    The canvas is in the style of a collage and depicts president John F. Kennedy.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    The canvas was created shortly after the President’s assassination and was purchased from art dealer Leo Castelli, who represented Rauschenberg at the time. The upcoming sale of the piece will likely “reset” the artist’s market, breaking his $18.6 million auction record and the records of other contemporary artists like Jasper Johns, whose “Flag” sold in 2014 for $36 million. 

    Sara Friedlander, Christie’s international director and head of its postwar and contemporary art department in New York told Bloomberg: “Everyone has been waiting for this painting. It’s the very best of the silkscreen paintings that’s left in private hands.’’

    The canvas is part of a collection owned by Robert and Beatrice “Buddy” Mayer, who was an heiress to the Sara Lee fortune. In total, Christie’s is set to offer more than $125 million of Mayer’s works. This collection includes Roy Lichtenstein’s $30 million 1962 “Kiss III,” and other Impressionist and modern art, in addition to Chinese ceramics and Latin American paintings.

    Mayer was a Montreal native, art patron and an activist who was a founding member of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.

    “It was a very exciting, politically charged time. And that’s the art they wanted to buy,” Friedlander said of its owners. 

Digest powered by RSS Digest

Mar 11

Today’s News 11th March 2019

  • Russian Warship Packing 'Vomit Weapon' Sparks Fear After Sailing Down English Channel

    A Russian warship carrying a “hallucination” weapon that “makes enemies vomit” successfully navigated the English channel over the weekend after conducting “air defense and countersabotage exercises” near Scotland’s only air force base, according to the UK’s Sunday Times. 

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Royal Navy warship HMS Defender was deployed to shadow the Russian frigate Admiral Gorshkov and three auxiliary vessels, which performed “provocative drills” in territorial waters, according to SNP defense spokesman Stewart McDonald. 

    The Gorshkov – the first of a new class of Russian frigates – embarked from the Barents Sea port town of Murmansk, home to Russia’s northern fleet. 

    Hallucinating device

    According to the Times, the Gorshkov is equipped with a “5P-42 Filin” or “Owl” optical device which can “provoke hallucinations and sickness in enemies using fast pulses of high-intensity light beams.” 

    The non-lethal Filin can be used at night or during twilight and is said to be effective from up to two kilometres away. In tests, volunteers who had the weapon turned on them found it was impossible to aim a firearm at a target protected by it. A fifth experienced something like a hallucination and about half noticed “signs of spatial disorientation, as well as nausea and dizziness”. The device is said to agitate the optic nerves of the enemy by modulating the brightness of the light. –The Times

    A Royal Navy spokesman said that the Defender was “monitoring the Russian task group and keeping track of their activity in areas of national interest.” 

    Scottish politicians, meanwhile, weren’t reassured by the Royal Navy’s response to the Russian ships. 

    “The UK’s Ministry of Defence is failing Scotland, allowing Russian navy vessels sailing through our territorial waters at will to conduct provocative drills like this,” said SNP Defense spokesman Stewart McDonald. 

    That said, a Royal Navy insider tells the Times that the Russian group was forced to take shelter in the Scottish islands due to bad weather, and continued their journey when conditions improved. 

    “They were waiting out the weather. Anyone who says they were trying to agitate is pushing fake news,” said the insider. 

    For anyone who wants to make their own barf gun, watch below:

  • The Orientalism Of Western Russophobia

    Authored by Max Parry via Off-Guardian.org,

    Last year marked the 40th anniversary of the publication of Edward W. Said’s pioneering book, Orientalism, as well as fifteen years since the Palestinian-American intellectual’s passing. To bid farewell to such an important scholar shortly after the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, which Said fiercely criticized until his dying breath before succumbing to leukemia, made an already tremendous loss that much more impactful.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    An illustration from a Wall Street Journal article entitled “Russia’s Turn to its Asian Past” depicting Vladimir Putin as Genghis Khan.

    His seminal text forever reoriented political discourse by painstakingly examining the overlooked cultural imperialism of colonial history in the West’s construction of the so-called Orient. Said meticulously interrogated the Other-ing of the non-Western world in the humanities, arts, and anthropology down to its minutiae. As a result, the West was forced to confront not just its economic and political plunder but the long-established cultural biases filtering the lens through which it viewed the East which shaped its dominion over it.

    His writings proved to be so influential that they laid the foundations for what is now known as post-colonial theory. This became an ironic category as the author himself would strongly reject any implication that the subjugation of developing countries is a thing of the past. How apropos that the Mandatory Palestine-born writer’s death came in the midst of the early stages of the ‘War on Terror’ that made clear Western imperialism is very much alive.

    Despite its history of ethnic cleansing, slavery, and war, the United States had distinguished itself from Britain and France in that it had never established its own major colonies within the Middle East, Asia or North Africa in the heart of the Orient. According to Said, it was now undergoing this venture as the world’s sole remaining superpower following the end of the Cold War with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

    Today’s political atmosphere makes the Bush era seem like eons ago. Thanks to the shameful rehabilitation of neoconservatism by centrist extremists, Americans fail to understand how Trumpism emerged from the pandora’s box of destructiveness of Bush policies that destabilized the Middle East and only increased international terrorism. Since then, another American enemy has been manufactured in the form of the Russian Federation and its President, Vladimir Putin, who drew the ire of the West after a resurgent Moscow under his leadership began to contain U.S. hegemony. This reached a crescendo during the 2016 U.S. Presidential election with the dubious accusations of election interference made by the same intelligence agencies that sold the pack of lies that Iraq possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction. The establishment has even likened the alleged intrusion by Moscow to 9/11.

    If a comparison between the 2001 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans and the still unproven allegations of Russian meddling seems outrageous, it is precisely such an analogy that has been made by Russiagate’s own biggest proponents, from neoconservative columnist Max Boot to Hillary Clinton herself.

    Truthfully, it is the climate of hysteria and dumbing down of discourse to such rigid dichotomies following both events where a real similarity can be drawn. The ‘with us or against us’ chasm that followed 9/11 has reemerged in the ‘either/or’ post-election polarity of the Trump era whereby all debate within the Overton window is pigeonholed into a ‘pro vs. anti-Trump’ or ‘pro vs. anti-Russia’ false dilemma. It is even perpetrated by some on the far left, e.g. if one critiques corporate media or Russiagate, they are grouped as ‘pro-Trump’ or ‘pro-Putin’ no matter their political orientation. This dangerous atmosphere is feeding an unprecedented wave of censorship of dissenting voices across the spectrum.

    In his final years, not only did Edward Said condemn the Bush administration but highlighted how corporate media was using bigoted tropes in its representations of Arabs and Muslims to justify U.S. foreign policy. Even though it has gone mostly undetected, the neo-McCarthyist frenzy following the election has produced a similar travesty of caricatures depicting Russia and Vladimir Putin. One such egregious example was a July 2018 article in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Russia’s Turn to Its Asian Past” featuring an illustration portraying Vladimir Putin as Genghis Khan.

    The racist image and headline suggested that Russia is somehow inherently autocratic because of its past occupation under the Mongol Empire during its conquest of Eastern Europe and the Kievan Rus state in the 13th century. In a conceptual revival of the Eurocentric trope of Asiatic or Oriental despotism, the hint is that past race-mixing is where Russia inherited this tyrannical trait. When the cover story appeared, there was virtually no outcry due to the post-election delirium and everyday fear-mongering about Russia that is now commonplace in the media.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    The overlooked casual racism used to demonize Russia in the new Cold War’s propaganda doesn’t stop there. One of the main architects of Russiagate, former Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper, in an interviewwith NBC‘s Meet the Press on the reported meddling stated:

    And just the historical practices of the Russians, who typically, almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, which is a typical Russian technique. So we were concerned.”

    Clapper, whose Office of the DNI published the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections”, has been widely praised and cited by corporate media as a trustworthy source despite his previous history of making intentionally false statements at a public hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee denying that the National Security Agency (NSA) was unconstitutionally spying on U.S. citizens.

    The disclosures of NSA activities by whistleblower Edward Snowden that shocked the world should have discredited Clapper’s status as a reliable figure, but not for mainstream media which has continuously colluded with the deep state during the entire Russia investigation. In fact, the scandal has been an opportunity to rehabilitate figures like the ex-spymaster complicit in past U.S. crimes from surveillance to torture. Shortly after the interview with NBC, Clapper repeated his prejudiced sentiments against Russians in a speech at the National Press Club in Australia:

    But as far as our being intimate allies, trusting buds with the Russians that is just not going to happen. It is in their genes to be opposed, diametrically opposed, to the United States and to Western democracies.”

    The post-election mass Trump derangement has not only enabled wild accusations of treason to be made without sufficient evidence to support them, but such uninhibited xenophobic remarks to go without notice or disapproval.

    In fact, liberals have seemingly abandoned their supposed progressive credence across the board while suffering from their anti-Russia neurological disorder. In an exemplar of yellow journalism, outlets like NBC News published sensational articles alleging that because of the perceived ingratiation between Trump and Putin, there was an increase in Russian ‘birth tourism’ in the United States.

    More commonly known by the pejorative ‘anchor babies’, birth tourism is the false claim that many immigrants travel to countries for the purpose of having children in order to obtain citizenship. While there may be individual cases, the idea that it is an epidemic is a complete myth — the vast majority of immigration is motivated by labor demands and changes in political or socio-economic factors in their native countries, whether it is from the global south or Eastern Europe. Trump has been rightfully criticized for promoting this falsehood regarding undocumented immigrants and his executive orders targeting birthright citizenship, but it appears liberals are willing to unfairly apply this same fallacy toward Russians for political reasons.

    In order to make sense of the current groupthink hysteria towards Moscow, it must be understood in its context as an extension of the ongoing doctoring of history regarding U.S.-Russia relations since the Cold War. Americans living within the empire are proselytized into a glorified and nationalist version of their entire background, beginning with merchants and explorers ‘discovering’ the continent and the whitewashing of indigenous genocide. This imaginary narrative includes the version of WWII taught in U.S. schools and the arms race with the Soviet Union that followed. The West presents an entirely Anglospheric perspective of the war starting with its very chronology.

    For example, it is said that the conflict ‘officially’ began with the September 1st, 1939 invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany. This mythology immediately frames the war from an Eurocentric viewpoint by separating the Sino-Japanese war that was already underway as the Pacific Ocean theater began long before the ‘surprise’ Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and U.S. entry into the conflict.

    The truth is that nearly everything Americans are taught about U.S. participation in the war is either a mischaracterization or a lie, with its role in the Allied victory inflated exponentially. The widely held misconception that the 1944 Normandy landings in the Allied invasion of France was the decisive turning point in Europe is a fairy tale. The ‘D’ in D-Day does not stand for ‘decision’ as many Westerners assume, and when the Allied forces converged on Germany from East and West it was the Soviets who captured Berlin.

    Although Operation Overlord may have been the largest invasion transported by sea in history, the real watershed in the Great Patriotic War was the Soviet victory in the Battle of Stalingrad the previous year, the biggest defeat ever suffered by the German army. The U.S. only took on the Wehrmacht once it was exhausted by the Red Army which bore the real burden of overcoming Germany.

    Just three years earlier, the British army had been completely vanquished by the Nazi armed forces. Omitted from Hollywood folklore like Christopher Nolan’s film Dunkirk is that the Germans were entirely capable of pressing on with an invasion of the British isles but abruptly halted their advance — what stopped them? Quite simply, Hitler’s fanatical desire to conquer the Soviet Union and eradicate communism which he regarded as a greater threat to the Third Reich than Western capitalism. It is not surprising that the Eastern Front became a higher priority considering that the ruling classes in Britain, France and the U.S. had previously financed the German rearmament in violation of the Treaty of Versailles.

    The Germans did not hold the same hatred for the West that it reserved for the Russians. In fact, the Führer personally admired the U.S. so much for the extermination of its natives that he named his armored private train ‘Amerika’, a mobile version of the Wolf’s Lair. The Nuremberg race statutes were partly inspired by Jim Crow segregation laws in the U.S. and many of the defendants at the Nuremberg trials tried to excuse their atrocities by arguing the similarity between Nazi race theories and the eugenicist movement which actually originated in the United States.

    Auschwitz physician Josef Mengele was even previously employed as an assistant to the head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics institute that was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.

    Hitler also preferred an attack on the Soviets over an invasion of Britain because of the eugenics of Lebensraum. Nazi Germany, like Britain and France, was really an imperial settler colonialist state and Hitler viewed the Slav inhabitants of the USSR as ethnically inferior to the ‘master race.’ The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact had been a strategic move to buy time for the Soviets in preparation for a German onslaught, at the time the most powerful military power in the world.

    Britain and France had rebuffed Stalin’s efforts to form an alliance in 1938, leaving the USSR no choice but to sign a non-aggression pact with Germany, knowing full well it was only a matter of time until Hitler would eventually embark on his Masterplan for the East.

    Operation Barbarossa, in June 1941, broke the agreement and the German dictator ultimately sealed his own fate. Although the Soviets were victorious, the slaughter that proceeded it had no parallel in human history as 27 million citizens would lose their lives in the fight compared to less than half a million Americans. Even worse, the West has made a mockery of this sacrifice with their refusal to fully acknowledge the USSR’s contribution despite the fact that they did the vast majority of the fighting and dying while 80% of all German casualties were on the Eastern Front.

    Meanwhile, the Cold War had already begun before the Second World War even ended. Whether or not Stalin was fully aware of either the U.S. capability or plans to use the atomic bomb against Japan is still a matter of debate, as U.S. President Harry S. Truman changed his story numerous times over the years.

    Nevertheless, their use is incorrectly attributed by the West to have brought the war’s end and very few Americans realize this tale was told entirely for political reasons. The purported rationale was to allegedly save the lives of American soldiers that would be lost in a future Allied invasion of Japan planned for the Autumn of 1945. Controlling the narrative became crucial in ‘justifying’ the use of such deadly weapons which held the secret motivation to begin an arms race with the Soviets.

    Stalin and U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had agreed at the Yalta Conference in February 1945 that the USSR would eventually break its neutrality treaty with Japan and enter the Pacific theater later in the year. That was until Roosevelt died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage just a few months later while American nuclear physicists were busy at work enriching uranium in Los Alamos, New Mexico.

    Then, just a day prior to newly inaugurated President Truman’s meeting with Stalin at the Potsdam Conference in July, the U.S. army and Project Y successfully detonated a nuclear weapon for the first time with the Trinity test as part of the expensive Manhattan Project. After his face-to-face with Truman at Potsdam, whom everyone agrees at least hinted to Stalin of the new U.S. weaponry, the Soviet premier suspected the new U.S. leader would go back on the previous agreement at Yalta with Roosevelt that included compromises with the USSR in the Pacific.

    The ugly truth is that the U.S. was well aware that the Japanese were willing to conditionally surrender on the basis of immunity for Emperor Hirohito. However, the U.S. secretly wanted to achieve an Allied victory ideally without Soviet participation so it could demonstrate its exclusive nuclear capability in order to dominate the post-war order. Japan didn’t relinquish following the first bombing of Hiroshima but the second, Nagasaki, three days later — both of which mostly impacted civilians, not its military.

    What else happened on August 9th, 1945? The Soviet Union declared war on Japan upon realizing that the U.S. was backtracking on its pledge with the underhanded use of ‘Fat Man and Little Boy’ that instantly killed more than 200,000 civilians. The timing gave the appearance that the bomb resulted in the surrender when it was the Soviet invasion of occupied Manchuria in the north against Japan’s military stronghold that was the real tipping point which led to an unconditional acceptance of defeat.

    According to the Western narrative, the Cold War only began following Winston Churchill’s invitation to the U.S. by Truman after being surprisingly voted out of office in 1946. At Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, he gave a speech entitled “Sinews of Peace”, widely known as the Iron Curtain speech, where he condemned Soviet policies in Europe and popularized the moniker for the boundary dividing the continent after the war:

    From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an “iron curtain” has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia; all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow.”

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Although the term ‘iron curtain’ predates Cold War usage to describe various barriers political or otherwise, what is not commonly known is that Churchill likely appropriated the term from its originator, none other than the German Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels himself, who used it in reference to the Soviet Union. In February 1945, he wrote in Das Reich newspaper:

    If the German people lay down their weapons, the Soviets, according to the agreement between Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, would occupy all of East and Southeast Europe along with the greater part of the Reich. An iron curtain would fall over this enormous territory controlled by the Soviet Union, behind which nations would be slaughtered.”

    The ‘Nazi megaphone’ himself may have gotten the term from the Wehrmacht propaganda publication Signal which in 1943 published an article entitled “Behind the Iron Curtain” that described:

    He who has listened in on the interrogation of a Soviet prisoner of war knows that once the dam is broken, a flood of words begins as he tries to make clear what he experienced behind the mysterious iron curtain, which more than ever separates the world from the Soviet Union.

    Is it any wonder that British newspaper The Guardian is now illustrating cartoons in its anti-Russia propaganda today that imitate Goebbels’ anti-Soviet posters during WWII?

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Although Stalin was unaware of Churchill’s lifting of Nazi phraseology, he still detected the resemblance between Western and Third Reich policies toward the Soviet Union in the Fulton speech during an interview with Pravda:

    A point to be noted is that in this respect Mr. Churchill and his friends bear a striking resemblance to Hitler and his friends. Hitler began his work of unleashing war by proclaiming a race theory, declaring that only German-speaking people constituted a superior nation.

    Mr. Churchill sets out to unleash war with a race theory, asserting that only English-speaking nations are superior nations, who are called upon to decide the destinies of the entire world. The German race theory led Hitler and his friends to the conclusion that the Germans, as the only superior nation, should rule over other nations. The English race theory leads Mr. Churchill and his friends to the conclusion that the English-speaking nations, as the only superior nations, should rule over the rest of the nations of the world.

    Actually, Mr. Churchill, and his friends in Britain and the United States, present to the non-English speaking nations something in the nature of an ultimatum: “Accept our rule voluntarily, and then all will be well; otherwise war is inevitable.”

    But the nations shed their blood in the course of five years’ fierce war for the sake of the liberty and independence of their countries, and not in order to exchange the domination of the Hitlers for the domination of the Churchills. It is quite probable, accordingly, that the non-English-speaking nations, which constitute the vast majority of the population of the world, will not agree to submit to a new slavery.”

    It is easy to see the parallels between Stalin’s explanation for the geopolitical tensions underlying the Cold War and Edward Said’s postcolonial theory. From a Marxist perspective, one of Said’s shortcomings was a reductionism in understanding empire to cultural supremacy, one of the reasons he unfortunately conflated Marxism with Orientalism as well. When it came to the Cold War, Said also demonstrated a lack of understanding of internationalism. He wrote:

    By the time of the Bandung Conference in 1955, the entire Orient had gained its independence from the Western empires and gained a new configuration of imperial powers, the United States and the Soviet Union. Unable to recognize “its” Orient in the new Third World, Orientalism now faced a challenging and politically armed Orient.”

    Yet who foremost ‘armed’ the movements of national liberation? The USSR, including support for the Palestinians during most of its history. Nevertheless, Stalin’s description of the West’s prerogative for post-war hegemony based on the belief in its primacy has many overlaps with the idea that the Occident exercised patronizing dominance over the East.

    Today, even though the Berlin Wall has long since fallen and Eastern Europe is under free enterprise, the political establishment in the West is still clinging to this attitude and misunderstanding of Moscow to fulfill its need for a permanent global nemesis with a desire to eventually colonize Russia with foreign capital as it did under Boris Yeltsin.

    Russia has historically possessed a unique and ambivalent identity located between the East and West, having been invaded by both European and Asian empires in previous centuries. Said included Russia in Orientalism in his analysis of European countries and their attitude toward the East, but did not note that Russia is in many respects the Orient within the Occident, as more than 75% of its territory as the largest nation in the world is actually located in Asia while three quarters of its population live on the European side.

    Russia may be partly European, but it is certainly not Western. Then again, Europe is not a continent unto itself but geographically connected to Asia with the arbitrary division between them based on cultural differences, not landmass, where Russia is an intermediate. Expansionism under Peter the Great may have brought Western European ‘cultural values’ and modernization to Russia, but the majority of its territory itself remains in Asia.

    Even after the presumed end of the Cold War, Russia has been excluded from the European Union and instead joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), while developing strong ties with China. As recently disclosed documents from the National Security Archive prove, NATO has broken its promise to Mikhail Gorbachev during the George H.W. Bush administration that it not expand eastward following Germany’s enrollment. It has since added 13 countries since 1999, 10 of which were former Warsaw Pact states.

    Russia’s alliance with China has been solidified precisely because it is still not treated in the same regard as other European nations even after the adoption of a private sector economy. In order to justify its continued armament and avoid obsolescence, NATO has manufactured an adversarial relationship with Moscow.

    Contrary to the widespread perception of his rhetoric, in terms of policy-making President Trump has been equally as hostile to Moscow as his predecessors, if not more so in light of the U.S. withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF). What the usual suspects behind the attempted soft-coup against him fail to understand is that Trump’s tact toward Putin is more likely an inverted version of the ‘only Nixon could go to China’ strategy, an unexpected style of diplomacy based on the pragmatic objective of containing Beijing by dividing America’s two primary foes.

    The liberals still in denial about their election defeat continue to underestimate Trump, but the Chinese are not fooled. The architect behind Nixon’s détente with Mao, Henry Kissinger, is even believed to have encouraged Trump to ease tensions with Moscow in order to quarantine China and don’t think they haven’t noticed. Ultimately, the divide between Trump and his enemies in the establishment is really a disagreement over strategy in how to surround China and prevent the inevitable downfall of the U.S. empire.

    The ongoing demonization of Moscow is ultimately about China as well. It was only a matter of time until the uncertain allegations of election interference were also leveled against Beijing without proof as a Joint Statement from the U.S. intelligence agencies recently showed.

    Make no mistake  –  underneath the West’s Russophobia lies Sinophobia and as Washington’s real geopolitical challenger, China will in due course emerge as the preferred bogeyman. The bipartisan hawkishness has created an environment where rapprochement and diplomacy of any kind is seen as weakness and even a sign of treason, making the prospect of peace seemingly impossible. As China continues to grow, it will find itself more squarely in the crosshairs of imperialism, regardless of whether Trump’s strategy to renew relations with Moscow against Beijing is successful. Until then cooler heads at the highest levels of government must prevail as they thankfully did at the height of the first Cold War for the sake of peace between Russia, the U.S. and the entire world.

  • Air Force Releases Video Of XQ-58A Valkyrie Supersonic Stealth Combat Drone

    The Air Force Research Laboratory (ARL) has just published a never before seen video of the Kratos XQ-58 Valkyrie, an unmanned combat air vehicle (UCAV), which completed its first flight on March 5, 2019, at Yuma Proving Ground, Arizona.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    According to a statement published by the US Air Force, the inaugural test flight of the XQ-58A was a joint effort within ARL’s Low-Cost Attritable Aircraft Technology portfolio, which has been instructed by the Air Force to provide the service with supersonic stealth drones at an affordable cost. These objectives are met by designing and manufacturing drones faster by developing innovative tools, and maturing and leveraging commercial manufacturing processes to reduce build time and cost.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Tuesday’s first test flight is an important step forward for the experimental “loyal wingman” concept that can escort fifth-generation fighters, like the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor and F-35 Lightning II, into combat, conduct surveillance missions, and even absorb enemy fire.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Developed for runway independence, the XQ-58A “behaved as expected and completed 76 minutes of flight time,” said the Air Force statement.

    ARL and Kratos spent 2.5 years from contract award to develop the XQ-58A. The statement said the stealth drone would have five planned test flights in two phases that evaluate the functionality, aerodynamic performance, and launch and recovery systems.

    Doug Szczublewski, AFRL’s XQ-58A Program Manager said, “XQ-58A is the first example of a class of UAV that is defined by low procurement and operating costs while providing game-changing combat capability.”

    XQ-58A will have an impressive range of about 3,000 miles. It can carry a payload of 600 lb., including small-diameter bombs and missiles.

  • Calling Dr. Strangelove: The Threat Of Nuclear War Cannot Prevent World War III Forever

    Authored by Robert Bridge,

    Today, humanity is confronted with an ugly paradox in that the world’s foremost peacekeepers are nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles. One bad move on the geopolitical chessboard, however, could trigger a global catastrophe.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    On July 25, 1945, in the waning moments of World War II, then US President Harry S. Truman jotted the following words in his diary, “We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world.” But not terrible enough to employ them, it seems.

    Just weeks later, the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese industrial cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, indiscriminately killing some 200,000 civilians in, literally, a flash. Many others died in the years that followed from radiation poisoning and other associated illnesses. If there is a special place in hell for those who would expose the planet to such horrific weapons, Truman must certainly be there.

    The historic tragedy is not without some dark irony. Albert Einstein, whose theory of relativity spearheaded the development of atomic weapons, was worried that Adolf Hitler would acquire the deadly know-how before the West. This prompted him in 1939 to write a letter to Truman’s predecessor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, advising him to expedite research into nuclear fission. American scientists, working in the secret Manhattan Project, succeeded beyond Einstein’s wildest dreams.

    The famous physicist, appalled by the devastation visited upon the two Japanese cities, expressed regret over his fateful decision to warn the Americans.

    “Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in producing an atomic bomb,” he said, “I would have never lifted a finger.”

    Since then, the world has been forced to live with the knowledge that all life on earth could be quickly extinguished in the event of some mishap or conflict. Yet this knowledge has not stopped most governments from coveting nuclear weapons because they understand this technology is their best life insurance policy, so to speak.

    Indeed, only the simple-minded could have failed to take away lessons with regards to the West’s top hits list. A brief glance at the candidates designated for US-led regime change – Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Ukraine, Yugoslavia and Syria as the most obvious – demonstrated an obvious fact: only unarmed countries need to worry about foreign actors determining their ‘democratic’ future.

    In marked contrast to those weaker countries that ‘suffer what they must’, members of the nuclear club (US, Russia, UK, France, China, India, Pakistan and North Korea, while it is generally recognized that Israel possesses nuclear weapons although it does not officially acknowledge them) can rest easy in the belief that they are safe from outside attack.

    Lately, however, that self-confidence has been greatly shaken by a spate of dramatic events that have given the entire world pause. The most recent wake-up call came this month with a series of aerial dogfights between Pakistan and India – two countries that possess over 100 nuclear warheads apiece. The incident demonstrated exactly how fast things can spiral out of control, especially when third-party actors i.e. terrorists are involved in the equation.

    On February 14, the Pakistan-based terrorist group Jaish-e-Mohammed carried out a suicide attack on an Indian military convoy in the Pulwama District that killed over 40 soldiers. Less than two weeks later, New Delhi – accusing Islamabad of going soft on terrorism (sound familiar?) – retaliated by hitting a “terrorist camp” in a Pakistan-controlled part of Kashmir. Tensions mounted the following day as the Pakistani military carried out airstrikes along the Line of Control (LoC), shooting down two Indian aircraft that crossed into its territory and capturing one pilot, who has since been released.

    It is impossible to read such reports without recalling that both Pakistan and India possess nuclear weapons. This places the enemy combatants in a curious position in that they must practice extreme restraint so as to avoid a ‘worse-case scenario’, and we all know what that is. Whether or not the two regional rivals can continue to keep cool heads remains to be seen.

    Another recent incident involving nuclear powers came as a tragic accident, although no less disconcerting. In September, four Israeli F-16 fighter jets launched a reckless attack on Latakia, Syria that resulted in the downing of a Russian military aircraft, which was accidentally hit by Syrian ground fire. The incident resulted in the death of 15 Russian crew members, as well as heightened global tensions.

    The Russian Ministry of Defense accused Israel of deliberately using the Russian aircraft to attract fire in that the Israeli aircraft failed to either change their approach to the intended targets or give Moscow enough time to move the Il-20 to safety.

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Although tensions eventually calmed down between Moscow and Tel Aviv, the incident provided a grim reminder that the world is becoming chaotic to the point where accidents between nuclear powers are increasingly likely.

    By far, the most disturbing development on the global stage, however, is the spectacle of Washington unilaterally withdrawing from arms control treaties – specifically the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF). Needless to say, these moves will rekindle the global arms race – a positive development for defense contractors, no doubt, but an unmitigated disaster for everyone else.  

    Most worrisome is that the US is trashing these landmark treaties at the very same time it has built a missile defense system in Eastern Europe, while actively building up its military footprint smack on Russia’s border. Moscow, naturally, has responded in kind, with Vladimir Putin having recently unveiled an array of weapon systems that will make US-led NATO think twice about making any aggressive moves against Russia.

    Judging by such American antics, one almost gets the impression that it believes a nuclear war is somehow a winnable venture. And there are grounds to believe that is the case. According to a 2017 report, for example, a panel of Pentagon officials have called on the president to consider a “tailored nuclear option for limited use.”

    As described in the National Interest, using low-yield nuclear weapons against an adversary’s conventional forces will “demonstrate that you mean serious business and might be crazy enough to launch an all out nuclear attack.”

    Judging by what transpired in 1945 against the Japanese, is there any reason to doubt that many people could believe that America is “crazy enough” to do the unthinkable for a second time?

    With such deranged ideas floating around, it’s no wonder that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a non-profit group of academics devoted to the study of security issues, said the world is now perched at “two minutes before midnight” with regards to a nuclear cataclysm due to ongoing events that place the world in “extraordinary danger.” 

    To paraphrase the 1964 black political comedy, Dr. Strangelove, maybe we should all just stop worrying and love the bomb?

  • China's Gold-Buying Spree Extends To Third Month

    After China’s official gold reserves rose for the first time in around two years (since Oct 2016) in December, Beijing appears to have joined the global gold rush, increasing its gold reserves for the third month in a row in February to 60.26 million ounces.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    As we previously noted, China has long been silent on its holdings of gold as many countries are turning away from the greenback.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    The value the country’s holdings of the precious metal reached US$79.5 billion, increasing by more than $3 billion compared to the end of last year.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Goldman Sachs has flagged central-bank buying as a plank supporting its bullish outlook for gold, which it expects to rally to $1,400 an ounce over six months.

    China is also trying “to diversify its reserves” away from the greenback, according to Jeffrey Halley, senior market analyst at currency broker OANDA. The analyst told the South China Morning Post that the state of affairs in global politics, including a trade war with the US, are driving China’s interest to buy gold as a “safe haven hedge.” 

    Just as we saw in 2015/2016, it appears China is reducing its US Treasury exposure as it increases its gold holdings…

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    In January, China dropped to sixth place among the world’s largest holders of the yellow metal behind Russia. With its 67.6 million ounces of gold, Russia now stands in fifth place behind the US, Germany, France, and Italy.

    Last month’s inflow of 9.95 tons follows the addition of 11.8 tons in January and 9.95 tons in December. Should China continue to accumulate bullion at that pace over 2019, it may end the year as the top buyer after Russia, which added 274.3 tons in 2018.

    Crucially, the size of the gold addition are far less important than the signaling effect – why did China decide now was the right time to publicly admit its gold reserves are rising?

    After months of seeming stability in the yuan relative to gold, Q4 2018/Q1 2019 saw China seemingly allow gold to appreciate relative to the yuan (although the last week or so has seen Yuan strengthen against gold)

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    One wonders if Alasdair Macleod is on to something when he notes that if the yuan is to replace the dollar for China’s trade, officials will have to back it with gold…

    It is hard to see how the US can match a sound-money plan from China. Furthermore, the US Government’s finances are already in very poor shape and a return to sound money would require a reduction in government spending that all observers can agree is politically impossible. This is not a problem the Chinese government faces, and the purpose of a gold-linked jumbo bond is not so much to raise funds; rather it is to seal a price relationship between the yuan and gold.

    Whether China implements the plan suggested herein or not, one thing is for sure: the next credit crisis will happen, and it will have a major impact on all nations operating with fiat money systems. The interest rate question, because of the mountains of debt owed by governments and consumers, will have to be addressed, with nearly all Western economies irretrievably ensnared in a debt trap. The hurdles faced in moving to a sound monetary policy appear to be simply too daunting to be addressed.

    Ultimately, a return to sound money is a solution that will do less damage than fiat currencies losing their purchasing power at an accelerating pace. Think Venezuela, and how sound money would solve her problems. But that path is blocked by a sink-hole that threatens to swallow up whole governments. Trying to buy time by throwing yet more money at an economy suffering a credit crisis will only destroy the currency. The tactic worked during the Lehman crisis, but it was a close-run thing. It is unlikely to work again.

    Because China’s economy has had its debt expansion of the last ten years mostly aimed at production, if she fails to act soon she faces an old-fashioned slump with industries going bust and unemployment rocketing. China offers very limited welfare, and without Maoist-style suppression, faces the prospect of not only the state’s plans going awry, but discontent and rebellion developing among the masses.

    For China, a gold-exchange yuan standard is now the only way out. She will also need to firmly deny what Western universities have been teaching her brightest students. But if she acts early and decisively, China will be the one left standing when the dust settles, and the rest of us in our fiat-financed welfare states will left chewing the dirt of our unsound currencies.

    Is China’s “signal” an explicit warning of the end to the dollar era that has existed since August 1971, when gold as the ultimate money was driven out of the monetary system.

    In fact, that appears to be exactly what is happening as for the first time since the end of the second world war, and catalyzed by the GFC 2008/9, central banks have begun to aggressively diversify into gold and away from the US dollar…

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

  • Sunday Satire (Or Not?): "Eveything Is Bad, The World Is Ending, & You Shouldn't Have Kids"

    Via BabylonBee.com,

    The United States birth rate has continued to fall as millennials increasingly believe that everything is bad, the world is going to end, and to bring kids into this nightmarish hellscape would be tantamount to child abuse.  

    “The world is going to end in twelve years. If you have kids, it will end in probably like six years or something because they’ll just breathe more,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said on a recent Instagram Live broadcast.

    “I have the science right here.”

    Ocasio-Cortez held up a copy of National Geographic.

    She later realized she had been referencing an article from 1989 warning that the world would end in 2001 if deep and wide environmental policies were not enforced.

    “If scientists from thirty years ago said the world was going to end in 12 years, who am I to doubt science?” she said upon realizing this.

    ”Science is science.”

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    “The most progressive thing we can do is abort as many of the next generation as possible so they don’t have to be brought into this apocalyptic nightmare,” said progressive blogger Martina Bridges on a live stream over her iPhone from the driver’s seat in her Lexus on a sunny day in Santa Monica while drinking a cucumber lime acai iced tea.

    However, in conflict with the traditional progressive view of not having children, some evidence suggests that one of the world’s greatest resources is the bright young minds of tomorrow. Research shows that children born today could be tomorrow’s innovators, finding solutions to the world’s problems this generation never even thought of.

    “That’s junk science,” said progressive researcher Darrell Lyons from the University of Henshaw. “Name one generation who was improved by the next generation. It’s a myth. People are born, they pollute the Earth, the world ends. That is how it has always worked out as long as the Earth has existed.” 

    “Name one person who isn’t born yet who could fix the world’s problems,” Lyons went on. “I’ll wait.”

    Lyons sat with his arms crossed for close to thirty minutes before reporters began exiting the conference room.

    “True progressivism knows the truth: this generation is the last possible hope for mankind,” Bridges continued on her live stream.

