Mar 17

Today’s News 17th March 2018

  • Ex-FBI Asst. Director Says Upcoming Inspector General Report Is "Pure TNT"

    Former FBI Assistant Director Chris Swecker said today that a highly anticipated report from the DOJ’s Inspector General Michael Horowitz will contain “some pure TNT.” Horowitz has been investigating the conduct of the FBI’s top brass surrounding the 2016 election for over a year. He also uncovered over 50,000 text messages between two anti-Trump / pro-Clinton FBI employees directly involved in the exoneration of Clinton and the counterintelligence operation launched against the Trump campaign. 

    Swecker: “The behavior if it’s manifested in the action with your thumb on the scale of a particular investigation, one way or the other, that’s borderline criminal behavior — manipulating an investigation. I think this IG report is going to be particularly impactful, more so than any of these useless congressional investigations. I think you’re going to see some pure TNT come out in this IG report.”

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    The Inspector General’s report is thought to include evidence of outgoing Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe ordering agents to alter “302” forms – the paperwork an agent files after interviewing someone.

    Horowitz is also reportedly homing in on McCabe’s handling of the Anthony Weiner laptop after reports emerged that he wanted to avoid taking action on the FBI’s findings until after the 2016 election. 

    The inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, has been asking witnesses why FBI leadership seemed unwilling to move forward on the examination of emails found on the laptop of former congressman Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.)until late October — about three weeks after first being alerted to the issue, according to these people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter. A key question of the internal investigation is whether McCabe or anyone else at the FBI wanted to avoid taking action on the laptop findings until after the Nov. 8 election, these people said. It is unclear whether the inspector general has reached any conclusions on that point. –WaPo

    In January, Fox’s Sean Hannity sat down with journalist Sara Carter – who shed light on the McCabe situation, saying that FBI Director Christopher Wray was “shocked to his core” after reading the GOP-authored “FISA” memo describing FBI malfeasance surrounding the 2016 U.S. election:

    Carter: What we know tonight is that FBI Director Christopher Wray went Sunday and reviewed the four-page FISA memo. The very next day, Andrew McCabe was asked to resign. Remember Sean, he was planning on resigning in March – that already came out in December. This time they asked him to go right away. You’re not coming into the office. I’ve heard rep[orts he didn’t even come in for the morning meeting – that he didn’t show up.

    Hannity: A source of mine told me tonight that when Wray read this, it shocked him to his core.

    Sara Carter: Shocked him to his core, and not only that, the Inspector General’s report – I have been told tonight by a number of sources, there’s indicators right now that McCabe may have asked FBI agents to actually change their 302’s – those are their interviews with witnesses. So basically every time an FBI agent interviews a witness, they have to go back and file a report. 

    Hannity: Changes? So that would be obstruction of justice? 

    Carter: Exactly. This is something the Inspector General is investigating. If this is true and not alleged, McCabe will be fired. I heard they are considering firing him within the next few days if this turns out to be true. 

    Meanwhile, several Republican Senators are asking the Department of Justice (DOJ) to order a special counsel to probe the FBI’s conduct during its investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election – including the use of the “Steele dossier” in seeking a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant against former Trump Campaign advisor Carter Page. The letter marks the second formal request by the Senate Judiciary Committee.

    The request comes amid controversy over Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe’s pension – which is in jeopardy after the Department of Justice’s internal watchdog found enough evidence of malfeasance to recommend firing McCabe immediately. 

    The letter also notes that Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who they have the “utmost confidence” in, “does not have the tools that a prosecutor would to gather all the facts, such as the ability to obtain testimony from essential witnesses who are not current DOJ employees.” 

    Senators Chuck Grassley Chuck Grassley (Iowa), Lindsey Graham (S.C.), Thom Tillis (N.C.) and John Cornyn (Texas), signed a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions as well as Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to name a special counsel who can “gather all the facts.”

    “We believe that a special counsel is needed to work with the Inspector General to independently gather the facts and make prosecutorial decisions, if any are merited. The Justice Department cannot credibly investigate itself without these enhanced measures of independence,” wrote the senators. 

    See the letter below, and click on the tweet for more background on the ongoing investigation from Nick Short of the Security Studies Group. 

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    As Chuck Ross of the Daily Caller points out, the letter also “broke a bit of news”:

    It reveals that Bruce Ohr, the former deputy assistant attorney general, was interviewed 12 separate times by the FBI in 2016 and 2017.

    Ohr was in contact with Steele prior to the 2016 election. And shortly after the election, Ohr was in contact with Glenn Simpson, the founder of Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that hired Steele to investigate Trump.

    Ohr’s wife, a Russia expert named Nellie Ohr, also happened to be working as a contractor for Fusion GPS for its Trump investigation.

    Senate Judiciary Republicans want to know whether the FBI and DOJ were aware of that relationship.

    The committee letter lists all of Ohr’s FBI interviews, which were summarized on what’s known as a FD-302 document. The first interview with Ohr was conducted on November, 22, 2016. The most recent occurred on May 15, 2017. –Daily Caller

    The DOJ’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) announced in January that it was opening a probe of the FBI’s handling of the Clinton email investigation. Meanwhile, Attorney General Jeff Sessions asked the OIG to explore whether FBI officials abused their authority when they used an unverified and salacious dossier from Fusion GPS to obtain a FISA warrant on Carter Page. 

    That said, Sessions has resisted repeated calls for a second Special Counsel. 

    Graham and Grassley also asked the OIG to look into the FBI’s conduct while handling the Russia probe, writing in a February letter: 

    “We respectfully request that you conduct a comprehensive review of potential improper political influence, misconduct, or mismanagement in the conduct of the counterintelligence and criminal investigations related to Russia and individuals associated with (1) the Trump campaign, (2) the Presidential transition, or (3) the administration prior to the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller.” 

    The Senators also noted in their Thursday letter that if the DOJ declines to appoint a second special counsel, they want “a detailed reply explaining why not.” 

  • Trump Slams "Sanctimonious Comey" After Sessions Fires FBI's McCabe A Day Before Retirement

    Update: President Trump tweets that McCabe’s firing “is a great day for the hard working men and women of The FBI… and  democracy,” then lashes out at “sanctimonious” former FBI Director Comey’s “lies and corruption going on at the highest levels of the FBI” indicating that his actions made McCabe “look like a choirboy.”

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    Perhaps this means Trump will lay off the constant trolling of Sessions for a while?

    *  *  *

    As we detailed earlier, after a long day of what seemed like the swamp protecting one of their dirtiest creatures, Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, just over 24 hours before he was set to retire and claim his full pension benefits.

    McCabe turns 50 on Sunday – the earliest he would have been eligible for his full retirement benefits.

    Sessions noted that both the Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz as well as the FBI’s disciplinary office had found “that Mr. McCabe had made an unauthorized disclosure to the news media and lacked candor – including under oath – on multiple occasions.” 

    So, McCabe was involved in leaks and he lied under oath. 

    Horowitz found that McCabe had authorized two FBI officials to talk to then-Wall Street Journal reporter Devlin Barrett for a story about the case and another investigation into Clinton’s family foundation. Barrett now works for The Washington Post. –WaPo

    “I have terminated the employment of Andrew McCabe effective immediately,” said Sessions, who said he based his decision on the findings. 

    While the move will probably cost McCabe a significant portion of his retirement benefits, he could challenge it in court.

    Former FBI officials tell CNN that McCabe could also lose out on future health care coverage in his retirement,  but the “most significant ‘damage’ to a separated FBI employee is: loss of lifetime medical benefits for self and family,” tweeted CNN law enforcement analyst James A. Gagliano, a retired FBI supervisory special agent.

    On Thursday he spent almost four hours at the DOJ to beg for his full retirement. 

    Full statement from AG Sessions:

    The FBI’s OPR then reviewed the report and underlying documents and issued a disciplinary proposal recommending the dismissal of Mr. McCabe. Both the OIG and FBI OPR reports concluded that Mr. McCabe had made an unauthorized disclosure to the news media and lacked candor – including under oath – on multiple occasions.

    The FBI expects every employee to adhere to the highest standards of honesty, integrity, and accountability. As the OPR proposal stated, “all FBI employees know that lacking candor under oath results in dismissal and that our integrity is our brand.”