    “We know that the most brilliant minds to ever exist, past or future, are ours. If we don’t have our way, that’s the real Armageddon.”

    What is the truly progressive solution if it is not continuing to have kids? Bridges, Ocasio-Cortez, and many other progressives believe that the only hope for true progress is to bring about a system of government from the early 1900s that has led to the death of millions and to vote for the oldest presidential candidate in history.

    *  *  *

    Fact or Fiction?

  • U.S. "Gets Its Ass Handed To It" In World War III Simulation: RAND

    In simulated World War III scenarios, the U.S. continues to lose against Russia and China, two top war planners warned last week. “In our games, when we fight Russia and China, blue gets its ass handed to it” RAND analyst David Ochmanek said Thursday.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    RAND’s wargames show how US Armed Forces – colored blue on wargame maps – experience the most substantial losses in one scenario after another and still can’t thwart Russia or China – which predictably is red – from accomplishing their objectives: annihilating Western forces.

    “We lose a lot of people. We lose a lot of equipment. We usually fail to achieve our objective of preventing aggression by the adversary,” he warned.

    In the next military conflict, which some believe may come as soon as the mid-2020s, all five battlefield domains: land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace, will be heavily contested, suggesting the U.S. could have a difficult time in achieving superiority as it has in prior conflicts.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    The simulated war games showed, the “red” aggressor force often destroys U.S. F-35 Lightning II stealth fighters on the runway, sends several Naval fleets to the depths, destroys US military bases, and through electronic warfare, takes control of critical military communication systems. In short, a gruesome, if simulated, annihilation of some of the most modern of US forces.

    “In every case I know of,” said Robert Work, a former deputy secretary of defense with years of wargaming experience, “the F-35 rules the sky when it’s in the sky, but it gets killed on the ground in large numbers.”

    So, as Russia and China develop fifth-generation fighters and hypersonic missiles, “things that rely on sophisticated base infrastructures like runways and fuel tanks are going to have a hard time,” Ochmanek said. “Things that sail on the surface of the sea are going to have a hard time.”

    “That’s why the 2020 budget coming out next week retires the carrier USS Truman decades early and cuts two amphibious landing ships, as we’ve reported. It’s also why the Marine Corps is buying the jump-jet version of the F-35, which can take off and land from tiny, ad hoc airstrips, but how well they can maintain a high-tech aircraft in low-tech surroundings is an open question,” said Breaking Defense.

    Meanwhile, speaking purely hypothetically of course, “if we went to war in Europe, there would be one Patriot battery moving, and it would go to Ramstein. And that’s it,” Work complained. The US has 58 Brigade Combat Teams across the continent but doesn’t have anti-air and missile-defense capabilities required to handle a barrage of missiles from Russia.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    RAND also war-gamed cyber and electronic attacks in the simulations, Work said; Russia and China tend to cripple US communication networks.

    “Whenever we have an exercise and the red force really destroys our command and control, we stop the exercise,” Work said without a trace of humor. Beijing calls this “system destruction warfare,” Work said. They aim to “attack the American battle network at all levels, relentlessly, and they practice it all the time.”

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    The Air Force asked RAND to formulate a plan several years ago to improve the outcomes of the wargames in favor of the US, Ochmanek said. “We found it impossible to spend more than $8 billion a year” to fix the problems. 

    “That’s $8 billion for the Air Force. Triple that to cover for the Army and the Navy Department (which includes the US Marines),” Ochmanek said, “and you get $24 billion.”

    Work was less concerned about the near-term risk of war, and he said, China and Russia aren’t ready to fight because their modernization efforts have not been completed. He said any major conflict is unlikely for another 10 to 20 years from now.

    He said “$24 billion a year for the next five years would be a good expenditure” to prepare the military for World War III.

    RAND offers a sobering assessment that America could lose a multi-front war in the future, which is quite shocking considering that the US spent nearly three times as much as the second biggest war power, China, did in 2017.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    With the defense budget stuck around $700 billion per annum for the remainder of President Trump’s term, America’s Warhawks are inciting fear through simulated wargames with one purpose only: demand more taxpayers’ money for war spending.

  • Greenwald: Coordinated Lie Over Maduro Burning Aid Trucks Reveals How Fake News Spreads

    Authored by Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept

    NYT’s Exposé on the Lies About Burning Humanitarian Trucks in Venezuela Shows How US Govt and Media Spread Fake News

    EVERY MAJOR U.S. WAR of the last several decades has begun the same way: the U.S. Government fabricates an inflammatory, emotionally provocative lie which large U.S. media outlets uncritically treat as truth while refusing at air questioning or dissent, thus inflaming primal anger against the country the U.S. wants to attack. That’s how we got the Vietnam War (North Vietnam attacks U.S. ships in the Gulf of Tonkin); the Gulf War (Saddam ripped babies from incubators); and, of course, the war in Iraq (Saddam had WMDs and formed an alliance with Al Qaeda).

    This was exactly the tactic used on February 23, when the narrative shifted radically in favor of those U.S. officials who want regime change operations in Venezuela. That’s because images were broadcast all over the world of trucks carrying humanitarian aid burning in Colombia on the Venezuela border. U.S. officials who have been agitating for a regime change war in Venezuela – Marco Rubio, John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, the head of USAid Mark Green – used Twitter to spread classic Fake News: they vehemently stated that the trucks were set on fire, on purpose, by President Nicolas Maduro’s forces.

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    As it always does – as it always has done from its inception when Wolf Blitzer embedded with U.S. troops – CNN led the way in not just spreading these government lies but independently purporting to vouch for their truth. On February 24, CNN told the world what we all now know is an absolute lie:  that “a CNN team saw incendiary devices from police on the Venezuelan side of the border ignite the trucks,” though it generously added that “the network’s journalists are unsure if the trucks were burned on purpose.”

    Other media outlets endorsed the lie while at least avoiding what CNN did by personally vouching for it. “Humanitarian aid destined for Venezuela was set on fire, seemingly by troops loyal to Mr Maduro,” The Telegraph claimed. The BBC uncritically printed: “There have also been reports of several aid trucks being burned – something Mr Guaidó said was a violation of the Geneva Convention.”

    That lie – supported by incredibly powerful video images – changed everything. Ever since, that Maduro burned trucks filled with humanitarian aid was repeated over and over as proven fact on U.S. news outlets. Immediately after it was claimed, politicians who had been silent on the issue of Venezuela or even reluctant to support regime change began issuing statements now supportive of it. U.S. news stars and think tank luminaries who lack even a single critical brain cell when it comes to war-provoking claims from U.S. officials took a leading role in beating the war drums without spending even a single second to ask whether what they were being told were true:

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    But on Saturday night, the New York Times published a detailed video and accompanying article proving that this entire story was a lie. The humanitarian trucks were not set on fire by Maduro’s forces. They were set on fire by anti-Maduro protesters who threw a molotov cocktail that hit one of the trucks. And the NYT’s video traces how the lie spread: from U.S. officials who baselessly announced that Maduro burned them to media outlets that mindlessly repeated the lie.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    While the NYT’s article and video are perfectly good and necessary journalism, the credit they are implicitly claiming for themselves for exposing this lie is totally undeserved. That’s because independent journalists – the kind who question rather than mindlessly repeat government claims and are therefore mocked and marginalized and kept off mainstream television – used exactly this same evidence on the day of the incident to debunk the lies being told by Rubio, Pompeo, Bolton and CNN.On February 24, the day the lie spread, Max Blumenthal wrote from Venezuela, on the independent reporting Grazyzone site, that “the claim was absurd on its face,” noting that he “personally witnessed tear gas canisters hit every kind of vehicle imaginable in the occupied Palestinian West Bank, and I have never seen a fire like the one that erupted on the Santander bridge.” He compiled substantial evidence strongly suggesting that the trucks were set ablaze by anti-Maduro protesters, including Bloomberg video showing them using Molotov cocktails, to express serious doubts about the mainstream narrative. On Twitter, in response to Marco Rubio’s lie, he wrote:

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Meanwhile, others – who use their brains to critically evaluate what the U.S. Government says when it’s trying to start a new war, rather than mindlessly recite those claims as Truth, as U.S. media stars do – used the exact same evidence cited by the NYT last night to show that it was anti-Maduro protesters, not Maduro troops, who set the trucks on fire. But they were able to do it in the hours immediately following the incident, not three weeks later – but, needless to say, they were ignored by U.S. media outlets:

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

     

    Those last two tweets – using video footage to debunk the lies spread by Marco Rubio, CNN and the U.S. Government – happen to be from a correspondent with RT America. Please tell me: who was acting here as lying propagandists and agents of State TV, and who was acting like a journalist trying to understand and report the truth?

    So everything the New York Times so proudly reported last night has been known for weeks, and was already reported in great detail, using extensive evidence, by a large number of people. But because those people are generally skeptical of the U.S. Government’s claims and critical of its foreign policy, they were ignored and mocked and are generally barred from appearing on television, while the liars from the U.S. Government and their allies in the corporate media were, as usual, given a platform to spread their lies without any challenge or dissent, just like the manual for how to maintain State TV intructs.

    Indeed, none of the people questioning the original claim about the burning trucks, or citing this evidence to argue that the U.S. Government and its Venezuelan ally Guaidó were lying, ever made it onto national television to present their dissent. They weren’t allowed on. To the extent they were acknowledged at all, it was to defame them as Maduro apologists – for telling the truth – just as those who tried to combat the propaganda of 2002 and 2003 were smeared as being pro-Saddam. Only Rubio, Bolton, Pompeo, and various other U.S. officials were permitted to spread their lies without any challenge.

    That’s particularly notable since the Russian Government, a long-time ally of the Maduro government, themselves published the evidence showing this was a lie. Claims from the Russian or Venezuelan governments deserves as much skepticism as the claims of any other government, but they at least deserve to be heard. But the corporate U.S. media – precisely because it is State TV even as it is loves to accuse others of being that – never airs the views of governments adverse to the U.S. Government except in the most cursory and mocking way:

    It should be noted that this is not the first time outrights lies were spread by the U.S. Government and the U.S. media to inflame regime change against Venezuela. A photograph of a bridge between Colombia and Venezuela was broadcast all over the world as proof that Maduro was blocking humanitarian aid.

    But the CBC – to their great credit – published a long apology noting that they, too, had fallen for this propaganda by publishing the photo of the bridge to support this narrative when, in fact, that bridge had been closed years earlier due to tensions between the two countries. Few, if any, of the U.S. media outlets that spread that lie offered a similar correction or apology.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Equally false is the widespread, popular media claim that Maduro has refused to allow any humanitarian aid to enter Venezuela. That, too, is an outright lie. The Venezuelan government has allowed substantial amountsof aid into their country from countries that have not threatened to overthrow the President with an external coup; Maduro has only blocked trucks and planes from entering that come from those countries (the U.S, Brazil, Colombia) that have been threatening Venezuela. something any country would do.

    Indeed, both the Red Cross and the United Nations expressed concerns about “humanitarian aid” from the U.S. on the ground that it was a pretext for regime change and would politicize humanitarian aid). Even NPR recognized that “the U.S. effort to distribute tons of food and medicine to needy Venezuelans is more than just a humanitarian mission. The operation is also designed to foment regime change in Venezuela — which is why much of the international aid community wants nothing to do with it.”

    That concern is obviously valid given the history of Elliott Abrams, the envoy leading U.S. policy in Venezuela, of exploiting “humanitarian aid” as a scam to smuggle weapons and other tools to overthrow Latin American governments he dislikes – another fact rarely if ever mentioned in U.S. media reports.

     

    What we have here is classic Fake News – spread on Twitter, by U.S. officials and U.S. media stars – with the clear and malicious intent to start a war. But no western proponents of social media censorship will call for their accounts to be cancelled nor call for their posts to be deleted. That’s because “Fake News” and the war against it is strictly a means of combating propaganda by U.S. adversaries; the U.S. and its alliesmaintain extensive programs to spread Fake News online and none of those anti-Fake News crusaders call for those to be shut down.

    And the next time claims are made about Venezuela designed to fuel regime change and wars, the independent journalists and analysts who were absolutely right in this instance – who recognized and documented the lies of the U.S. Government weeks before the New York Times did – will again be ignored or, at best, mocked. Meanwhile, those in the media and Foreign Policy Community who uncritically amplified and spread this dangerous lie will be treated as the Serious People whose pronouncements are the only ones worth hearing. With rare exception, dissent on Venezuela will continue to be barred.

    That’s because the U.S. media, by design, does not permit dissent on U.S. foreign policy, particularly when it comes to false claims about U.S. adversaries. That’s why skeptics of U.S. regime change in Venezuela, or dissenters on the prevailing orthodoxies about Russia, have largely been disappeared from mainstream media outlets, just as they were in 2002 and 2003.

    That’s not because U.S. media stars are ordered to do this. They don’t need to be ordered. They know propaganda is their job. More to the point, they are über-patriotic jingoists who revere U.S. officials and thus do not possess a single cell of critical thinking in their brain. That’s why they have TV programs in the first place. If they weren’t this way, they wouldn’t be on TV, as Noam Chomsky put it to the BBC’s Andrew Marr so perfectly in this short clip from many years ago (the whole three-minute context, well worth watching, is here). This tells the whole story of this sordid affair in Venezuela:

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jshttps://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jshttps://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jshttps://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jshttps://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jshttps://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  • Brookings Says China Overstated Size Of Its Economy By 12%

    Since China managed to weather the fallout from the financial crisis without registering much of a slowdown in its “official” GDP figures, playing “guess the real growth rate” has become one of the most popular parlor games among the professional economist set. Whereas the stakes are much higher for academics on the mainland (one of whom was censored and threatened by government thugs after speculating that GDP growth on the mainland might be closer to 2%), researchers at American think tanks have freely offered estimates ranging from 2% to 4% (which, admittedly, would still put China well ahead of the US).

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>China

    But as investors and economists once again cast a wary eye toward China as signs of flagging growth are once again threatening to sink the whole world into a recession, a team of researchers from the Brookings Institute has published a carefully researched paper detailing the exact mechanism by which authorities in Beijing inflate the country’s GDP figures, while estimating that China’s economy is roughly 12% smaller than the official figures would suggest. Brookings published the paper on Thursday, just two days after Party leaders at the annual National Party Congress lowered their economic growth forecast to between 6% and 6.5% of GDP.

    Though the paper focused on the period between 2008 and 2016, it’s the latest evidence that China’s economic slowdown has been more severe than believed, and that the growth rate from last year – China’s worst since the early 1990s – might, in reality, be just under 6% (compared with 6.6%).

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>China

    According to Brookings, much of the manipulation in Chinese official government statistics takes place at the local level. In what the FT described as “a legacy of Maoist state planning”, authorities in Beijing hand down growth targets to local officials, who use it to goalseek the official statistics they hand back.

    “China’s national accounts are based on data collected by local governments. However, since local governments are rewarded for meeting growth and investment targets, they have an incentive to skew local statistics. China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) adjusts the data provided by local governments to calculate GDP at the national level,” the study’s authors said.

    Evidence of this is relatively obvious: Year after year, the sum total of China’s provincial growth figures is larger than the unadjusted national figures reported by Beijing. Though central authorities accused three provinces of doctoring their data back in 2017, authorities have done little else to discourage the practice.

    Inflated data in hand, China’s National Bureau of Statistics struggles to adjust it, and though readings before 2008 were reportedly more accurate, more recently, the figures have been further off the mark, according to Brookings.

    “NBS has done a lot of work to weed out the fake numbers added by local government, but it just doesn’t have enough power and capacity, nor the right incentives,” Michael Zheng Song, economics professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and a co-author of the paper, told the FT. “It would be unfair to blame NBS for fabricating GDP numbers.”

    So, now that we’ve once again affirmed what many have widely suspected, what does this mean for US-China trade talks? Well, it would seem to confirm the argument made by an FT columnist earlier this week that President Xi has just as much to lose from a failed trade deal as President Trump.

    Here are a few other conclusions from the paper:

    • Official data overstated growth of nominal GDP by an average of 1.7% per year between 2008 and 2016
    • This made the economy 12% smaller in 2016 than figured indicated
    • GDP growth in real terms was overstated by 2% over the same period
    • The paper’s authors are more confident about GDP data in nominal terms versus real terms
    • Overstatement of industrial and investment output were the most severe
    • Data on consumption was found to be the most reliable

    But with authorities anxious to suppress any information that would contradict their economic narrative, we now wait to see whether Beijing will declare former Fed Chair and Brookings Institute economist Ben Bernanke (along with the study’s authors) ‘persona non grata’.

Digest powered by RSS Digest

Mar 10

Today’s News 10th March 2019

  • Intelligence Contractors Make Second Attempt In One Week To Provoke Tensions With North Korea

    Authored by William Craddick via Disobedient Media,

    It’s the second, but no less ludicrous, attempt in one week to sway the opinion of the public and President Donald Trump against the concept of denuclearization and peaceful dialogue with North Korea.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    A March 8, 2019 report from National Public Radio (NPR) follows another by NBC News with sensational and misleading claims that satellite imagery released by private corporations with contractual ties to government defense and intelligence agencies show imminent preparations by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) to engage in missile testing or the launch of a satellite from their facilities in Sanumdong, North Korea. An examination of the photos provided shows absolutely no indication of such activity.

    I. Satellite Footage Of Sanumdong Facility Shows No Sign Of Imminent Launch

    Images provided to NPR by private contractor DigitalGlobe consist of two low resolution images, one of a building in the Sanumdong complex and the other of a train sitting along a rail line. In neither photo is there any discernible amount of unusual activity.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Credit: Image ©2019 DigitalGlobe, Inc. Graphic: Alyson Hurt/NPR

    The first image of a “production hall” bears a striking resemblance to a similar photo run by the Washington Post in July 2018 where unnamed intelligence officials claimed that North Korea was building one or possibly two liquid fueled ICBMs which appear to have never materialized or been used in any launch. The claims came one month after President Trump met with Chairman Kim Jong Un in Singapore for a historic summit between the United States and the DPRK.

    NPR’s claims that the imagery shows “vehicle activity” occurring around the facility. Yet close inspection shows that the “activity” consists of a few inert vehicles, which appear to be a white pickup and white dump truck or flatbed parked in a permanent position next to piles of metal. The scene does not appear to be different from any number of sleepy yards of businesses that can be examined by members of the public on Google Maps.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Credit: Image ©2019 DigitalGlobe, Inc. Graphic: Koko Nakajima/NPR

    The second image, according to NPR, shows rail cars sitting “in a nearby rail yard, where two cranes are also erected.” The photo simply shows a train car sitting inert with empty flatbed cars and hopper cars that are either filled with coal or empty. A second rail line similarly holds a number of hoppers and flatbed cars. Hopper cars in particular are totally unsuitable for the transportation of military technology such as missiles.

    The tracks in the lower left corner are covered in snow, meaning that the train sat for many months through the winter or was backed into its position. Considering that US and international sanctions have caused an extreme scarcity of fuel in the DPRK it is likely that the trains have not moved for quite some time, unless their diesel engines were converted to burn coal or wood.

    In short, there is absolutely no indication that several low resolution photos of a facility in North Korea have any activity in them outside of a few rusting vehicles that have sat without moving for some time.

    II. NPR’s Sources Of Satellite Imagery Are Contractors For The CIA And Pentagon

    The report by NPR lists two sources of satellite imagery – DigitalGlobe, Inc. and Planet Labs, Inc. As Disobedient Media has previously reported, DigitalGlobe is an American vendor of satellite imagery founded by a scientist who worked on the US military’s Star Wars ICBM defense program under President Ronald Reagan. DigitalGlobe began its existence in Oakland, CA and was seeded with money from Silicon Valley sources and corporations in North America, Europe and Japan. Headquartered in Westminster CO, DigitalGlobe works extensively with defense and intelligence programs. In 2016, it was revealed that DigitalGlobe was working with CIA chipmaker NVIDIA and Amazon Web Services to create an AI-run satellite surveillance network known as Spacenet.

    Planet Labs is a private satellite imaging corporation based in San Francisco, CA that allows customers with the money to pay an opportunity to gain access to next generation surveillance capabilities. In February 2016, Federal technology news source Nextgov noted a statement from former CIA Information Operations Center director and senior cyber adviser Sue Gordon that Planet Labs, DigitalGlobe and Google subsidiary Skybox Imaging were all working with the Pentagon’s National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) to provide location intelligence. Planet Labs’ own website also lists press releases detailing past contracts for subscription access to high resolution imagery with the NGA.

    *  *  *

    The pervasive involvement of intelligence agencies and defense contractors in attempts to undermine negotiations with North Korea does not create confidence in the already shaky claims made by NPR regarding alleged preparations by the DPRK to participate in a missile launch.

    These contentions are not supported in substance by any tangible facts. As claims and pressure continue to build on President Donald Trump to abandon the peace process, there are multiple factions of the United States government who are running a real risk of behaving in manners which could be interpreted as open sedition or refusal to carry out the stated goals and policies of the President.

  • Self-Proclaimed "Nerd" Wins $10,000 After Discovering Hidden Contest In Insurance Contract

    Self-proclaimed nerd Donelan Andrews of Thomaston, Georgia won $10,000 after discovering a hidden contest in the often-ignored fine print of a travel insurance contract bought from Tin Leg, a subsidiary of Florida-based Squaremouth. 

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    “If you’ve read this far, then you are one of the very few Tin Leg customers to review all of their policy documentation,” the fine print read. “We estimate that less than 1 percent of travelers that purchase a travel insurance policy actually read all of their policy information — and we’re working to change that.”

    To Andrews – the first person to win the hidden contest out of 73 policies sent out a day earlier, reading the fine print comes naturally. 

    “I always read all the fine print,” according to the Washington Post, which noted that her college major was consumer economics. “I know I sound like a nerd, but I learned to read contracts so you don’t get taken advantage of.” 

    According to Andrews, her friends and family aren’t surprised. 

    “Most of the comments from people who know me have been, ‘that doesn’t surprise me at all, you’re that kind of person,” she said. “Particularly in my family, I’m the one who gets things straight.”

    The contest reminded the 59-year-old Andrews of an old trick she’s used on her high school students. 

    She thought back to the days when she used to write high school tests, and she’d sneak in a bonus for students who carefully read the instructions. For example, the fourth sentence of test instructions would say something like: Circle the number 10 three times for 10 extra points. –Washington Post

    “About a third of the class would read it and the rest would get mad,” she said. “The lesson they learned is they need to read the directions.”

    The day after Andrews discovered the contest on Feb. 12 and emailed Squaremouth, a company representative contacted An and said she’d won $10,000. 

    “It was my lucky day” 

    In addition to the $10,000 Andrews won, Squaremouth donated an additional $20,000; $5,000 to each of the Georgia schools she works for, and $10,000 to children’s literacy charity “Reading Is Fundamental.” 

  • Mueller's Manafort Scam: 4 Years In The Slammer For Helping Ukraine Against Russia!

    Authored by Andrew McCarthy via The National Review,

    Paul Manafort Was an Agent of Ukraine, Not Russia

    He is a scoundrel, but he was never a Kremlin operative.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Paul Manafort, the clandestine agent of Russia at the heart of the Trump campaign’s “collusion” scand – oh, wait.

    Have you ever noticed what Paul Manafort’s major crime was? After two years of investigation, after the predawn raid in which his wife was held at gunpoint, after months of solitary confinement that have left him a shell of his former self, have you noticed what drew the militant attention of the Obama Justice Department, the FBI, and, ultimately, a special counsel who made him the centerpiece of Russia-gate?

    According to the indictment Robert Mueller filed against him, Manafort was an unregistered “agent of the Government of Ukraine.” He also functioned as an agent of Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine’s president from 2010 to 2014, and of two political parties, the Party of Regions and its successor, the Opposition Bloc.

    Manafort was not an unregistered agent of Russia. Mueller never alleged that Manafort was a clandestine operative of the Kremlin. He worked for Ukraine, not Putin. Indeed, for much of his time in Ukraine, he pushed his clients against Putin’s interests.

    Mueller’s prosecutors looked on glumly Thursday as Manafort was sentenced to a mere 47 months’ imprisonment by Judge T. S. Ellis III of the federal court in Alexandria, Va. After rescinding the cooperation agreement they had extended Manafort following his convictions at trial, Mueller’s team had pressed for a sentence of up to 24 years for the 70-year-old former Trump campaign chairman. The judge demurred, pointedly observing that Manafort was “not before this court for anything having to do with collusion with the Russian government to influence [the 2016] election.”

    The prosecutors won’t be chagrined long, of course. Against Manafort, one case with a potential century of jail time was not enough. There’s a case in Washington, too. There, Manafort will be sentenced next week, by a different judge who will surely impose a sentence more to the special counsel’s liking. The knowledge of that, more than anything else, explains Judge Ellis’s comparative wrist-slap, which ignored sentencing guidelines that called for a severe prison term.

    Those guidelines were driven by prodigious financial fraud, not espionage. No one has even alleged espionage — even though the investigation was aggressive, even though the two indictments charge numerous felonies, and even though Mueller has had as his star informant witness Manafort’s longtime sidekick, Richard Gates, a fellow fraudster who was deeply involved in his partner’s work for foreign governments.

    Understand:

    Paul Manafort would never have been prosecuted if he had not joined Donald Trump’s campaign. He would not have been prosecuted if Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 election and spared Democrats the need to conjure up a reason to explain their defeat – something other than nominating a lousy candidate who stopped campaigning too early.

    Manafort’s Ukrainian work was not a secret. By the time of the 2016 campaign, he’d been at it for over a dozen years. He wasn’t alone. Not even close. An array of American political consultants flocked to post-Soviet Ukraine because that’s where the money was. Manafort worked for the Party of Regions, led by Yanukovych. The Obama consultants worked for Yanukovych’s rival, Yulia Tymoshenko — the populist-socialist who sometimes colluded with Putin and other times posed as his opponent. The Clinton consultants lined up with Viktor Yuschenko, Putin’s generally pro-Western bête noire, who was nearly assassinated by Kremlin operatives and who navigated between east and west.

    What you may already notice is that Ukraine is complicated. That collusion narrative you’ve been sold since November 8, 2016? It’s a caricature.

    The people peddling it know that Americans are clueless about the intricacies of politics in a former Soviet satellite and the grubby bipartisan cesspool of international political consultancy. You are thus to believe that the Party of Regions was nothing but a cat’s paw of Moscow; that Manafort went to work for Yanukovych, the party’s Putin puppet; and that Manafort’s entrée into the Trump campaign was a Kremlin coup, a Russian plot to control of the White House.

    Sure. But then . . . where’s the collusion charge? If that’s what happened, where is the special counsel’s big indictment of a Trump–Russia conspiracy, with Manafort at its core?

    There is no such case because the collusion narrative distorts reality.

    Manafort is not a good guy. He did business and made lots of money with Ukrainian and Russian oligarchs who, largely through their organized-crime connections, made their fortunes in the post-Soviet gangster-capitalism era, when the spoils of an empire were up for grabs.

    Manafort got himself deeply in hock with some of these tycoons. He may owe over $25 million to Oleg Deripaska, a Russian aluminum magnate. Deripaska, you’ve repeatedly been told, is Putin’s oligarch. That may be true — they are close enough for Putin to have intervened on his behalf when the U.S. government imposed travel restrictions. But former senator Bob Dole intervened on Deripaska’s behalf, too. So did the FBI, when they thought Deripaska could help them rescue an agent detained in Iran. So did Christopher Steele, the former British spy of Steele-dossier infamy.

    Having business with Deripaska did not make Manafort a Russian spy. No more than taking $500,000 from a Kremlin-tied bank made Bill Clinton a Russian spy. For a quarter century, the United States government encouraged commerce with Russia, notwithstanding that it is anti-American and run like a Mafia family. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton worked with the Putin regime to develop Moscow’s version of Silicon Valley. Business with Russia was like what the Clintons used to tell us about lies about sex: Everybody does it.

    Manafort’s business eventually soured. There is good reason to believe that, once he was installed as chairman of the Trump campaign — when Trump looked like a sure GOP-nomination winner and general-election loser — Manafort tried to monetize his position of influence. He hoped to make himself “whole,” as he put it, by demonstrating that he was once again a political force to be reckoned with — offering Deripaska briefings on the campaign, offering his Ukrainian oligarch benefactors polling data showing that Trump had a real chance to win.

    Manafort likes the high life. Running with this crowd helped him live it, and helped him hide most of his money overseas, in accounts he could stealthily access without sharing his millions with the taxman.

    But all that said, Manafort was not a Russian agent. Even Robert Mueller, who went after him hammer and tongs, never accused him of that.

    When his Ukrainian oligarch sponsors asked him to take Yanukovych on as a client, Manafort was reluctant. Yanukovych was essentially a thug who grew up in the Soviet system. The corruption of the 2004 presidential election, which Yanukovych’s Kremlin-backed supporters tried to steal, ignited Kiev’s Orange Revolution. Manafort, a cold-blooded Republican operative who had cut his teeth fighting off the Reagan revolution in the 1976 Ford campaign, calculated that Yanukovych was damaged goods.

    But in the shadowy world of international political consultancy, money talks and scruple walks. Manafort’s oligarch patrons made the Regions reconstruction project worth his while. He remade Yanukovych from the ground up: Learn English, warm to Europe, embrace integration in the European Union, endorse competitive democracy, be the candidate of both EU-leaning Kiev and Russia-leaning Donbas.

    This was not a Putin agenda. It was an agenda for Ukraine, a country with a split personality that needs cordial relations with the neighborhood bully to the east as it fitfully lurches westward. Regions was a pro-Russia party, but that is not the same thing as being Russia. What the oligarchs want is autonomy so they can run their profitable fiefdoms independent of Kiev. They leverage Moscow against the EU . . . except when they talk up EU integration to ensure that they are not swallowed up by Moscow. What the oligarchs mainly are is corrupt, which suited Manafort fine.

    The unsavory business was successful for a time. Regions returned to power. Yanukovych finally won the presidency and immediately announced that “integration with the EU remains our strategic aim.” It was a triumph for Manafort, but a short-lived one. While Yanukovych rhapsodized about rising to Western standards, he ran his administration in the Eastern authoritarian style, enriching his allies and imprisoning his rivals.

    The latter included Tymoshenko, who was prosecuted over a gas deal she had entered when she was prime minister — with Putin. Russia bitterly criticized her prosecution, and when she was sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment, the Kremlin blasted Yanukovych’s government for pursuing her “exclusively for political motives.” Manafort, meanwhile, continued to airbrush Yanukovych’s image in the West, scheming with lobbyists and a law firm to help him defend the controversial Tymoshenko trial — a scheme abetted by lawyer Alex van der Zwaan, who eventually pled guilty to making false statements to Mueller’s investigators.

    Yanukovych’s moment of truth came in late 2013. He was poised to sign the Association Agreement with the EU, a framework for integration. Putin furiously turned up the heat: blocking Ukrainian imports, drastically reducing Ukrainian exports, bleeding billions of trade dollars from Kiev’s economy, threatening to cut off all gas supplies and drive Ukraine into default. Manafort pleaded with his client to stick with the EU. Yanukovych caved, however, declining to enter the Association Agreement and making an alternative pact with Putin to assure gas supplies and financial aid.

    It was over this decision that the Euromaidan protests erupted. Yanukovych fled the country in early 2014, given sanctuary in Moscow. Subsequently, Regions renounced Yanukovych, blaming him for the outbreak of violence and for looting the treasury. The party disbanded, with many of its members reemerging as the Opposition Bloc, the party to which Manafort gravitated — along with his partner, Konstantin Kilimnik, and his lobbyist associate, W. Samuel Patten. (Like Manafort, Patten has pled guilty to working as an unregistered agent of Ukraine; Kilimnik, who is in Russia, was indicted by Mueller for helping Manafort tamper with witnesses.)

    Paul Manafort is a scoundrel. He was willing to do most anything for money – even offering to burnish Putin’s image as he burnished Yanukovych’s. But Manafort was never a Kremlin operative working against his own country, except in the fever dreams of the Clinton campaign’s Steele dossier. And his crimes notwithstanding, he’d be a free man today if Mrs. Clinton had won. Instead, he’ll be sentenced yet again next week. And this time, he’ll get slammed.

  • NYC's Chrysler Building To Sell At Massive Discount

    Signa Holding, Austria’s largest privately owned real estate company, has reached an agreement to purchase the iconic Chrysler Building in New York City in partnership with property firm RFR Holding for about $150 million, according to Reuters.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    The price is at a steep discount compared to the $800 million the Abu Dhabi Investment Council paid for a 90% stake in the building right before the 2008 financial crisis. Shortly after the investment arm of the Government of Abu Dhabi bought the property, commercial real estate prices crashed.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Sources told Reuters that the deal includes both the office building and the pyramid-topped Trylons on the land between the tower and 666 Third Avenue.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    The Art Deco–style skyscraper, was completed in 1930 on the East Side of Midtown Manhattan in New York City. It is a recognizable symbol of Manhattan’s skyline, was for a short time in the early 1930s the tallest building in the world, only to be surpassed by the Empire State Building.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    The most significant factor weighing on the price is out of control expenses tied to the building’s ground lease. The land under the tower is owned by the Cooper Union school, which raised the rent to $32.5 million last year from $7.75 million in 2017.

    “The ground lease is a glaringly obvious negative,” Adelaide Polsinelli, a broker at New York City-based Compass, told Bloomberg. “The other negatives are that the space is not new and it is landmarked, therefore it’s twice as hard to get anything done.”

    Tishman Speyer Properties and the Travelers Insurance Group bought the Chrysler Building in 1998 for about $230 million. In 2001, a 75% stake in the building was sold, for $300 million to TMW, the German arm of an Atlanta-based investment fund. Abu Dhabi bought the German fund’s share as well as part of Tishman’s in June 2008. Reuters said Signa and RFR were extremely close to a deal to purchase the tower.

    Signa has an extensive portfolio of landmark buildings in prime locations. Its holdings include KaDeWe and the Upper West Tower in Berlin, Goldenes Quarter with the Park Hyatt Hotel in Vienna, Alte Akademie in Munich, and Alsterhaus and Alsterarkaden in Hamburg.

    RFR has also made a name for itself in commercial real estate by owning and managing some of Manhattan’s most prestigious commercial properties, including the Seagram Building and Lever House, which are located on Park Avenue.

    Signa and RFR had completed several deals together in the past,  including in 2017, when Signa bought five landmark properties from RFR in Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt, and Munich for about 1.5 billion euros.

  • Seven Things Saudi Women Still Can't Do, Despite Driving Ban Lift

    Authored by Nadine Dahan via Middle East Eye,

    In a decree issued in September 2017, Saudi King Salman ruled that women would be allowed to drive cars in 2018, a move which ended the kingdom’s status as the only country in the world where it was forbidden.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Saudi’s law against women drivers was one of many controversial laws presenting a web of restrictions to women.

    Saudi women are required to get permission from a male family member, sometimes even a younger brother, for some of the most important decisions of her life.

    And whilst they are now allowed to drive, here is a list of things Saudi women still can’t do:

    1. Eat freely in public

    As part of the kingdom’s dress code, women are required to wear a face veil. This, whilst selectively enforced, means that wherever it is, women must then eat under their face veil.

    2. Dress ‘for beauty’

    They must cover their hair and bodies. The kingdom’s dress code requires women to wear an “abaya,” a dress-like full length cloak.

    3. Freely socialise with non-relative males

    Women are not free to socialise with men outside of their immediate families, and can even be imprisoned for committing such an offence.

    4. Marry whomever they like

    There are rulings against Saudi marrying non-Muslim, Shia, or atheist men.

    5. Travel

    Travelling without a male guardian’s permission is prohibited.

    6. Open a bank account

    In Saudi Arabia, women still need their husband’s permission before they are allowed to open a bank account.

    7. Get a job

    Although the government no longer requires a woman to have a guardian’s permission in order to work, many employers still demand the permission before hiring.

    The struggle for greater women’s rights in the kingdom has been a difficult one, with activists arrested for defying the driving ban last year. In recent months, a model was arrested for wearing a short skirt.

  • Chaos Continues At Tesla As Company Now "Freezing" Store Closures And Layoffs

    When even the pro-Tesla crowd at electrek begins to describe the company’s sales strategy transition as “chaotic”, you know there’s real problems afoot for Elon Musk and his merry band of world changers. This happened following reports that Tesla was “freezing current store closures” less than two weeks after telling the public that it would close most of its retail locations in a move to try and cut costs. 

    Employees are being told that Tesla is freezing both store closures and layoffs “until at least the end of the month”. Tesla has reportedly already closed 29 stores between the U.S. and Canada, following the February 28 announcement. Sales management at the company reportedly held a conference call with regional management last Friday, indicating to them that the company was stopping short on any more closures or layoffs until the end of the month.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Some retail stores that didn’t close were told to stop booking test drives last week. On Friday, some of them were prompted to go back to “business as usual”, despite retail employees not having access to commission and bonuses, resulting in far lower compensation. Many employees are “walking away” due to the pay cut and some suspect that Tesla is suspending the transition period for store closures simply to push out employees, in order to avoid paying them severance. 

    Tesla currently owes lease obligations of $1.6 billion, with $1.1 billion due between now and 2023, the Wall Street Journal reported earlier. This includes payments for store leases, galleries and real estate abroad. Robert Taubman, chief executive officer of Taubman Centers Inc., is quoted as saying at the Citi 2019 Global Property CEO conference: “Tesla is a company with a viable balance sheet that is going to owe a lot of landlords a lot of money.”

    The decision to close down all of its retail stores and move to an online-only sales model surprised many of the company’s employees and investors. For instance, we pointed out one investor who sold his shares in the company as a result of being blindsided by the news.

    “This was a total 180-degree turn. Tesla had been talking about expanding stores, and all of a sudden they are closing them. To me, this signals a huge financial concern and a possible cash-flow issue for Tesla,” former investor in Tesla, Alex Chalekian, said.

    It pains me to say this, since I really love the company, but we have sold our position in #Tesla for our advisory clients. I believe that the decision to close retail stores is a bad one and points to the weakness in sales and financial strength of the company. $TSLA

    — Alex Chalekian (@AlexChalekian) March 1, 2019

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Members of the media were equally as stunned.

    This is not an adjustment to strategy. This is a total reversal. They had a retail plan 2 months ago and concluded they had to tear the whole thing up and come up with a radical new plan. What does that say about the company? @elonmusk @tesla https://t.co/3k04m0pW5i

    — Neal Boudette (@nealboudette) March 1, 2019

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Tesla was “negotiating and signing leases” as recently as last month, according to executives at Taubman and Macerich.

    It’s estimated that a “few hundred” employees have already been laid off with severance. The remaining ones have viewed this freeze as an “opportunity to prove themselves” – so it’s probably a good time to avoid a trip into your local Tesla showroom, in order to avoid the “hard sell” that Tesla hated so much about the traditional dealer model to begin with. 

    For now, we’ll just leave you with electrek’s take:

    This is a chaotic situation for retail employees who are left in the dark for the most part.

    It’s either turning into what feels like an extremely poorly managed, haphazard transition or it is intentionally made that way to push out employees like some are suspecting.

    It is hard to say which is worse. Probably the latter, which would reek of corporate greed and would be disappointing to see from Tesla.

  • Bruce Ohr's Testimony Contradicts Testimony Provided By Rosenstein And Simpson

    Authored by Sara Carter,

    Department of Justice senior official Bruce Ohr’s testimony contradicts testimony given by other senior government officials and key witnesses who testified before Congress regarding the FBI’s investigation into President Trump’s 2016 campaign and alleged collusion with the Russian government, according to the full transcripts released Friday.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Ohr’s 268-page testimony, released by Republican member of the House Judiciary Committee Georgia Rep. Doug Collins, reveals inconsistency and contradiction in testimony given by Glenn Simpson, founder of embattled research firm Fusion GPS and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who is set to leave his post sometime this month.

    It also reveals that many questions are still left unanswered.

    The Contradictions and The Revelations 

    1. Glenn Simpson suggests in his testimony to the Senate that he never spoke to anyone at the FBI about Christopher Steele, the former British spy he hired to investigate the Trump campaign during the election. However, Ohr suggests otherwise telling former Rep.Trey Gowdy under questioning “As I recall, and this is after checking with my notes, Mr. Simpson and I spoke in August of 2016. I met with him, and he provided some information on possible intermediaries between the Russian government and the Trump campaign.”

    2. In another instance, Simpson’s testimony also contradicts notes taken by Ohr after a meeting they had in December, 2016. Unverified allegations were decimated among the media that the Trump campaign had a computer server that was linked to a Russian bank in Moscow: Alpha Bank. Simpson suggested to the Senate that he knew very little about the Trump -Alpha Bank server story and couldn’t provide information. But Bruce Ohr’s own handwritten notes state that when he met with Simpson in December 2016, Simpson was concerned over the Alpha Bank story in the New York Times. “The New York Times story on Oct. 31 downplaying the connection between Alfa servers and the Trump campaign was incorrect. There was communication and it wasn’t spam,” stated Ohr’s notes. This suggests that Simpson was well aware of the story, which was believed by congressional investigators to have started from his research firm.

    3. Ohr testified to lawmakers that Simpson provided information to federal officials that was false regarding Cleta Mitchell, a well-known Republican campaign finance lawyer, and information regarding the National Rifle Association. Sean Davis, with the Federalist pointed this out in a tweet today. Read one of those stories here.

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    4. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein would not answer questions to lawmakers during testimony about when he learned that Ohr’s wife, Nellie Ohr, was working for Fusion GPS. Just check this out from Rep. Matt Gaetz’s interview with Judge Jeanine on Fox News.

    “Rod Rosenstein won’t tell us when he first learned that Nellie Ohr was working for Fusion GPS,” said Gaetz, in August, 2018.

    “So I want to know from Bruce Ohr, when did he tell his colleagues at the Department of Justice that in violation of law that required him to disclose his wife’s occupation his sources of income. He did not do that. So when did all of the other people at the Department of Justice find this out because Rod Rosenstein, I’ve asked him twice in open hearing and he will not give an answer. I think there’s a real smoking gun there.”

    However, in Ohr’s testimony he says he told the FBI about his wife’s role at Fusion GPS but only divulged his role to one person at the DOJ: Rosenstein. At the time, Rosenstein was overseeing the Trump-Russia probe, and had taken the information from Ohr and gave it to the FBI. Just read The Hill’s John Solomon full story here for the full background on Ohr’s testimony. I highlighted an important date below: remember Rosenstein wouldn’t answer lawmakers questions as to when he knew about Nellie Ohr. It also appears he failed to tell lawmakers about the information he delivered to the FBI.

    Ohr stated in his testimony: “What I had said, I think, to Mr. Rosenstein in October of 2017 was that my wife was working for Fusion GPS… The dossier, as I understand it, is the collection of reports that Chris Steele has prepared for Fusion GPS.”

    Ohr added: “My wife had separately done research on certain Russian people and companies or whatever that she had provided to Fusion GPS…But I don’t believe her information is reflected in the Chris Steele reports. They were two different chunks of information heading into Fusion GPS.”

    5. Ohr also told lawmakers in his testimony that the former British spy, Christopher Steele was being paid by the FBI at the same time he was getting paid by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC. However, there was another player paying Steele and it was a Russian oligarch named Oleg Deripaska. Deripaska, a tycoon connected to Russian President Vladimir Putin, had well known animus toward his former friend Paul Manafort.

    Rep. Mark Meadows asked Ohr during testimony “Did Chris Steele get paid by the Department of Justice?

    Ohr’s response: “My understanding is that for a time he was a source for the FBI, a paid source.

    In the testimony Ohr also revealed that Steele had told him details about his work with Deripaska saying Deripaska’s attorney Paul Hauser “had information about Paul Manafort, that Paul Manafort had entered into some kind of business deal with” Deripaska. Ohr said Manafort “had stolen a large amount of money from” the Russian Oligarch and that Hauser was “trying to gather information that would show that.”

  • $250M Lawsuit Against CNN Imminent; Covington High MAGA Student Suffered "Vicious" And "Direct Attacks" 

    CNN is about to be sued for more than $250 million for spreading fake news about 16-year-old Covington High School student Nicholas Sandmann. 

    Sandmann was viciously attacked by left-leaning news outlets over a deceptively edited video clip from the January March for Life rally at the Lincoln Memorial, in which the MAGA-hat-wearing teenager appeared to be mocking a Native American man beating a drum. Around a day later, a longer version of the video revealed that Sandmann did absolutely nothing wrong – after the media had played judge, jury and executioner of Sandmann’s reputation. 

    CNN will be the second MSM outlet sued over their reporting of the incident, after Sandmann launched a $250 million lawsuit against the Washington Post in late February. 

    Speaking with Fox News host Mark Levin in an interview set to air Sunday, Sandmann’s attorney, L. Lin Wood, said “CNN was probably more vicious in its direct attacks on Nicholas than The Washington Post. And CNN goes into millions of individuals’ homes. It’s broadcast into their homes.” 

    “They really went after Nicholas with the idea that he was part of a mob that was attacking the Black Hebrew Israelites, yelling racist slurs at the Black Hebrew Israelites,” continued Wood. “Totally false. Saying things like that Nicholas was part of a group that was threatening the Black Hebrew Israelites, that they thought it was going to be a lynching.”

    “Why didn’t they stop and just take an hour and look through the internet and find the truth and then report it?” Wood asked. “Maybe do that before you report the lies. They didn’t do it. They were vicious. It was false. CNN will be sued next week, and the dollar figure in the CNN case may be higher than it was [against] The Washington Post.”

    Watch: 

  • A Modest Proposal For The Fed

    Authored by Jeff Deist via The Mises Institute,

    Quantitative easing, the program of asset buying initiated by the US Federal Reserve Bank in 2008, represents the most profound monetary experiment in the history of the world. Between fall of 2008 and fall of 2014, three successive rounds of QE quadrupled the monetary base of the world’s most-used and dominant currency, from less than $1 trillion to more than $4 trillion. The Fed literally created new money, bought Treasury debt and mortgage-backed debt (of dubious character) from commercial banks, and credited them with new reserves.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    It was a great trick. 

    If QE can be done without adverse effects or with few adverse effects, it represents nothing short of monetary alchemy (h/t Nomi Prins). Everything we thought we knew about the Fed as backstop lender of last resort to commercial banks, as hallway monitor of inflation and unemployment, is out the window.

    If QE works, then every government on earth must take notice of the opportunity to effectively recapitalize their own banks and industries free of charge. QE turns central banks into kings of capital markets, into active participants in the economy. As one twitterati put it, expansionary QE created the biggest untold American story of the last twenty years: the Fed can now inflate and deflate assets, devalue savings, influence wages and productivity, encourage corporate malfeasance, and engineer balance sheets—all the while creating economic winners and losers. 

    What politician or central banker could resist?

    Recall how defenders of QE not only argued it was necessary, but beneficial. Paul Krugman was among the worst offenders, insisting that low interest rates would mitigate any harms from such rapid monetary expansion. These defenders dismissed, and continue to dismiss, what is now obvious: since 2008 the US economy has experienced significant asset inflation in equity markets and certain housing markets, plus a creeping but steady rise in many consumer prices.  

    This is no surprise. Did it never occur to QE cheerleaders that 1% money market yields might chase money into the stock market? Or that 2% interest rates might not encourage US businesses, households, and individuals to get solvent?

    But monetary stimulus, like fiscal stimulus, is a heady drug for politicians and their central bank enablers. Once you accept consumption rather than production as the basis for a healthy economy, creating new money starts to sound like a good idea. And if creating money is a good idea, why not create a lot of it—especially in the midst of an economic crisis? 

    In 2008 Ben Bernanke was at least honest about the radical nature of what the Fed had embarked upon. He used the term “extraordinary monetary policy” for the unprecedented expansionary QE program, a program he insisted was made necessary by a potentially catastrophic global financial crisis. 

    But there were dissenters. David Stockman, for one, strongly disputes whether Main Street needed to save Wall Street. Chapter 26 of The Great Deformation lays out Stockman’s case against more debt and credit in an already overleveraged corporate landscape, not to mention the moral hazard of bailing out investment banks by creating money. And of course virtually all Austrian economists, plus plenty of non-Austrians, loudly opposed QE from the start: new bank reserves don’t magically create new goods and services in the economy. Low interest rates discourage capital formation and encourage malinvestment. More debt is not the answer for too much debt. And why should banks, flush with QE reserves, lend at all in a shaky economy when (since 2008) the Fed pays them interest on those excess reserves? 

    So here’s a modest proposal for the Federal Reserve officials, and a challenge to economists who reject Austrian views on QE and business cycles in general:

    Return the Fed’s balance sheet to its pre-2008 level, by selling assets and/or letting assets mature. Do this over an identical six year period that mirrors the timeline for QE 1, 2, and 3. Do so at a rate and volume similar to which purchases were made during that period. For transparency, and to calm markets, announce this plan ahead of time. 

    In other words, return the country to “ordinary” monetary policy. After all, the crisis is over and the economy is healthy, right? If Austrians are wrong, if in fact QE saved the country and wasn’t merely an artificial process of juicing the economy and monetizing debt, it can and must be fully unwound. 

    In fact the St. Louis Fed president James Bullard nearly promised as much back in those quaint days of 2010:

    The (FOMC) has often stated its intention to return the Fed balance sheet to normal, pre-crisis levels over time. Once that occurs, the Treasury will be left with just as much debt held by the public as before the Fed took any of these actions.

    So how about it, Mr. Powell? A real economy operates without ultra-low interest rates and activist central bank stimulus. You’ve wavered lately; suggesting even the painfully slow process of QE tapering may be halted. Don’t make Mr. Bullard a liar, or at least a bad prognosticator. And don’t make Mr. Bernanke your permanent silent partner when it comes to Fed governance. Do what must be done, take the patient off its feeding tube, and make history as the first modern Fed Chair who allowed the US economy to rebuild itself on real capital instead of debt.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Shrink the Fed’s balance sheet and we can talk about whether QE “worked.”  Until then, we can’t know if economic growth is real or artificial. 

Digest powered by RSS Digest

Mar 09

Today’s News 9th March 2019

  • Syria Accuses US Of Stealing Over 40 Tons Of Its Gold

    Authored by Eric Zuesse via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    The Syrian National News Agency headlined on February 26th, “Gold deal between United States and Daesh” (Daesh is ISIS) and reported that,

    Information from local sources said that US army helicopters have already transported the gold bullions under cover of darkness on Sunday [February 24th], before transporting them to the United States.

    The sources said that tens of tons that Daesh had been keeping in their last hotbed in al-Baghouz area in Deir Ezzor countryside have been handed to the Americans, adding up to other tons of gold that Americans have found in other hideouts for Daesh, making the total amount of gold taken by the Americans to the US around 50 tons, leaving only scraps for the SDF [Kurdish] militias that serve them [the US operation].

    Recently, sources said that the area where Daesh leaders and members have barricaded themselves in, contains around 40 tons of gold and tens of millions of dollars.

    Allegedly, “US occupation forces in the Syrian al-Jazeera area made a deal with Daesh terrorists, by which Washington gets tens of tons of gold that the terror organization had stolen, in exchange for providing safe passage for the terrorists and their leaders from the areas in Deir Ezzor where they are located.”

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    ISIS was financing its operations largely by the theft of oil from the oil wells in the Deir Ezzor area, Syria’s oil-producing region, and they transported and sold this stolen oil via their allied forces, through Turkey, which was one of those US allies trying to overthrow Syria’s secular Government and install a Sunni fundamentalist regime that would be ruled from Riyadh (i.e., controlled by the Saud family). This gold is the property of the Syrian Government, which owns all that oil and the oil wells, which ISIS had captured (stolen), and then sold. Thus, this gold is from sale of that stolen black-market oil, which was Syria’s property.

    The US Government claims to be anti-ISIS, but actually didn’t even once bomb ISIS in Syria until Russia started bombing ISIS in Syria on 30 September 2015, and the US had actually been secretly arming ISIS there so as to help ISIS and especially Al Qaeda (and the US was strongly protecting Al Qaeda in Syria) to overthrow Syria’s secular and non-sectarian Government. Thus, whereas Russia started bombing ISIS in Syria on 30 September 2015, America (having become embarrassed) started bombing ISIS in Syria on 16 November 2015. The US Government’s excuse was “This is our first strike against tanker trucks, and to minimize risks to civilians, we conducted a leaflet drop prior to the strike.” They pretended it was out of compassion — not in order to extend for as long as possible ISIS’s success in taking over territory in Syria. (And, under Trump, on the night of 2 March 2019, the US rained down upon ISIS in northeast Syria the excruciating and internationally banned white phosphorous to burn ISIS and its hostages alive, which Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama had routinely done to burn alive the residents in Donetsk and other parts of eastern former Ukraine where voters had voted more than 90% for the democratically elected Ukrainian President whom Obama’s coupin Ukraine had replaced. It was a way to eliminate some of the most-undesired voters — people who must never again be voting in a Ukrainian national election, not even if that region subsequently does become conquered by the post-coup, US-imposed, regime. The land there is wanted; its residents certainly are not wanted by the Obama-imposed regime.) America’s line was: Russia just isn’t as ‘compassionate’ as America. Zero Hedge aptly headlined “’Get Out Of Your Trucks And Run Away’: US Gives ISIS 45 Minute Warning On Oil Tanker Strikes”. Nobody exceeds the United States Government in sheer hypocrisy.

    The US Government evidently thinks that the public are fools, idiots. America’s allies seem to be constantly amazed at how successful that approach turns out to be.

    Indeed, on 28 November 2012, Syria News headlined “Emir of Qatar & Prime Minister of Turkey Steal Syrian Oil Machinery in Broad Daylight” and presented video allegedly showing it (but unfortunately providing no authentication of the date and locale of that video).

    Jihadists were recruited from throughout the world to fight against Syria’s secular Government. Whereas ISIS was funded mainly by black-market sales of oil from conquered areas, the Al-Qaeda-led groups were mainly funded by the Sauds and other Arab royal families and their retinues, the rest of their aristocracy. On 13 December 2013, BBC headlined “Guide to the Syrian rebels” and opened “There are believed to be as many as 1,000 armed opposition groups in Syria, commanding an estimated 100,000 fighters.” Except in the Kurdish areas in Syria’s northeast, almost all of those fighters were being led by Al Qaeda’s Syrian Branch, al-Nusra. Britain’s Center on Religion & Politics headlined on 21 December 2015, “Ideology and Objectives of the Syrian Rebellion” and reported: “If ISIS is defeated, there are at least 65,000 fighters belonging to other Salafi-jihadi groups ready to take its place.” Almost all of those 65,000 were trained and are led by Syria’s Al Qaeda (Nusra), which was protected by the US

    In September 2016 a UK official “FINAL REPORT OF THE TASK FORCE ON COMBATING TERRORIST AND FOREIGN FIGHTER TRAVEL” asserted that, “Over 25,000 foreign fighters have traveled to the battlefield to enlist with Islamist terrorist groups, including at least 4,500 Westerners. More than 250 individuals from the United States have also joined.” Even just 25,000 (that official lowest estimate) was a sizable US proxy-army of religious fanatics to overthrow Syria’s Government.

    On 26 November 2015, the first of Russia’s videos of Russia’s bombing ISIS oil trucks headed into Turkey was bannered at a US military website “Russia Airstrike on ISIS Oil Tankers”, and exactly a month later, on 26 December 2015, Britain’s Daily Expressheadlined “WATCH: Russian fighter jets smash ISIS oil tankers after spotting 12,000 at Turkish border”. This article, reporting around twelve thousand ISIS oil-tanker trucks heading into Turkey, opened: “The latest video, released by the Russian defence ministry, shows the tankers bunched together as they make their way along the road. They are then blasted by the fighter jet.” The US military had nothing comparable to offer to its ‘news’-media. Britain’s Financial Times headlined on 14 October 2015, ”Isis Inc: how oil fuels the jihadi terrorists”. Only America’s allies were involved in this commerce with ISIS — no nation that supported Syria’s Government was participating in this black market of stolen Syrian goods. So, it’s now clear that a lot of that stolen oil was sold for gold as Syria’s enemy-nations’ means of buying that oil from ISIS. They’d purchase it from ISIS, but not from Syria’s Government, the actual owner.

    On 30 November 2015 Israel’s business-news daily Globes News Service bannered “Israel has become the main buyer for oil from ISIS controlled territory, report”, and reported:

    An estimated 20,000-40,000 barrels of oil are produced daily in ISIS controlled territory generating $1-1.5 million daily profit for the terrorist organization. The oil is extracted from Dir A-Zur in Syria and two fields in Iraq and transported to the Kurdish city of Zakhu in a triangle of land near the borders of Syria, Iraq and Turkey. Israeli and Turkish mediators come to the city and when prices are agreed, the oil is smuggled to the Turkish city of Silop marked as originating from Kurdish regions of Iraq and sold for $15-18 per barrel (WTI and Brent Crude currently sell for $41 and $45 per barrel) to the Israeli mediator, a man in his 50s with dual Greek-Israeli citizenship known as Dr. Farid. He transports the oil via several Turkish ports and then onto other ports, with Israel among the main destinations.

    After all, Israel too wants to overthrow Syria’s secular, non-sectarian Government, which would be replaced by rulers selected by the Saud family, who are the US Government’s main international ally.

    On 9 November 2014, when Turkey was still a crucial US ally trying to overthrow Syria’s secular Government (and this was before the failed 15 July 2016 US-backed coup-attempt to overthrow and replace Turkey’s Government so as to impose an outright US stooge), Turkey was perhaps ISIS’s most crucial international backer. Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s leader, had received no diploma beyond k-12, and all of that schooling was in Sunni schools and based on the Quran. (He pretended, however, to have a university diploma.) On 15 July 2015, AWD News headlined “Turkish President’s daughter heads a covert medical corps to help ISIS injured members”. On 2 December 2015, a Russian news-site headlined “Defense Ministry: Erdogan and his family are involved in the illegal supply of oil”; so, the Erdogan family itself was religiously committed to ISIS’s fighters against Syria, and they were key to the success of the US operation against Syrians — theft from Syrians. The great investigative journalist Christof Lehmann, who was personally acquainted with many of the leading political figures in Africa and the Middle East, headlined on 22 June 2014, “US Embassy in Ankara Headquarter for ISIS War on Iraq – Hariri Insider”, and he reported that the NATO-front the Atlantic Council had held a meeting in Turkey during 22-23 of November 2013 at which high officials of the US and allied governments agreed that they were going to take over Syria’s oil, and that they even were threatening Iraq’s Government for its not complying with their demands to cooperate on overthrowing Syria’s Government. So, behind the scenes, this conquest of Syria was the clear aim by the US and all of its allies.

    The US had done the same thing when it took over Ukraine by a brutal coup in February 2014: It grabbed the gold. Iskra News in Russian reported, on 7 March 2014, that “At 2 a.m. this morning … an unmarked transport plane was on the runway at Borosipol Airport” near Kiev in the west, and that, “According to airport staff, before the plane came to the airport, four trucks and two Volkswagen minibuses arrived, all the truck license plates missing.” This was as translated by Michel Chossudovsky at Global Research headlining on 14 March, “Ukraine’s Gold Reserves Secretly Flown Out and Confiscated by the New York Federal Reserve?” in which he noted that, when asked, “A spokesman for the New York Fed said simply, ‘Any inquiry regarding gold accounts should be directed to the account holder.’” The load was said to be “more than 40 heavy boxes.” Chossudovsky noted that, “The National Bank of Ukraine (Central Bank) estimated Ukraine’s gold reserves in February to be worth $1.8 billion dollars.” It was allegedly 36 tons. The US, according to Victoria Nuland (Obama’s detail-person overseeing the coup) had invested around $5 billion in the coup. Was her installed Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk cleaning out the nation’s gold reserves in order to strip the nation so that the nation’s steep indebtedness for Russian gas would never be repaid to Russia’s oligarchs? Or was he doing it as a payoff for Nuland’s having installed him? Or both? In any case: Russia was being squeezed by this fascist Ukrainian-American ploy.

    On 14 November 2014, a Russian youtube headlined “In Ukraine, there is no more gold and currency reserves” and reported that there is “virtually no gold. There is a small amount of gold bars, but it’s just 1%” of before the coup. Four days later, Zero Hedge bannered “Ukraine Admits Its Gold Is Gone: ‘There Is Almost No Gold Left In The Central Bank Vault’”. From actually 42.3 tons just before the coup, it was now far less than one ton.

    The Syria operation was about oil, gold, and guns. However, most of America’s support was to Al-Qaeda-led jihadists, not to ISIS-jihadists. As the great independent investigative journalist Dilyana Gaytandzhieva reported on 2 July 2017:

    “In December of last year while reporting on the battle of Aleppo as a correspondent for Bulgarian media I found and filmed 9 underground warehouses full of heavy weapons with Bulgaria as their country of origin. They were used by Al Nusra Front (Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria designated as a terrorist organization by the UN).”

    The US had acquired weapons from around the world, and shipped them (and Gaytandzhieva’s report even displayed the transit-documents) through a network of its embassies, into Syria, for Nusra-led forces inside Syria. Almost certainly, the US Government’s central command center for the entire arms-smuggling operation was the world’s largest embassy, which is America’s embassy in Baghdad.

    Furthermore, On 8 March 2013, Richard Spenser of Britain’s Telegraph reported that Croatia’s Jutarnji List newspaper had reported that “3,000 tons of weapons dating back to the former Yugoslavia have been sent in 75 planeloads from Zagreb airport to the rebels, largely via Jordan since November. … The airlift of dated but effective Yugoslav-made weapons meets key concerns of the West, and especially Turkey and the United States, who want the rebels to be better armed to drive out the Assad regime.”

    Also, a September 2014 study by Conflict Armaments Research (CAR), titled “Islamic State Weapons in Iraq and Syria”, reported that not only east-European, but even US-made, weapons were being “captured from Islamic State forces” by Kurds who were working for the Americans, and that this was very puzzling and disturbing to those Kurds, who were risking their lives to fight against those jihadists.

    In December 2017, CAR headlined “Weapons of the Islamic State” and reported that “this materiel was rapidly captured by IS forces, only to be deployed by the group against international coalition forces.” The assumption made there was that the transfer of weapons to ISIS was all unintentional.

    That report ignored contrary evidence, which I summed up on 2 September 2017 headlining “Russian TV Reports US Secretly Backing ISIS in Syria”, and reporting there also from the Turkish Government an admission that the US was working with Turkey to funnel surviving members of Iraq’s ISIS into the Deir Ezzor part of Syria to help defeat Syria’s Government in that crucial oil-producing region. Moreover, at least one member of the ‘rebels’ that the US was training at Al Tanf on Syria’s Jordanian border had quit because his American trainers were secretly diverting some of their weapons to ISIS. Furthermore: why hadn’t the US bombed Syrian ISIS before Russia entered the Syrian war on 30 September 2015? America talked lots about its supposed effort against ISIS, but why did US wait till 16 November 2015 before taking action, “’Get Out Of Your Trucks And Run Away’: US Gives ISIS 45 Minute Warning On Oil Tanker Strikes”?

    So, regardless of whether the US Government uses jihadists as its proxy-forces, or uses fascists as its proxy-forces, it grabs the gold — and grabs the oil, and takes whatever else it can.

    This is today’s form of imperialism.

    Grab what you can, and run. And call it ‘fighting for freedom and democracy and human rights and against corruption’. And the imperial regime’s allies watch in amazement, as they take their respective cuts of the loot. That’s the deal, and they call it ‘fighting for freedom and democracy and human rights and against corruption around the world’. That’s the way it works. International gangland. That’s the reality, while most of the public think it’s instead really “fighting for freedom and democracy and human rights and against corruption around the world.” For example, as RT reported on Sunday, March 3rd, about John Bolton’s effort at regime-change in Venezuela, Bolton said: “I’d like to see as broad a coalition as we can put together to replace Maduro, to replace the whole corrupt regime,’ Bolton told CNN’s Jake Tapper.” Trump’s regime wants to bring clean and democratic government to the poor Venezuelans, just like Bush’s did to the Iraqis, and Obama’s did to the Libyans and to the Syrians and to the Ukrainians. And Trump, who pretends to oppose Obama’s regime-change policies, alternately expands them and shrinks them. Though he’s slightly different from Obama on domestic policies, he never, as the US President, condemns any of his predecessors’ many coups and invasions, all of which were disasters for everybody except America’s and allies’ billionaires. They’re all in on the take.

    The American public were suckered into destroying Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011, Syria in 2011-now, and so many other countries, and still haven’t learned anything, other than to keep trusting the allegations of this lying and psychopathically vicious and super-aggressive Government and of its stenographic ‘news’-media. When is enough finally enough? Never? If not never, then when? Or do most people never learn? Or maybe they don’t really care. Perhaps that’s the problem.

    On March 4th, the Jerusalem Post bannered “IRAN AND TURKEY MEDIA PUSH CONSPIRACY THEORIES ABOUT US, ISIS: Claims pushed by Syrian regime media assert that US gave ISIS safe passage out of Baghuz in return for gold, a conspiracy picked up in Tehran and Ankara”, and simply assumed that it’s false — but provided no evidence to back their speculation up — and they closed by asserting “The conspiracies, which are manufactured in Damascus, are disseminated to Iraq and Turkey, both of whom oppose US policy in eastern Syria.” Why do people even subscribe to such ‘news’-sources as that? The key facts are hidden, the speculation that’s based on their own prejudices replaces whatever facts exist. Do the subscribers, to that, simply want to be deceived? Are most people that stupid?

    Back on 21 December 2018, one of the US regime’s top ‘news’-media, the Washington Post, had headlined “Retreating ISIS army smuggled a fortune in cash and gold out of Iraq and Syria” and reported that “the Islamic State is sitting on a mountain of stolen cash and gold that its leaders stashed away to finance terrorist operations.” So, it’s not as if there hadn’t been prior reason to believe that some day some of the gold would be found after America’s defeat in Syria. Maybe they just hadn’t expected this to happen quite so soon. But the regime will find ways to hoodwink its public, in the future, just as it has in the past. Unless the public wises-up (if that’s even possible).

  • Prosecutors Charge Alleged Masterminds Of $4 Billion Crypto Pyramid Scheme

    Anybody who was following developments in the crypto-universe during the ICO boom of 2017 already knows – or at least suspects – that the cryptocurrency industry is littered with scams and hackers eager to separate uncritical and gullible investors from their hard-earned money. Some of bitcoin’s harshest critics have likened the mother of all cryptocurrency to a pyramid scheme.

    But as thousands of marginal buyers have learned, that distinction can be subjective. But when it comes to OneCoin, a cryptocurrency project launched in 2014 that purportedly attracted more than $3.5 billion in investor capital, that label is unquestionably appropriate. To wit, federal prosecutors in Manhattan this week busted what they described as an “old-school” pyramid scheme supercharged by blockchain technology when they arrested one of the founders of OneCoin at LAX.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>Ruja

    Ruja Ignatov

    The Bulgarian heads of the alleged fraud, Konstantin Ignatov and his sister Ruja, have both been charged with an array of felonies, including wire fraud, securities fraud and money laundering. While Konstantin was taken into custody in the US, Ruja hasn’t been apprehended, according to Bloomberg.

    The alleged head of the scheme, Konstantin Ignatov, was arrested Wednesday at Los Angeles International Airport and charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, Manhattan U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman said in a statement. Ignatov’s sister Ruja, the founder and original leader of OneCoin, was charged with wire fraud, securities fraud and money laundering. She hasn’t been arrested.

    So far, prosecutors have located $1.2 billion in investor money, which had reportedly been laundered through 21 countries. OneCoin operated by paying customers commissions if they managed to recruit more members. The company has been accused of lying to customers, telling them that the value of the coins was determined by market forces when it was actually artificially set by the company, which “mined” coins internally on its servers.

    According to Reuters, the company’s records show sales of nearly $4 billion and profits of $2.5 billion (though what actually happened with the money, and what distinctions like “profit” and “sales” even mean within the context of this scheme, isn’t really clear).

    Prosecutors said OneCoin, which still operates, claimed to have more than 3 million members, who would receive commissions for recruiting new members to buy cryptocurrency packages.

    Much of the $1.2 billion of investor money located so far was laundered through at least 21 countries, prosecutors said.

    OneCoin records, meanwhile, show profit of 2.23 billion euros (US$2.51 billion) on sales of 3.35 billion euros (US$3.77 billion) in the two years ended Sept. 2016, they added.

    Prosecutors accused the founders of building their company on “lies and deceit.”

    The defendants “created a multibillion-dollar cryptocurrency company based completely on lies and deceit,” U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman in Manhattan said in a statement. “Investors were victimized while the defendants got rich.”

    Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance added: “These defendants executed an old-school pyramid scheme on a new-school platform.”

    Ruja, who was known online as “cryptoqueen” allegedly created the company, before handing management off to her brother. She hasn’t been heard from since late 2017, when she disappeared. She is believed to still be at large.

    Prosecutors also have evidence that the founders knew the company was a scam, and actively tried to deceive their customers.

    Ignatova was quoted as telling a co-founder that “I cheat currently on coins,” and that one possible “exit strategy” was to “take the money and run and blame someone else.”

    Ignatov, meanwhile, allegedly told a OneCoin member recently in Las Vegas: “If you are here to cash out leave this room now because you don’t understand what this project is about.”

    Another defendant, Mark Scott, 50, of Coral Gables, Fla., pleaded guilty in September of helping the company launder some $400 million. Scott is a former partner at law firm Locke Lord.

    This is the second major crypto scam to be exposed so far this year, after the “collapse” of QuadrigaCX, the disgraced Canadian crypto exchange that was apparently drained of its customers’ $150 million in deposits last spring, months before the founder mysteriously “died” while traveling in India late last year, leaving his widow and former company to declare bankruptcy.

    Whatever happens next, one thing’s for sure: With bitcoin mired in the second year of a bear market, this news certainly doesn’t inspire confidence in the crypto space.

  • Which States Have The Highest Taxes On Marijuana?

    Submitted by Priceonomics

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    When comparing cannabis prices across states that have recreationally legalized, it’s easy to assume that the rates at which cannabis is taxed dictate the prices consumers are paying in dispensaries. For example, California has high tax rates for their cannabis, and also have some of the most expensive prices on the legal market.  