    Pursuant to Department Order 1202, and based on the report of the Inspector General, the findings of the FBI Office of Professional Responsibility, and the recommendation of the Department’s senior career official, I have terminated the employment of Andrew McCabe effective immediately.

    McCabe responded to his ouster, saying that his firing, along with negative comments by President Trump were meant to undermine Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, reported the New York Times.

    “The idea that I was dishonest is just wrong,” said McCabe, adding, “This is part of an effort to discredit me as a witness.”

    Mr. McCabe was among the first at the F.B.I. to scrutinize possible Trump campaign ties to Russia. And he is a potential witness to the question of whether Mr. Trump tried to obstruct justice. Mr. Trump has taunted Mr. McCabe both publicly and privately, and Republican allies have cast him as the center of a “deep state” effort to undermine the Trump presidency. –NYT

    While McCabe’s firing is directly related to the disclosure of sensitive information to the media about the Clinton email investigation, the former Deputy Director took a leave of absence in January amid a heated controversy over the FBI’s conduct surrounding the 2016 election.

    In December, The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee has discovered that edits made to former FBI Director James Comey’s statement exonerating Hillary Clinton for transmitting classified info over an unsecured, private email server went far beyond what was previously known – as special agents operating under McCabe changed various language which effectively decriminalized Clinton’s behavior. 

    McCabe’s team also conducted a counterintelligence operation to investigate the Trump campaign, in which they used an unverified dossier and were not forthright with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) over its political origins, in violation of FBI policy. 

    As revelations of FBI misconduct spiraled out of control last year, President Trump noted that McCabe was “racing the clock to retire with full benefits.”

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    On Thursday, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said “We do think that it is well documented that he has had some very troubling behavior and by most accounts a bad actor.“

    While “background conversations with reporters are commonplace in Washington,” notes the Washington Post, “McCabe’s authorizing such a talk was viewed as inappropriate because the matter being discussed was an ongoing criminal investigation.”

    One wonders how long before McCabe writes his multi-million-dollar ‘tell-all’ book… or when he will start his new job? We hear the offers are pouring in…

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  • Mapping The Countries With The Most Billionaires

    There are roughly 36 million millionaires in the world.

    That means if you meet someone from the global population at random, there’s a 1 in 200 chance that they could be a millionaire – this makes for surprisingly good odds.

    However, as VisualCapitalist’s Jeff Desjardins notes, the billionaire on the other hand is a much rarer breed. According to Forbes, there are just over 2,000 billionaires in existence, making up just 0.00003% of the global population.

    Where do these people live, and what countries have the highest concentrations of them as citizens?

    25 COUNTRIES THAT ARE RICH IN BILLIONAIRES

    Today’s infographic comes to us from TitleMax, and it shows the 25 countries with the most billionaires in them. It also covers the richest person in each of these countries, as well.

    Courtesy of: Visual Capitalist

    Here is the list of countries, sorted by the number of billionaires:

    The United States has the most billionaires in total with 565.

    In second place is China (319) – a country that is adding billionaires at a rapid pace, but also losing some of its ultra-rich population to capital flight.

    BILLIONAIRE CONCENTRATION

    Although the United States has the most billionaires by a large margin, the country ranks 6th in terms of billionaire concentration.

    In the U.S., there is one billionaire for every 571,858 people, but it is beat out in this measurement by Hong Kong (110k), Switzerland (233k), Singapore (267k), Sweden (319k), and Israel (475k).

    Hong Kong, which has the highest rate of billionaires in the world, boasts 67 billionaires in just one city of roughly seven million.

    For comparison’s sake, if Mainland China could somehow have the same rate of billionaire occurrences as Hong Kong, the country would amass 12,575 billionaires – more than six times the total amount in the world that currently exist!

    LOWEST BILLIONAIRE CONCENTRATIONS

    With only roughly 2,000 billionaires scattered throughout the world, it’s estimated that there are over 100+ countries and dependencies that actually have zero billionaires as citizens. For example, Haiti, Lithuania, Ethiopia, Belarus, and Andorra are just a few places that have millionaires, but no billionaires.

    As for countries that made the above list, India and Indonesia are pretty scarce in terms of their billionaire concentrations – if you were to hit the street in these countries, the odds are 1 in 13 million that a random person would be a billionaire.

  • Stephen Hawking – Doomsday Prophet's Top Five Predictions

    Via GoldCore.com,

    Stephen Hawking, the visionary physicist who passed away this week at the age of 76, made five predictions about how and when mankind will face its doom.

    In a week when geo-political tensions between the world’s two leading nuclear powers, Russia and the U.S. are worsening with the UK and U.S. accusing Russia of a nerve agent attack and imposing sanctions on Russia, it is a good time to consider and heed Hawking’s doomsday predictions or warnings, especially about nuclear war.

    Below is an interesting article which looks at five of Hawking’s doomsday predictions as collated by Qt.com.au:

    WE NEED an exit strategy. Fast.

    From global warming to artificial intelligence, Professor Stephen Hawking made a number of terrifying predictions about the apocalyptic threats facing humanity.

    The celebrated late scientist said humanity is at a “tipping point”, and that our best bet will be to leave Earth completely.

    Here are five main factors he said are contributing to the end of the world.

    NUCLEAR TECHNOLOGY

    In 2007, Prof Hawking fronted a campaign to cancel Trident, Britain’s nuclear weapons deterrent.

    “Nuclear war remains the greatest danger to the survival of the human race,” he said.

    “To replace Trident would make it more difficult to get arms reduction, and increase the risk.

    “It would also be a complete waste of money because there are no circumstances in which we would use it independently.”

    Prof Hawking has also identified “aggression” as the human trait will destroy us all.

    He warned it could lead to irrational actions, like sparking nuclear war.

    Prof Hawking said nuclear war remains the ‘greatest danger’ to humanity’s survival.

    “I fear evolution has in-built greed and aggression to the human genome,” he told the BBC. “There is no sign of conflict lessening, and the development of militarised technology and weapons of mass destruction could make that disastrous. The best hope for the survival of the human race might be independent colonies in space.”

    DONALD TRUMP

    Prof Hawking made it clear he was not a fan of Donald Trump.

    He was particularly critical of the US President after he vowed not to sign the Paris Agreement on climate change.

    “Climate change is one of the great dangers we face and it’s one we can prevent if we act now,” he told the BBC. “By denying the evidence for climate change and pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement, Donald Trump will cause avoidable environmental damage to our beautiful planet, endangering the natural world, for us and our children.”

    In a Skype talk delivered at the Starmus science and arts festival last year, he made his case more urgent.

    “Unlike Donald Trump, who may just have taken the most serious and wrong decision on climate this world has seen, I am arguing for the future of humanity and a long-term strategy to achieve this,” Prof Hawking said.

    “We have given our planet the disastrous gift of climate change … When we have reached similar crises there has usually been somewhere else to colonise … But there is no new world, no utopia around the corner. We are running out of space, and the only places to go to are other worlds.”

    On ITV’S Good Morning Britain, Prof Hawking was asked to explain Mr Trump’s ascendancy to the White House.

    “I can’t,” he responded. “He is a demagogue who seems to appeal to the lowest common denominator.”

    ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

    In recent years, Prof Hawking had raised the alarm about the potential threat of artificial intelligence.

    Speaking at the Web Summit in Lisbon in November, the famous physicist said AI has the potential to be the best or worst thing humanity has ever seen and the scary reality is we just don’t know which yet.

    “We cannot know if we will be infinitely helped by AI or ignored by it and sidelined, or conceivably destroyed by it,” he said.

    While AI could be hugely beneficial for reducing poverty, disease and restoring the natural environment, it’s impossible to predict “what we might achieve when our own minds are amplified by AI”.

    “AI could be the worst invention of the history of our civilisation, that brings dangers like powerful autonomous weapons or new ways for the few to oppress the many.

    “AI could develop a will of its own, a will that is in conflict with ours and which could destroy us. In short, the rise of powerful AI will be either the best, or the worst thing ever to happen to humanity.”

    Hawking warned scientists and global governments needed to focus on maximising benefits for society rather than pure capability.

    “We need to employ effective management in all areas of its development,” he said. “We stand on a threshold of a brave new world. It is an exciting, if precarious, place to be and you are the pioneers.”