    As an online cannabis price comparison and dispensary locator service, Wikileaf has access to data on weed prices across the country. We ranked the recreationally legal states, first by tax rates, and then by the average cost per eighth. We found that while Washington has the highest tax on cannabis at 47%, they find themselves one of the less expensive state to buy cannabis.

    Conversely, Alaska is the most expensive state to purchase cannabis in, while having lower taxes.  While taxes certainly do have an effect on the price that consumers pay for cannabis in dispensaries, Wikileaf’s data shows that the rate at which cannabis is taxed is not the only factor that dictates market price.

    These are the sales tax rates on cannabis from each recreational state on consumer-facing sales taxes through January 2019:

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Washington tops the list, taking up to 37 percent from cannabis purchases, followed by Oregon at 17 percent, California and Colorado at 15 percent, Maine and Nevada at 10 percent and Massachusetts at 6.3 percent. Alaska is the only state on the list so far that doesn’t tax on cannabis purchases.

    Sales Tax Isn’t The Only Cost Passed On To Consumers

    Somewhere between 37 and 0 percent is a big difference. However, those sales tax rates aren’t the only tax you’re paying. Many states have additional taxes and fees to pair with their tax rates on purchases.

    For example, while Alaska doesn’t tax their cannabis purchases, they do charge growers $50 per ounce, and growers in Maine are charged anywhere between $94 and $325 per pound on top of their 10 percent sales tax rate. These are the additional taxes that consumers end up paying per recreational state:

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    When you add up the taxes on dispensaries, growers, sales, and local government taxes, you get a fuller picture of how taxed the cannabis industry actually is. With all of those costs together, here’s a clearer picture of which states are collecting the most from legal cannabis.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Washington cannabis is taxed at 47.1%, making that state’s marijuana the most taxed in the country. California comes in second, at a tax rate of 40.3%. Yet, according to Wikileaf’s menu data below, the average price of an eighth after all taxes in Washington is the fifth most expensive out of eight states, while California comes in two spots more expensive.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    If taxes are the main reason why cannabis prices are high, then it’s tough to explain why, despite Washingtonian cannabis buyers being taxed 7 percent more overall than Californians, their price per eighth is around $8 less. What’s even more surprising is Alaska, only the fifth most taxed state, is actually the most expensive state to purchase weed in. So while there may be a correlation between taxes and prices, our data indicates that there is not a direct causal relationship between the two.

    Since each state has its own regulations and framework for recreational cannabis, there isn’t any blanket reason for why prices are the way they are across all states. However, those particular factors that affect the price of cannabis in every single state all seem to affect one thing: supply. Let’s look closer at California as an example.

    California: Other Causes of High Prices

    California has an extensive application process for obtaining their licenses, one that has been muddled with roadblocks. This makes it both difficult AND expensive to obtain legal licenses, severely choking off the cannabis supply in a state once flush with legal weed. According to Bloomberg, there were a grand total of 1,100 registered cannabis dispensaries in the state prior to legalization. Now, there are only 410 registered dispensaries.

    Considering that those 410 dispensaries are competing with a massive Californian black market (which estimates say is much larger than the current legal market in 2018,) the industry in California is worse off than it seems.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    According to those estimates, the legal sales in California totaling $2.5 billion in 2018 are more than doubled by the nearly 5.9 billion the black market accounted for in 2017. That’s a massive portion of a very lucrative pie that the legal cannabis industry in California has to contend with.

    On top of the red tape and political issues, the supply (volume of growers) and environmental factors need to be considered as well. Droughts and wildfires raging through the state has limited crop yields and driven up the prices, with some producers claiming to have lost as much as an entire year’s crop in the most recent wildfires.

    While taxes certainly do affect the price of weed, they don’t tell the whole story. We took data that ranked recreationally legal states in order of highest tax rates and compared it against Wikileaf’s pricing data for the average cost of an eighth in each of these states. If the rates at which each state taxes cannabis determines its market price, then you would expect the rankings from the two data sets to match. However, the fact that they don’t match leads us to two conclusions. The first is that there is a correlative, not causal, relationship between taxes and marijuana prices. The second conclusion is that there are other culprits for both high and low prices of cannabis, such as in the case of California.

  • China's Social Credit System Just Blocked Tens Of Millions Of Plane And Train Tickets

    China’s social credit system prevented people from buying 17.5 million flights and 5.5 million train tickets in 2018, according to the Associated Press, which obtained a document from the National Public Credit Information Center.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    The AP reports that millions were attempting to make travel purchases were blocked because they ended up on the government’s blacklist for social credit offenses. The report didn’t discuss how these people had become “discredited.”

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    The Communist Party of China (CPC) says the social credit system is an essential component of the Socialist market economic system and the social governance system. Its aim is to encourage trustworthy behavior through a blend of penalties and rewards for citizens to improve a fast-changing society after three decades of economic reform. Offenses can include failure to pay taxes or fines, jaywalking, smoking, shoplifting, or taking drugs. Penalties include restrictions on travel, business, obtaining loans, or access to education. Companies can lose access to low-interest bank loans or be dropped from government contracts.

    One government slogan for the scheme says: “Once you lose trust, you will face restrictions everywhere.”

    The social control system is part of efforts by President Xi Jinping’s Communist regime to use artificial intelligence and surveillance cameras to control more than a billion people.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    CPC launched social credit in 2014 and is currently piloting it in multiple cities around China. The system is expected to roll out nationwide by 2020, giving the government control to almost all people and businesses.

    Human rights activists warn that social credit is too hard on citizens and might unfairly label people as untrustworthy without telling them.

    U.S. Vice President Mike Pence condemned social credit in October as “an Orwellian system premised on controlling virtually every facet of human life.”

    AP said some of the offenses last year penalized people for false advertising or violating drug safety rules.

    Since inception, the system has caused 3.5 million people to “voluntarily fulfill their legal obligations,” the report said, which included 37 people who paid a total of 150 million yuan ($22 million) in overdue fines or confiscations.

    The report gave limited details on how many citizens live in areas where social credit is operating.

    In the West, social credit is very controversial and is often portrayed as a futuristic society controlled by the illusion of a perfect society through artificial intelligence and surveillance cameras.

  • New Houses Are Getting Smaller – But They're Still Much Larger Than What Your Grandparents Had

    Authored Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

    The average square footage in new single-family houses has been declining since 2015. House sizes tend to fall just during recessionary periods. It happened from 2008 to 2009, from 2001 to 2002, and from 1990 to 1991.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    But even with strong job growth numbers in recent years, it looks like demand for houses of historically large size may have finally peaked.

    According to Census Bureau data, the average size of new houses in 2017 was 2,631 square feet. That’s down from the 2015 peak of 2,687.

    2015’s average, by the way, was an all-time high and represented decades of near-relentless growth in house sizes in the United States since the Second World War.

    Indeed, in the fifty years from 1967 to 2017, the average size of new houses increased by two-thirds (67 percent) from 1,570 to 2,631 square feet. At the same time, the quality of housing also increased substantially in everything from insulation, to roofing materials, to windows, and to the size and availability of garages.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Source: Department of Labor, Census Bureau, HUD.

    Meanwhile, the size of American households during this period decreased 22 percent from 3.28 to 2.54 people. Needless to say, the amount of square footage per person has expanded greatly over the past fifty years. (Square footage in new multifamily construction has also increased.)

    And yet, we continue to hear in survey data that Americans are “overworked,” “stressed out,” and pushed to the limit when it comes to paying for living space. If that’s the case, why do so many Americans continue to buy new housing that’s more than 50 percent larger than what their parents grew up in?

    Part of it is a matter of demonstrated preference versus what they say in surveys. The demonstrated behavior or many people is simply that they prefer more house to less, even if it means more stress in making that mortgage payment every month. Another factor is the low-low mortgage rates that continue to be available to a great many borrowers. Sure, that extra 500 square feet above and beyond what your dad shared with 3 siblings might be a bit much, but if you can spread the payments out over 30 years, why not just get it?

    How Government Policy Led to a Codification of Larger, More Expensive Houses

    But there are other factors as well. In recent decades, local governments have continued to ratchet up mandates as to how many units can be built per acre, and what size those new houses can be. As The Washington Post reported last month, various government regulations and fees, such as “impact fees,” which are the same regardless of the size of the unit, “incentivize developers to build big.” The Post continues, “if zoning allows no more than two units per acre, the incentive will be to build the biggest, most expensive units possible.”

    Moreover, community groups opposed to anything that sounds like “density” or “upzoning” will use the power of local governments to crush developer attempts to build more affordable housing. However, as The Post notes, at least one developer has found “where his firm has been able to encourage cities to allow smaller buildings the demand has been strong. For those building small, demand doesn’t seem to be an issue.”

    Many involved in home sales likely won’t be shocked to hear this. In many markets, it’s the mid-priced homes that sell the fastest. In the Denver metro area, for example, homes priced in the $300,000-400,000 range are quickly snapped up. But luxury homes coming in around $700,000 or a million dollars can languish. Indeed, the Washington Post article features a Denver-area couple who were delighted to buy a new downsized 1,400 square foot house for $257,000.

    As much as existing homeowners and city planners would love to see nothing but upper middle-class housing with three-car garages along every street, the fact is that not everyone can afford this sort of housing. But that doesn’t mean people in the middle can only afford a shack in a shanty town either — so long as governments will allow more basic housing to be built.

    Local housing has become so inflexible as a combination of a variety of historical trends which later become nearly set in stone thanks to government policy. We have seen this at work as decades of federal housing policy has worked to encourage ever-larger debt loads which in turn leads to larger houses as well. Eventually, this sort of housing — and the sort of people who live in it — reach a critical mass politically. The people who live in the larger houses then want to make sure that the “character of the neighborhood” is preserved — by force of law — which ends up excluding new types of more economical housing. This doesn’t necessarily mean apartment buildings, of course. It can simply mean smaller, more simple single-family housing. But once existing homeowners begin to dominate the local political process, the deck becomes stacked against new homeowners who can only afford basic housing that the old-timers don’t want to see.

    The result is an ossified housing policy designed to reinforce existing housing, while denying new types of housing that is perhaps more suitable to smaller households and a more stagnant economic environment.

    Eventually, though, something has to give. Either governments persist indefinitely with restrictions on “undesirable” housing — which means housing costs skyrocket — or local governments finally start to allow builders to build housing more appropriate to the needs of the middle class.

    For now, the results have been spotty. But where developers are allowed to actually build for a middle-class clientele, it looks like there’s plenty of demand.

    Not Really Downsizing

    The Post’s article covering this downsizing phenomena is titled “Downsizing the American Dream,” but this represents nothing that might be called a downsizing when compared to the alleged Golden Age of the American Dream in postwar America.

    After all, by the standards of the 1950s and 1960s, the new “smaller” houses remain large and luxurious by comparison. According to a 1956 report by the US Department of Labor, “The 2-bedroom, 1-bathroom house, with less than a thousand square feet of floor area … typified new houses in 1950.”

    Keep in mind, moreover, that the average household size in 1950 was 3.37 (compared to 2.62 in 2000). Those two bedrooms and that one bathroom in 1950 say a lot more traffic than would typically be the case today.

    House-sizes grew considerably into the 1960s, but even those homes — which were often three-bedroom two-bathroom houses for families with children — still came in around 1,500 square feet well into the 1970s.

    Today, the average new house has more than 1,000 square feet than a home of the 1960s — often housing no more than a couple and its dog.

    But do new home buyers need all that house? It’s hard to know since housing production is caught up in a complex web of government financing, government regulation, and neighborhood NIMBYism.

    To know the answer, we’d have to allow developers to build less-expensive housing, but that would require a great simplification of the political and regulatory processes developers must deal with. Expectations for housing have changed so much over the past fifty years, it’s hard to imagine a return to what households of the past would have considered to be normal, middle-class housing.

    It would be an interesting experiment, though: would city planners and neighborhood groups welcome a developer who planned to build a neighborhood of 1950s retro housing? That is: new two-bedroom, one-bathroom houses of 1,000 square feet? (They’d have to exclude the asbestos siding typical of the time, and the terrible insulation of the time would need to be replaced with something more modern.)

    It would be interesting to see someone try it.

  • Mark Zuckerberg's Elaborate Security Measures Rumored To Include 'Panic Chute'

    Thanks to weekly death threats and bipolar stalkers, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his #2, Sheryl Sandberg, are protected by an elaborate security apparatus to monitor, track and intercept threats against the Billionaire and his Chief Operating Officer. 

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    According to an in-depth investigation by Business Insider into Facebook’s security practices, Zuckerberg used to be a security nightmare during his mid-20s; randomly wandering off while his security detail scrambled to keep up. 

    “He was in his mid-20s,” said one BI source.”He was developing a platform he truly believed was good. At the time he didn’t grasp the concept that there were haters out there.”

    In the years since, the 34-year-old billionaire has adopted a far more cautious schedule more closely resembling that of a dignitary than a tech executive. 

    During company all-hands meetings, members of Zuckerberg’s Praetorian Guard sit at the front of the room and are dotted throughout the crowd, just in case an employee tries to rush him. They wear civilian clothes to blend in with nonsecurity employees. –Business Insider

    Panic chute?

    Zuckerberg’s fortifications include armed executive protection officers on constant guard in and around his several gated Bay Area homes – at least one of which has a panic room, according to the report. Meanwhile, while Zuckerberg’s desk is in an open workspace instead of a walled-off office, guards are always nearby – while an adjacent conference room near his desk has bulletproof glass and a panic button. 

    And according to employee rumors, the conference room even has a secret “panic chute” to evacuate Zuckerberg to safety. 

    The truth of this matter remains murky: One source said they had been briefed about the existence of a secret exit route through the floor of the conference room into the parking garage, but others said they had no knowledge of it. Facebook declined to comment. –Business Insider

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Facebook employs more than 70 security personnel – lead by former US Secret Service special agent Jill Leavens Jones. The company’s board approved a $10 million annual security allowance for Zuckerberg and his family, “and with good reason,” according to the report. 

    Both Zuckerberg and Sandberg receive near-constant threats; from stalkers and those who wish to do them harm. 

    The billionaire chief exec lives an extraordinarily public life, with 118 million followers on Facebook alone (making him both an icon of Facebook’s ideals and, increasingly, a magnet for public ire after his company’s recent scandals), and the threats he faces are severe.

    He receives numerous of death threats each week, and the security team monitors social media for mentions of him and Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, to detect them. The pair also have stalkers, who alternately declare their undying love for the execs and harbor worrying vendettas against them. –Business Insider

    The Facebook execs are also at risk of being subject to political stunts – such as when Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates was smacked in the face with a pie while touring Brussels in 1998. 

    Zuckerberg receives unsolicited presents at home – “everything from cookies to a gift from a rabbi after the birth of one of his children. (These get sent to the security team for inspection; Zuckerberg doesn’t open them himself.)”

    Things are a bit less extreme inside of the Facebook offices – however the security team is always on high alert, and very menacing. 

    “If you’ve ever been close to his office, you’ll see there are big burly people sitting there staring at screens. They pretend to be software engineers, but everyone knows that they are security guards,” said one Facebook employee in a Quora post. “Once I was there at 7 a.m., and tried to take a picture of his office (he was not inside) to send to my family, but immediately, 3 of the men came seemingly out of nowhere and asked me to delete the picture.” 

  • Vietnam's Energy Dilemma Is About To Become A Crisis

    Authored by Tim Daiss via Oilprice.com,

    Vietnam can’t seem to get a break. The country lies just beneath China, its giant neighbor to the north, and shares many of the same socialist ideals that Beijing promulgates. However, Sino-Vietnamese relations have been a source of tension for years dating back to the colonization of Vietnam by China centuries ago – a historical fact that the average Vietnamese citizen has never forgotten. Even after the protracted and costly war between North Vietnam and the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese government, that ended more than 40 years ago, China (which had proven a valuable ally for Hanoi during the war) turned on its smaller communist ally and invaded the country in 1979. It was a brief but bloody border war which showed Beijing that Vietnam could still hold its own.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Fast forward several decades and Hanoi is still trying to placate Beijing while at the same time rapidly improving relations with one-time adversary Washington. In fact, U.S.- Vietnamese relations, both trade and bilateral, have improved so much recently that the two sides could now arguably be called allies in the Asia-Pacific region. Of course, much of that alliance, similar in some respects to the decades-old U.S. alliance with Saudi Arabia, is born of necessity. The U.S.-Saudi alliance was berthed in the aftermath of World War 2, held together amid shared concerns during the cold war, and remains amid worries over Iranian hegemony ambitions in the Middle East. The U.S.-Vietnamese alliance is largely held together over the mutual aim of both Washington and Hanoi to keep China’s economic and military ambitions in check in the Asia-Pacific region, particularly in the volatile South China Sea, where Beijing claims as much as 90 percent of the troubled body of water.

    Vietnam’s energy quandary

    However, Hanoi’s angst with Beijing isn’t just political, it also related to Vietnam’s energy sector.

    China’s increased muscle-flexing in the region has negatively impacted Vietnam’s ability to develop its own offshore natural gas resources.

    Last March, according to a BBC report at the time, state-owned Petro Vietnam ordered Spanish energy firm Repsol to suspend an oil and gas project, which was in its final stages, off the country’s southeast coast within Vietnam’s, own 200-nautical mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ). The pull-out cost Repsol some $200mn in lost investment, an amount that the company has to date been unsuccessful at recouping. It was the second time in less than a year that Hanoi had bowed to Chinese pressure in its own waters. In July 2017, Hanoi also ordered Repsol to stop oil drilling operations at an adjacent location, Block 136/3, in response to what media at the time called “threats from China.” The geopolitical squabble in 2017 came just days after Repsol reportedly made a major gas discovery in the area.

    Consequently, to offset both its blockage of developing its own gas resources and to help Vietnam meet its growing energy demand amid stellar economic growth, the country needs to turn to renewables. However, it’s still in the early stages of developing renewable energy sources and needs to introduce more incentive policies to attract more investment, media in the country reported last week, citing both domestic and international experts.

    Hoang Quoc Vuong, Vietnam’s deputy minister of industry and trade, said that the rapid increase in energy demand and consumption of around 10 percent per year is having negative impacts on the environment, exhausting natural resources and also impacting the country’s energy security. Nonetheless, he reasoned, Vietnam’s clean energy development still has limitations, including unstable supply, difficulty in energy transmission and high costs. He added that the ministry was studying solutions to efficiently develop renewable energy towards a low-carbon economy.

    For more than a decade, Vietnam’s economic growth has been second only to China as the country continues to develop and modernize. According to a report by the country’s Central Economic Commission, Vietnam’s economic growth stood at 7.08 percent last year. Vietnam ranks second among Southeast Asian countries with a total power system capacity of nearly 50,000 MW and is ranked 23rd on a global scale.

    However, Vuong added that it’s necessary for Vietnam to develop a structure of energy supply sources, including hydroelectric, thermoelectric and renewables. Promoting an energy transition towards a low-carbon economy was critical, he said. By the end of last year, total hydropower capacity in the country of more than 90 million reached 22,000 MW, while solar capacity and wind power capacity is estimated to reach 1,000 MW and 1,500 MW, respectively. Vuong added that the ministry was also receiving a number of proposals to develop wind and solar power projects in the country.

    However, hurdles remain to achieve those goals. The International Energy Agency (IEA) recently said that Vietnam in the early stages of developing renewable energy, thus the government needed to develop appropriate mechanisms to reduce risks for investors in renewable energy development. Pham Huong Giang, deputy head of the Renewable Energy Department under the Ministry of Industry and Trade, said the ministry was studying mechanisms to promote investment in developing renewable energy.

  • Trump May Charge Allies Up To 600% More For Hosting US Troops

    President Trump has ordered his administration to draw up formal demands for Germany, Japan and all other countries hosting American troops to pay the full price of US soldiers deployed on their soil, along with a 50% premium for the privilege of hosting them, reports Bloomberg, citing a dozen administration officials and people briefed on the matter. 

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    President Donald Trump speaks to troops at Ramstein Air Base, Germany, Thursday, Dec. 27, 2018. (Photo by Brian Ferguson via Stars and Stripes)

    In some cases, nations hosting American forces could be asked to pay five to six times as much as they do now under the “Cost Plus 50” formula. –Bloomberg

    Trump has long-complained that countries hosting US troops aren’t paying enough, to the point where he nearly derailed recent talks with South Korea over how much they’re paying for the 28,000 US troops on their soil – overruling his negotiators and telling National Security Advisor John Bolton “We want cost plus 50.” 

    The president’s team sees the move as one way to prod NATO partners into accelerating increases in defense spending — an issue Trump has hammered allies about since taking office. While Trump claims his pressure has led to billions of dollars more in allied defense spending, he’s chafed at what he sees as the slow pace of increases. –Bloomberg

    “Wealthy, wealthy countries that we’re protecting are all under notice,” said Trump during a January 17 speech at the Pentagon. “We cannot be the fools for others.“

    Bloomberg‘s sources caution that the idea is “one of many under consideration,” in order to try and convince US allies to pay more, and the plan may be toned down. That said, “it has sent shock waves through the departments of Defense and State, where officials fear it will be an especially large affront to stalwart US allies in Asia and Europe.” 

    Other current and former administration officials “describe it as far more advanced than is publicly known,” reports Bloomberg. In addition to seeking more money from allies hosting US troops, the Trump administration wants to use the new policy as means of leverage over countries to do what the US demands overseas. 

    As evidence, they say officials at the Pentagon have been asked to calculate two formulas: One would determine how much money countries such as Germany ought to be asked to pay. The second would determine the discount those countries would get if their policies align closely with the U.S. –Bloomberg

    The warning to South Korea was a deliberate move, says Victor Cha, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. By demanding “Cost Plus 50” from Seoul, Trump is signaling a paradigm shift. 

    “We have a more integrated military with South Korea than with any other ally,” said Cha. “To send this message to a front-line Cold War ally is trying to say very clearly that they want a paradigm shift with the way they do host-nation support.”

    Others think that the “Cost Plus 50” plan will spark debates within allied governments over whether they even want US troops on their soil. Both Germany and Japan, two of the three defeated WWII Axis powers, have long-resisted the presence of American troops on their soil. Other countries such as Poland, on the other hand, welcome US troops. 

    Germany currently pays around 28% of the costs of US forces on German soil – or around $1 billion per year. Under the “Cost Plus 50” plan, their payment would skyrocket – along with payments from Japan and South Korea. 

    “You start tipping over rocks and see what crawls out and you’ve got to be ready for it,” said American Enterprise Institute defense policy expert MacKenzie Eaglen. “You’re going to see domestic political debates wrapped around these military bases once you reopen the discussion.” 

    Trump has been musing about the idea that countries should pay the full cost, plus a premium, since taking office. His ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, said it’s all about making sure other countries have “skin in the game.”

    “If you have countries which clearly can afford to do it and are not doing it because they think we’ll just step in and do it for them, the president has a problem with that,” he said in an interview.

    Sondland declined to say which countries would be targeted and wouldn’t elaborate when asked specifically about the “Cost Plus 50” approach. –Bloomberg

    The “Cost Plus 50” plan reportedly originated at the National Security Council – however officials have declined to confirm or deny the proposal. 

    “Getting allies to increase their investment in our collective defense and ensure fairer burden-sharing has been a long-standing U.S. goal,” said NSC spokesman Garrett Marquis. “Getting allies to increase their investment in our collective defense and ensure fairer burden-sharing has been a long-standing U.S. goal.” 

    Critics of the plan say it ignores the benefits the US enjoys from having US troops stationed abroad. 

    “Getting allies to increase their investment in our collective defense and ensure fairer burden-sharing has been a long-standing U.S. goal,” said former US Ambassador to NATO, Douglas Lute. “The truth is they’re there and we maintain them because they’re in our interest.”

    In Germany, for instance, the U.S. relies on several crucial installations: the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center and the Ramstein Air Base. Landstuhl is a world-class medical facility that has provided emergency care to U.S. soldiers wounded in Iraq and other trouble spots.

    Germany is also home to the headquarters of the U.S. Africa Command. Estimating how much Germany ought to pay for those bases, which serve so many other interests, would be complicated. –Bloomberg

    “There are a lot of countries that would say you’ve got it absolutely wrong — you think we’re going to pay for this?” said former deputy assistant secretary of defense, Jim Townsend, who added: “I hope cooler heads prevail.”

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  • UN Panel Says North Korea Obtained $670 Million In Crypto & Fiat Via Hacking: Report

    Authored by Ana Berman via CoinTelegraph.com,

    North Korea has reportedly amassed $670 million in fiat and cryptocurrencies by conducting hacking attacks, Asia-focused financial newspaper Nikkei Asian Review reports on Friday, March 8. The publication cites a U.N. Security Council report.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    image courtesy of CoinTelegraph

    The report, prepared by a panel of experts, was presented to the Security Council’s North Korea sanctions committee ahead of its annual report. According to the documents obtained by Nikkei, the hackers attacked overseas financial institutions from 2015 to 2018 and purportedly used blockchain “to cover their tracks.”

    As cited by Nikkei, the report states that the attack were allegedly conducted by a specialized corps within the North Korean military, forming part of country’s government policy. The experts believe that the corps is responsible for hacking Interpark, a South Korean e-commerce site, and luring $2.7 million in exchange for stolen data.

    According to Nikkei, the experts came to the conclusion that virtual currencies helped North Korea to circumvent economic sanctions – as they are harder to trace and can be laundered multiple times – and obtain foreign currency. The authors of the report recommended that U.N. member nations share information on possible North Korean attacks with other governments to prevent them in the future.

    Nikkei also alleges that blockchain has been previously used by a Hong Kong-based startup, Marine Chain, to circumvent sanctions against North Korea. As the newspaper writes, the company, which traded ships around the world via blockchain, was suspected of supplying cryptocurrencies to the North Korean government and shut down in September 2018.

    As Cointelegraph previously reported, in 2018 a study revealed that hacker group “Lazarus,” reportedly funded by North Korea, has stolen $571 million from cryptocurrency exchanges since early 2017. Out of fourteen separate exchange breaches analyzed, five have been attributed to “Lazarus,” including the industry record-breaking $532 million NEM hack of Japan’s Coincheck in January, 2018.

    Meanwhile, other countries sanctioned by the world community, such as Iran and Venezuela, also have reported seeing cryptocurrencies as an effective way to circumvent financial restrictions. For instance, four Iranian banks reportedly developed a gold-backed cryptocurrency called PayMon, and the country is allegedly negotiating with Switzerland, South Africa, France, the United Kingdom, Russia, Austria, Germany and Bosnia to carry out financial transactions in cryptocurrency.

Digest powered by RSS Digest

Mar 08

Today’s News 8th March 2019

  • US Admiral Warns About 'Hazardous' Military Buildup In South China Sea

    Though it rarely makes headlines in the US, the simmering rivalry between American and Chinese military forces has prompted some to declare the South China Sea – where Beijing has been building out its military and naval infrastructure in defiance of international court rulings – the “world’s most dangerous hotspot”.

    And as China has transformed rocky atolls into stationary aircraft carriers, nobody has been more vocal about the dangers of China’s increasingly aggressive posture in the Pacific than Admiral Philip Davidson, the commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, who has warned about the growing geopolitical threat even as many established economists have played down the risk of a conflict because, in theory, the economic links between the world’s two largest economies represent a reliable counterweight.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>Davidson

    Admiral Philip Davidson

    Offering yet another ominous warning just days after Washington again provoked Beijing by flying two B-52 bombers over the contested sea, Davidson told a group of reporters that he had observed a rise in Chinese military activity in the Pacific.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>Nine Dash

    Asked about the US’s “freedom of navigation” operations in the region, Davidson declined to offer specifics but said only that the US would remain “an enduring Pacific power.” But turning the focus again to China, Davidson warned that China’s military buildup was a “hazard” to trade flows and financial information that circulates via fiber optic cables running on the ocean floor under the South China Sea.

    “It’s building, it’s not reducing in any sense of the word,” Davidson told reporters on Thursday in Singapore when asked about China’s military activities in the South China Sea. “There has been more activity with ships, fighters and bombers over the last year than in previous years, absolutely.”

    “It’s a hazard to trade flows, the commercial activity, the financial information that flows on cables under the South China Sea, writ large,” Davidson added.

    As Bloomberg pointed out, Davidson’s comments appeared to assuage US allies’ concerns about a possible US pullout from the region, which have intensified thanks to President Trump’s isolationist rhetoric.

    Davidson’s comments are the latest from a senior U.S. official seeking to reassure allies in Southeast Asia of the American commitment to what Washington refers to as the Indo-Pacific region. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo last week in Manila assured the Philippines that a defense treaty would apply if its vessels or planes are attacked in the South China Sea.

    However, many of the US’s regional allies, particularly the Philippines, have questioned whether the US has done enough to curb Beijing’s ambitions. Some top Philippine military officials have even questioned whether the US defense pact needs to be changed.

    Top Philippine officials have clashed over whether the mutual defense pact with the U.S. needs to be changed. While Foreign Secretary Teodoro Locsin has said the 1951 accord should stay the same, Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana wants it reviewed, even after Pompeo’s assurances.

    The U.S. hasn’t stopped Chinese “aggressive actions” so far, Lorenzana noted in a statement earlier this week, while warning that vagueness in the document could cause “chaos during a crisis” and that the Philippines didn’t want to be dragged into a shooting war it didn’t start.

    China has targeted a 7.5% increase in defense spending in 2019, a slowdown from last year’s projected 8.1% increase though still seen as consistent with President Xi Jinping’s plans to grow and advance the military.

    And even with domestic growth slowing, China continues to spend on its military buildup. And Davidson doesn’t expect this to change. And Beijing’s increasingly belligerent rhetoric about its plans for “reunifying” with Taiwan would seem to confirm this assessment.

  • "America First": A Stronger Monroe Doctrine

    Authored by Federico Pieraccini via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    The previous articles (first, second) examined what appears to be a coordinated strategy between Moscow and Beijing to contain the damage wrought by the United States around the world. This strategy’s effectiveness relies heavily on the geographical position of the two countries vis-a-vis the United States and the area of contention. We have seen how the Sino-Russian strategy has been effective in Asia and the Middle-East, greatly stemming American disorder. Moscow and Beijing have less capacity to contain the US and influence events in Europe, given that much depends on the Europeans themselves, who are officially Washington’s allies but are in reality treated as colonies. With the new “America First” doctrine, it is the central and southern parts of the American continent that are on the receiving end of the US struggling to come to terms with the diminishment of its hitherto untrammelled influence in the world.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    South and Central American countries blossomed under the reign of socialist or leftist anti-imperialist governments for the first decade of this century. Such terms as “21st-century socialism” were coined, as was documented in the 2010 Oliver Stone documentary film South of the Border. The list of countries with leftist governments was impressive: Fernando Lugo (Paraguay), Evo Morales (Bolivia), Lula da Silva (Brazil), Rafael Correa (Ecuador), Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (Argentina), Fidel Castro (Cuba), Daniel Ortega (Nicaragua) and Hugo Chávez (Venezuela).

    We can establish a close correlation between Washington’s actions since 1989 and the political roller-coaster experienced in South America in the ensuing thirty years.

    Washington, drunk on the experience of being the only superpower in the post-Soviet period, sought to lock in her commanding position through the establishment of full-spectrum dominance, a strategy that entails being able to deal with any event in any area of ​​the globe, treating the world as Washington’s oyster.

    Washington’s endeavor to shape the world in her own image and likeness meant in practical terms the military apparatus increasing its power projection through carrier battle groups and a global missile defense, advancing towards the land and sea borders of Russia and China.

    Taking advantage of the US dollar’s dominance in the economic, financial and commercial arenas, Washington cast aside the principles of the free market, leaving other countries to contend with an unfair playing field.

    As later revealed by Edward Snowden, Washington exploited her technological dominance to establish a pervasive surveillance system. Guided by the principle of American exceptionalism, combined with a desire to “export democracy”, “human rights” became an enabling justification to intervene in and bomb dozens of countries over three decades, aided and abetted by a compliant and controlled media dominated by the intelligence and military apparatuses.

    Central and South America enjoyed an unprecedented political space in the early 2000s as a result of Washington focusing on Russia, China, Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Somalia, Georgia and Ukraine. The Latin Americans exploited this breathing space, with a dozen countries becoming outposts of anti-imperialism within a decade, advancing a strong socialist vision in opposition to free-market fundamentalism.

    Both Washington and Moscow placed central importance on South America during the Cold War, which was part of the asymmetric and hybrid war that the two superpowers undertook against each other. The determination by the United States to deny the Soviet Union a presence in the American hemisphere had the world holding its collective breath during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

    As any student of international relations knows, the first objective of a regional power is to prevent the emergence of another hegemon in any other part of the world. The reason behind this is to obviate the possibility that the new power may venture into other regions occupied by other hegemonic powers, thereby upsetting the status quo. The second primary objective is to prevent access by a foreign power to its own hemisphere. Washington abides by this principle through its Monroe Doctrine, set forth by President James Monroe, with the United States duly expelling the last European powers from the Americas in the early 19th century.

    In analyzing the events in South America, one cannot ignore an obvious trend by Washington. While the United States was intent on expanding its empire around the world by consolidating more than 800 military bases in dozens of countries (numbering about 70), South America was experiencing a political rebirth, positioning itself at the opposite end of the spectrum from Washington, favoring socialism over capitalism and reclaiming the ancient anti-imperialist ideals of Simon Bolivar, a South American hero of the late 18th century.

    Washington remained uncaring and indifferent to the political changes of South America, focusing instead on dominating the Middle East through bombs and wars. In Asia, the Chinese economy grew at an impressive rate, becoming the factory of the world. The Russian Federation, from the election of Putin in 2000, gradually returned to being a military power that commanded respect. And with the rise of Iran, destined to be the new regional power in the Middle East thanks to the unsuccessful US intervention in Iraq in 2003, Washington began to dig her own grave without even realizing it.

    Meanwhile, South America united under the idea of a common market and a socialist ideology. The Mercosur organization was founded in 1991 by Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. But it was only when Venezuela, led by Chavez, became an associate member in 2004 that the organization assumed a very specific political tone, standing almost in direct opposition to Washington’s free-market template.

    Meanwhile, China and Russia continued their political, military and economic growth, focusing with particular attention on South America and the vast possibilities of economic integration from 2010. Frequent meetings were held between Russia and China and various South American leaders, culminating in the creation of the BRICS organization (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa). Brazil, first with Lula and then with Dilma Rousseff, was the unofficial spokesperson for the whole of South America, aligning the continent with the emerging Eurasian powers. It is during these years, from the birth of the BRICS organization (2008/2009), that the world began a profound transformation flowing from Washington’s progressive military decline, consumed as it was by endless wars that ended up eroding Washington’s status as a world power. These wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have deeply undermined US military prestige, opening unprecedented opportunities for alliances and future changes to the global order, especially with the rise of Iran’s influence in the region as a counterweight to US imperialism.

    China, Russia and the South American continent were certainly among the first to understand the potential of this political and historical period; we can recall meetings between Putin and Chavez, or the presence of Chinese leaders at numerous events in South America. Beijing has always offered high-level economic assistance through important trade agreements, while Moscow has sold a lot of advanced military hardware to Venezuela and other South American countries.

    Economic and military assistance are the real bargaining chips Moscow and Beijing offer to countries willing to transition to the multipolar revolution while having their backs covered at the same time.