    DEATH BY FIREBALL

    Overpopulation is going to turn our planet into a red-hot fireball.

    Prof Hawking warned the Earth will be reduced to a ball of fire within 600 years when our energy consumption overloads.

    In a video appearance at the 2017 Tencent WE Summit in Beijing, he said: “By the year 2600, the world’s population would be standing shoulder to shoulder, and the electricity consumption would make the Earth glow red-hot.”

    To save ourselves, he said we must take a leaf out of Star Trek and “boldly go where no one has gone before”.The planet is eventually going to become one big, red-hot fireball.

    He has also warned that over the next 100 years, we need to look to colonise Mars and other planets.

    Speaking at the Starmus science festival in Norway last year, he said the Moon and Mars would be the best sites to begin new colonies, and said we could establish outposts on these sites within 30 and 50 years respectively, The Telegraph reported.

    ASTEROID STRIKES

    Prof Hawking has warned that if global warming doesn’t wipe us out, an asteroid strike will.

    At the Starmus festival, he said it was only a matter of time before the Earth would be destroyed by either an asteroid, soaring temperatures or overpopulation.

    “This is not science fiction. It is guaranteed by the laws of physics and probability,” he said.

    “To stay risks being annihilated.

    “Spreading out into space will completely change the future of humanity. It may also determine whether we have any future at all.”Prof Hawking warned that becoming a “cosmic sloth” was not an option.

    “Wherever we go we will need to build a civilisation, we will need to take the practical means of establishing a whole new ecosystem that will survive in an environment that we know very little about and we will need to consider transporting several thousands of people, animals, plants, fungi, bacteria and insects.”

    *  *  *
    R.I.P.

    Source @MitchellToy

  • Syrian War For Dummies – Three Versions

    As the Ghouta campaign continues to unfold, we should expect that both politicians and mainstream media will give us – in the words of philosopher and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr – “necessary illusion and emotionally potent oversimplifications” intended to shape our perceptions of events.

    It goes without saying that such “emotionally potent oversimplifications” on Syria have formed the dominant paradigm through which the American public has received its information over the past seven years of war. From the State Department officials to think tank “experts” to the Graham/McCain axis to CNN panelists to the neocon twitterati and all the usual interventionistas who cast everything in terms of Manichean good vs. evil, darkness vs. light, bloodthirsty tyrants vs. noble populace – we’ve had to endure and fight seven years of a constant stream of propaganda on Syria.

    Image source: Thierry Ehrmann via Flickr

    This worldview is what BBC filmmaker Adam Curtis accurately characterized as a ‘goodies and baddies’ dualistic vision of global events which keeps the Western public under the illusion that its own political leaders are perpetually driven by concern over human rights, defending the weak and oppressed, and spreading democracy over and against the unenlightened megalomaniac dictators of the world who are simply bent on brutalizing their own people.

    The BBC’s Curtis concluded of the “humanitarian” wars that followed in the wake of the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ (especially Libya and Syria) :

    The question at the heart of this whole story is – Who was the ventriloquist? And who was the dummy? Maybe we were the dummy? By allowing perception management with its simplifications, falsehoods and exaggerations to create a simplified vision of the world – we fell into a fake universe of certainty when really we were just watching a pantomime. 

    And now as the Arab Spring unfolds and reveals the true chaos and messiness of the real world – above all the horror of what is happening in Syria – we find ourselves completely unable to understand it or even know what to do. So those stories get ignored while we follow others with clearer and more simplified dramas which have what seem to be obvious goodies and baddies – thank god for Iran, North Korea and Jimmy Savile.

    Although the Syrian war is almost over, many Americans still don’t understand what transpired over the last seven years, because the mainstream narrative has been an embarrassing mix of propaganda, half-truths and lies.

    Below are three versions of the conflict as presented by Chris Kanthan via Sott.net.  

    Disney Version

    Once upon a time, a country called Syria was ruled by a ruthless dictator named Bashar Al-Assad. He was a cruel man who gassed his own people. His actions caused a civil war in Syria. America and Europe tried their best to stop the devastating civil war, and even generously accepted many Syrian refugees. Eventually America went to Syria, defeated ISIS, and is now trying to restore stability.

    This above version is quite popular among many Americans and Europeans and the Western mainstream media.

    * * *

    High School Version

    Oppressed by Assad’s brutal regime, the Syrian people longed for freedom and democracy. One day, people started protesting in a small city. In response, Assad killed many peaceful protesters. However, this backfired and the entire country was engulfed in protests. Soon a civil war broke out, which led to millions of refugees fleeing Syria.

    America was appalled and, for humanitarian reasons, decided to help the Syrians who were fighting Assad. When Assad gassed his own people, America intervened and removed all his chemical weapons. Unfortunately, Assad managed to gas innocent civilians again after a few years. Then, America went to Syria, defeated ISIS, and is now trying to restore stability.

    The above version is presented in most of the global mainstream media.

    * * *

    College Version

    Simply put, the Syrian “civil war” is an illegal, proxy war waged against Syria. In defiance of international laws, many countries have been sending weapons and terrorist mercenaries into Syria for the last seven years (to gain a deeper understanding of who wants to topple Assad and why, please read: Chaos in Syria: Part 1 – Three Motives and Seven Countries).

    2011

    In early 2011, US/UK special forces used Jordan’s military base to assist protests against Assad in a border town called Daraa. With the Muslim Brotherhood’s organizational skills and Saudi Arabia’s deep pockets, violent protests spread thru Syria. Soon, an organized and armed militia known as Free Syrian Army (FSA) was created by the outsiders.

    After the fall of Gaddafi in late 2011, the US State Department and US intelligence agencies organized the shipment of tons of deadly weapons such as Stinger missiles and Sarin gas from destroyed Libya to Syria, via Turkey. Even with all this help, the American proxy force known as the FSA couldn’t win the war. At this point, NATO and Neocons wanted to bomb Syria, but Russia and China vetoed the motion in the UN, so the imperial war by deception moved on to the next phase.

    2012

    In early 2012, someone dialed Al Qaeda (referred to as AQ or AQI in government documents). Zawahiri, AQ’s top leader, called for help and experienced Islamic terrorists from all over the world rushed into Syria by way of Saudi Arabia’s international jihadist recruitment agency. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, received an email from her chief adviser, saying that “Al Qaeda is on our side” .

    Al Qaeda rebranded itself as Al Nusra, and fearsome weapons such as grenade launchers, mortars, tanks and anti-tank missiles started pouring into Syria via Turkey and Jordan.

    The CIA spent $100,000 to train each rebel. Billions of US taxpayers dollars were wasted once again on supporting the same terrorist groups that attacked the USA on 9/11 .

    Watching the western media, the average person had no idea that we were supporting Al Qaeda or how heavily armed these “rebels” were.

    Western media and politicians also stuck to their talking points and referred to all these fighters as “moderate rebels.” However, many of them are ruthless Islamists who use suicide bombers, behead even children, and commit unspeakable atrocities. They are also religious fanatics who seek out and kill Christians and Shiites. This is described in detail in the book, Deconstructing the Syrian War.

    A Pentagon memo warned against this reckless policy and precisely predicted the rise of groups such as ISIS. Obviously the memo was ignored (or even happily accepted) by the White House and other officials.

    2012 was also the year when the refugee crisis became a serious international problem. By the end of the year, almost 200,000 people had fled Syria. In the coming years, it would swell to five million.

    2013

    When FSA and AQ failed to oust Assad, the “powers that be” started recruiting Sunni extremists in Iraq. In April 2013, ISIS was officially established out of the AQI insurgency. In the next year, these barbaric mercenaries would capture much of eastern Syria.

    This was also the year when Obama’s red-line was crossed – the use of chemical weapons by Assad. UN experts who went to the site soon found that it was actually the rebels who had likely used the chemical weapons. The report was quickly drowned by the western propaganda machine.

    2014-2016

    The next two years were just repetitions of the daily brutality of war, with ISIS making huge gains in the east. Whenever the rebels started to lose, either more weapons would flow in, or Israel would fly into Syria and bomb the Syrian army.