    The transformation of the world order from a unipolar to a multipolar system became a fact in 2014 with the return of Crimea to the Russian Federation following the NATO coup in Ukraine. The inability for the US to prevent this fundamental strategic defeat for Brussels and Washington marked the beginning of the end for the Pentagon still clinging on to a world order that disappeared in 1991.

    As the multipolar mutation developed, Washington changed tactics, with Obama offering a different war strategy to the one advanced during the George W. Bush presidency. Projecting power around the globe with bombs, carrier battle groups and boots on the ground was no longer viable, with domestic populations being in no mood for any further major wars.

    The use of soft power has always been part of the US toolkit for influencing events in other countries; but given the windfall of the unipolar moment, soft power was set aside in favor of hard power. However, following the failures of explicit hard power from 1990 to 2010, soft power was back in favor, and organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the International Republican Institute (IRI) set about training and financing organizations in dozens of hostile countries to subvert governments by underhanded means (colour revolutions, the Arab Spring, etc.).

    Among those on the receiving end of this soft-power onslaught were the South American countries deemed hostile to Washington, already under capitalist-imperialist pressure for a number of years in the form of sanctions.

    It is during this time that South America suffered a side effect of the new multipolar world order. The United States started retreating home after losing influence around the globe. This effectively meant focusing once again on its own backyard: Central and South America.

    Covert efforts to subvert governments with socialist ideas in the hemisphere increased. First, Kirchner’s Argentina saw the country pass into the hands of the neoliberal Macri, a friend of Washington. Then Dilma Rousseff was expelled as President of Brazil through the unlawful maneuvers of her own parliament, following which Lula was imprisoned, allowing for Bolsonaro, a fan of Washington, to win the presidential election.

    In Ecuador, Lenin Moreno, the successor of Correa, betrayed his party and his people by being a cheerleader for the Pentagon, even protesting the asylum granted to Assange in Ecuador’s embassy in London. In Venezuela following Chavez’s suspicious death, Maduro was immediately targeted by the US establishment as the most prominent representative of an anti-imperialist and anti-American Chavismo. The increase in sanctions and the seizure of assets further worsened the situation in Venezuela, leading to the disaster we are seeing today.

    South America finds itself in a peculiar position as a result of the world becoming more multipolar. The rest of the world now has more room to maneuver and greater independence from Washington as a result of the military and economic umbrella offered by Moscow and Beijing respectively.

    But for geographic and logistical reasons, it is more difficult for China and Russia to extend the same guarantees and protections to South America as they do in Asia, the Middle East and Europe. We can nevertheless see how Beijing offers an indispensable lifeline to Caracas and other South American countries like Nicaragua and Haiti in order to enable them to withstand Washington’s immense economic pressure.

    Beijing’s strategy aims to limit the damage Washington can inflict on the South American continent through Beijing’s economic power, without forgetting the numerous Chinese interests in the region, above all the new canal between the Atlantic and the Pacific that runs through Nicaragua (it is no coincidence that the country bears the banner of anti-imperialist socialism) that will be integrated into the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Moscow’s objective is more limited but just as refined and dangerous to Washington’s hegemony. A glimpse of Moscow’s asymmetrical military power was given when two Russian strategic bombers flew to Venezuela less than four months ago, sending an unmistakable signal to Washington. Moscow has the allies and the technical and military capacity to create an air base with nuclear bombers not all that far away from the coast of Florida.

    Moscow and Beijing do not intend to allow Washington to mount an eventual armed intervention in Venezuela, which would open the gates of hell for the continent. Moscow and Beijing have few interlocutors left on the continent because of the political positions of several countries like Argentina, Brazil and Colombia, which far prefer an alliance with Washington over one with Moscow or Beijing. We can here see the tendency of the Trump administration to successfully combine its “America First” policy with the economic and military enforcement of the Monroe Doctrine, simultaneously pleasing his base and the hawks in his administration.

    Leaving aside a possible strategy (Trump tends to improvise), it seems that Trump’s domestic political battle against the Democrats, declared lovers of socialism (naturally not as strident as the original Soviet or Chavist kind), has combined with a foreign-policy battle against South American countries that have embraced socialism.

    The contribution from China and Russia to the survival of the South American continent is limited in comparison to what they have been able to do in countries like Syria, not to mention the deterrence created by Russia in Ukraine in defending the Donbass or with China vis-a-vis North Korea.

    The multipolar revolution that is changing the world in which we live in will determine the rest of the century. One of the final battles is being played out in South America, in Venezuela, and its people and the Chavist revolution are at the center of the geopolitical chessboard, as is Syria in the Middle East, Donbass in Central Europe, Iran in the Persian Gulf, and the DPRK in Asia. These countries are at the center of the shift from a unipolar to a multipolar world order, and the success of this shift will be seen if these countries are able to resist US imperialism as a result of Moscow and Beijing respectively offering military help and deterrence and economic survival and alternatives.

    Russia and China have all the necessary means to place limits on the United States, protecting the world from a possible thermonuclear war and progressively offering an economic, social and diplomatic umbrella to those countries that want to move away from Washington and enjoy the benefits of living in a multipolar reality, advancing their interests based on their needs and desires and favoring sovereignty and national interest over bending over to please Washington.

  • Rubio Demands US Initiate "Widespread Unrest" In Venezuela

    Predictably during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Thursday, Republican chairman Marco Rubio condemned Venezuela’s Maduro as a “clear danger” and a “threat to the national security of the US.” To be expected the hearing was filled with plenty of threats and talk of flipping “military elites” and enforcing tougher sanctions. 

    But perhaps unexpected was just how out in the open and brazen Rubio’s own admissions of how far he’s willing to go in promoting regime change in Caracas. In public testimony he called on the US to promote “widespread unrest” in order to eventually bring down the Maduro government.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Rubio previously at the Colombian border, near the Simon Bolivar international bridge in Cucuta, Colombia on February 17. Image source: AFP

    It appears Rubio is now urging the White House to initiate a full-on “Syria option” for Venezuela, which implies covert arming, funding, and militarization of the opposition to reach peak escalation and confrontation with the government, perhaps inviting broader external military intervention, similar to efforts to topple Syria’s Assad over the past years. 

    We’ve commented before about how popular anti-Maduro protests seemed to have lost significant momentum of late, pretty much fading out altogether over the past couple weeks, after tensions came to a head on Feb. 23 when US-backed opposition leader Juan Guaido led a failed attempt to get an unauthorized humanitarian aid convoy across the Colombian-Venezuelan border.

    This as it appeared the opposition was itching for a provocation that might draw the US and regional allies into some of kind of more direct intervention, and as a significant uptick in US military flights went to and from Colombia near the border with Venezuela. 

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    During Thursday’s Senate hearing, there appeared a willingness to admit the fact that it appears Maduro is not going anywhere anytime soon, for example, when the committee’s top Democrat, Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey, said, “Confronting tyranny requires sustained commitment. But Maduro is not invincible. He’s far from it.”

    Though issuing plenty of threats of tighter sanctions and strangling Venezuelan oil exports, the Democrats on the committee stopped short of endorsing military action: “The support that we have lent unequivocally on Venezuela does not include the use of force,” Menendez said further.

    However, Rubio’s extreme “regime change by any means possible” hawkishness was on full display. Journalist Max Blumenthal reports: 

    At Senate hearing on Venezuela just now, Marco Rubio called for the US to promote “widespread unrest” as a means of encouraging regime change. His proposal was met with approval.

    Blumenthal noted this was a reference to instigating further “violent guarimba riots” — referencing the local Spanish word — that have been a feature of Venezuelan city streets since Maduro was sworn in for a second six year term in January, and which has further represented the more violent side of Venezuelan politics for years. 

    Journalist Clifton Ross, who has long reported from on the ground in Venezuela, explained the term as follows: 

    Your Spanish lesson for the day is guarimba, (feminine, as in ‘me voy a la guarimba’ I’m going to the guarimba) the blocking of roads, lighting of tires, and sometimes involving defensive acts of rock-throwing, a practice adopted by the Venezuelan opposition in response to elections they feel are unfair. Those who participate in the guarimbasare known as guarimberos. It is presently the season of guarimbas, and one can only hope, for the sake of the nation, that they will soon come to an end.

    Though Maduro has survived the latest round of international pressure to succumb to internal coup efforts led by a US-supported opposition, the fires of unrest Venezuela don’t look to be extinguishable anytime soon.

    As Ben Norton also pointed out on Thursday while speaking of using “humanitarian aid” as a pretext for regime change: “They’re not even hiding it at this point.”

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Indeed, Rubio personally promised just this during hearing: “To those in Venezuela: Your fight for freedom and restoration of democracy is our fight, and the free world has not and will not forget you,” he said, and added, “We [the United States] will be [focused] on this as long as it takes.” Earlier in the day Rubio told Fox News that:

    “Trump won’t give up until Maduro is gone in Venezuela.”

    More ominously, Rubio predicted during the hearing, “Venezuela is going to enter a period of suffering no nation in our hemisphere has confronted in modern history,” in reference to the Venezuelan military blocking US aid shipments and tightening sanctions.

    Of course Rubio laid all blame for the dire future plight of common Venezuelans on the Maduro regime alone, and not on his own admitted desire to stir yet more unrest in the country. 

  • Craddick: Today's Korea Quake & The Path Forward After The Hanoi Summit

    More than a few eyebrows were raised this evening after reports, from South Korean news, that an “artificial” quake has taken place in North Korea, which was immediately spun as a possible underground nuclear test. This is not entirely unexpected as President Trump has already been barraged by a wave of special interests hoping to derail peace talks. However, as Disobedient Media’s William Craddick details below, the end goal of denuclearization and peace for North Korea is within reach, stay the course.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Although the Hanoi Summit did not result in a signed deal between the negotiating teams, both North Korea and the United States should not come away from their meetings discouraged. As President Donald Trump said during a post-Summit press conference, both parties have come away with the information they needed to understand each other’s perspective. An agreement is within reach if dialog is continued with adequate frequency.

    With proper planning for the next meeting between the leaders of the United States (US) and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), proper perspective for Chairman Kim Jong Un and cooperation from the Global Powers the mutually beneficial goal of denuclearization and an end to hostilities in the Korean Peninsula is within sight.

    I. Feedback On Hanoi

    The length of negotiations were unfortunately hampered not only by partisan bickering at home, but also the looming threat of the nearby border war that was breaking out between India and Pakistan as well as apparent harassment of North Korea by intelligence agencies.

    Both President Trump and Chairman Kim also miscalculated in their approach to negotiations. Kim’s insistence that sanctions be dropped before denuclearization was an unrealistic expectation borne out of North Korean fears of a potential US invasion that failed to account for US sensitivities about previous North Korean failures to conform to past agreements between the members of the Six Party Talks. Trump’s modus operandi of walking from negotiations to increase pressure and the likelihood of a favorable deal was also an unnecessary solution to a problem that could have been resolved by an extension of the Summit’s timeframe to hammer out points of contention.

    None of these mistakes were terminal however, and there is a very clear road forward towards peace and stability.

    II. Recommendations For Future Summit

    To overcome the stumbling block that hampered a total success in Hanoi a step by step process for denuclearization must be laid out. The most logical method of execution would be to agree to a road plan whereby North Korea would progressively disarm specific sites and dispose of weapons systems, verified by outside inspection. In return, the US would remove specific sanctions as benchmarks are met. Such a clear and controlled process will help boost North Korean confidence in the intention of the United States to deal fairly in relation to sanctions and assuage US fears about any unfaithful dealing by North Korea. If an agreement that allows for the DPRK to retain a limited number of nuclear weapons is reached it will need to include arrangements for routine inspections to ensure that the ordinance can be tracked to the satisfaction of the international community.

    Any deal that is reached must include a signed agreement by the United States pledging not to attack the DPRK or overthrow Kim Jong Un. Ideally, such promises would also be accompanied by a framework outlining the ways in which the United States will assist North Korea with economic development. Because North Korea’s pursuit of nuclear weapons was incentivized by fear of foreign invasion by the US there must be assurances, publicly memorialized in writing, to reduce these kinds of tensions. These promises should not necessarily be expected to include the removal of American troops from South Korea since their presence is aimed to protect South Korea and Japan from a hypothetical invasion by China. As such an invasion would also necessitate the occupation of North Korea, the US deployment in South Korea also provides an element of security to Kim Jong Un, his people, and government.

    Although the process of nuclear disarmament is a priority that must be resolved before other concerns, a formal ending to the Korean War must also be a primary objective of both the DPRK and the United States. If both parties were to schedule disarmament strategically there is an outside possibility that the next summit could include the signing of an armistice. The choice of Seoul as the location for the next summit would also allow for representatives of South Korea and China to be present in the event that denuclearization talks had progressed satisfactorily to the point that the topic of the Korean War could be properly broached. Hosting a summit in Seoul would also create an opportunity for Kim Jong Un and President Moon Jae-in to discuss various issues relating to inter-Korean affairs and future partnerships as relations continue to warm.

    III. Recommendations To Chairman Kim Jong Un

    The young leader of North Korea certainly did not ask to come to power in the manner that he did and has faced a number of challenges while navigating power struggles and grappling with a country suffering from isolation and collapsing infrastructure. Kim Jong Un has an unprecedented opportunity to show the world that he will be a truly great ruler of North Korea that will take them from a hermit kingdom to a regional powerhouse on par with their southern neighbor. Steps that Chairman Kim could take towards this goal include voluntary denuclearization and an international diplomacy campaign to build new bridges and put his country on the map geopolitically.

    A. Voluntary Denuclearization

    Pre-emptively taking steps to denuclearize certain sites in the DPRK would be a maverick move from a country that has long caused consternation to its neighbors by behaving unpredictably. Such actions would also help North Korea make a stronger case to their American counterparts for progressively removing sanctions in return for verified movement towards denuclearization.

    It is a common trope amongst some political commentators that North Korea sought nuclear weapons with the primary goal of using them as a deterrent against the United States. But as journalists such as Julian Assange have correctly noted, North Korea’s WMD stockpiles were primarily acquired due to their fears of strategic threats from China. Chinese troops have already once become a de facto occupier of North Korea during the Korean War. Establishment media outlets such as Foreign Policy have also openly advocated for Chinese troops to occupy North Korea in recent years. Korea has a long history with China, which has generally ruled the region as a pseudo-vassal state in a similar manner the other areas such as Tibet and Xinjiang. There is little doubt that any direct Chinese military involvement in North Korea would lead to disastrous policies of Hanification in the region. It is through this lens that the DPRK’s behavior must be interpreted.

    B. Nuclear Technology Acquisition

    North Korea’s nuclear technology sounds worrying when described in lurid headlines, but the reality is that their stockpiles are more of a risk to themselves than the countries they supposedly would use them to attack.

    North Korea is notoriously cash starved, but their communist economy has been effective at producing conventional weaponry en mass. It is this one overabundant resource that has allowed the hermit kingdom to strike the deals needed to acquire second hand nuclear technology. Nations who have seemingly engaged in such transactions with the DPRK generally appear to be Middle Eastern and include Syria, Iran and potentially Egypt. This policy has also created some significant liability for North Korea, as the weaponry they sell often ends up on the black market or in the hands of rebel and terror groups which creates a chain of attribution tying the DPRK to organizations engaged in activities which they never had any intention of supporting.

    • Syria – As outlined by the Council on Foreign Relations’ Foreign Affairs, North Korea has had a collaborative relationship with the Syrian government since the 1960’s which has involved the frequent sale by the DPRK of conventional weaponry and missiles. It would appear that the terms of these sales included arrangements to transfer nuclear technology. In 2004, World Tribune reported the deaths of several technicians from the Syrian Scientific Studies and Research Center, an institute responsible for the research and development of nuclear, biological, chemical and missile technology and weapons, in the Ryongchon province of North Korea. In 2008, Japanese national public broadcaster NHK cited South Korean military sources who stated that as many as ten North Koreans may have been killed in an Israeli airstrike of a facility in Deir ez-Zor, Syria that was allegedly a secret nuclear reactor capable of producing plutonium.

    • Iran – Iran and North Korea have also enjoyed a close relationship since the Iran-Iraq war, where North Korea began selling conventional weapons and military technology to Iran while also providing military advisors. The business relationship has opened another avenue for North Korea to acquire nuclear technology. A 2003 report by the Los Angeles Times highlighted the Iranian government’s connections to nuclear programs in Russia, China and Pakistan as well as North Korea. While the first three had long-established nuclear programs at the time, North Korea did not. This provides yet another indication that conventional weapons and technology transfers by the North Korean government were made with the goal of acquiring nuclear materials, technology and know-how.

    • Egypt – A third potential venue for the DPRK to barter for hand-me-down nuclear technology was Egypt. According to the Federation of American Scientists, Egypt launched a nuclear program in 1954, but shifted their focus to research and civilian applications in 1967 after being defeated in the Six Day War. Much like with Syria and Iran, Egypt has a long-standing military and diplomatic relationship with North Korea that has drawn the ire of the United Nations. Although their nuclear reactors were originally provided by the Soviet Union, Egypt has also acquired reactors for research purposes from other countries such as Argentina as recently as 1992. Given the long history of weapons sales by North Korea to Egypt, both directly and indirectly through brokerage services, it is likely nuclear technology transfers could have occurred in the course of these dealings.

    C. North Korea’s Nuclear Weapons And Technology Are A Danger To Itself

    Although North Korea believes their nuclear stockpiles are a deterrent, they are actually a double-edged sword that places them in danger because of the risk posed by the radiation they create as well as the fact that the mere possession of such assets will make the DPRK a target in the event of any nuclear war between the great powers that would suck them into a conflict they cannot win.

    Because of the aged condition of the technology purchased second-hand by the DPRK to develop nuclear capabilities it is likely that the radiation risk to the entire country is high. The many failures of North Korea’s missile tests have long been noted by Western and international media. Considering the run down materials and apparently shoddy construction of nuclear facilities, reactors and, missile technology there is a very real possibility that some of the North’s nuclear weapon “tests” were in fact accidental explosions. The potential for another disaster on the scale of Chernobyl or Fukushima may be far higher than publicly acknowledged.

    The risk of radiation poisoning to North Korea’s population could also be extreme based on the record high statisticsof cancer death rates in South Korea. Additionally, if the death of Kim Jong Il was in any way aggravated by radiation exposure, then the risk to Kim Jong Un’s health in the long term could become a concern for the overall wellbeing of his country.

    Nuclear weapons provide North Korea with a false sense of protection. In the event that war might break out between North Korea and one of the Great Powers or between the Great Powers themselves the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) would ensure that North Korea would become a target for multiple nations with more nuclear and conventional firepower than it could ever hope to muster in return.

    The possession of nuclear weapons is not a fix-all for North Korea and would in fact doom them to destruction in the event of a war. North Korea might fear that to relinquish them would condemn the country to the same fate as Libya or the Ukraine. But North Korea does not play into any strategies relating to regional destabilization like Libya or Venezuela. Nor does it factor into long term expansion plans for organizations like NATO. There is far more to gain by reducing or totally eliminating stockpiles of nuclear weapons than there is to retain them.

    D. A Diplomatic Charm Campaign

    Kim Jong Un is a man who is happy while traveling abroad, but who seems to merely be going through the motions when at home in a nation whose infrastructure is built with relics of the Japanese and Soviet eras. Embarking on a series of outreach efforts to project a more positive image of North Korea, build diplomatic ties and lay the groundwork for the establishment of embassies around the world is a much needed first step in transforming his country.  Meetings with European and Asian leadership will be essential if Kim wishes to communicate that the DPRK is open for business. Such a campaign could also include a historic visit to the White House in the same manner as the 1987 summit between General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev and President Ronald Reagan near the end of the Cold War.

    IV. Recommendations To The Big Three Powers

    With Trump’s walk-away in Hanoi, Russia and China have a fresh opportunity to step into negotiations and win a PR victory that will ultimately help make the world a safer place. All three great powers have the necessary experience working with WMDs and considerable incentive to peacefully eliminate the threat from North Korea. Yet only the United States has stepped up to the plate to do the heavy lifting involved with the process. Russia and China must begin to understand the benefits they stand to gain from assisting the DPRK on the path to peace.

    China’s incentive to bring peace and stability to the Korean Peninsula is one that plays into their long term geopolitical goals. Actions taken to help solve the crisis would allow Beijing to recuperate their image around Asia, particularly after years of contentious strife with countries such as Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam over territorial water disputes. Proof that China can resolve their conflicts peacefully will speak far louder than any words will be able to.

    Russia also has every reason to take an increased role in the peace process since they have begun to build a reputation as a stabilizing global power after their intervention to prop up the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad in the Syrian civil war. Their cooperation with North Korea would create a new avenue for economic cooperation within the DPRK, whose economy is being eyed by many different corporate interests that hope to secure lucrative deals while assisting with infrastructure and trade development.

    V. Conclusion: Stay The Course, Ignore Naysayers

    It is little surprise to see that in the aftermath of the Hanoi Summit, President Trump has been barraged by a wave of special interests hoping to derail peace talks. This is very much analogous to the pressure that was placed on President Ronald Reagan in the aftermath of the 1986 Reykjavík Summit. Trump’s response must be, like Reagan’s, to ignore it and persevere.

    Institutions such as the Heritage Foundation have already begun baying for a return to hardline policies that will stifle any hope of a future deal. In the media, NBC News, an outlet that previously worked with the CIA and parts of the defense industry to undermine Korea negotiations, has once again been active in using any imaginable excuseto argue against the peace process. These distractions detract from the promising future of a prosperous, peaceful Korean Peninsula that no longer is a liability to the world, but an asset.

    Chairman Kim Jong Un must continue with open arms to work with the global powers and the DPRK’s neighbors to pursue denuclearization and an armistice. President Trump and Kim walked away from Hanoi with a continued feeling of goodwill and a clear vision of each other’s perspectives and desires. This understanding must be built on to achieve a total success that will become the toast of the international community for years to come.

  • Deadbeat Nation? 37 Million Credit Cards Were 90 Days Past Due In 4Q18 

    As those who follow our monthly consumer credit updates already knew, aggregate household debt balances jumped in 4Q18 for the 18th consecutive quarter, and were $869 billion (6.9%) above the previous peak (3Q08) of $12.68 trillion. As of late December, total household indebtedness was at a staggering $13.54 trillion, $32 billion higher than 3Q18. Overall household debt is now 21.4% above the 2Q 2013 trough, according to quarterly data from the Fed.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    “The increase in credit card balances is consistent with seasonal patterns but marks the first time credit card balances re-touched the 2008 nominal peak,” according to the report.

    There are approximately 480 million credit cards in US circulation, that is 1.47 credit cards per citizen, and up more than 100 million since the 2008 financial crisis.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    More troubling is that according to the Fed, 37 million Americans had a 90-day delinquent strike added to their credit report last quarter, an increase of two million from the fourth quarter of 2017. These 37 million delinquent accounts held roughly $68 billion in debt.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Credit-card balances slipping into serious delinquency have been growing for the last several years, according to the Fed.  As of 2019, a record number of Americans also have auto loans that are 90 days past due.

    “The substantial and growing number of distressed borrowers suggests that not all Americans have benefited from the strong labor market and warrants continued monitoring and analysis of this sector,” economists Andrew Haughwout, Donghoon Lee, Joelle Scally, and Wilbert van der Klaauw noted in a Feburary report. 

    Rising delinquency levels pose a serious risk to consumer spending, which accounts for more than 2/3 of economic activity.

    Almost a third of the credit card debt is held by the baby boomer generation, while millennials are up to their eyeballs in student loans. That could be troubling because some of the oldest and youngest borrowers are financially dependent on family members, according to Josh Wright, the chief economist at iCIMS and a former Federal Reserve staffer.

    “This tells us that if the expected economic slowdown gets serious, these are the groups that will pose the biggest threat to the economy,” he said.

    While President Trump continues to promote the “greatest economy ever” on Twitter, 1Q19 GDP expectations have crashed, a troubling sign that consumers have topped out.

    Last week, Goldman published its 1Q19 GDP tracking estimate at a paltry +0.9%. This forecast, as Goldman’s chief economist Jan Hatzius said, “reflects an expected drag from inventories, sequentially slower consumption growth, a decline in residential investment, and a four-tenths drag from the government shutdown.”

    Goldman wasn’t the only one echoing low-growth forecasts for 1Q19, but also the NY Fed’s GDP Nowcast, which showed growth crumbled from 1.22% (and 2.17% as recently as a month ago), to a stunning 0.88%, as a result of the collapse in Personal Consumption, Housing Starts, Wholesale Inventories, and others.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    The most shocking: Atlanta Fed’s 1Q19 GDP nowcast – recently tumbled to just 0.5%. And while it is possible that consumers hit their maximum threshold of borrowing ahead of the holiday spending season, the growing refusal to service their credit card debts is an ominous sign of a nearing recession.

  • Chinese Exports Collapse In February Despite Largest Credit Injection Ever

    While a few will blame the total and utter collapse in China exports in February on the lunar new year’s early date this year, the scale of the miss is simply stunning.

    For a few brief seconds, everything was awesome as Bloomberg’s initial headline proclaimed a big RISE in exports, but they quickly corrected – causing heart attacks across every tape-reading algo in the world…

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Exports plunged 20.7 percent in February while imports fell 5.2 percent, leaving a trade surplus of $4.12 billion, the customs administration said Friday.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Economists forecast both exports and imports would shrink, although not as much as the fall. The Lunar New Year break fell about 10 days earlier than last year, likely boosting January’s shipments and weighing on February’s.

    But Chinese imports from the US crashed the most on record…

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    In addition to the shutdown that happens each year, February was an uncertain period for Chinese exporters, with negotiations through the month on whether the U.S. would raise tariffs from March 1.

    Analysts were quick to defend the crash as an outlier…

    “There is big progress in the trade talks compared with a few months ago. But the trade tension itself brings uncertainties to companies, who could slow or delay their investment, or even move some of their production overseas” UBS AG economist Tao Wang said in a conference call on Thursday. A potential economic slowdown in the U.S. and Europe, together with their monetary policies, will also add to the external challenges for China, she said.

    And the rest of the world better hope so too… because if this correlation holds up – all hell is about to break loose back in the ‘decoupled’ USA…

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    US equity futures dropped on the headlines…

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    And Chinese stocks were already suffering their biggest drop of the year…

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    As a reminder, this collapse is occurring after the PBOC announced it had flooded the economy with a gargantuan 4.64 trillion yuan in various new forms of debt which comprise China’s Total Social Financing in January, including notably, the “shadow” credit which Beijing had been aggressively cracking down on: an aggressive credit expansion which many took as a tacit confirmation that China was losing the fight with deleveraging.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    So if 4.64 trillion didn’t help… and RRR cuts… and promises of tax cuts… just what is the US and Chinese equity market pricing in?

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

  • Amazon Vendors Panic After Online Giant Suddenly Halts Purchases

    After Amazon successfully put a majority of its retail “brick and mortar” competitors out of business, it is now cracking down on its own supply chain.

    In Jeff Bezos latest move to boost flagging profits and razor-thin margins at the company’s core e-commerce business, Amazon abruptly stopped buying products over the past two weeks from many of its wholesale vendors, encouraging them to instead sell their products directly to consumers on Amazon’s marketplace, even if that means disrupting relationships with longtime suppliers and potentially limiting customer choice. And, according to Bloomberg which cited consultants who help clients sell on Amazon, thousands of vendors are affected.

    The departure from the company’s traditional business model of serving as logistical middleman between buyers and sellers, is pushing suppliers directly onto the marketplace – rather than selling products itself – and lets Amazon offload the risk but more importantly, the cost of purchasing, storing and shipping the merchandise. Instead, leveraging its quasi-monopolistic scale, Amazon is moving to charge suppliers for these services while taking a commission on each transaction, resulting in much higher margins per transaction. The disruptive strategy is part of a larger effort to reduce overhead by getting more suppliers to use an automated self-service system that requires no input from Amazon managers.

    Commenting on the change in the company’s traditional operating model, Amazon responded to Bloomberg that it regularly reviews its selling partner relationships “and may make changes when we see an opportunity to provide customers with improved selection, value and convenience.” What it meant is that it is now big enough to extract an even greater profit from each transaction as the company’s vendors have no other choice.

    And while their options may be limited, the vendors were not only shocked by the change in strategy, they are also furious: the abrupt cancellation of orders prompted panic this week at the ShopTalk retail conference that drew more than 8,000 retailers, brands and consultants to Las Vegas.

    Some attendees said Amazon stopped submitting routine orders last week for a variety of products, often without explanation. The drought continued this week, affecting more vendors and leaving them frustrated about the lack of communication from Amazon.

    One vendor who has been selling products to Amazon for five years said he got a canned response when he inquired why his routine weekly purchase order never came through. The response gave him no clarity about his standing as a vendor, he said.

    Meanwhile, unless sellers adopt to the new way of transacting they could be stuck with massive losses as they find themselves with significant inventory they are unable to find buyers for. As Bloomberg explains, because many suppliers source products from manufacturers months in advance, “they’ll have to quickly shift their sales tactics if the expected Amazon orders don’t come in.”

    Now more Amazon vendors will be forced to sell on the marketplace or risk getting stuck with unsold inventory, said Will Land, CEO of Marketplace Valet, an e-commerce logistics provider and consulting firm in Riverside, California.

    “When you get used to those big checks,” he said, “it’s hard to pull away.”

    “If you’re heavily reliant on Amazon, which a lot of these vendors are, you’re in a lot of trouble,” said Dan Brownsher, Chief Executive Officer of Channel Key, a Las Vegas e-commerce consulting business with more than 50 clients that sell more than $100 million of goods on Amazon annually. “If this goes on, it can put people out of business.” Brownsher was among several consultants who said Amazon’s move has affected thousands of vendors.

    In some ways the move shouldn’t have come as a surprise: in recent years, Amazon has increasingly prioritized its marketplace. More than half of all products sold on Amazon in 2018 came from marketplace merchants, while revenue providing services to those merchants is growing at double the pace of revenue from the online store. This is reflected in the company’s “sum of the parts” valuation: according to Evercore ISI analyst Anthony DiClemente, the marketplace business is worth about $250 billion, more than double the value of the online retail business.

    It’s almost as if having put many of its less efficient competitors out of business, Amazon has “gone hostile” against the very people who made its ascent to the throne of online retail monopoly possible in the first place.

    Which once again begs the question: is Amazon a monopoly, and when will the FTC finally be forced to me a determination. One thing is certain: as Bezos – and Amazon – seek to also directly influence consumer behavior, don’t be surprised not to find any mention of just how “capitalistic” Amazon has become, say, on the pages of the Washington Post, which is bundled as a “free” subscription to any paying member of Amazon Prime.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

  • World's Most Successful Hedge Fund Manager Ever Reveals Some Of Medallion's Secrets

    Two years ago, when profiling the world’s most successful hedge fund in history, Bloomberg stared like this:

    Sixty miles east of Wall Street, a spit of land shaped like a whale’s tail separates Long Island Sound and Conscience Bay. The mansions here, with their long, gated driveways and million-dollar views, are part of a hamlet called Old Field. Locals have another name for these moneyed lanes: the Renaissance Riviera.

    That’s because the area’s wealthiest residents, scientists all, work for the quantitative hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, based in nearby East Setauket. They are the creators and overseers of the Medallion Fund—perhaps the world’s greatest moneymaking machine. Medallion is open only to Renaissance’s roughly 300 employees, about 90 of whom are Ph.D.s, as well as a select few individuals with deep-rooted connections to the firm.

    The fabled fund, and we are of course talking about Renaissance Technologies’ employees-only Medallion fund, known for its intense secrecy and “black box”-like mystery of what actually goes on there, has produced about $55 billion in profit over the last 28 years, making it about $10 billion more profitable than funds run by billionaires Ray Dalio and George Soros. What’s more, it did so in a shorter time and with fewer assets under management. Just like Berie Madoff, the fund almost never loses money. Its biggest drawdown in one five-year period was half a percent.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    “Renaissance is the commercial version of the Manhattan Project,” says Andrew Lo, a finance professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and chairman of AlphaSimplex, a quant research firm. Lo credits Jim Simons, the 78-year-old mathematician who founded Renaissance in 1982, for bringing so many scientists together. “They are the pinnacle of quant investing. No one else is even close.”

    Yet while many have tried to emulate and reverse engineer Medallion’s success, nobody has come close to the inner workings of the world’s most successful money machine.

    At least until Wednesday, when fabled code-breaker and Renaissance founder, Jim Simons spoke at MIT, at the second of three talks about his iconic career; the talk, which followed last week’s conversation about mathematics and precedes next week’s on philanthropy, attracted an overflowing crowd that included MIT investing chief Seth Alexander. Andre Stern of the U.K.’s Oxford Asset Management introduced Simons.

    Simons launched Renaissance after leaving academia and in 1988 started the Medallion Fund, which through last year generated an unrivaled annual average return of about 40 percent, according to calculations by Bloomberg. “That’s net of fees,” Simons said in response to a question from a reporter.

    As discussed here extensively in the past, while Renaissance manages money across a handful of funds, the in-house only Medallion evokes the greatest mystery, and as Bloomberg notes, it employs trading strategies to predict price changes in global markets that over three decades no one on Wall Street has been able to replicate. That’s why the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission came calling after the Bernard Madoff scandal broke in 2008, Simons said.

    “They did study us,” said Simons as he spoke about his career in money management. “Of course, they didn’t find anything.”

    What was more unique, is that the traditionally media-shy Simons offered a some clues into what sets Renaissance apart:

    At the core of the company, which employs about 300 people, Simons said “is a great computing system, good scientists and low turnover.” Employees, who get a piece of the profits, sign non-disclosure agreements when they are hired and non-compete contracts after a couple of years on the job.

    “It’s fun to work there,” Simons said in a question and answer format led by MIT professor Andrew Lo, who started the quant fund AlphaSimplex Group. “People get paid a lot of money.” Some, like former co-CEO Robert Mercer may not find it that much fun to work there, but that’s why he recently quit the firm.

    According to Simons, the East Setauket-New York company never stops improving its models as it tries to stay a step ahead of the competition, which has flourished in recent years as quant firms attracted more assets than traditional, fundamental shops. Simons stepped down as head of the company in 2010 but remains as non-executive chairman. He said he meets with the company monthly, encouraging management to keep hiring good, young scientists.

    Sharing some more details into the company’s “secret sauce”, Simons said that the Medallion strategy is continually being reinvented, though some parts have remained for as many as two decades. Initially launched as a systematic, trend-following fund that traded in commodities markets, it was losing money after the first six months. So the fund was completely revamped.

    Still, the company realized after about 15 years that there were limits on how much Medallion could manage without pushing markets too much, Simons said in a conversation after the talk. So Renaissance finished booting outside investors in the fund in 2005, and since then has sought to limit its size.

    While Simons refused to say how much Medallion has in assets, Bloomberg calculations put it at about $10 billion. Simons did say there is about $45 billion in the firm’s other funds, which are still open to outside investors, and generate far smaller returns than Medallion.. They employ longer-term trading strategies, so the funds haven’t delivered the same level of returns as Medallion.

    “Yes inefficiencies do get traded out, but the market is dynamic,” Simons said, quoted by Bloomberg, in response to a question from the audience. “There’s room for new inefficiencies to materialize. We keep finding new things and throwing out old things.”

    After his talk, students descended on the former mathematician who had broken ground in the field decades ago, winning the American Mathematical Society’s Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry in 1976.

    In the middle of the scrum, Simons vaped, producing a cloud of smoke as he answered more questions.

    Below we publish a video recording of the first part of Simons’ three part presentations, discussing the role of mathematics in money.

  • Nonfarm Payroll Preview: Beware The Snow Shock, But All Eyes On Wages

    After January’s blockbuster report, analysts forecast Friday’s headline nonfarm payrolls will drop to a far more muted pace of 180k (12-month average: 234k), with the February jobs drop due to more seasonal temperatures weighing on weather-sensitive industries. Survey quirks may contribute to firmer wage growth, which could tick up to a pace last seen in 2009.

    Here’s what to expect from the BLS at 830am EST on Friday morning courtesy of RanSquawk:

    • Non-farm Payrolls: Exp. 180k, Prev. 304k.
    • Unemployment Rate: Exp. 3.9%, Prev. 4.0% (NOTE: the FOMC currently projects unemployment will stand at 3.5% at the end of
    • 2019, and 4.4% in the longer-run).
    • U6 Unemployment Rate: Prev. 8.1%.
    • Average Earnings Y/Y: Exp. 3.3%, Prev. 3.2%.
    • Average Earnings M/M: Exp. 0.3%, Prev. 0.1%.
    • Average Work Week Hours: Exp. 34.5hrs, Prev. 34.5hrs.
    • Private Payrolls: Exp. 175k, Prev. 296k.
    • Labour Force Participation: Prev. 63.2%.

    JOB GROWTH: While consensus expects a sharp drop from last month’s 304K payrolls print, predicting a number around 180K, Goldman is bracing for a big miss on the headline jobs print, estimating that nonfarm payrolls increased 150k in February, 30k below consensus and the slowest pace in five months. Goldman believes the trend in job growth has likely slowed from the 232k average pace of the last six months, and expects a drag of at least 40k from above-average snowfall during the February survey week. The February seasonal factors have also evolved unfavorably in recent years—perhaps reflecting the unusually mild weather of recent Februaries. If so, this would also restrain payroll growth in tomorrow’s report.

    WAGE GROWTH: While the Street expects a healthy 0.3% MM rise in average hourly earnings (3.3% for the YY), Nomura is slightly more optimistic, and forecasts the annualised rate will rise to 3.4%, the firmest pace since April 2009. “We expect average hourly earnings to increase 0.34% MM in February, partly due to a positive bias related to where the BLS survey week falls relative to the first of the month,” Nomura writes, “in addition, we see some upside risk to February AHE arising from unusual declines for certain industries during January including manufacturing and construction that could revert.”

    Meanwhile, Goldman estimates average hourly earnings increased 0.4% month-over-month, with the year-over-year rate rising two tenths to a new cycle high of 3.4% (consensus is +0.3% mom and +3.3% yoy). Our forecast reflects quite favorable calendar effects (the February survey week ended on the 16th of the month). Supervisory earnings have also been somewhat soft in recent months and could rebound, as headline average hourly earnings (+0.77% over the last three months) have underperformed the production and non-supervisory subset (+0.96%).

    JOBLESS CLAIMS: For the week of the February NFP survey period, US initial jobless claims for the week were reported at 236k vs 200.5k for the January survey period. Some desks had noted that the trend-pace of jobless claims has weakened (jobless claims ticking higher), which is likely to be a function of slowing economic growth. This may continue in the coming months, though  positive developments on China/US trade and Brexit may see some flattening in the summer. Additionally, claims have been rising from very low levels.

    ADP PAYROLLS: The ADP reported 179k payrolls were added to the US economy in November, short of the 195k the Street was looking for. Crucially, Moody’s chief economist stated that while the report was strong, job growth has likely peaked: “This month’s report is free of significant weather effects and suggests slowing underlying job creation. With very tight labour markets, and  record unfilled positions, businesses will have an increasingly tough time adding to payrolls.” Others noted that the data followed months of above-trend prints, so may not signal any meaningful shift in job growth. Additionally, Pantheon Macroeconomics says it  looks for an official NFP reading above the ADP print since the BLS data will include people returning to work following hurricanes. “ADP isn’t directly affected by hurricanes because it counts names on payroll lists, while the BLS only counts people who were paid during the survey period, so hourly-paid part-timers can drop off the numbers after storms, and then return the following month,” Pantheon said.

    BUSINESS SURVEYS: The employment sub-index in the manufacturing ISM report for February ticked down by 3.2 points, taking it to 52.3, signalling employment growth for a 29th straight month. “Employment continued to expand, but at the lowest level since November 2016, when the index registered 51.6 percent,” ISM said, noting that an Employment Index above 50.8 percent, over  time, is generally consistent with an increase in the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data on manufacturing employment. The  nonmanufacturing ISM employment sub-component fell by 2.6 points, taking it to a still healthy 55.2, representing the  60th consecutive monthly print above 50. The survey compiler noted comments from respondents, which included “lower employment  makes higherpaying positions elsewhere more attractive” and “It is more difficult to find well-qualified workers. Our backlog of  unfilled jobs is stubbornly the same despite the efforts of the HR department.”

    JOB CUTS: Challenger reported US employers announced 76.8k job cuts in February – the highest monthly total in over threeand-a-half years; that’s a 45% jump vs January, and 117% jump vs February 2018. Challenger noted that the sharp rise was primarily due to the US Army cutting over 50k jobs, as well as the fall in oil prices which caused thousands of job cuts within the energy  sector.

    “Job cuts have been trending upward since the last half of 2018,” Challenger wrote, “we continue to see companies respond to shifting consumer behaviour, new technology, as well as trade and market uncertainty through workforce restructuring,” and added that retailers, meanwhile, “are closing or revamping brick-and-mortar locations, leading to job loss or going bankrupt and cutting their entire workforces.” The organisation also drew attention to the auto sector, where job cuts are up by over 200% YY. “The Auto industry is one in which shifting consumer demand and new tech is creating the need to pivot in a different direction. Tech companies like Apple and Tesla are competing for the self-driving market, causing disruptions to traditional manufacturers and suppliers like Apple and Tesla are competing for the self-driving market, causing disruptions to traditional manufacturers and suppliers.”

    Here are they key qualitative considerations headed into tomorrow’s jobs print, via Goldman:

    Arguing for a weaker report:

    • Winter weather. Mild winter weather likely boosted job growth in December and January by 100k or more cumulatively, and the unwind of these effects is likely to weigh on job growth in February and early spring. Furthermore, survey-week snowfall swung above average in February, with a 1-inch seasonally adjusted rise vs. January (population-weighted basis, see left panel of Exhibit 1). The February seasonal factors have also evolved unfavorably in recent years (see right panel) – note the possibility that the seasonal adjustment software is fitting to the unusually mild weather of recent Februaries. If so, the seasonal factors could amplify the impact of snowy weather in tomorrow’s report. Goldman’s February payroll growth estimate embeds a -40k weather effect, but there is risk of a considerably larger drag.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    • Jobless claims. Initial jobless claims rose over the five weeks between the payroll reference periods (+8k to 229k on average, a 10-month high). This increase is consistent with some slowing in the underlying pace of job growth. Continuing claims also rose from survey week to survey week (+89k to 1,805k), but we continue to believe that residual seasonality is currently boosting that measure (by 100-150k).
    • Job cuts. Announced layoffs reported by Challenger, Gray & Christmas increased by 23k in February to 66k (SA by GS). On a year-over-year basis, announced job cuts rose 41k, mostly reflecting increases in the industrial goods (+28k yoy) and retail (+13k yoy) sectors, the latter of which may include the impact of retailer bankruptcies (Payless Shoes, Charlotte Russe).

    Arguing for a stronger report:

    • Job availability. Three measures of labor demand all rose to new cycle highs in their most recent readings. The Conference Board labor market differential—the difference between the percent of respondents saying jobs are plentiful and those saying jobs are hard to get—rose 0.2pt to +34.3 in February. JOLTS job openings also rose (+169k to 7,335k in December). Third, the Conference Board’s Help Wanted Online (HWOL) index—whose methodology has been improved to remove duplicate ads and other sources of volatility—rose to 0.3pt to 104.0 in February.
    • Labor supply constraints. Historically, labor supply constraints are less likely to bind in February, as first-reported job growth is often relatively strong when the unemployment rate is below estimates of NAIRU (for example, in 1997-99, 2006, and 2017-18). This may reflect the seasonally elevated pool of unemployed workers available to be hired (following end-of-year layoffs). Relatedly, firms may pull forward some spring hiring into February if they expect difficulty finding workers.

    Neutral Factors:

    • Business surveys. Service-sector business surveys generally improved in February, as our headline non-manufacturing tracker  rose by 4.0pt. While the employment component also increased (+1.3pt to 54.0), it has still declined notably in recent months and remains well below the elevated levels seen in mid-2018. Manufacturing-sector surveys were mixed in February, and our manufacturing employment tracker remained relatively stable (+0.2pt to 55.8). Taken together, business surveys suggest a slowdown in the pace of job growth but hardly a collapse (see Exhibit 2). Service-sector job growth rose 224k in January and averaged 173k over the last six months. Manufacturing payroll employment rose 13k in January and increased 19k on average over the last six months.
    • ADP. The payroll-processing firm ADP reported a 183k increase in February private payroll employment—7k below consensus and moderately below the average pace over the prior six months (+214k). While slightly below expectations, the February ADP report suggests that the underlying pace of job growth remains above potential. We also note that winter weather tends to affect the official payroll measure more so than it affects the ADP series.
    • End of Government Shutdown. While the partial government shutdown (Dec. 22 through Jan. 25) did not significantly affect January’s federal employment figures (+1k mom sa), contractor layoffs may have weighed on the information (-4k) and business services (+30k vs. six month average of +43k) categories in that report. In terms of February job growth, while a rebound in contractor activity could conceivably boost employment in some services categories, federal office closures in the first two weeks of the payroll month may have depressed federal hiring.

    Source: RanSquawk, Goldman

Digest powered by RSS Digest

Mar 07

Today’s News 7th March 2019

  • America And Europe: Growing Differences Over Iran

    Authored by Ezra Friedman via GlobalRiskInsights.com,

    The United States’ and Poland’s co-hosted conference in Europe was a controversial event. It has united some American allies around President Donald Trump’s aggressive anti-Iran posturing while alienating some others.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    The Summit demonstrated divisions amongst European Union member states on the current American administration’s foreign and security policies. It also exhibited new budding relations between various states in the region. Furthermore, it showed the growing polarity between America and the EU on issues concerning the Middle East, especially the Iran nuclear deal.

    Iran: Consensus achieved? Or division on display?

    The Trump Administration’s publicised Warsaw Middle East Summit intended to unify American allies in pursuit of Middle Eastern peace and security. The two-day eventbrought together representatives from 60 countries where they publicly discussed geopolitical issues facing the region. This included promoting America’s current policy toward Iran. Nonetheless, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has denied claims that the conference was singularly aimed at Tehran despite the antagonistic rhetoric employed during the event.

    Speeches by the US and high-level allied officials showed a united front through anti-Iran posturing. Both Secretary Pompeo and Vice President Pence railed against the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). They demanded Europe support the US and withdraw from negotiations. The landmark Obama era agreement placed limits on Iran’s nuclear program while guaranteeing relief from American, European, and UN sanctions. However, not all traditional US allies have supported President Trump’s actions of withdrawal and the subsequent return of sanctions. The makeup of states present at the Summit highlighted these differences. Other than the UK, no other major European ally sent high-level representation. Turkey, a major NATO member and regional force also chose not to attend.

    The lack of support for the US’ Iran policy is emphasised as Russia and China, parties to the JCPOA did not engage with the conference agenda. This is a break from the Obama era trend, where they largely endorsed American intentions towards Iran. The unpopularity of President Trump’s policy can further be witnessed by the refusal of the EU delegate to join the summit. The underlying divisions of various states on whether to support or oppose the JCPOA as well as disagreement on how best to engage with the Islamic Republic seem to have led to a lack of tangible results at the end of the meetings.

    Europe maintains unity – for now

    The Trump Administration’s reinstituted extraterritorial sanctions against Iran have led to uncertainty for many European countries. These states have attempted to remain allied with the US and follow its Middle East policy while also supporting the EU’s united front on the JCPOA. Germany, France, the UK, amongst several others, withstood mounting pressure by the Americans to scrap the deal. Contrary to US’ expectations, the EU has rolled out INSTEX in an attempt to circumvent American sanctions and extend normalcy in relations with Tehran.

    It is important to note that Eastern European states continue to diverge from the EU on several critical fronts. These states are increasingly finding affinity with the US in light of security issues vis-à-vis Russia. Poland is a strong example of a state that is trying to encourage an increased domestic presence of American troops while still supporting the EU’s stance on the JCPOA. Policy issues, including the erosion of democratic institutions, and differences on migration policy may create disunity within the EU. Member states may look increasingly to partisan interests over time.

    Unknowns

    Several factors may upend the status quo. This would allow for the Trump Administration to make some progress on its aggressive anti-Iran policies.

    The United Kingdom: There is a possibility that Brexit may result in the UK leaving EU without a deal. In light of this, the UK is attempting to shore up its relationships with non-EU states, especially the US and Israel. If Brexit results in a no deal, the UK could seek to leverage withdrawing from the JCPOA to gain favour with the US. Though this outcome is unlikely as Brexit may be delayed, such a development could upend the current state of affairs.

    Turkey-Iran- Russia: During the summit, Turkey, Iran and Russia held trilateral talks on developments in Syria. The three states are united on their opposition to US troops in Syria-albeit for different motivations. Turkey, a NATO member, is increasingly aligned with Russia and Iran on geopolitical issues, placing it at odds with the US, the Gulf States, and Israel. The US withdrawal from Syria is imminent and this will lead to an increased role for Turkey on the ground. Such a development could lead to direct clashes between Turkish and Syrian regime forces. If this were to happen, the current alignment of states risks facing changes. If Iran and Russia violently support of Assad could place Turkey squarely in support of the US anti-Iran policy in the region. However, the likelihood of this is negligible.

    Iran’s considerations

    The Islamic Republic is currently staying in the JCPOA. Tehran has weighed the stakes and believes it has much to gain under current conditions. The cost-benefit analysis shows that Iran’s ballistic missile program and regional activities are benefiting from the current disagreements between the world powers on the JCPOA. The European states, Russia and China’s continued support for the deal in opposition to the US and the return of sanctions will allow this situation to continue. This has furthered Iran’s standing within the international community. However, Iran is going through an intense economic crisis which is only intensifying with the return of US sanctions. If conditions continue to worsen, Tehran may have to reconsider its position on remaining in the agreement.

    Winners and losers

    The biggest winner is Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu. It is election season in Israel and Bibi is currently under an immense amount of pressure. Netanyahu has long touted warming ties with Arab Sunni states, especially in the Gulf. Clear agreement on policy issues, specifically on Iran’s role in the region, will likely win him much needed support within the Israeli public as he further brandishes the image of ‘Mr. Security’.

    Another major winner is the EU which demonstrated yet again its resilience under American pressure. Under the leadership of Federica Mogherini, the EU continues to maintain its position on the agreement. This is while it continues to keep its member states in line with the official position on the nuclear deal process.  This is no small featgiven the diplomatic blitz of the Trump Administration. The JCPOA is also a winner when reflecting on these developments. An American withdrawal from the deal in May last year had significantly raised the risks of the agreement collapsing. However, its continuedsurvival places it in the winner’s category. The JCPOA survival continues to provide some measurement of hope that military conflict over Iran’s nuclear program is not imminent.

    Two major losers are evident. Firstly, the Trump Administration’s Iran policy continues toremain largely unsupported by crucial players needed for its success. Following Warsaw, it is unlikely this is going to change in the short term. Secondly, Arab states who attended may suffer from a public relations crisis at being seen so friendly in public with Israel.

    Predictions for the future

    In the short to medium term, Iran will likely continue to adhere to the JCPOA. Its continued compliance has allowed Tehran to intensify its powerful ballistic missile program, support proxies and project its influence across the region. This includes the deployment of troops and economic projects. President Trump’s continued insistence on global compliance to US extraterritorial sanctions is causing serious friction between the US and countries around the world; thereby lending the regime in Tehran the legitimacy it covets.

    A serious change likely in the status quo would be if the economic crisis in Iran worsens. Such a development would change the calculations of the Iranian government. It can lend domestic hardliners the upper hand in their argument for withdrawal from the agreement. Given the rampant corruption and stagnation in the Iranian economy, it is not an impossibility. When coupled with a severe water crisis and the return of US sanctions, such an outcome is plausible. Nonetheless, the government in Tehran may attempt to continue under current circumstances in an attempt to outlast President Trump who faces reelection in 2020.

  • Top Philippine General Warns US Bomber Missions Near China Could 'Spark War'

    After weeks of seeming relative quiet in the South China Sea, which previously witnessed steadily ratcheting tensions as US naval ships and planes passed near Chinese military assets with increased frequency in the latter part of 2018, the US has once again risked an encounter with Beijing by flying a pair of B-52 strategic bombers in close proximity with China. 

    The US Pacific Air Forces confirmed in a statement on Monday, “Two B-52H Stratofortress bombers took off from Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, and participated in routine training missions, March 4, 2019.” It was the first such flight through the area of the South China Sea since November. 

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    U.S. Air Force B-52H Stratofortress Bomber, via Defpost.

    Two US Air Force B-52H Stratofortress long-range bombers took off from Guam to conduct “routine training missions” over disputed airspaces of the South and East China seas, according to the statement. 

    “One bomber conducted training in the vicinity of the South China Sea before returning to Guam, while the other conducted training in the vicinity of Japan in coordination with the U.S. Navy and alongside our Japanese air force counterparts before returning to Guam,” the US Pacific Air Forces continued.

    An ABC report identified the operations as part of the the U.S. Air Force’s Continuous Bomber Presence (CBP) based out of Andersen AFB in Guam, which involves rotating B-1, B-52 and B-2 long-range bombers to conduct training missions in Asia. 

    Locked in a continued trade war with Washington, Beijing was no doubt angered by the patrols though remained uncharacteristically quiet in its response, which is typically immediate. The last times B-52s transited the East and South China Seas were in September and in November of 2018. 

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Subi Reef, Spratly Islands, South China Sea, in May 2015, appearing to show Chinese military build-up. Image source: Wiki Commons.

    Meanwhile, in a surprising moment of possible tension among allies the Philippines’ top defense official on Tuesday has publicly questioned the US maneuvers. 

    Speaking Tuesday, Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana said the Philippines-US Mutual Defense Treaty (MDT) runs the risk of causing “confusion and chaos during a crisis,” especially as the US ramps ups such aerial patrols of the region and “freedom of navigation” exercises. 

    “The Philippines is not in a conflict with anyone and will not be at war with anyone in the future. But the United States, with the increased and frequent passage of its naval vessels in the West Philippine Sea, is more likely to be involved in a shooting war. In such a case and on the basis of the MDT, the Philippines will be automatically involved,” Lorenzana said, according to CNN Philippines, using the local term for the South China Sea (the West Philippine Sea). 

    The United States, for its part, has long held its operations, even when sailing close to disputed islands claimed by China or flying overhead, are intended to assert that the area is international waters and in international airspace.

  • Civil War Would Erupt If "Green New Deal" Socialists Actually Get What They Want

    Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,

    In the months preceding the 2016 presidential election, I predicted a Trump election win but tried to temper expectations with the reality that there were multiple scenarios exploitable by globalists which could turn the conservative elation into confusion and chaos. Just after the election, I published an article titled ‘Order Out Of Chaos: The Defeat Of The Left Comes With A Cost’. In that article I warned that the political Left, when confronted with failure, has displayed a habit of doubling or tripling down and becoming even more extreme in their rhetoric and policies. I also warned that this might influence the political Right to become more extreme in response.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    This is the problem when attempting to explain the False Left/Right Paradigm to people who are new to the concept. Yes, at the top of the political pyramid, all the players support essentially the same policies of centralization and more power to the elites. But, at the bottom of the pyramid, there are numerous and legitimate divides among common citizens. The divides are real, not false, and it is these divides that the elites seek to exploit.

    One divide that we are likely to hear much more about in the next two years is the divide between “old school” democrats and the new “green deal” socialists/communists. Another more vitriolic divide is the one between common sense conservatives and the “double down” socialist cult.

    The narrative being constructed here is a fascinated but disturbing one. Consider the pattern on display:

    Sovereignty activists unseat the old Republican guard and take control of the party through Trump during the 2016 election while pushing “populism” to the forefront of the mainstream. They supplant the social justice left who thought they had the world in the palm of their hand. In response, the left goes even more insane; searching for meaning in a world that obviously does not want them, they come to the realization that not only did they run the worst possible candidate in 2016 (Clinton), but their platform was not “extreme enough”. They now plan to not only take down Trump by any means necessary, but they also plan to break down their own “old guard” and rebuild the Democratic party into something openly communist (rather than closet communist).

    Of course, this narrative is not reality. Trump didn’t push out the old guard neo-con Republicans. In fact, the elites run his administration today through globalist agents like Bolton, Pompeo, Ross, and Mnuchin. The Trump Administration, while perhaps rebellious in its rhetoric, has done nothing to “drain the swamp” in Washington DC. The left is rebelling against a fantasy. There was no populist takeover of the US government; there are no champions for liberty, free markets and individual sovereignty in the White House. Is was all a con game.

    But who benefits from the con?  The globalists, of course, but how does the “green deal” left play into the scheme?

    I suspect that the leftists will find themselves in a similar position as liberty conservatives down the road as the “green new deal” is forced into the mainstream consciousness. With “socialists” like Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez receiving more public and media attention than ever, it is clear that there is an agenda by the establishment to generate manufactured excitement over socialist/communist policies. To be clear, the way our system operates today is ALREADY quite socialist, with big government interference in almost every aspect of business and life. However, the green new deal represents a full blown Marxist approach to government control. It is essentially soviet level communism, repackaged as environmental socialism.

    The Democrats are about to have their own fake internal revolution, which the elites plan to control just as they have controlled Trump’s “takeover” of the Republican Party.

    The political Left is more vulnerable than ever to this kind of transition. As noted above, they feel they lost the 2016 election because they ran an establishment candidate on policies that were not extreme enough, and some of them also still believe the debunked notion that the election was stolen by Russian hackers. But, if they do campaign in 2020 on a socialist/communist platform, it will be the same old elitist establishment that benefits. The old guard will become the new guard, just as the old guard became the “new guard” when Trump entered office.

    I will try to break the situation down as clearly as I can…

    Globalists patterns tend to repeat. They use the same strategies over and over again because these strategies have worked for them in the past. As I noted in my article ‘Trump Trade Wars A Perfect Smokescreen For A Market Crash’, Trump’s presidency strangely echoes that of Herbert Hoover’s. Almost every Trump policy from large corporate tax cuts to infrastructure spending programs to aggressive trade tariffs is reminiscent of Hoover’s presidency just before the onset of the Great Depression (also, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates into economic weakness during Hoover’s presidency, just as they are doing during Trump’s presidency).

    Hoover was a one term president unseated by economic collapse. He was then replaced by perhaps the most openly communistic leader the US has ever had; Franklin D. Roosevelt. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” was the catalyst for most big government socialist programs for decades to come.

    I do not think it is a coincidence that Trump’s presidency closely matches Hoover’s.

    I do not think it is a coincidence that the Federal Reserve is tightening policy into weakness today (cutting $65 billion in assets from their balance sheet in February alone) just as they did during Hoover’s term.

    I do not think it is a coincidence that the US is currently suffering a vast economic downturn in fundamental data in housing markets, auto markets, credit markets, manufacturing, and retail.

    And, I do not think it is a coincidence that as we enter the third year of Trump’s first (and perhaps last) term, the extreme left suddenly proposed a highly socialist “new deal” program from left field. This pattern is rather familiar.

    Some people might argue that the green new deal is a sideshow, and that the American people would never support such measures or any presidential candidates that would implement them. And I would agree IF we were to hold an election today. After all, front-muppet Cortez comes off like an angry teenager who just discovered Marx and Alinsky and decided to base her entire identity around the cliff notes of their manifestos.

    But, by 2020 the story may be much different.

    If the globalist scheme is as I have been predicting, and they plan to bring down the US economy into recession/depression territory under Trump’s watch, then the ensuing public fear could develop into support for measures citizens might have originally thought absurd. Trump would likely be voted out even if the Democratic candidate is a full blown socialist, or the election could be rigged by the elites in favor of the Democrat candidate.

    During the recent testimony of Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer suggested in a rather odd exchange with Congress that if Trump were to lose the election in 2020 that the transition “would never be peaceful…”. The leftist media has already pounced on this comment and asserted that conservatives would support Trump in a kind of violent retroactive coup should the Dems win in the next election.

    Generally I find the expositions of leftists in the media so delusional it is painful. Their vision is so clouded by bias and fantasy that many of them could be mistaken for institutionalized schizophrenics. They see racists and fascists under every rock and behind every tree, and they justify their insanity by creating enemies that simply do not exist. That said, in this case, I actually agree with their assessment.

    If the left runs on a new green deal platform and wins in 2020, conservatives would likely revolt violently, and even though I know that the elitist establishment would seek to ultimately benefit from a civil war in the US, and even though I know that Trump is a pied piper for the globalists, I could not admonish such a rebellion.

    The green new deal would be so devastating to the US economy that it could only result in complete destabilization and eventually mass extermination. The consequences of its policies need to be examined more thoroughly not just by conservatives but people on the left that have not yet fallen off the fence into extremism. The agenda is frightening.

    Government Support Of Non-Profits To Manage Local Economies: Green deal proponents pretend as if they will fight for more localized economies, but their brand of “support” is aimed at cooperation between non-profits and government. Non-profits are some of the most corrupt organizations active in the US. Also, while giving government incentives to promote localism does not sound like a bad idea, government should not be involved in economic management at all. How far will government go to ensure that local economies are given priority? What if incentives are not enough and regulation follows as it usually does? Enforcing localism is like enforcing charity. If localism is enforced, it is not localism. It must be voluntary.

    100% Clean Energy By 2030: It’s interesting that this policy matches exactly with the UN’s sustainability agenda for 2030. First and foremost, there is no concrete evidence whatsoever that carbon causes global warming or “climate change”, and certainly no evidence that man-made carbon affects the environment. But, the UN’s sustainability plans hinge on the idea of carbon “pollution” and taxation, and so does the new green deal. With a stated cost of $13.4 Trillion to convert to 100% renewable energy (an extremely low estimate), the money to pay for everything has to come from somewhere.

    The funds will come from the average consumer and fuel taxation; taxes high enough to make driving a gas vehicle prohibitive over time. And of course carbon taxation of what is left of US manufacturing and industry, leaving the US completely non-competitive in global trade. This portion of the green new deal would essentially sink the US into third world status.

    Full Employment Program: We’ve seen the results of “full employment” policies in communist countries in the past, and they generally do not work out too well for the average person. The only way to implement such standards is through forced wealth redistribution and much lower wages. Meaning, once again, American living standards would have to be sharply decreased.

    There is a longer list of green deal directives which you can read about here.  The devil is in the details, and how such measures would actually be enforced.  The level of state control and involvement in business and our lives would have to be far more extensive that it is today, and that is saying a lot.  So, how could this possibly come about without massive resistance?

    The only way that a majority of average Americans would support these vast changes to our culture and our economic system is if we are already in the midst of a financial disaster and we feel as though we have nothing left to lose. The economic decay currently initiated by the Fed through their deliberate implosion of the “everything bubble” they created over the past decade indicates that this may very well be the case by 2020.  What I’m saying is, just as I predicted Trump would win in 2016, I am now predicting Trump will lose in 2020 if economic conditions continue to decline.

    The establishment could develop this scenario one of two ways:

    First, a Trump attempt to keep the White House, backed by conservative support and unconstitutional martial law. 

    Second, Trump steps down willingly to be replaced by a Democrat energized by green deal fanaticism. 

    The first option would depend on how many conservatives realize Trump is controlled opposition and refuse to go along with the theatrics.

    In either case, a peaceful transition is not going to happen.  Millions of conservatives would not accept the institution of green deal measures.  They would revolt against them, along with the host of other predictable policies socialists would pursue, from gun control to increased taxation in every area of life.  Domestic warfare would be inevitable.  Perhaps even preferable.  The problem is, would a conservative rebellion against green deal socialists be a grass roots affair, or would it be manipulated in a top-down farce?

    The ultimate solution to the problem would be for conservatives to focus their efforts not on leftists, but on the globalists that are attempting to pull strings on both sides of the political divide.  The globalists are the root of the cancer infecting our civilization, and they must by cut out.

    If this is not done, then the only outcome I see in this situation would be mindless civil war. The globalists would work to control both sides through puppet leadership while we are hyperfocused only on the political left.  Which means, they could control who wins, and who loses.

    *  *  *

    If you would like to support the publishing of articles like the one you have just read, visit our donations page here.  We greatly appreciate your patronage.

  • Florida Man Redeems Rare Stolen Coins Worth $33,000 In Supermarket 'Coin Star' Machine

    “Florida Man” has really outdone himself this time.

    After stealing a rare coin collection from an elderly and disabled retiree, Shane Anthony Mele dumped what their owner said was at least $33,000 worth of collectible coins down a Coin Star star machine at a Florida supermarket and collected their face value, receiving about $30 – enough for a couple of 12 packs.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>Florida

    Shane Anthony Mele

    At least that’s what Michael Johnson, the victim of the theft, told the Palm Beach Post. Johnson said He had befriended Mele after being introduced by a mutual friend a few years ago. And earning his trust, Mele stole the coins – robbing Johnson of his entire retirement.

    With most of his retirement savings gone, Johnson has been left to figure out how he will manage to survive.

    Michael Johnson envisioned Shane Anthony Mele sending those commemorative presidential dollarsspiraling down a slot, to be converted from $33,000 worth of collectibles to just enough store credit to buy a couple of 12-packs of beer.

    “He easily had $33,000 worth, and he dumped it in a Coin Star machine,” Johnson said.

    Authorities said Mele, 40, of Riviera Beach confessed he stole rare coins and other items, valued at $350,000, from Johnson’s North Palm Beach office in December.

    Mele reportedly said he sold some, then ran many through change machines, where he got just face value.

    Johnson, who said he’s disabled and mostly not working, said Mele wiped him out of his life savings.

    “I was using those coins to help stay alive,” he said.

    “There’s no insurance that covers this kind of thing, really. Not at the losses we’re talking about,” he said. “It’s put me in a world of hurt.”

    North Palm Beach Police swiftly arrested Mele – who still had some of the coins in his possession – and booked him on charges of grand theft with a value of more than $100,000. In a sign that drug addiction may have motivated the theft, he was also booked on a 10-count drug charge that police said was unrel;ated to the theft. In addition to the spare change he received from the Coin Star machine, Mele said he took some of the coins to a local coin & jewelry shop, where he sold them for roughly $4,000.

    Mele was booked the evening of Feb. 1 at the Palm Beach County Jail, charged with grand theft of more than $100,000, along with a unrelated 10-count drug charge. He left Feb. 4 after posting bond, jail and court records show.

    Mele could not be located for comment. A North Palm Beach Police report shows no address, and the telephone number shown for Mele was disconnected.

    Johnson, who’s in the finance industry, said he inherited a large coin collection, as well as a love of collecting, from his father, who died about six years ago. He said he started collecting at age 16 and estimated he had more than 100,000 coins in 80 boxes, some worth just a little and some extremely valuable.

    Now, he said, they’re mostly gone.

    Whether Johnson might have the chance to recover the coins remains unclear.

  • Forced Blood Draws & Implied Consent Laws Make A Mockery Of The Fourth Amendment

    Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

    “The Fourth Amendment was designed to stand between us and arbitrary governmental authority. For all practical purposes, that shield has been shattered, leaving our liberty and personal integrity subject to the whim of every cop on the beat, trooper on the highway and jail official.”

    – Herman Schwartz, The Nation

    You think you’ve got rights? Think again.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    All of those freedoms we cherish—the ones enshrined in the Constitution, the ones that affirm our right to free speech and assembly, due process, privacy, bodily integrity, the right to not have police seize our property without a warrant, or search and detain us without probable cause—amount to nothing when the government and its agents are allowed to disregard those prohibitions on government overreach at will.

    This is the grim reality of life in the American police state.

    Our so-called rights have been reduced to technicalities in the face of the government’s ongoing power grabs.

    Consider a case before the U.S. Supreme Court (Mitchell vs. Wisconsin) in which Wisconsin police officers read an unconscious man his rights and then proceeded to forcibly and warrantlessly draw his blood while he was still unconscious in order to determine if he could be charged with a DUI.

    To sanction this forced blood draw, the cops and the courts have hitched their wagon to state “implied consent” laws (all of the states have them), which suggest that merely driving on a state-owned road implies that a person has consented to police sobriety tests, breathalyzers and blood draws.

    More than half of the states (29 states) allow police to do warrantless, forced blood draws on unconscious individuals whom they suspect of driving while intoxicated.

    Seven state appeals courts have declared these warrantless blood draws when carried out on unconscious suspects are unconstitutional. Courts in seven other states have found that implied consent laws run afoul of the Fourth Amendment. And yet seven other states (including Wisconsin) have ruled that implied consent laws provide police with a free pass when it comes to the Fourth Amendment and forced blood draws.

    With this much division among the state courts, a lot is riding on which way the U.S. Supreme Court rules in Mitchell and whether it allows state legislatures to use implied consent laws as a means of allowing police to bypass the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement in relation to forced blood draws and unconscious suspects.

    Mind you, this is the third time in as many years that the Supreme Court has taken up the issue of warrantless blood draws.

    In 2016, the Court ruled 7-1 in Birchfield v. North Dakota that states may not prosecute suspected drunken drivers for refusing warrantless blood draws when they are arrested. However, the Court also tossed the cops a bone by giving them a green light to require a warrantless breath test incident to arrest. Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito rightly recognized the danger of allowing the government to warrantlessly take possession of—and preserve indefinitely—one’s biological and genetic material.

    In 2013, a divided Supreme Court held in Missouri v. McNeely that people suspected of drunken driving can’t automatically be subjected to blood tests without a warrant and without their consent.

    The differences between McNeely, Birchfeld and Mitchell are nuanced, but it is in these nuances that the struggle to preserve the Fourth Amendment can best be seen.

    The Fourth Amendment has been on life support for a long time.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Our freedoms—especially the Fourth Amendment—continue to be strangulated by a prevailing view among government bureaucrats that they have the right to search, seize, strip, scan, spy on, probe, pat down, taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation.

    Forced cavity searches, forced colonoscopies, forced blood draws, forced breath-alcohol tests, forced DNA extractions, forced eye scans, forced inclusion in biometric databases: these are just a few ways in which Americans are being forced to accept that we have no control over our bodies, our lives and our property, especially when it comes to interactions with the government.

    Worse, on a daily basis, Americans are being made to relinquish the most intimate details of who we are—our biological makeup, our genetic blueprints, and our biometrics (facial characteristics and structure, fingerprints, iris scans, etc.)—in order to clear the nearly insurmountable hurdle that increasingly defines life in the United States: we are now guilty until proven innocent.