    In late 2015, the Syrian government sought Russia’s help. Within a month, the Russian air force weakened ISIS by destroying most of the oil tankers that ISIS was using to transport oil to Turkey. By the end of 2016, the Syrian government had the upper hand – Aleppo was liberated from Al Qaeda, and ISIS was running out of cash and morale.

    2017

    2017 was turning out to be a great year for Assad. By March, ISIS had lost over three hundred towns to the Syrian army. Al Qaeda was facing a similar demise, losing one big city after another.

    Furthermore, Trump had stopped arming the rebels in February. In late March, Trump and Tillerson dropped the slogan “Assad must go”.

    Finally, Assad was getting ready for an EU-UN peace conference on April 4-5.

    This was the moment (when events had turned in favor of the Syrian government) that the alleged chemical attack occurred in an area controlled by the rebels in Idlib province. Plus it happened on the very day that the peace conference began.

    Without any investigation, within an hour after the pictures and videos came out, Western warmongers declared that Assad was responsible. No independent doctors or experts were sent to the site. Anyone who took the time to critically analyze the situation could see that the chemical attack was likely either a hoax or a false flag attack.

    2018

    After Russia had effectively defeated ISIS, the US didn’t just leave Syria, since the real goal is to Balkanize Syria and prepare for a war against Iran. Thus the West is now trying to use Kurds as a proxy tool in this effort. It’s likely that the US will have military bases in Syria for a long time. As long as the US government can keep borrowing money, such wild adventures will continue.

    In their quest for hegemonic geopolitical goals, the elites are sowing more chaos around the world and irreparably damaging the western moral compass. The global mafia’s rule seems to be this: if you play by our rules, we will be nice to you. If you don’t…

    Those are the three versions of the Syrian civil war. Which one will Americans choose to believe?

    * * *

    P.S. Here are some links to read if you would like to gain a Ph.D. version of the Syrian conflict:

    • a. 1956: CIA plot to overthrow the Syrian government
    • b. 1983: CIA document on plans to obliterate Syria to enable an oil pipeline
    • c. 1986: CIA document on how to use Muslim Brotherhood to fuel a sectarian (Sunni v. Shiite) civil war in Syria
    • d. 2001: Wesley Clark told that USA will take out 7 countries in 5 years (Libya, Syria etc.)
    • e. 2005: CNN Interview. Christiane Amanpour tells Assad that the western governments are plotting a regime change in Syria
    • f. 2006: State Dept cable: Detailed discussion of various strategies to enable regime change in Syria
    • g. 2009: State Dept Email: Saudi Arabia is worried that a Shiite crescent is turning into a full moon (referring to a possible Iran-Iraq-Syria-Lebanon coalition)
    • h. 2009: State Dept Cable: Saudi Arabia is the #1 source of funding of terrorism worldwide
    • i. 2012 State Dept Email: Conquest of Syria means a weakened Iran and this is important for Israel
    • j. 2012: State Dept Email: Use Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey to arm/train rebels
    • k. 2014: Hillary Clinton admits in an email that Saudi Arabia and Qatar fund ISIS
    • l. 2015: Joe Biden says Saudi Arabia and Qatar arming/funding Al Qaeda in Syria
    • m. 2016: John Kerry in a leaked audio recording explains how the US trained/armed the opposition and was hoping to use ISIS to force Assad into negotiation
    • n. Israel’s Mossad chief admits helping Al Qaeda and says that it’s because Al Qaeda never attacks Israel

  • Male Democrat PAC Operative Arrested For Assaulting Female Trump Admin Official

    U.S. Capitol Police have arrested a Democrat staffer from the American Bridge political action committee (PAC) on Thursday for assaulting a female Interior Department communications official after a House budget hearing.

    The suspect, whose name is currently withheld, reportedly shoved the woman to the ground while chasing down Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke following his testimony to the House Committee on Natural Resources on the department’s 2019 budget proposal, according to the Daily Caller‘s Michael Bastasch. 

    Interior officials filed a police report, The Daily Caller News Foundation has learned, but it has not yet been processed, police said. It will be made public in seven to 10 days once processed. American Bridge did not respond to TheDCNF’s request for comment. –Daily Caller

    An officer told Politico that they “arrested an adult male for simple assault against another individual outside room 1234 in the Longworth House Office Building,” adding “The suspect was transported to USCP Headquarters for processing.” 

    Interior communications director Laura Rigas told Politico she was “greatly alarmed and extremely irate that a female senior member of my DOI Communications team was physically assaulted today by a Democrat staffer from the PAC American Bridge.”

    “We are appalled to hear of the events following yesterday’s hearing where a member of Secretary Zinke’s staff was victim to an assault,” committee spokeswoman Katie Schoettler told the Daily Caller News Foundation (DCNF).

    “These actions are reprehensible and have no place in this body. We thank the U.S. Capitol Police for their quick response and professionalism,” Schoettler said. “The USCP is now handling the matter.”

    American Bridge is a political action committee founded by Democratic operative David Brock in 2010 and funded in part by George Soros – who donated $2 million to the PAC in 2016. Their mandate is “holding Republicans accountable for their words and actions,” according to their website. 

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

     

  • California Teacher Placed On Leave For Daring To Question School Walkout

    Authored by Jay Syrmopoulos via TruthInMedia.com,

    California high school history teacher Julianne Benzel is on paid suspension after engaging her students in a discussion where she shared her perspective on the politics of organized protests in anticipation of the National School Walkout, which took place on the morning of March 14.

    “We had a dialogue in class about it in Thursday and Friday. And today I received the call. So I am aghast,” Benzel told CBS Sacramento.

    Benzel said that she questioned her students as to the appropriateness of schools sanctioning a protest against gun violence and whether the school administration was willing to allow protests for other causes, but she noted that she never discouraged her pupils from taking part in the walkout.

    “If you’re going to allow students to walk up and get out of class without penalty then you have to allow any group of students that wants to protest,” Benzel said.

    “And so I just kind of used the example which I know it’s really controversial, but I know it was the best example I thought of at the time,” Benzel told CBS Sacramento.

    “[If] a group of students nationwide, or even locally, decided ‘I want to walk out of school for 17 minutes’ and go in the quad area and protest abortion, would that be allowed by our administration?”

    According to Benzel, her students understood the purpose of her discussion, but on Wednesday, she received notification that she was being placed on leave. While students were walking out of class, Benzel was informed she was being placed on paid administrative leave.

    “I didn’t get any backlash from my students. All my students totally understood that there could not be a double standard,” she said.

    School officials didn’t elaborate on the specific nature of the issue, but released a statement reading in part:

    A Rocklin High School teacher has been placed on paid administrative leave due to several complaints from parents and students involving the teacher’s communications regarding today’s student-led civic engagement activities.

    Benzel said that she hopes the national student walkout will facilitate broader discussion not focused entirely on second amendment gun rights, but also on free speech.

    Student Nick Wade, who didn’t walk out, told CBS13 that he believes the politics behind the protest played a large role – and that protests related to a more “conservative” cause would likely be denied by school officials.

    “I feel like if we were to go to school and say something like I want to walk out maybe for abortion rights, then you know they probably wouldn’t let us because that’s more of a conservative push. But someone wants to say let’s walk out for gun control then the school’s going to go with it because it’s more of a popular view,” said Wade.

    Benzel told the news station that she acquired legal counsel and plans to meet with the school administration on Thursday.

  • Kelly: No More Personnel Changes At The White House; Trump May Be Leaker

    White House Chief of Staff John Kelly told White House staff in a Friday meeting that there would be no more dismissals at this time, according to The Hill.

    The news follows a wild week of firings and speculation over who’s neck is on the block – following the abrupt ouster of Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson and his assistant. 

    “The chief of staff actually spoke to a number of staff this morning, reassuring them that there were no immediate personnel changes at this time and that people shouldn’t be concerned, that we should do exactly what we do everyday, and that’s come to work and do the best job we can,” said White House press secretary Sarah Sanders.

    “That’s exactly what we’re doing and exactly what we’re focused on.”

    The Friday announcement comes on the heels of a report by the Washington Post late Thursday that Trump was firing national security adviser H.R. McMaster – and would reportedly be looking for a “soft landing spot” for the three-star general in a position where he could earn his fourth star. 