    Such is life in America today that individuals are being threatened with arrest and carted off to jail for the least hint of noncompliance, homes are being raided by police under the slightest pretext, property is being seized on the slightest hint of suspicious activity, and roadside police stops have devolved into government-sanctioned exercises in humiliation and degradation with a complete disregard for privacy and human dignity.

    Remember what happened to Utah nurse Alex Wubbels after a police detective demanded to take blood from a badly injured, unconscious patient without a warrant?

    Wubbels refused to go along with the cop’s order, citing hospital policy that requires police to either have a warrant or permission from the patient in order to draw blood.

    The detective had neither.

    Irate, the detective threatened to have Wubbels arrested if she didn’t comply. Backed up by her supervisors, Wubbels respectfully stood her ground only to be roughly grabbed, shoved out of the hospital, handcuffed and forced into an unmarked car while hospital police looked on and failed to intervene (take a look at the police body camera footage, which went viral, and see for yourself).

    Michael Chorosky didn’t have an advocate like Wubbels to stand guard over his Fourth Amendment rights. Chorosky was surrounded by police, strapped to a gurney and then had his blood forcibly drawn after refusing to submit to a breathalyzer test. “What country is this? What country is this?” cried Chorosky during the forced blood draw.

    What country is this indeed?

    Unfortunately, forced blood draws are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the indignities and abuses being heaped on Americans in the so-called name of “national security.”

    For example, 21-year-old Charnesia Corley was allegedly being pulled over by Texas police for “rolling” through a stop sign. Claiming they smelled marijuana, police handcuffed Corley, placed her in the back of the police cruiser, and then searched her car for almost an hour. No drugs were found in the car.

    As the Houston Chronicle reported:

    Returning to his car where Corley was held, the deputy again said he smelled marijuana and called in a female deputy to conduct a cavity search. When the female deputy arrived, she told Corley to pull her pants down, but Corley protested because she was cuffed and had no underwear on. The deputy ordered Corley to bend over, pulled down her pants and began to search her. Then…Corley stood up and protested, so the deputy threw her to the ground and restrained her while another female was called in to assist. When backup arrived, each deputy held one of Corley’s legs apart to conduct the probe.

    The cavity search lasted 11 minutes. This practice is referred to as “rape by cop.”

    Corley was eventually charged with resisting arrest and with possession of 0.2 grams of marijuana. Those charges were subsequently dropped.

    David Eckert was forced to undergo an anal cavity search, three enemas, and a colonoscopy after allegedly failing to yield to a stop sign at a Wal-Mart parking lot. Cops justified the searches on the grounds that they suspected Eckert was carrying drugs because his “posture [was] erect” and “he kept his legs together.” No drugs were found.

    During a routine traffic stop, Leila Tarantino was subjected to two roadside strip searches in plain view of passing traffic, while her two children—ages 1 and 4—waited inside her car. During the second strip search, presumably in an effort to ferret out drugs, a female officer “forcibly removed” a tampon from Tarantino. No contraband or anything illegal was found.

    Thirty-eight-year-old Angel Dobbs and her 24-year-old niece, Ashley, were pulled over by a Texas state trooper on July 13, 2012, allegedly for flicking cigarette butts out of the car window. Insisting that he smelled marijuana, the trooper proceeded to interrogate them and search the car. Despite the fact that both women denied smoking or possessing any marijuana, the police officer then called in a female trooper, who carried out a roadside cavity search, sticking her fingers into the older woman’s anus and vagina, then performing the same procedure on the younger woman, wearing the same pair of gloves. No marijuana was found.

    Sixty-nine-year-old Gerald Dickson was handcuffed and taken into custody (although not arrested or charged with any crime) after giving a ride to a neighbor’s son, whom police suspected of being a drug dealer. Despite Dickson’s insistence that the bulge under his shirt was the result of a botched hernia surgery, police ordered Dickson to “strip off his clothes, bend over and expose all of his private parts. No drugs or contraband were found.”

    Meanwhile, four Milwaukee police officers were charged with carrying out rectal searches of suspects on the street and in police district stations over the course of several years. One of the officers was accused of conducting searches of men’s anal and scrotal areas, often inserting his fingers into their rectums and leaving some of his victims with bleeding rectums.

    It’s gotten so bad that you don’t even have to be suspected of possessing drugs to be subjected to a strip search.

    A North Carolina public school allegedly strip-searched a 10-year-old boy in search of a $20 bill lost by another student, despite the fact that the boy, J.C., twice told school officials he did not have the missing money. The assistant principal reportedly ordered the fifth grader to disrobe down to his underwear and subjected him to an aggressive strip-search that included rimming the edge of his underwear. The missing money was later found in the school cafeteria.

    Suspecting that Georgia Tech alum Mary Clayton might have been attempting to smuggle a Chik-Fil-A sandwich into the football stadium, a Georgia Tech police officer allegedly subjected the season ticket-holder to a strip search that included a close examination of her underwear and bra. No contraband chicken was found.

    What these incidents show is that while forced searches may span a broad spectrum of methods and scenarios, the common denominator remains the same: a complete disregard for the dignity and rights of the citizenry.

    In fact, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Florence v. Burlison, any person who is arrested and processed at a jail house, regardless of the severity of his or her offense (i.e., they can be guilty of nothing more than a minor traffic offense), can be subjected to a strip search by police or jail officials without reasonable suspicion that the arrestee is carrying a weapon or contraband.

    Examples of minor infractions which have resulted in strip searches include: individuals arrested for driving with a noisy muffler, driving with an inoperable headlight, failing to use a turn signal, riding a bicycle without an audible bell, making an improper left turn, engaging in an antiwar demonstration (the individual searched was a nun, a Sister of Divine Providence for 50 years).

    Police have also carried out strip searches for passing a bad check, dog leash violations, filing a false police report, failing to produce a driver’s license after making an illegal left turn, having outstanding parking tickets, and public intoxication. A failure to pay child support can also result in a strip search.

    As technology advances, these searches are becoming more invasive on a cellular level, as well.

    For instance, close to 600 motorists leaving Penn State University one Friday night were stopped by police and, without their knowledge or consent, subjected to a breathalyzer test using flashlights that can detect the presence of alcohol on a person’s breath.

    These passive alcohol sensors are being hailed as a new weapon in the fight against DUIs. (Those who refuse to knowingly submit to a breathalyzer test are being subjected to forced blood draws. Thirty states presently allow police to do forced blood draws on drivers as part of a nationwide “No Refusal” initiative funded by the federal government.

    Not even court rulings declaring such practices to be unconstitutional in the absence of a warrant have slowed down the process. Now police simply keep a magistrate on call to rubber stamp the procedure over the phone.)

    The National Highway Safety Administration, the same government agency that funds the “No Refusal” DUI checkpoints and forcible blood draws, is also funding nationwide roadblocks aimed at getting drivers to “voluntarily” provide police with DNA derived from saliva and blood samples, reportedly to study inebriation patterns.

    In at least 28 states, there’s nothing voluntary about having one’s DNA collected by police in instances where you’ve been arrested, whether or not you’re actually convicted of a crime.

    All of this DNA data is being fed to the federal government.

    Airline passengers, already subjected to virtual strip searches, are now being scrutinized even more closely, with the Customs and Border Protection agency tasking airport officials with monitoring the bowel movements of passengers suspected of ingesting drugs. They even have a special hi-tech toilet designed to filter through a person’s fecal waste.

    Iris scans, an essential part of the U.S. military’s boots-on-the-ground approach to keeping track of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, are becoming a de facto method of building the government’s already mammoth biometrics database. Funded by the Dept. of Justice, along with other federal agencies, the iris scan technology is being incorporated into police precincts, jails, immigration checkpoints, airports and even schools. School officials—from elementary to college—have begun using iris scans in place of traditional ID cards. As for parents wanting to pick their kids up from school, they have to first submit to an iris scan.

    As for those endless pictures everyone so cheerfully uploads to Facebook (which has the largest facial recognition database in the world) or anywhere else on the internet, they’re all being accessed by the police, filtered with facial recognition software, uploaded into the government’s mammoth biometrics database and cross-checked against its criminal files. With good reason, civil libertarians fear these databases could “someday be used for monitoring political rallies, sporting events or even busy downtown areas.”

    While the Fourth Amendment was created to prevent government officials from searching an individual’s person or property without a warrant and probable cause—evidence that some kind of criminal activity was afoot—the founders could scarcely have imagined a world in which we needed protection against widespread government breaches of our privacy, including on a cellular level.

    Yet that’s exactly what we are lacking and what we so desperately need.

    Unfortunately, the indignities being heaped upon us by the architects and agents of the American police state—whether or not we’ve done anything wrong—are just a foretaste of what is to come.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the government doesn’t need to tie you to a gurney and forcibly take your blood or strip you naked by the side of the road in order to render you helpless. It has other methods—less subtle perhaps but equally humiliating, devastating and mind-altering—of stripping you of your independence, robbing you of your dignity, and undermining your rights.

    With every court ruling that allows the government to operate above the rule of law, every piece of legislation that limits our freedoms, and every act of government wrongdoing that goes unpunished, we’re slowly being conditioned to a society in which we have little real control over our bodies or our lives.

  • TSA Confiscates Rocket Launcher At Pennsylvania Airport 

    The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) confiscated a “rocket-propelled grenade launcher” at Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley International Airport on Monday.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    TSA Public Affairs spokesperson Lisa Farbstein tweeted, “@TSA officers detected the unassembled parts of a military rocket-propelled grenade launcher in a man’s checked bag at @FLYLVIA yesterday. When assembled, the launcher was determined to be non-functioning and the grenade an inert replica. (Thank goodness!).”

    In a press release, TSA said the inert grenade launcher belonged to a Florida man who tried to pass it through a checkpoint of high-tech security scanners.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    The unassembled pieces were spotted by TSA personnel who were operating an X-ray machine. TSA said there was a barrel, trigger, sights, and an inert round.

    Pictures from the TSA indicate it was an inert Russian RPG-7, a portable, reusable, unguided, shoulder-launched, anti-tank rocket-propelled grenade launcher.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    The unidentified man, from St. Augustine, Florida, was detained by airport police. He told police that he thought a replica grenade launcher could be allowed on a plane.

    Though the TSA website indicates “realistic replicas of firearms” may be permitted in checked bags, no weapons of “military nature” are permitted in checked or carry-on luggage, a TSA official said in the press release.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Passengers who attempt to bring weapons of “military nature” through a checkpoint can face civil penalties of up to $13,000, TSA said.

    However, in this situation, the inert grenade launcher was confiscated, and the man was allowed to continue his flight to Orlando Sanford International Airport, reportedly without a fine.

    This comes one day after Farbstein tweeted another incident that occurred over the weekend where someone tried to sneak a fake grenade, pellets and other paraphernalia through a security checkpoint at New Jersey’s Newark Liberty International Airport.

    Someone on Twitter replied to the TSA spokesperson post and asked: Is this a “trial run”? 

  • The Intelligent Cryptocurrency Investor

    Authored by Boss Cole via HackerNoon.com,

    If you wish to be an intelligent investor in the cryptocurrency markets, you are about to get your chance. The speculators have gone home, the optimists have packed their bags and the pessimists are running the show.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    While we may be lacking in the financial data required to obtain true intrinsic value estimations we now have the opportunity to look for real companies, building the future, expanding their size and generating revenues and profits.

    If we assume to know that the current sentiment is negative and that we are likely sitting in the depression stage of the market cycle, we can then compare this list of high-quality companies to the current pricing, stage in the cycle and their past market values to arrive at a value approximation.

    The Intelligent Cryptocurrency Investor

    Recently I have been reading “The Intelligent Investor” By Benjamin Graham. I have read a lot of trading and investing books, so it was interesting that I had not read this iconic piece already. There is a wealth of old knowledge in this book that still rings true today. In fact, I have found recently that reading old books, or “classics” often gives you a better summary of the core principles around a topic than the new editions.

    Let me set the scene with a quote from the book.

    The whole point of investing is not purely to earn more money than average, but to earn enough money to meet your own needs. The best way to measure your investing success is not by whether you are beating the market right now, but whether you have put in a financial plan and a behavioural discipline that are likely to get you to where you want to go. In the end what matters isn’t crossing the finish line before anybody else but making sure that you do cross it.

    It’s easy for us to lose focus on this, with the constant feed of price data and news headlines our brains can become completely overwhelmed. Cryptocurrency investing is unique. It involves a much larger degree of speculation than stock market investing because there is a distinct lack of hard, factual and financial data.

    This means you need new frameworks for valuation and trading, which is why for cryptocurrency I have leaned towards focussing on the technical analysis of long term trends and market psychology. I believe this is the approach I will be using for a long time yet, as I cannot see a wealth of new data flooding the scene any time soon.

    The Intrinsic Value Of A Cryptocurrency

    While we cannot accurately speculate on the intrinsic value of a cryptocurrency without insider knowledge of assets, revenues and profits we can evaluate the opinion and beliefs of the market participants. In value investing the first step is to run the numbers and decide what the overall value of the business is by looking at its current net assets, its past performance and conservative future revenue earning potential. Yet in cryptocurrency, we do not have this data. What we are left to make our judgments from is past market values and market psychology at that time. Doing this will give us an approximation to the “true market value” (different to the intrinsic value).

    For example, if a cryptocurrency has been falling into an area that it held previously on a number of occasions, you can assume that this level was a fair market value for that cryptocurrency. However, what you need to add into this technical calculation, is the emotional state of the market at previous times, and at this current time.

    Let’s say that as price approached this specific level, and it then broke down. Did the price break down because of the overall negative market sentiment? Or was it due to more negative market opinions of the individual asset in question? If it was caused by an overall shift in the market sentiment, there is a chance this asset dropped below its true market value due to the manipulation in overall emotions. However, if the price dropped in a time of overall positive market sentiment, it is more likely that there is something specific and different about the asset in question.

    Determining The Top Of An Asset Bubble

    Now, all of this information is useful to determine the potential bottoms, and the true market value of cryptocurrencies, however, it is most helpful when judging and profiting from the overvaluation of assets.

    As we talked about earlier individual cryptocurrencies are highly speculative in nature. Combine this with the fact that the majority of the investors are non-institutional or “average” people we can begin to create a clearer picture. The result is a market environment much like the early years of the stock market. A plethora of new valuation methods are being created, and the market is still dominated by emotion.

    To use the terminology of Howard Marks, we see the pendulum of investor psychology swing back and forth, at an incredibly fast speed. What would usually take weeks, months or years, happens in hours and days. This is due to a lack of sophistication, liquidity, and players in the market. One of the main lessons I have learned in cryptocurrency is that what goes up, will almost always come back down.

    We can use our framework of fair market value to observe assets that have been pushed up above this level and are likely headed for a retracement. We can also use this framework to inform potential buying opportunities as prices approach fair market valuations.

    The Psychology Of An Intelligent Investor

    Back in the spring of 1720, Sir Isaac Newton owned shares in the South Sea Company, the hottest stock in England. Sensing that the market was getting out of hand, the great physicist muttered that he “could calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of the people.” Newton dumped his South Sea shares, pocketing a 100% profit totaling £7,000. But just months later, swept up in the wild enthusiasm of the market, Newton jumped back in at a much higher price — and lost £20,000 (or more than $3 million in today’s money). For the rest of his life, he forbade anyone to speak the words “South Sea” in his presence.

    Why is this relevant?

    The problem illustrated above is that nobody can predict the top of such bubbles or price increases. In the case of cryptocurrency, prices often take time to return to their fair market value, but they usually do. There are miniature bubbles confined to a handful of assets expanding and popping constantly because nobody believes, or can accurately assess the “intrinsic value” of these cryptocurrencies. There always becomes a price so high, that nobody wants to pay it anymore. Then the news turns negative, sentiment shifts, and the crowd moves from that “hot” asset to the next “hot asset”.

    “The market is a pendulum that forever swings between unsustainable optimism (which makes stocks too expensive) and unjustified pessimism (which makes them too cheap). The Intelligent Investor is a realist who sells to optimists and buys from pessimists.” — Benjamin Graham

    In cryptocurrency, our main role is to assess the cycle of emotions, and how that cycle is correlated to price, and I believe the above quote serves that purpose. In cryptocurrency, the optimists are usually proved wrong, and when the last pessimist falls, those optimists will take control yet again.

    If you wish to be an intelligent investor in the cryptocurrency markets, you are about to get your chance. The speculators have gone home, the optimists have packed their bags and the pessimists are running the show. While we may be lacking in the financial data required to obtain true intrinsic value estimations we now have the opportunity to look for real companies, building the future, expanding their size and generating revenues and profits. If we assume to know that the current sentiment is negative and that we are likely sitting in the depression stage of the market cycle, we can then compare this list of high-quality companies to the current pricing, stage in the cycle and their past market values to arrive at a value approximation.

    “Investing isn’t about beating others at their game. It’s about controlling yourself at your own game.”

  • Forget $8 Billion: Company Will Build 234 Miles Of Trump's Border Wall For $1.4B

    A North Dakota company is offering to build 234 miles of President Trump’s border wall for a fraction of the $8 billion President Trump wants for the same stretch. 

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Telling the Washington Examiner that President Trump is overpaying, Fisher Sand and Gravel Company CEO Tommy Fisher says his company can do the job for just $1.4 billion, or $4.31 billion if the US government wants to incorporate paved roads and border technology – plus a warranty! 

    “Our whole point is to break through the government bureaucracy,” Fisher told the Examiner. “If they do the small procurements as they are now … that’s not going to cut it.”

    Of the $8 billion Trump is hoping to spend, he already has $1.375 billion of that amount from Congress, which can only be used to build fencing in the Rio Grande Valley. Trump is seeking to repurpose another $3.1 billion in defense funding for more border wall and $3.6 billion more through his emergency declaration that Congress and the courts will challenge. –Washington Examiner

    According to Fisher, the $1.4 billion would cover 20 miles of levee wall in the Rio Grande Valley, along with an additional 214 miles in the surrounding area. According to the bill Congress passed to approve said funds, the construction is restricted to the Rio Grande region, and was originally slated to cover around 55 miles of steel slat fencing. 

    According to a representative of the Army Corps of Engineers, the Trump administration has yet to decide how the $8 billion Trump wants to spend will be allocated. 

    The corps is considering how to spend money Congress gave DHS last fiscal year and has not requested bids from the private sector because it’s still in the procurement process.

    Replacement and new wall projects have struggled to get underway in Trump’s first two years in office. Just 35 miles of wall have gone up in that time. The Army Corps of Engineers has procured around 75 miles but has not awarded $900 million for the project of the $1.35 billion that was in the 2018 omnibus. –Washington Examiner

     Lawmakers along with DHS officials are expected to travel to the Arizona border this week to survey current work being performed on the border. 

  • Trucking Boom U-Turns

    Authored by Wolf Richter via WolfStreet.com,

    Another Gauge of the Goods-Based Economy Heads South.

    Orders for Class-8 trucks – made by Daimler (Freightliner, Western Star), Paccar (Peterbuilt, Kenworth), Navistar International, and Volvo Group (Mack Trucks, Volvo Trucks) – plunged 58% in February compared to February last year, to 16,700 orders, according to FTR Transportation Intelligence after they’d already plunged 58% year-over-year in January and 43% in December.

    The orders in January and February were back in the range of the “transportation recession” that had hit the industry in 2015 and 2016. At the time, truck and engine manufacturers reacted with layoffs. But for now, they’re sitting on a massive backlog from the boom in orders last year (data via FTR):

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    The business is infamously cyclical, with regular booms that lead to over-ordering and then overcapacity, followed by busts that then sort it all out again. The industry is also seasonal, so we can use year-over-year comparisons to eliminate most of the effects of seasonality.

    The chart below shows the percent change of Class-8 truck orders for each month compared to the same month a year earlier. The year-over-year plunges over the past three months are of the same magnitude as the plunges during the last transportation recession (data via FTR):

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    “The weaker orders mean that backlogs will tumble for the second straight month, but they remain at historically high levels,” FTR says. These backlogs will keep plants running at capacity until mid-2019, and some truck makers “are booked solid for 2019 with limited sales slots open for the remainder of the year,” according to FTR.

    So truck makers are going to stay busy for a while, and fleets are getting their trucks, and trucking capacity is expanding and will continue to expand, even as orders get slashed.

    This rising capacity finally provides some relief to shippers, such as retailers or industrial companies that need to ship their products to their customers. The transportation recession – as tough as it was on truckers, railroads, and truck and component makers – was nirvana for shippers: lower freight rates and no bottlenecks. But in 2018, they’d been complaining about soaring freight rates and shipping delays, and any loosening of those shipping conditions is a godsend to them.

    Now, shippers are getting a break as the trucking sector is cooling off, according to FTR’s Shippers Conditions Index. The index, which gauges the temperature of the freight market — including trucking, rail, and intermodal — from the shippers’ point of view, combines freight demand, freight rates, fleet capacity, and fuel price into an index value.

    A positive index value signals “good, optimistic conditions” for shippers – not truckers. A value around zero represents a neutral operating environment. A negative value signals “bad, pessimistic conditions” for shippers, according to FTR. “Double digit readings (both up or down) are warning signs for significant operating changes.”

    Index values had been deeply negative, with several months in the double digits, until late last year, then the pressure came off. The index for November, released a month ago, turned positive for the first time since August 2016, and index for December, released at the end of February, rose further into positive territory (data via FTR):

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    “Stable fuel prices, a turn in rail service levels, and loosening truck capacity have combined to create a favorable environment for shippers seeking to move freight,” said FTR’s VIP of rail and intermodal, Todd Tranausky.

    Now there’s the same problem on the horizon that contributed to the transportation recession of 2015 and 2016: Inventories have been piling up. In December, latest data available, wholesale inventories rose 7.3% from December 2017, to a record $662 billion, even as sales have begun to stall. As companies react by whittling down their orders, shipments decline.

    This is already happening, according to the Cass Freight Index – and it’s causing a peculiar situation. “In 30 years, I’ve never seen anything like this,” fretted the CEO of warehouse operator Pacific Mountain Logistics. Read… Inventory Pileup Sounds Alarm for Goods-Based Economy

Digest powered by RSS Digest

Mar 06

Today’s News 6th March 2019

  • Will 5G Cell Phone Technology Lead To Dramatic Population Reduction As Large Numbers Of Men Become Sterile?

    Authored by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog,

    I know that the title of this article is controversial, but the scientific research that has been done in this area inevitably leads us to some conclusions that are inescapable. 

    Our current cell phone technology produces electromagnetic radiation that damages male fertility, and the radiation produced by the new 5G technology will be much more powerful and therefore much more dangerous.  But most people don’t know about this.  Instead, most people are greatly looking forward to the rollout of 5G technology because it will be up to 100 times faster than our current 4G technology, and who wouldn’t want that?  The big cell phone companies will be spending hundreds of billions of dollars to install hundreds of thousands of new 5G antennas, and every single one of those antennas will be constantly emitting very powerful electromagnetic radiation.  Since we can’t see the radiation, to many people the threat does not seem real, but the truth is that if you live in a major urban area you are constantly being bombarded by it.  And once the new 5G network is completely rolled out, you would literally have to live in the middle of nowhere to get away from it completely.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    5G is a quantum leap from 4G, but because the smaller 5G waves do not travel as well, a lot more antennas will be required…

    In order to achieve faster speeds, 5G relies on millimeter waves, which are even smaller than microwaves and operate at a higher frequency. These smaller waves are more easily absorbed by buildings, trees and other things (like people), so more towers will be needed in order to maintain connectivity. The industry has created specialized “small cell” stations and new, larger base stations to accommodate the demands of 5G tech. Even so, it’s expected that a small cell will need to be installed every 250 meters in cities for 5G to work properly. There will be one on every street corner.

    In addition, 5G technology is “ultra high frequency and ultra high intensity”…

    5G cell towers are more dangerous than other cell towers for two main reasons. First, compared to earlier versions, 5G is ultra high frequency and ultra high intensity. 1G, 2G, 3G and 4G use between 1 to 5 gigahertz frequency. 5G uses between 24 to 90 gigahertz frequency. Within the RF Radiation portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, the higher the frequency the more dangerous it is to living organisms.

    So basically the radiation that we will constantly be absorbing will be much, much, much more powerful than before, and the sources emitting the radiation will be much closer to us.

    Are you starting to get the picture?

    If that wasn’t bad enough, an investigation conducted at a university in Israel discovered that the surface of the human body actually draws 5G radiation in “like an antenna”…

    What’s further disturbing about 5G radiation is how the human body responds to and processes it. Dr. Ben-Ishai from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem discovered as part of a recent investigation that human skin acts as a type of receptor for 5G radiation, drawing it in like an antenna.

    “This kind of technology, which is in many of our homes, actually interacts with human skin and eyes,” writes Arjun Walia for Collective Evolution about the study.

    “… human sweat ducts act like a number of helical antennas when exposed to these wavelengths that are put out by the devices that employ 5G technology,” he adds.

    But because we cannot detect this radiation with our five senses, most people will never even understand what is happening to them.

    Okay, now let’s talk about fertility.

    Several early studies found that our current cell phone technology has a negative affect on male fertility…

    A 2005 mouse study found “a significant genotoxic [DNA-damaging] effect on…spermatozoa.”

    A 2007 rat study found “significantly higher incidence of sperm cell death,” suggesting “that carrying cellphones near reproductive organs could negatively affect male fertility.” And a 2009 rat study found that the radiation from cellphones “negatively affects semen quality and may impair male fertility.”

    And about a decade ago, a study that looked at men that were being treated at an infertility clinic concluded that using a cell phone had a substantial impact on sperm quality…

    In 2008, for instance, scientists led by Ashok Agarwal, director of research at the Center for Reproductive Medicine at the Cleveland Clinic, announced the findings of a study on 361 men treated at a fertility clinic. About 10 percent rarely or never used a cellphone, while just over half were on their cell more than two hours a day. Using a cellphone, the scientists concluded, “decrease[s] the semen quality in men by decreasing the sperm count, motility, viability, and normal morphology.” Or, as Agarwal put it less formally, “semen quality tended to decline as daily cellphone use increased. Men who said they used their phones for more than four hours each day had the lowest average sperm count and motility and the lowest numbers of normal, viable sperm.”

    But even more alarming was a 2014 University of Exeter study that came up with some extremely frightening numbers…

    In 2014, another study on this matter was released, this one led by the University of Exeter. This study utilized 1,492 semen samples collected from fertility clinics and research centers. 50-80 percent of the samples had normal movement, but that number fell by 8 percent when the samples were exposed to cell phone radiation. This suggests that sperm viability and overall quality deteriorates when exposed to cell phone frequencies.

    The same study goes on to propose that the reason 14 percent of couples in high and middle income countries experience infertility is because so many adults now have cell phones.

    By now, you have probably heard that if you want to have a baby, you should not carry your cell phone around in your pants.

    Well, one couple that was unable to conceive actually tried this, and it worked…

    In her 2010 book Disconnect: The Truth About Cell Phone Radiation, What the Industry Has Done to Hide It, and How to Protect Your Family, Devra Davis recounts the story of a couple who had been unable to conceive. One doctor told them to keep their cellphones off their bodies and use them only to text or with a corded headset for two months. Within a year, they had a baby.

    Now let’s take a step back and look at the broader picture.

    Overall, it is undeniable that sperm counts have been steadily declining in the western world.

    In fact, one recent study found that sperm counts in the western world have been declining by about 2 percent a year…

    Male fertility is falling every year in the Western world — and experts blame chemicals and modern lifestyles.

    A study of 124,000 men visiting fertility clinics in Europe and the USA found sperm quality reducing by almost 2% per year.

    Separate research focusing on 2,600 sperm donors [men with above-normal fertility] showed a similar pattern.

    2 percent may not sound like a lot, but over time it really starts adding up.

    In fact, a different study found that sperm counts in the western world had fallen by a total of 59 percent from 1973 to 2011…

    While most men can still father a child, scientists say the human race faces extinction if the trend continues.

    It follows a landmark study last year showing a 59% cut in Western sperm counts from 1973 to 2011.

    If sperm counts in the western world continue falling this dramatically, pretty soon most men in the western world will be infertile.

    And if that happens, there will be dramatic population reduction.

    At this point, the CDC is telling us that the birth rate in the United States has already hit an all-time record low…

    The research comes after the US National Center for Health Statics – the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) data arm – announced in July of 2017 that fertility in the US had reached an all-time low.

    Birth rates among American women have been falling for decades, but took a sharp downward turn beginning around 2010.

    By 2016, the fertility rate in the US was only 62 live births per every 1,000 women.

    It is interesting to note that the very first iPhone was released in 2007.

    The implications of what I have shared with you so far are staggering, and we desperately need an open and honest public debate about these issues.

    And in this article, I haven’t even had room to discuss the scientific studies that link cell phone use to cancer and other debilitating diseases.

    Of course all of the studies mentioned in this article examined the impact of our current cell phone technology or older technologies.  Now we are moving on to 5G, and there has not been any safety testing done on 5G technology at all.

    According to Dr. Martin L. Pall, a PhD and Professor Emeritus of Biochemistry and Basic Medical Sciences at Washington State University, rolling out 5G without any safety testing at all is an incredibly foolish idea…

    “Putting in tens of millions of 5G antennae without a single biological test of safety has got to be about the stupidest idea anyone has had in the history of the world.”

    But despite the objections of Dr. Pall and countless other scientists, we are going to do it anyway.

    And at this point, there isn’t much that anyone can do.  According to federal law, local communities are banned from considering health concerns when deciding whether or not to put in new cell phone antennas…

    However, according to federal law the city simply can’t consider health concerns. It’s outlined in a small section of the Telecommunications Act, based on science from 1996, back when we were still talking on cellphones that looked like bricks.

    “I find it really unfair,” said Hiestand.

    If cities do consider health, cell companies can sue them.

    We need to get the word out about this.

    We are talking about one of the biggest health dangers in American history, and once 5G technology has been completely rolled out nationwide it will be too late to do anything about it.

  • Chinese Hackers Stole Maritime Military Secrets From Group Of Universities

    What has become an entrenched pattern of optimistic US-China trade headlines being followed by fresh reports about China’s cyberespionage campaign played out once again on Tuesday, when the Wall Street Journal published a story about Chinese hackers’ efforts to infiltrate more than two dozen universities in the US and around the globe to try and steal maritime military technology.

    Instead of citing government sources, WSJ cited findings by private research firm iDefense, which argued that the University of Hawaii, the University of Washington and Massachusetts Institute of Technology were among at least 27 universities in the US, Canada and Southeast Asia that had been targeted by Beijing.

    The report essentially previewed a report set to be published by iDefense later this week. In the report, the agency confirms that Robert Lighthizer was right when he warned that China’s cyberespionage efforts had only intensified since the beginning of the trade spat, even as the US has insisted that China must cease such activities to win a trade deal. By now, regular readers are familiar with the many different MSS-backed hacking groups that have actively worked to steal trade secrets – groups like ATP10, which was reportedly responsible for the expansive “operation Cloudhopper”.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>WSJ

    According to iDefense, the organization that masterminded the university intrusions, which focused on undersea technology and mostly targeted schools with ties to the Massachusetts oceanographic institute, is called “Temp.Periscope.” The firm has also been linked to the infiltration of Navy contractors and subcontractors.

    The research, to be published this week, is the latest indication that Chinese cyberattacks to steal U.S. military and economic secrets are on the rise. The findings, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, name a substantial list of university targets for the first time, reflecting the breadth and nature of the ongoing cyber campaign that iDefense said dates to at least April 2017.

    Chinese officials didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, but have denied that they engage in cyberattacks.

    iDefense said it identified targeted universities by observing that their networks were pinging servers located in China and controlled by a Chinese hacking group known to researchers interchangeably as Temp.Periscope, Leviathan or Mudcarp. Researchers at the U.S. cyber firm FireEye , who have studied the same group, said the iDefense findings were generally consistent with their own intelligence.

    An explanation for the name wasn’t provided.

    Some of the schools had been targeted because of their proximity to the South China Sea (see South Korea’s Sahmyook University). Others, because they had been awarded Navy research contracts.

    A university consortium called the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, a research organization with ties to many of the schools targeted by the group, appeared to be a focus for the hackers. Its systems had been infiltrated, as the hackers apparently sought to obtain research that Woods Hole had lead on undersea communications technology.

    Nearly all of the universities shared a common link to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, a research and education nonprofit located in Woods Hole, Mass. iDefense said it had high confidence that Woods Hole’s network likely had been breached by the Chinese hackers.

    With specialization in marine science and engineering, Woods Hole is the largest independent oceanographic research institution in the US, boasting notable achievements that include locating the Titanic in 1985, more than 70 years after it sunk.

    Some of the targeted schools, including MIT, Penn State and the University of Washington, are affiliated with a unit at Woods Hole known as the Acoustic Communications Group, which works on undersea communications technology, according to the nonprofit’s website.

    That group also partners with the Navy’s Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport, R.I. Reports last year said the Temp.Periscope team had hacked into an unidentified company under contract with the warfare center and stolen secret plans to build a supersonic antiship missile planned for use by American submarines.

    Whether this will have any material impact on the trade deal that China and the US are scrambling to finish remains to be seen. But if the past is any indication, Trump will likely brush off this report, like he has so many others, as he tries to secure a deal at any cost.

  • Democrats Search For A Crime To Punish Trump And Americans Who Voted For Him

    Authored by Sara Carter,

    The House Judiciary Committee’s Democratic Chairman Rep. Jerrold Nadler is a man in search of a crime. Nadler and his colleague House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff have moved the conversation from Russian collusion and are now promising to investigate virtually everything connected to President Donald Trump.

    Mind you, we the tax payers will be paying for these investigations and it will drag America and the administration into another two years of endless witch hunts.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Yes, a witch-hunt.

    Can you imagine if someone despised you so much that all they did day in and day out was search for something, anything, that would get those around you to doubt your intentions. Imagine having to fight every single day of your life against never ending accusations. Even when those accusations are later proven false it won’t matter because the original lie has already been thoroughly disseminated far and wide among the population.

    Why are Nadler, D-NY, and Schiff, D-CA, promising these investigations? Because they want to impeach Trump. It’s just that simple. They also want to send a message to the American people: your vote really didn’t matter because in the end it’s Congress that holds the power.

    Think about that. There was never any evidence of crime that called for Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to establish a special counsel. Yet, he did. In fact, he wrote the letter authorizing Trump to fire former FBI Director James Comey. Comey would’ve been fired the first day had Hillary Clinton been president.

    However, obstruction charges are at the top of the Nadler’s list of investigations. He also promises to investigate all of Trump’s financial dealings and past business associations.

    Nadler and Schiff are creating their own special counsel.

    Why? The pair realize that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report will not do the damage they were hoping it would. Both Democratic leaders, supported by their party, realize that Mueller has found no evidence of a conspiracy with the Russians.

    It has left believers like Schiff, Nadler and many former Obama Administration officialswho’ve worked diligently over the past several years to destroy Trump, seething.

    They do not want to go on the defensive.

    Nadler and Schiff don’t want to explain that their narrative has been debunked. They do not want Americans to look too close because in the end what will be discovered is that the crimes they are accusing others of committing are the ones they themselves have committed.