    Sanders tamped down that rumor at the Friday briefing, telling reporters “he president said that it was not accurate and he had no intention of changing and that they have a great working relationship and he looked forward to continuing to work with him.” 

    “Our focus is not on a lot of the news stories you would like us to be focused on,” Sanders told reporters. “We’re actually focused on what the American people want us to do. That’s to come here, to do our jobs. General McMaster is a dedicated public servant and he is here not focused on the news stories that many of you are writing but on some really big issues, things like North Korea, Russia, Iran. That’s what he’s doing. And that’s what we’ll continue to be focused on every single day we show up for work.”

    Looks like that was fake news from WaPo

    Is Trump a leaker?

    Axios’ Jonathan Swan reports that John Kelly told reporters in an off-the-record briefing that President Trump is “likely speculating about staff moves to people outside the White House and that reporters are then talking to those people. And that’s how a good deal of news is likely being made about all the possible replacements.” 

    What we’re hearing:

    Kelly acknowledged to the reporters it’s likely that Trump is talking to people outside the White House and that reporters are then talking to those people. Kelly cast Trump’s own conversations as a significant contributing factor to stories about the staff changes. (Kelly was making the point that he’s not around for a lot of Trump’s conversations so can’t be sure what he’s telling people over the phone.)

    Kelly disputed the reports about H.R. McMaster imminently leaving the White House. He said there are no active plans to replace him, and added that it would be great if the Army gave McMaster a 4th star.

    Kelly also defended HUD Sec. Ben Carson, who is under pressure for spending $31,000 on a furniture set. Kelly said $31,000 sounds like a lot of money, but to put it in context he asked a reporter how much they think the chair they’re sitting on costs. Kelly said it’s probably worth hundreds of dollars but it will last a long time. He rationalized Carson’s $31,000 outlay by saying the table could last for 80 or 100 years. Kelly was pressed on whether the President was going to fire Carson. He made a military analogy. He said whenever he makes a decision, he makes sure that it’s legally permissible and from that line he takes five paces back — to allow for optics, ethical and other considerations. Kelly said he wants all decision-making across government to be like that and the impression reporters were left with was that Carson is not going to be fired. 

    Kelly said he has been telling Trump that Jeff Sessions is doing a good job. Kelly went above and beyond to defend Sessions, and told the president that the press only reports about 3% of what he does. 

    He said Deputy A.G. Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Chris Wray are also doing good jobs. 

    Kelly also said that Larry Kudlow’s past cocaine habit won’t be a problem for his security clearance, as it is public knowledge. Kelly joked that the 1990s were “a crazy time.” –Axios

    It would seem counterintuitive for Trump to purposefully project an image of chaos within the White House. Then again, maybe it’s all part of the show. 

  • Fordham Protesters Accuse Conservatives Of "White Supremacy" (For Buying Coffee)

    Authored by Sandor Farkas via Campus Reform,

    Fordham University students protested against “white supremacy” Monday, specifically citing an incident in which conservative students tried to buy coffee while wearing MAGA gear.

    Fordham Students United (FSU), “an intersectional coalition of student leaders, activists, faculty & alumni,” staged the March 12 protest in an effort to “bring social justice on campus,” writing on the Facebook page for the demonstration that “white supremacy” is present on campus but the administration has “failed to publicly denounce it.”

    The Fordham Ram reports that the protest, clocking in at an hour and a half, consisted of students shouting chants of “hate speech is not free speech” and marching with signs stating that “Racism is a Social Sin” and “White Supremacy Kills.”

    “Fordham’s policies and protection of white supremacy is putting people at risk,” one student shouted into a megaphone, with another claiming that the goal of the protest was to inspire a response from the administration. 

    “We just want to call on the school to directly address that there is a problem of white supremacy on campus, to denounce it, and to hold the people who are propagating this message accountable,” student Reyna Wang told the Ram, while another claimed that she is “literally scared” by the situation.

    As evidence of the white supremacy on campus, the protesters referenced a recent incident in which the president of a student group that runs an on-campus coffee house was disciplined for demanding that members of the school’s College Republicans chapter leave because their pro-Trump apparel violated the shop’s “Safer Space Policy.”

    Fordham, notably, sanctioned both the president of the coffee house as well as the student who recorded the encounter, but the FSU protesters were still disappointed in the outcome, saying the College Republicans demonstrated “threatening behavior” by showing up at the coffee shop in MAGA gear and expecting to be served like normal customers.

    The group also argues in its Facebook page that the College Republicans “set her (the president) up to be a target of harassment by national right-wing news and its followers.”

    Additionally, the Facebook page points to a a student’s social media post featuring the “flag of Kekistan,” an alt-right symbol, as further evidence of the need to protest white supremacy. 

    FSU contends that the alt-right flag, patterned on the Nazi German war ensign, is “a symbol of white nationalism,” but ignored the student paper’s discovery that nine of the 10 students pictured were unaware of what the flag was and what it stood for.

    “Fordham’s response, or lack thereof, to these events shows that the only free speech Fordham is willing to protect is the violent and racist rhetoric  that actively targets and threatens students of color, LGBTQ+ folks, immigrants, Muslims, Jews, and other minority groups,” the Facebook page for the protest concludes. 

    In response to the protests, Director of Communications Bob Howe told the Ram that as much as “the administration would like to protect the university community from hate speech, we are not insulated from the culture around us, a culture that is increasingly divisive and in some cases openly hateful.” 

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Mar 16

Today’s News 16th March 2018

  • French Judge Issues Arrest Warrant For Saudi Princess On Assault, Kidnapping Charges

    While her brother, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, is preparing to visit the White House to meet with President Donald Trump, Saudi Arabian Princess Hassa bint Salman, the daughter of King Salman bin Abdulaziz, has been made the subject of an arrest warrant issued by a French judge.

    Salman

    The princess is being charged with ordering her body guard to beat up a worker at her Paris apartment who was taking photos in an unauthorized part of the home, instead of working.

    When the princess and her bodyguard discovered him in the act of taking photos, the princess’s body guard confronted the man.

    The bodyguard was later arrested, per Reuters.

    “…Agence France-Presse, the workman was suspected of taking photographs in a private apartment of the princess on Avenue Foch, an expensive street near the Arc de Triomphe, according to the report.”

    Haaretz, citing French publication Le Point, which broke the story, reported that the incident took place in 2016, which is when the bodyguard was arrested. A French judge reportedly issued the arrest warrant for the princess late Thursday. It was filed under the French spelling Hussat ben Salmane.

    At the time of the arrest, a local newspaper quoted the bodyguard’s lawyer as saying that the bodyguard had intervened after hearing his employer scream. She had discovered the worker in her private apartment, not in the area where he was supposed to be carrying out plumbing work.

    Princess HbS left the country shortly after the incident, and hasn’t returned.

    In a fascinating twist, the warrant was issued a day after NBC News published a disturbing report about MbS’s efforts to “hide” his mother from his father. The report made it clear that MbS was essentially holding his mother captive for fear that she might try to impede his rise to power.

    Yet there is one Saudi woman whom U.S. officials say has not benefited from the prince’s rise: his own mother. Fourteen current and former senior U.S. officials told NBC News that intelligence shows Prince Mohammed bin Salman — often referred to by his initials MBS — blocked his mother from seeing his father, King Salman, more than two years ago and has kept her away from him as the young prince rapidly amassed power.

    Prince Mohammed, a key ally of the Trump White House, has concocted various explanations of his mother’s whereabouts over the years, such as that she’s out of the country receiving medical treatment, so King Salman would not know his son has been behind her continued absence, the current and former officials said.

    U.S. officials interviewed for this story believe, based on several years of intelligence, that MBS took action against his mother because he was concerned that she opposed his plans for a power grab that could divide the royal family and might use her influence with the king to prevent it. The officials said MBS placed his mother under house arrest at least for some time at a palace in Saudi Arabia, without the king’s knowledge.

    The Saudi Embassy in Paris did not respond to requests for comment. The Saudi government communications office and the royal court could not be reached for comment. Of course, none of this will likely impact MbS’s relationship with President Trump. The two have made no secret of their mutual desire to strengthen US-Saudi ties, just as the Kingdom threatens that it will build its own nuclear weapon if Iran ever gains the capability…

    After the reports of what was done to various members of the Saudi elites by her brother, perhaps she learned everything she is being accused from him? (and of course the lack of consequences for her action too)…

  • The Saker Warns: "When Dealing With A Bear, Hubris Is Suicidal"

    Via The Saker,

    Assuming mankind finds a way not to destroy itself in the near future and assuming that there will still be historians in the 22nd or 23rd centuries, I bet you that they will look at the AngloZionist Empire and see the four following characteristics as some of its core features: lies, willful ignorance, hypocrisy, and hysterics. To illustrate my point I will use the recent “Skripal nerve-gas assassination” story as it really encompasses all of these characteristics.

    I won’t even bother debunking the official nonsense here as others have done a very good job of pointing out the idiocy of the official narrative. If you are truly capable of believing that “Putin” (that is the current collective designator for the Evil Empire of Mordor currently threatening all of western civilization) would order the murder of a man whom a Russian military court sentenced to only 13 years in jail (as opposed to life or death) and who was subsequently released as part of a swap with the USA, you can stop reading right now and go back to watching TV. I personally have neither the energy nor the inclination to even discuss such a self-evidently absurd theory. No, what I do want to do is use this story as a perfect illustration of the kind of society we now all live in looked at from a moral point of view. I realize that we live in a largely value-free society where moral norms have been replaced by ideological orthodoxy, but that is just one more reason for me to write about what is taking place precisely focusing on the moral dimensions of current events.

    Lies and the unapologetic denial of reality:

    In a 2015 article entitled “A society of sexually frustrated Pinocchios” I wrote the following:

    I see a direct cause and effect relationship between the denial of moral reality and the denial of physical reality. I can’t prove that, of course, but here is my thesis: Almost from day one, the early western civilization began by, shall we say, taking liberties with the truth, which it could bend, adapt, massage and repackage to serve the ideological agenda of the day. It was not quite the full-blown and unapologetic relativism of the 19th century yet, but it was an important first step. With “principles” such as the end justifies the means and the wholesale violation of the Ten Commandants all “for the greater glory of God” the western civilization got cozy with the idea that there was no real, objective truth, only the subjective perception or even representation each person might have thereof. Fast forward another 10 centuries or so and we end up with the modern “Gayropa” (as Europe is now often referred to in Russia): not only has God been declared ‘dead’ and all notions of right and wrong dismissed as “cultural”, but even objective reality has now been rendered contingent upon political expediency and ideological imperatives.

    I went on to quote George Orwell by reminding how he defined “doublethink” in his book 1984:

    “To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it (…) To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality“

    and I concluded by saying that “The necessary corollary from this state of mind is that only appearances matter, not reality”.

    This is exactly what we are observing; not only in the silly Skripal nerve-gas assassination story but also in all the rest of the Russophobic nonsense produced by the AngloZionist propaganda machine including the “Litvinenko polonium murder” and the “Yushchenko dioxin poisoning“. The fact that neither nerve-gas, nor polonium nor dioxin are in any way effective murder weapons does not matter in the least: a simple drive-by shooting, street-stabbing or, better, any “accident” is both easier to arrange and impossible to trace. Fancy assassination methods are used when access to the target is very hard or impossible (as was the case with Ibn al-Khattab, whose assassination the Russians were more than happy to take credit for; this might also have been the case with the death of Yasser Arafat). But the best way of murdering somebody is to simply make the body disappear, making any subsequent investigation almost impossible. Finally, you can always subcontract the assassination to somebody else like, for example, when the CIA tried and failed, to murder Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Hussain Fadlallah by subcontracting his bombing to its local “Christian” allies, killing over 80 innocent people in the process. There is plenty of common crime in the UK and to get somebody to rob and stab Skripal would have probably been the easiest version. That’s assuming that the Russians had any reason to want him dead, which they self-evidently didn’t.

    But here is the important thing: every single criminal or intelligence specialist in the West understands all of the above. But that does not stop the Ziomedia from publishing articles like this one “A Brief History of Attempted Russian Assassinations by Poison” which also lists people poisoned by Russians:

    • Skripal by nerve gas

    • Litvinenko by polonium

    • Kara-Murza poisoned not once, but TWICE, by an unknown poison, he survived!

    • Markov poisoned by ricin and the Bulgarians with “speculated KGB assistance”

    • Khattab by sarin or a sarin-derivative

    • Yushchenko by dioxin

    • Perepilichny by “a rare, toxic flower, gelsemium” (I kid you not, check the article!)

    • Moskalenko by mercury

    • Politkovskaya who was shot, but who once felt “ill after drinking some tea that she believed contained poison”

    The only possible conclusion from this list is this: there is some kind of secret lab in Russia where completely incompetent chemists try every poison known to man, not on rats or on mice, but on high profile AngloZionist-supported political activists, preferably before an important political event.

    Right.

    By the way, the gas allegedly used in the attack, “Novichok”, was manufactured in Uzbekistan and the cleanup of the factory producing it was made by, you guessed it, a US company. Just saying…

    In any halfway honest and halfway educated society, those kind of articles should result in the idiot writing it being summarily fired for gross incompetence and the paper/journal posting it being discredited forever. But in our world, the clown who wrote that nonsense (Elias Groll, a Harvard graduate and – listen to this – a specialist of “cyberspace and its conflicts and controversies” (sic)) is a staff writer of the award-winning Foreign Policy magazine.

    So what does it tell us, and future historians, when this kind of crap is written by a staff writer of an “award winning” media outlet? Does it not show that our society has now reached a stage in its decay (I can’t call that “development”) where lies become the norm? Not only are even grotesque and prima facie absurd lies accepted, they are expected (if only because they reinforce the current ideological Zeitgeist. The result? Our society is now packed with first, zombified ideological drones who actually believe any type of officially proclaimed of nonsense and, second, by cowards who lack the basic courage to denounce even that which they themselves know to be false.

    Lies, however ridiculous and self-evidently stupid, have become the main ingredient of the modern political discourse. Everybody knows this and nobody cares. When challenged on this, the typical defense used is always the same: “you are the only person saying this – I sure ever heard this before!”.

    Willful ignorance as a universal cop-out

    We all know the type. You tell somebody that his/her theory makes absolutely no sense or is not supported by facts and the reply you get is some vaguely worded refusal to engage in an disputation. Initially, you might be tempted to believe that, indeed, your interlocutor is not too bright and not too well read, but eventually you realize that there is something very different happening: the modern man actually makes a very determined effort not to be capable of logical thought and not to be informed of the basic facts of the case. And what is true for specific individuals is even more true of our society as a whole. Let’s take one simple example: Operation Gladio:

    “Gladio” is really an open secret by now. Excellent books and videos have been written about this and even the BBC has made a two and a half hour long video about it. There is even an entire website dedicated to the story of this huge, continent-wide, terrorist organization specializing in false flag operations. That’s right: a NATO-run terrorist network in western Europe involved in false flag massacres like the infamous Bologna train station bombing. No, not the Soviet KGB backing the Baader-Meinhof Red Army Faction or the Red Brigades in Italy. No, the USA and West European governments organizing, funding and operating a terrorist network directed at the people of Western, not Eastern, Europe. Yes, at their own people! In theory, everybody should know about this, the information is available everywhere, even on the hyper-politically correct Wikipedia. But, again, nobody cares.

    The end of the Cold War was marked by a seemingly endless series of events which all provided a pretext for AngloZionist interventions (from the Markale massacres in Bosnia, to the Srebrenica “genocide”, to the Racak massacre Kosovo, to the “best” and biggest one of them all, 9/11 of course). Yet almost nobody wondered if the same people or, at least, the same kind of people who committed all the Gladio crimes might be involved. Quite the opposite: each one of these events was accompanied by a huge propaganda campaign mindlessly endorsing and even promoting the official narrative, even when it self-evidently made no sense whatsoever (like 2 aircraft burning down 3 steel towers). As for Gladio, it was conveniently “forgotten”.

    There is a simple principle in psychology, including, and especially in criminal psychology which I would like to prominently restate here:

    The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior

    Every criminalist knows that and this is why criminal investigators place so much importance on the “modus operandi”, i.e. the particular way or method a suspect or a criminal chooses in the course of the execution of his/her crimes. That is also something which everybody knows. So let’s summarize this in a simple thesis:

    Western regimes have a long and well-established track record of regularly executing bloody false-flag operations in pursuit of political objectives, especially those providing them with a pretext to justify an illegal military aggression.