    So what do they do? They fish for a crime, use the media to propagate their lies and spread malicious rumors. Those crimes can be anything from obstruction of justice, process crimes or financial crimes. The lawmakers will use the power of America’s purse. They will investigate Trump’s children, those who support him and those who work closely with him at the White House.

    However, remember this: It is the American people, liberty and the principals endowed in our Constitution that will pay the heaviest burden.

    Nadler announced his probe on Monday into potential “obstruction of justice.” He will lob accusation, after accusation, against the Trump administration and his family. He will seek documents and communications from over 60 individuals connected with the White House. He will look for that needle in a haystack for as long as it takes.

    Nadler and Schiff will conduct what they describe as thorough investigations. They will keep these lengthy investigations going to buy time on the clock until they get close to the Democratic National Convention.

    Nadler will do so at the cost of our nation. Don’t be fooled. He doesn’t care about the American people or justice. In the end, this all about ‘getting back’ for the Democrats.

    Not getting back at Trump but at the American people who voted for Trump. This isn’t about truth and justice – those who oppose Trump don’t care about those fundamental principals.

    Nadler is already setting the stage.

    “We are going to initiate investigations into abuses of power, into corruption … and into obstruction of justice,” said Nadler.

    “It’s our job to protect the rule of law.”

    This isn’t about the rule of law.

    If the rule of law was important to the Democrats, they should be aghast at the abuse of power that has occurred within the Obama Administration.

    The weaponization of the intelligence community, leaking of highly classified information to the press, gross negligence in the handling of classified information by Hillary Clinton, unmasking of Americans, malfeasance within the FBI, abuse of power within the Justice Department, plans by Rosenstein to wear a wire to record the president and the proposed plan to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove him from power.

    Instead this is what Nadler is accusing the president of:

    “It’s very clear that the president obstructed justice…

    Before you impeach somebody, you have to persuade the American public that it ought to happen.”

    GOP Rep. Kevin McCarthy said it himself on Monday, “they’re setting a whole new course because there’s no collusion so they want to build something else.”

    They do want something else: they want to find a way to coup the president before the eyes of the American people.

    Possibly only future historians will truly understand what is happening to our nation. But for now, we sit on a precipice of a divided nation. This division is being egged on by lawmakers who care more about destroying Trump than seeking truth and justice.

    The issue that matters most is the rule of law and guiding principals that make our nation great must take precedence.

    Without it, the America we know may disappear into the annals of history. If that happens, it’s “we the people” who will have only ourselves to blame.

  • "None Of Their Business": Qatar Blasts Saudi Objections To Possible Russian S-400 Purchase

    Russia and Qatar appear to be getting closer to striking a landmark deal for transfer of the S-400 anti-missile defense system to Doha, considered the most advanced anti-air system of its kind, and lately the result of tensions with the West wherever it is present, whether in Syria or Turkey. 

    Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stated at a press conference Monday while standing alongside Qatari Foreign Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani that Moscow is “ready to consider Doha’s requests for weapons delivery, if such requests appear,” according to TASS news agency. 

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Meeting on Monday between Sergey Lavrov and Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, via the AFP

    “Our military-technical cooperation with Qatar is regulated in a bilateral manner, 18 months ago we signed an intergovernmental agreement on military-technical cooperation,” Lavrov said. “Today, we reaffirmed the need to follow this agreement.”

    “When our Qatari partners send us requests for delivery of Russian military products, we will consider them,” the Russian FM added. Al-Thani confirmed earlier on Monday that Doha is currently holding negotiations with Moscow on the purchase of S-400 missile systems, but that no decision has been reached. 

    This brings up two pressing and potentially explosive issues: the ongoing diplomatic and economic war between Qatar and Saudi Arabia, and the fact that Qatar hosts the largest US military base in the Middle East at Al Udeid air base. 

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Russian S-400 systems, via Sputnik

    Over the past year Saudi Arabia has routinely leveled the charged that Qatar is a state-sponsor of terror and thus should be prevented by global powers from purchasing advanced weapons, a charge that Qatar denies. In its corner Saudi Arabia also has other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states like the UAE that have long sought to isolate Doha. 

    But since Saudi-led GCC states initiated a blockade against tiny but oil and gas rich Qatar staring in 2017, ties between Doha and Moscow have actually improved and grown. Qatari FM al-Thani addressed the continuing GCC crisis by saying:

    With regards to Saudi or other countries, it is none of their business, it’s a sovereign decision by Qatar.

    Last month reports suggested the Saudi king had threatened “military action” in a personal letter to French President Emmanuel Macron should Qatar move forward with obtaining the S-400s from Russia. The letter reportedly said “the kingdom would be ready to take all necessary measures to eliminate this defense system, including military action,” according to a French Le Monde report.

    For the past two years Russia has aggressively promoted its S-400 with agreements recently reached with Saudi Arabia and Turkey, something which has alarmed US defense planners.

    Broader proliferation of the advanced system in the Middle East would mark a significant and potentially irreversible retreat for already waning American influence in the region. This would mean the Middle East could soon witness the Russian-made S-400 in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, and Syria. 

  • OPCW Syria Report Crushes Western "Chemical Weapons" Narrative

    Authored by Tony Cartalucci via New Eastern Outlook,

    The OPCW (Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons) has presented its final report regarding an alleged chemical weapons attack on Douma, Syria on April 7, 2018. Despite attempts by the Western media to hail it as “proof” that the Syrian government used chemical weapons in Douma – the report says nothing of the sort.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    In fact, the report fails to link any of the alleged 43 deaths to apparent chlorine found at the scene of the alleged attack.

    Claims of the attack were made by US-backed militants on the eve of their defeat – with the Syrian military retaking Douma the following day. Initial reports claimed sarin or chlorine chemical weapons were deployed through the use of two yellow gas canisters modified as bombs.

    No sarin of any kind was found by OPCW inspectors.

    While the report suggests two modified yellow gas canisters were used in the attack and that they appeared to have been dropped onto two buildings (locations 2 and 4), the report also mentions that OPCW inspectors found a nearly identical canister in a workshop used by militants to construct weapons.

    The alleged “chemical weapons” attack prompted the United States, UK, and France to launch missiles strikes against Syrian military targets on April 14, 2018, long before the first OPCW inspectors even arrived at the sites of the alleged attack on April 21.

    No Link Between Chlorine and Casualties

    The OPCW report would note video and photographic evidence of alleged victims of chemical exposure could not be linked to any specific chemical including traces of chlorine OPCW inspectors found. The report would specifically claim (emphasis added):

    Many of the signs and symptoms reported by the medical personnel, witnesses and casualties (as well as those seen in multiple videos provided by witnesses), their rapid onset, and the large number of those reportedly affected, indicate exposure to an inhalational irritant or toxic substance. However, based on the information reviewed and with the absence of biomedical samples from the dead bodies or any autopsy records, it is not currently possible to precisely link the cause of the signs and symptoms to a specific chemical.

    In other instances, the OPCW report would cite witnesses – including medical staff who allegedly treated victims of the supposed attack – who expressed doubts of the presence of any chemicals at all.

    The report would state (emphasis added):

    A number of the interviewed medical staff who were purportedly present in the emergency department on 7 April emphasised that the presentation of the casualties was not consistent with that expected from a chemical attack. They also reported not having experience in the treatment of casualties of chemical weapons. Some interviewees stated that no odour emanated from the patients, while other witnesses declared that they perceived a smell of smoke on the patients’ clothes. 

    Other accounts reviewed by the OPCW suggest a large number of casualties were owed to smoke and dust inhalation from conventional bombardment.

    The report would specifically state (emphasis added):

    Some witnesses stated that many people died in the hospital on 7 April as result of the heavy shelling and/or suffocation due to inhalation of smoke and dust. As many as 50 bodies were lying on the floor of the emergency department awaiting burial. Others stated that there were no fatalities in Douma Hospital on 7 April and that no bodies were brought to the hospital that day.

    The conflicting witness reports, the lack of any evidence linking chlorine to even a single death on April 7, and other inconsistencies and contradictions make it impossible to use the report’s conclusions as “proof” that the Syrian government carried out a deadly chemical attack on the eve of its victory in Douma.

    Similar Canisters Found in Militant Workshop

    While the Western media has focused on the report’s conclusion that chlorine was present and possibly emanated from the two canisters that appear to have been dropped onto two buildings in the area, another crucial finding has been predictably glossed over.

    A militant-run weapons workshop investigated by OPCW inspectors revealed a large number of resources for working with chemicals to make explosives. Among an array of chemicals and equipment associated with making explosives, a yellow gas canister was found.

    The report would admit:

    Although the team confirmed the presence of a yellow cylinder in the warehouse, reported in Note Verbale of the Syrian Arab Republic (Annex 10, point 2) as a chlorine cylinder, due to safety reasons (risk involved in manipulating the valve of the cylinder, see Figure A.8.2) it was not feasible to verify or sample the contents. There were differences in this cylinder compared to those witnessed at Locations 2 and 4. It should be noted that the cylinder was present in its original state and had not been altered.

    The lack of interest by the OPCW in the canister despite the obvious implications of its presence in a weapons workshop controlled by militants calls into question the inspectors’ diligence and agenda.

    The canister’s “differences” are owed to the fact that those at locations 2 and 4 were modified to appear as bombs, while – admittedly – the canister in the militant workshop remained unaltered.

    The obvious implications of a nearly identical canister turning up in a militant workshop making weapons is that the militants may likely have also made the two converted canisters found at locations 2 and 4. OPCW inspectors found other improvised ordnance in the workshop including, “a number of 20-litre metallic drums, some fitted with crude cord-type fuses, which appeared to have been filled with plastic explosives to serve as improvised explosive devices.”

    Western media organizations have tried to dismiss the presence of the canister at the workshop by suggesting it was a “setup” orchestrated by the Syrian Arab Army. Huffington Post UK senior editor Chris York would go as far as referring to the workshop as:

    …the rebel explosives lab that had been captured by the SAA days before and which they were desperately trying to make look like a chemical weapons lab.

    In reality, the OPCW itself would suggest nothing of the sort, and noted that all of the equipment present was consistent with a weapons workshop. Nowhere does the OPCW suggest anything was altered – including the canister – which the OPCW specifically noted “had not been altered.”

    The presence of a canister nearly identical to those found at locations 2 and 4 in a militant weapons workshop provides at least as much evidence that militants staged the supposed chemical attack as the Western media claims the canisters at locations 2 and 4 suggest it was the Syrian government.

    In the absence of definitive evidence regarding who created and deployed the canisters found at locations 2 and 4, or how they truly ended up there, a better question to ask is “why” they would have ended up there.

    Chemical Weapon Attack in Douma… Cui Bono? 

    Why would the Syrian government – in the middle of a major military offensive it was on the literal eve of concluding in complete victory, drop only 2 canisters filled with a limited amount chemicals to kill – at most – 43 people? A simple artillery barrage could kill just as many people – or very likely – many more.

    The use of chemical weapons even on a large scale have historically proven less effective than conventional military weapons – and the use of chlorine on such a small scale as claimed in Douma serves no conceivable purpose at all – at least not for the Syrian military.

    Despite claims otherwise, the Syrian government has derived no benefit whatsoever had it been behind any of the chemical attacks it has been accused of by militants and their Western sponsors over the course of the Syrian conflict.

    The Douma attack – were it the Syrian military – would have served no tactical, strategic, or political purpose.
    Conversely, it would serve as one of the very few actions the Syrian government could take to jeopardize its victory by justifying a large scale Western-led military attack on Syrian forces.

    In fact, just one week after the alleged attack, the US, UK, and France would indeed launch as many as 100 missiles into Syria in retaliation, the Guardian would report.

    On the other hand, militants who had been occupying Douma had every reason to stage the attack.

    By staging the attack on the eve of their defeat and producing graphic scenes of human suffering – particularly among children – the militants would have a propaganda tool readily able to invoke global public concern, sympathy, and outcry in defense of their cause – a propaganda tool their Western sponsors eagerly amplified through their global-spanning media platforms.

    With the United States having previously launched entire wars based on false accusations of merely possessing chemical weapons, the militants correctly assumed the US would use the staged attack as a pretext  for further direct military aggression against the Syrian state – possibly saving them.

    The US still to this day cites “chemical weapons” and the Douma incident on April 7, 2018 specifically – as part of its pretext to maintain its illegal occupation of Syrian territory and its continued support of militants attempting to overthrow the Syrian government.

    The alleged use of “chemical weapons” by the Syrian government also regularly serves as a primary talking point used by the Western media when attacking anti-war politicians, pundits, and commentators.

    The OPCW report’s conclusions are too ambiguous to draw a conclusion one way or the other. The presence of a nearly identical canister in a militant workshop raises serious questions and associated implications suggesting the attack was staged – questions that must be adequately investigated and answered.

    That the Syrian government gained nothing from the attack and was only further jeopardized politically and strategically by it – raises questions about motivations that likewise need to be answered before drawing conclusions.

    But as the Western media has proven many times before – it is fully capable of producing entirely irrational lies based on tenuous evidence or no evidence at all – and even repeating those lies after being blatantly caught telling them previously.

    That the Western media is still attempting to sell WMD lies regarding Syria after being caught fabricating them to justify war in neighboring Iraq should be at the forefront of the global public’s mind when considering their “interpretations” of this latest OPCW report regarding Douma, Syria.

  • In Deathbed Video, 'Godfather' Of Climate Science Begs World Leaders To Deploy Last-Ditch Solar Shield

    Before passing away from heart disease on February 18, climate scientist Wallace Smith Broecker left behind a “final warning” to fellow scientists – telling them in a video recorded days before his death that humanity must deploy a volcano-inspired “solar shield” in order to cool down the atmosphere, according to NBC News. 

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Broecker, who popularized the phrase “global warming” in 1975 (right as the notion of “global cooling” became unpopular) – warned that world leaders aren’t acting quickly enough to halt the production of carbon dioxide, and the only solution is to geoengineer “the sulfur solution.” 

    The theory is that the planet might be cooled, in a worst-case scenario, by releasing massive amounts of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere some 70,000 feet above the Earth’s surface. The idea would be for jets to release so much SO2 that they would mimic a massive volcanic eruption, like the one at Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991, which shrouded much of the planet in a sulfurous cloud, cooling the Earth by about 1 degree Fahrenheit for a full year. –NBC News

    “If we are going to prevent the planet from warming up another couple of degrees, we are going to have to go to geoengineering,” said Broecker, adding that continued inaction could result in “many more surprises in the greenhouse,” known as Earth. 

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Wallace Broecker receiving the National Medal of Science from President Bill Clinton in 1996. Photo: Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory

    Broecker said that he had worked with another prominent climatologist on mechanical units that could remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but that at least 100 million of them would be required to get the job done. 

    Nevermind all that death

    As Phys.org noted in November 2017, blocking out the sun is probably a really bad idea according to a group of scientists from the University of Exeter. 

    new research led by climate experts from the University of Exeter suggests that targeting geoengineering in one hemisphere could have a severely detrimental impact for the other.

    They suggest that while injections of aerosols in the  would reduce  – responsible for such recent phenomena including Hurricane Katrina – it would at the same time lead to increased likelihood for drought in the Sahel, the area of sub-Saharan Africa just south of the Sahara desert.

    In response, the team of researchers have called on policymakers worldwide to strictly regulate any large scale unilateral geoengineering programmes in the future to prevent inducing natural disasters in different parts of the world.

    “Our results confirm that regional  is a highly risky strategy which could simultaneously benefit one region to the detriment of another. It is vital that policymakers take solar geoengineering seriously and act swiftly to install effective regulation,” said University of Exeter climate science expert Dr. Anthony Jones.

    Lets not forget that this is how the Matrix also started – albeit we aren’t doing it to fight sentient robots, yet. 

  • Be Wary Of Unrealistic Shale Growth Expectations

    Authored by Nick Cunningham via Oilprice.com,

    U.S. shale drillers are facing a serious problem: Their wells are not producing as much oil and gas as they had anticipated.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    When facing shareholder scrutiny, shale drillers have countlessly hyped the litany of technological breakthroughs, efficiency gains and innovative drilling techniques. Indeed, production from U.S. E&Ps has skyrocketed over the past decade, save for interruption during the 2014-2016 bust. But even then, shale executives argued that the downturn made them lean and mean, and that they would use their newfound frugality to ramp up production and profits.

    But the hype has slammed into reality on a few fronts.

    First, after years of bankrolling the shale industry in hopes of juicy profits, Wall Street is starting to lose patience. Some companies turn a profit, but the industry on the whole has been losing money since its inception in the mid-2000s. Executives are once again promising that enormous profits are just around the corner, but you could forgive the skeptics for questioning whether that will turn out to be the case.

    A second – and no less damning – development is starting to occur on the operational side of things. Shale companies are finding that the returns on pushing their drilling practices to evermore intense frontiers are beginning to fizzle. For years, drillers increased the length of their laterals, injected more and more sand and water underground, and packed wells closer and closer together. These techniques of intensification promised to produce more oil and gas for less money.

    Suddenly, there is evidence that the industry is running into a wall. The Wall Street Journal reported that shale wells placed too close together are starting to report unexpectedly disappointing results. The thinking is that the wells are interfering with each other. Adding more wells seems to be reducing the productivity of all the wells situated in close proximity. This so-called “parent-child” well problem, in which additional wells (the “child” wells) undercut the performance of the original well (the “parent”), may be the beginning of a larger problem with the shale industry.

    The WSJ says that some of the newer wells are producing as much as 50 percent less than the parent wells. Ultimately, when all is said and done, adding more wells may actually result in less oil and gas recovered since the pressure drops and the reservoir suffers damage. Not only are child wells less productive than the parent, but they actually cannibalize production from the parent wells by sapping reservoir pressure and in some cases flooding the parent well with fracking fluids from the child well.

    For instance, wells placed 375 feet apart may produce 28 percent less than wells produced 600 feet apart, the WSJ analysis finds. The figures grow worse the more the wells are packed tightly together – placing them only 275 feet apart results in a 40 percent decline in output relative to those placed 600 feet apart.

    But companies can’t simply space out the wells and still achieve the same production targets. They have finite acreage, sometimes carved up in a patchwork, so it’s not always possible to simply stretch out the same number of planned wells over longer distances.

    In other words, the parent-child well problem may mean that companies will have to drill fewer wells than they had anticipated. That means that they could be facing “an industrywide write-down if they are forced to downsize the estimates of drill sites they have touted to investors, some of which promised decades’ worth of choice spots,” the WSJ concluded.

    There are enormous ramifications for this problem. The valuation of shale E&Ps is based on forecasts for long-term production. As the WSJ reported in January, many of the rosy production forecasts from shale drillers over the past few years have not come to fruition.

    But the implications stretch beyond the share prices of individual companies. Medium- and long-term oil market forecasts depend very heavily on robust U.S. shale growth. In other words, global supply 5 and 10 years from now will be affected by the parent-child well problems. A study by Wood Mackenzie found that the Permian could undershoot expected growth by 1.5 million barrels per day.

    A revealing exchange occurred in late February on a fourth quarter earnings call for Centennial Resource Development. When asked why the company’s production guidance disappointed Wall Street estimates, Mark Papa, formerly of EOG Resources and now CEO at Centennial, testily dismissed the premise of the question.

    “Let me just make a simple statement here. All those expectations for production growth emanated from Wall Street expectations. None of those expectations came from Centennial guidance,” Papa said.

    He added that Centennial’s guidance “was very accurate and we’re just simply not responsible for guidance that’s created by Wall Street.”

    The discrepancy points to a larger problem – after years of buying into the promise of shale, Wall Street still hasn’t exactly woken up to the full scale of the parent-child well problem. Some companies are undershooting expected production growth because they are spacing wells too closely together. “The issue for the entire Permian Basin relates to parent-child wells. Every year, every company is drilling a higher percentage of child wells and those wells are simply not as powerful as the parent wells,” Papa said.

    Papa said that one reason that Wall Street may be confused as that so much M&A activity makes it hard to compare apples to apples. Companies have been growing, in some cases, because of consolidation rather than impressive operational results.

    Papa cut to the chase and issued a stark warning. He said that Centennial was like every other shale company in the Permian.

    “[W]e have some of the best acreage in the Delaware Basin and what we are seeing is the increasing impact of the child wells,” he said.

    “[B]ut that is just what I have been talking about really for a couple of years is that although the whole shale revolution appears to be quite powerful…If you look just under the hood, you see that every company has to run faster and faster to achieve growth because you’re seeing the effect of geology and well interference that is taking a toll.”

  • ECB Preview: Here Comes TLTRO?

    Submitted by RanSquawk

    On Wednesday at 1:45pm CET/7:45am EST, the ECB’s latest monetary policy decision is due. Here is what consensus expects:

    • Unanimous expectations look for the ECB to leave its three key rates unchanged
    • Inflation and growth forecasts set to be lowered
    • Will the Bank provide any further clarity on potential new TLTROs?

    PREVIOUS MEETING: The most recent policy announcement saw the Central Bank stand pat on rates as expected and maintain their guidance on rates and reinvestments. Focus for the press conference largely centred around the Bank’s assessment of the growth outlook for the Euro-area with policymakers opting to classify risks as now being ‘tilted to the downside’ vs. their prior view of ‘moving to the downside’. President Draghi stated that the implications for monetary policy from the assessment tweak were not discussed. Elsewhere on the policy front, the matter of TLTROs was raised during the press conference with Draghi stating that subject was brought up by several officials but no decision was taken as the monetary case for a fresh round needs to be presented.

    ECB MINUTES: ECB minutes provided little in the way of fresh insight with policymakers concluding that any decision taken on the TLTRO should not be taken too hastily and should serve policy objectives. Furthermore, the account revealed that the Bank  perceives that current market pricing is in-line with their current guidance; something that Draghi alluded to in his January press conference. From a growth perspective, central bankers believed that near-term growth momentum is likely to be weaker than earlier expected, the extent of this conviction will likely be a key source of focus for the March staff economic projections.

    SOURCE REPORTS: Since the previous press conference, various source reports have painted a conflicting view about the Bank’s attitude to fresh funding measures with one report suggesting that TLTROs are seen as a priority, whilst another stated that the governing council sees no urgent need to unveil a fresh round of funding and questioned the necessity in doing so at all. On forward guidance, sources suggested that some ECB policy makers are hesitant to change interest rates guidance as it would impact the term of the next ECB President.

    ECB RHETORIC: Since the prior meeting, notable communications highlights include comments from ECB’s Coeure who stated that the economic slowdown is stronger and broader than they expected, the inflation path will be shallower, adding that a new TLTRO is possible and the ECB are currently discussing it. Elsewhere, Chief Economist Praet noted he expects near-term projections to be revised lower but what counts is the medium-term and they see positive and negative factors there, adding that a rebound is likely but too early to tell by how much. ECB-hawk Nowotny suggested that the ECB has no conclusions yet on TLTRO, adding that if the slowdown is driven by one-offs, TLTRO may not be needed; decision to be made later than March. Interestingly, Nowotny also stated that he sees a discrepancy between ECB guidance and market expectations. Finally, ECB President Draghi gave little away during his Parliamentary hearing at the end of January by reiterating that significant monetary policy stimulus remains essential.

    DATA: From a growth perspective, Q4 2018 Eurozone GDP printed at 0.2% with RBC suggesting that early signals indicate that Q1 2019 will see only a marginal improvement at best. On the inflation front, February Y/Y CPI ticked higher to 1.5% from 1.4% amid a minor uptick in energy prices and unprocessed food, however, the ‘super core’ metric slipped to 1% from 1.1%, highlighting the weakness in underlying price developments. The latest batch of PMI readings saw composite PMI for Feb rise to 51.9 from 51.0 (prelim 51.4) with Pantheon Macro noting a “robust headline, signalling that services continue to show relative resiliency in the face of the sustained slowdown in manufacturing”. On the labour front, Unemployment ticked lower once again in January to 7.8% from the prior 7.9%.

    POTENTIAL ADJUSTMENTS TO ECB FORWARD GUIDANCE (INTRODUCTORY STATEMENT)

    RATES: With markets currently only pricing in a circa 50% chance of a 10bps deposit rate hike this year, the Bank’s current “at least through the summer of 2019” has continued to be brought into question. Despite source reports suggesting that some at the Bank are reticent to change rate guidance before the current President Draghi is replaced in October, an adjustment at some stage appears to be inevitable, the timing of it though, remains a subject of debate. UBS expect the ECB to acknowledge that rates will likely stay on hold until 2020 at their June meeting, whilst also floating the potential for the Bank to consider a tiered rate system  to alleviate the pressure of negative rates on Eurozone banks. Elsewhere, ING states that changing forward guidance to “interest rates to remain at their current levels at least until the end of the year” is a no-brainer but, this will not necessarily be  implemented at this meeting. This time around, RBC suggest that Draghi is likely to “qualify the ECB’s guidance to indicate a start later than September 2019 by stressing its state contingent aspect – i.e. the ‘at least’ as well as ‘as long as necessary’ parts of  the key sentence”.

    ASSET PURCHASES: No changes expected on this front given the recent conclusion of the Bank’s PSPP; a view backed by Rabobank.

    GROWTH/TRADE: Given that the last two meetings have seen tweaks on this front, it is unlikely that policymakers will make another adjustment to their assessment of the risk outlook with the latest incoming data neither disappointing enough to justify an even more pessimistic outlook or seeing enough of a pick-up to prompt a reversal in their recent adjustments. Instead, market participants will be looking at the Bank’s growth projections (see below) for greater clarity on the ECB’s current assessment of the risk outlook.

    INFLATION: No changes expected on this front. Danske Bank expect the ECB “to hold on to its narrative that ongoing labour market improvements and rising wages will eventually push up underlying inflation pressures.” However, Danske highlight that the minutes from the January meeting note increasing worries at the Bank over the missing transmission from wages to consumer prices.

    STAFF ECONOMIC PROJECTIONS:

    • Current ECB HICP forecasts: 2018 at 1.8% (prev. 1.7%), 2019 at 1.6% (Prev. 1.7%), 2020 at 1.7% (Prev 1.7%), 2021 at 1.8%
    • Current ECB real GDP forecasts: 2018 at 1.9% (prev. 2.0%), 2019 at 1.7% (Prev. 1.8%), 2020 at 1.7% (Prev 1.7%), 2021 at 1.5%

    Growth: On the growth front, as detailed above, Q4 2018 Eurozone GDP printed at 0.2%, which thus fell short of the ECB’s forecast of 0.4%. RBC note that, although growth is forecast to pick-up in H2, the ECB’s quarterly growth rates of 0.5% look too optimistic given current headwinds. Furthermore, the Bank will likely need to play catch-up to their latest guidance on growth (altered in January), which is yet to be accompanied with a round of economic projections. With this in mind, consensus looks for a downgrade to the Bank’s 2019 and 2020 growth outlook, with 2021 to be subject to little in the way of material changes, if at all.

    Inflation: From an inflation perspective, as highlighted earlier in our report, price pressure remains a key concern for the Bank.
    Morgan Stanley opines that although the narrative on inflation might not change in the statement, adjustments to staff projections on this front are likely. More specifically, Nomura note that, considering the cut-off point for staff estimates, the oil price  ssumption underpinning the forecasts is likely to be around 8% lower than the one seen in December. This, allied with the weaker growth outlook, Nomura argues could see 2019 and 2020 forecasts lowered. Nomura also highlight the importance of the 2021  forecast, which they explain acts as a useful indicator of the Bank’s stance on policy normalisation, which, if close to 2%, would suggest the ECB believes it remains on track.

    Please see below for Danske Bank’s expectations grid for ECB staff projections
    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    TLTRO

    TLTROs have been a focus for the market as they are seen as a useful tool for the Bank to help soothe the transition of policy normalisation and shield some of the more fragile Eurozone economies (particularly Italy) this year. At the January meeting, the matter of TLTROs was raised during the press conference with Draghi stating that the matter was brought up by several officials but no decision was taken as the monetary case for a fresh round needs to be presented. Since then, (as discussed above), one source report suggested that TLTROs are seen as a priority, whilst another stated that the governing council sees no urgent need to unveil a fresh round of funding and questioned the necessity in doing so at all. In terms of expectations for this week’s meeting, UBS suggest that given the likelihood of the Bank’s acknowledgement of lower growth and limited inflationary pressures, policymakers will send a strong signal on Thursday that it will soon offer a new TLTRO with a final decision and details potentially to be announced in April. Elsewhere, SocGen look for a formal announcement in June, adding that the decision is far from clear-cut, Barclays look for an unveiling between March and June, whilst Goldman Sachs look for an announcement this week with details to follow at a later point. In terms of how the TLTRO could be offered to lenders, RBC highlight that the main sticking point for the  ECB is more about the design of the operations, rather than whether to offer them or not. RBC explains that one issue facing policymakers is whether or not to offer a fixed rate, which would be at odds with the ECB’s current setting of expected rate hikes, or a floating rate, which could potentially lower the incentives for participation. Furthermore, Rabobank also highlight the potential debate between whether TLTROs will come with the precondition of increased lending or maintaining the current stock of loans; Rabobank favour the latter.

    MARKET REACTION

    Please see below for ING’s scenario analysis

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

  • China Has No Choice

    Authored by Jeffrey Snider via Alhambra Investment Partners,

    China’s central bank was given more independence to conduct monetary policies in late 2003. It had been operating under Order No. 46 of the President of the People’s Republic of China issued in March 1995, which led the 3rd Session of the Eighth National People’s Congress (China’s de facto legislature) to create and adopt the Law of the People’s Republic of China on the People’s Bank of China. This was amended in December 2003 by the 6th Meeting of the Standing Committee of the Tenth National People’s Congress.

    Already by then, the PBOC had begun using more of its monetary toolkit. It had experimented in 2002 with Open Market Operations, or OMO’s. The central bank would issue “bills” to Chinese banks, selling them in order to “soak up” excess liquidity under its definitions.

    These were supplemented beginning in September 2003 by the first increase in the RRR, the reserve requirement ratio. This bank lever had been around since the eighties though rarely was it ever used. During China’s rough experience with the Asian flu in the late nineties, the RRR had been deeply reduced to help cushion the economic impact of massive eurodollar irregularities sweeping across its front.

    This was an economic response in terms of a debt policy, not a monetary decision.

    The RRR told banks how much they needed to keep in liquid reserves (a ledger entry, satisfied via cash holdings or on account with the central bank). If it was reduced, theoretically banks would be able to increase lending because they would be increasingly freed from the reserve constraint. This would include lending in China’s nascent wholesale money markets.

    By 2003, the winds of eurodollar influence were blowing heavily in China’s favor again. That meant an excess of monetary resources for the banking sector, only some of which was scooped up by the PBOC as a consequence of pegging CNY’s exchange value to the dollar. To head off harmful inflation, the central bank required the more flexible mandate which was finally sanctioned at the Tenth Congress.

    In those early years of it, authorities stuck to mostly OMO’s. There were only two RRR increases in the beginning, an experiment, too, of sorts. The Chinese central bank was new to this potential liquidity framework and the last thing they wanted was to do too much.

    As the middle 2000’s progressed, and “hot money” eurodollar inflows only intensified, a more aggressive campaign was called for. By the middle of 2006, RRR increases became as regular as OMO’s.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    The thing is, these didn’t really work all that well individually or in combination(s). There were several reasons for the lack of control, including the bureaucratic structure of China’s official apparatus, government to central bank and back again.

    But most of all, RRR and/or OMO’s are blunt instruments of indeterminate pathologies. Exactly how does a 50 bps increase in the RRR effect a Chinese bank’s proclivity to lend? No one really knows but a higher reserve requirement does sound a lot like tightening.

    As you can see above, China’s economy came to be plagued by high inflation anyway, especially damaging food price inflation. The country’s CPI suggested still the deflationary drag at the end of 2002, a decrease of 0.4% in the month of December 2002, but rising to a breakout +3.2% in December 2003.

    It had at first seemed like the OMO’s were working, with inflation rates falling in the middle of 2005 before another sharp surge which triggered the aggressive response relying more on the uncertain RRR mechanics. By early 2008, despite the RRR having been pushed as high as 17.5% (for large banks), consumer price inflation was rampant the CPI reaching 8.5%. Food prices were rising by more than 20% per year.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    The only thing that stopped the onslaught was Euro$ #2. The Global Financial Crisis of 2008, Euro$ #1, had been a temporary reprieve before the same massive money imbalances revisited China in its immediate aftermath. The RRR was pushed up to as much as 21.5% before the second global deflationary wave finally erased its momentum.

    Since the middle of 2011, inflation is no longer a problem for the Chinese. Rather, monetary authorities now have nothing but the opposite concern.

    Their patchwork response has been to do the same things only in reverse; for eurodollar outflows the RRR is reduced. At times, the central bank even refrains from issuing central bank bills. As with the period before 2008, from 2011 to 2013 it didn’t go well.

    By the middle of 2014, the PBOC had added new capacities for more targeted bank liquidity, lending windows such as the MLF or SLF.

    Here’s the thing, though. Chinese monetary authorities after relying heavily on tools like the MLF in 2016 and 2017 are no longer as much interested in them. They increased the RMB part of the central bank balance sheet to no avail.

    This then left the RRR as China’s main monetary line of defense against deflationary forces in 2018 and going forward. Given its obviously poor performance as an inflation-fighting instrument, why would anyone be optimistic on its chances of succeeding now? You could try to make the case that it could possibly be more effective when used in reverse, but that’s just silly.

    China’s Communists aren’t silly; they are authoritarian monsters, meaning they have to be pragmatic for their own survival especially where economic growth (the peasant-to-middle class pipeline) is concerned.

    China’s Premier Li Keqiang announced today that the national growth target for 2019 was reduced to a range between 6.0% and 6.5% real GDP expansion. This is lower still than 2018’s mandate for “about” 6.5%, which came in as expected at exactly 6.5%. What are the chances China’s GDP sees the top end of its newly set corridor? If the bottom, this would be the lowest growth since the eighties.

    Perhaps a significant sign, China’s Communist leadership appears to have given up entirely targeting both retail sales growth and fixed asset investment.

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Li warned:

    China will face a graver and more complicated environment as well as risks and challenges that are greater in number and size. China must be fully prepared for a tough struggle.

    This is not a new theme except if you have been listening exclusively to the wishful thinking of Western Economists and central bankers. Since the 19th Communist Party Congress (the political apparatus, a separate entity from the National People’s Congress) held in October 2017, government officials have been consistent about this “tough struggle.” There never was globally synchronized growth at least not at a level that would meaningfully change the world’s economic circumstance.

    Behind everything is the same thing. Keynes was right. Inflation is one monetary evil, but its twin is far, far worse. At least with inflation things are moving, Chinese peasants are progressed up into the middle class even if it is more expensive when they get there. 

    <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    Deflation, however, is when everything stops; Dante’s Hell was freezing cold. It doesn’t have to be all at once like in the early thirties, this can be a prolonged affair dragging out across more years than anyone cares to remember. The frog isn’t being slowly boiled, it is being progressively frozen. It is now almost completely frigid, too cold to be able to leap out of the icy water. Stuck here without any other options, it must conserve its energy as best it can and hope that it can somehow survive.

    If given a choice, you pick the heat of high inflation over this every day of the week; until you realize it isn’t your choice. It never really was.

Digest powered by RSS Digest