    Frankly, I submit that the thesis above is really established not only by a preponderance of evidence but beyond a reasonable doubt. Right?

    Maybe. But that is also completely irrelevant because nobody gives a damn! Not the reporters who lie for a living nor, even less so, the brainwashed zombies who read their nonsense and take it seriously. The CIA tried to kill Fidel Castro over 600 times – who cares?! All we know is that the good folks at Langley would never, ever, kill a Russian in the UK, out of respect for international law, probably…

    That willful ignorance easily defeats history, facts or logic.

    Here is a simple question a journalist could ask:

    “would the type of people who had no problems blowing up an large train station, or bringing down three buildings in downtown New York, have any hesitation in using a goofy method to try kill a useless Russian ex-spy if that could justify further hostile actions against a country which they desperately need to demonize to justify and preserve the current AngloZionist world order?”.

    The answer I think is self-evident. The question shall therefore not be asked. Instead, soy-boys from Foreign Policy mag will tell us about how the Russians use exotic flowers to kill high visibility opponents whose death would serve no conceivable political goal.

    Hypocrisy as a core attribute of the modern man

    Willful ignorance is important, of course, but it is not enough. For one thing, being ignorant, while useful to dismiss a fact-based and/or logical argument, is not something useful to establish your moral superiority or the legality of your actions. Empire requires much more than just obedience from its subject: what is also absolutely indispensable is a very strong sense of superiority which can be relied upon when committing a hostile action against the other guy. And nothing is as solid a foundation for a sense of superiority than the unapologetic reliance on brazen hypocrisy. Let’s take a fresh example: the latest US threats to attack Syria (again).

    Irrespective of the fact that the USA themselves have certified Syria free of chemical weapons and irrespective of the fact that US officials are still saying that they have no evidence that the Syrian government was involved in any chemical attack on Khan Shaykhun, the USA is now preparing to strike Syria again in “response” to future chemical attacks! Yes, you read that right. The AngloZionists are now announcing their false flags in advance! In fact, by the time this analysis is published the attack will probably already have occurred. The “best” part of this all is that Nikki Haley has now announced to the UN Security Council that the US will act without any UN Security Councilapproval. What the USA is declaring is this: “we reserve the right to violate international law at any time and for any reason we deem sufficient”. In the very same statement, Nikki Haley also called the Syrian government an “outlaw regime”. This is not a joke, check it out for yourself. The reaction in “democratic” Europe: declaring that *Russia* (not the US) is a rogue state. QED.

    This entire circus is only made possible by the fact that the western elites have all turned into “great supine protoplasmic invertebrate jellies” (to use the wonderful words of Boris Johnson) and that absolutely nobody has the courage, or decency, to call all this what it really is: an obscene display of total hypocrisy and wholesale violation of all norms of international law. The French philosopher Alain Soral is quite right when he says that modern “journalists are either unemployed or prostitutes” (he spoke about the French media – un journaliste français c’est soit une pute soit un chômeur – but this fully applies to all the western media). Except that I would extend it to the entire Western Establishment.

    I would further argue that foreign aggression and hypocrisy have become the two essential pillars for the survival of the AngloZionist empire: the first one being an economic and political imperative, the 2nd one being the prerequisite for the public justification of the first one. But sometimes even that is not enough, especially when the lies are self-evidently absurd. Then the final, quasi-miraculous element is always brought in: hysterics.

    Hysteria as the highest form of (pseudo-)liberalism

    I don’t particularly care for the distinction usually made between liberals and conservatives, at least not unless the context and these terms is carefully and accurately defined. I certainly don’t place myself on that continuum nor do find it analytically helpful.

    The theoretical meaning of these concepts is, however, quite different from what is mostly understood under these labels, especially when people use them to identify themselves. That is to say that while I am not at all sure that those who think of themselves as, say, liberals are in any way truly liberal, I do think that people who would identify themselves as “liberals” often (mostly?) share a number of characteristics, the foremost of which is a very strong propensity to function at, and engage in, an hysterical mode of discourse and action.

    The Google definition of hysteria is “exaggerated or uncontrollable emotion or excitement, especially among a group of people (…) whose symptoms include conversion of psychological stress into physical symptoms (somatization), selective amnesia, shallow volatile emotions, and overdramatic or attention-seeking behavior”. Is that not a perfect description of US politicians, especially the (putatively) “liberal” ones? Just think of the way US Democrats have capitalized on such (non-)issues as “Russian interference” (externally) or “gun control” (internally) and you will see that the so-called “liberals” never get off a high-emotional pitch. The best example of all, really, is their reaction to the election of Donald Trump instead of their cult-leader Hillary: it has been over a year since Trump has been elected and yet the liberal ziomedia and its consumers are still in full-blown hysteria mode (with “pussyhats”, “sky-screams” and all). In a conversation you can literally drown such a liberal with facts, statistics, expert testimonies, etc. and achieve absolutely no result whatsoever because the liberal lives in an ideological comfort zone which he/she is categorically unwilling and, in fact, unable, to abandon, even temporarily. This is what makes liberals such a *perfect* audience for false-flag operations: they simply won’t process the narrative presented to them in a logical manner but will immediately react to it in a strongly emotional manner, usually with the urge to immediately “do something”.

    That “do something” is usually expressed in the application of violence (externally) and the imposition of bans/restrictions/regulations (internally). You can try to explain to that liberal that the very last thing the Russians would ever want to do is to use a stupid method to try to kill a person who is of absolutely no interest to them, or to explain to that liberal that the very last thing the Syrian government would ever do in the course of its successful liberation of its national territory from “good terrorists” would be to use chemical weapons of any kind – but you would never achieve anything: Trump must be impeached, the Russians sanctioned and the Syrians bombed, end of argument.

    I am quite aware that there are a lot of self-described “conservatives” who have fully joined this chorus of hysterical liberals in all their demands, but these “conservatives” are not only acting out of character, they are simply caving in to the social pressure of the day, being the “great supine protoplasmic invertebrate jellies” mentioned above. Again, I am not discussing real liberals or real conservatives here (regardless of what these terms really mean), I am talking about those who, for whatever reason, chose to place that label upon themselves even if they personally have only a very vague idea of what this label is supposed to mean.

    So there we have it: an Empire built (and maintained) on lies, accepted on the basis ignorance, justified by hypocrisy and energized by hysterics. This is what the “Western world” stands for nowadays. And while there is definitely a vocal minority of “resisters” (from the Left and the Right – also two categories I don’t find analytically helpful – and from many other schools of political thought), the sad reality is that the vast majority of people around us accept this and see no reason to denounce it, nevermind doing something about it. That is why “they” got away with 9/11 and why “they” will continue to get away with future false-flags because the people lied to, realize, at least on some level, that they are being lied to and yet they simply don’t care.

    Truly, the Orwellian slogans of 1984 “war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength” perfectly fit our world.

    However, when dealing with the proverbial Russian bear, there is one lesson of history which western leaders really should never forget and which they should also turn into a slogan: when dealing with a bear, hubris is suicidal.

  • The Fed Has Its Finger On The Button Of A Nuclear Debt Bomb

    Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,

    I hear a lot of talk lately in the alternative media (and even the mainstream media) of the potential for World War III. The general assumption when one hears that term is that “nuclear conflict” is imminent. But a world war does not necessarily have to be fought with nukes. For example, we are perhaps already witnessing the first shots fired in a global economic war as the Trump administration gets ready to implement far-reaching trade tariffs. This action might provide cover (or justification) for destructive attacks on the U.S. fiscal system by China, Japan, Russia, the EU, OPEC nations, etc. The ultimate attack being a dumping of their U.S. debt holdings and the death of the dollar’s world reserve status.

    Of course, an economic “world war” between nations would in itself be a smokescreen for and an even more insidious internal war being waged against the global economy by central banks.

    There is a longstanding misconception that central banks always manipulate economic conditions to make them appear “healthy” and that the main concern of central bankers is to “defend the golden goose.” This is false. According to the evidence at hand as well as open admissions by central bankers, these private institutions have throughout history also deliberately created financial crises and collapses.

    The question I always get from people new to the field of alternative economics is — “Why would central bankers crash a system they benefit from?” This question is drawn from a flawed understanding of the situation.

    First, there is the assumption that economic systems are static rather than fluid. In reality, vast sums of wealth can be transferred into and out of any notion on a whim and at the speed of light. The collapse of one economy or multiple economies does not necessarily include the destruction of banker wealth. Even if wealth was their top goal (which it is not), global banks and central banks do not see any particular economy as a “cash cow” or a “golden goose.” From their behavior and tactics in the past, it is more likely that they see national economies as mere storage containers.

    Banks can pour their wealth, which they create from thin air, into one or more of these many available containers. They can circulate that wealth within the container for a time and then pour all their wealth out at a moment’s notice. One container is no more valuable to them than any other container, and sometimes sacrificing a container can be beneficial.

    The perceived destruction of a national economy can often be exploited as a means to a greater end. Usually this “greater end” means exploiting the crisis to justify centralization of power or the transfer of power from the public into the hands of an elitist class.

    I have outlined the history of such transfers on numerous occasions, including the liquidity crisis of 1914 (just after the establishment of the Federal Reserve) leading into World War I and the subsequent hoarding of financial power by banks as well as the creation of the League of Nations.

    Or how about the artificial bubble in multiple asset classes created by the Federal Reserve in the 1920s through low interest rates? A bubble which was then burst through the aggressive raising of interest rates at the onset of the Great Depression. This crash coincided with other fabricated economic disasters in Europe and Asia, leading to social despair, the rise of communism and fascism and World War II. This crisis benefited the banking establishment greatly as thousands of smaller independent banks were crushed and a handful of major banks devoured all assets. And, let’s not forget that WWII led to the creation of globalist edifices like the United Nations, the IMF, World Bank, the beginning roots of the European Union, etc.

    Every new economic calamity seems to consolidate property and bureaucratic control into the hands of the same class of technocrats. And each calamity is linked to a very important economic factor — massive debt dependency.

    So, let’s fast forward to today’s era of burgeoning crisis and how central banks like the Fed are feeding the fire of disaster. I would like to focus most of all on our debt situation to illustrate how the Fed can and will trigger an explosion, a controlled demolition of our financial system. What is our debt situation in the U.S. today?

    The Consumer Debt Bomb

    Total American household debt skyrocketed beyond $13 trillion at the end of 2017, well beyond historic highs. This is the fifth consecutive year of household debt increases, including credit cards, auto loans, mortgages, student loans, etc. This trend suggests that the “economic recovery” so far has not actually been based on any legitimate wealth creation or resurgence, but an even greater dependence on the same debt that helped cause the crash of 2008. The Fed’s money printing did NOT trickle down to consumers as was originally promised.

    While these sectors of consumer debt did not necessarily enjoy the same near-zero rates as banks and corporations did after the crash and the bailout bonanza, their rates are now rising along with the Fed’s rate increases. This is affecting numerous asset classes including housing markets and auto loans.

    The cold hard reality is that as the Fed raises interest rates all other areas of the economy come under pressure. The average citizen, with his/her record debt levels, is now subject to the machinations of the central bank through the arbitrary shifting of a single data point like “inflation”.

    The Corporate Debt Bomb

    This debt bomb is possibly the most subversive and the least understood. I have been warning about how corporate debt and rising interest rates could cause a stock market crash for quite some time, but only recently have mainstream analysts caught up to this realization.

    Today, institutions like S&P Global Ratings are showing that at least 37% of 13,000 corporations examined have a debt to earnings ratio of five times, making them “highly leveraged.” This debt level is also even higher than it was in 2007 just before the collapse of Lehman and the beginning of the credit crisis.

    The concern goes beyond debt holdings, though. Consider the fact that corporations have been exploiting low interest rates to borrow incredible sums of cash for the sole purpose of purchasing their OWN stocks. Stock buybacks are basically a legal form of market manipulation in which companies buy stocks back from the public and greatly reduce the number of existing stocks circulating in the market, thereby artificially increasing the value of each stock overall and keeping the Dow in the green.

    Stock buybacks have been the primary fuel for the longest bull market in history, a bull market so fake that even the mainstream media has been questioning its validity lately. Stock buybacks are completely dependent on cheap debt, and cheap debt is disappearing as the Fed continues raising interest rates. The natural reaction by stock markets will be a crash.

    Some people may question whether or not the Fed is actually doing this “deliberately,” or if they are simply ignorant. I would refer them to the recently released Fed minutes from 2012, in which Jerome Powell, now the chairman of the Federal Reserve, talked repeatedly of the negative reaction that would occur within markets once the Fed began cutting its balance sheet holdings and raising interest rates after addicting equities markets to the drug of easy profits.

    Jerome Powell himself is recorded as knowing exactly what will happen as interest rates rise, and he is continuing to raise them anyway, while also cutting the Fed balance sheet far faster than was originally telegraphed to the public. How can anyone in their right mind argue that the Fed is not bringing the U.S. economy down deliberately?

    The National Debt Bomb

    This debt bomb has a much longer fuse that the other two, but in the wake of a potential global trade war (World War III), the question arises as to how long it will take before major U.S. treasury bond holders like China dump their holdings in retaliation.

    With Trump refusing to take a stand against the continued raising of the national debt ceiling, and the addition of his $1.5 Trillion infrastructure spending plan, there is little doubt that our national debt will continue to rise. Therefore, foreign investment is essential.

    It is important to remember that the Federal Reserve used to be the largest purchaser of U.S. debt or the “buyer of last resort.” Now, the Fed has ended quantitative easing and is cutting its balance sheet swiftly. So, the only buyers left are foreign central banks and investors. My prediction is that the Fed will not step in if a trade war escalates to a treasury bond dump. Or, that they will not step in until it is far too late to stall the resulting crisis.

    In Barack Obama’s eight years as president the national debt was essentially doubled. This is a unsustainable rate of debt issuance, even for a nation with the world reserve currency. If we lose foreign investment and the world reserve currency then that debt accumulation will come back to haunt us.

    It is important to remember that whatever happens within our economy and the global economy, central banks like the Fed have fully facilitated the bubbles produced as well as the inversions that result. The Fed knows exactly what it is doing. And all other factors, from the Trump trade wars to foreign dumping of U.S. treasuries and the dollar, will be a distraction from the banking elites truly culpable.

    Economic warfare can in some cases be just as devastating as nuclear warfare.  It can wipe out entire populations, give rise to tyrants and enslave the minds of individuals through the weaponization of resource scarcity.  Such wars, though less psychologically immediate as our cinematic fears of atomic doom, should be taken very seriously, and the culprits behind them have to be dealt with harshly.

    *  *  *

    If you would like to support the publishing of articles like the one you have just read, visit Brandon Smith’s donations page here.  We greatly appreciate your patronage.

  • Can These Low-Cost "Tube Homes" Solve Hong Kong's Housing Crisis?

    One local Hong Kong architect is bringing a new meaning to the phrase “pipe dream.”

    James Law has designed what he calls the “OPod Tube Housing”. Though the product, a not-so-subtly play on one of the best-selling consumer electronics, was proposed as a novelty. But since he finished it, Law says he’s already received inquiries from around the world. So far, he’s built one “conceptual” test house in one of Hong Kong’s industrial areas.

    Pod

    Law was inspired to design the OPod when he observed some leftover storm sewer drain pipes at a construction site. He quickly noticed that they could easily be converted into “really cute micro-living architecture,” he told the Associated Press.

    The pods are only 100 square feet, and are similar in size to Hong Kong’s famous “cubical apartments”…but would represent a much better value and possibly help assuage a worsening housing crisis caused by record-high rents.

    At 100 square feet (9.3 square meters) the tube houses are not that much smaller than Hong Kong’s infamous “cubicle homes” — older apartments subdivided into cramped and squalid living spaces. They’re roomier than other types of tenement housing, such as so-called “coffin” and “cage” homes.

    …

    There’s a lot crammed into the OPod. It consists of two sections of 2.5-meter (about 8 foot) diameter pipes fitted with glass doors on both ends. A living area inside includes a bench that converts into a bed, opposite shelves on the facing, curving wall. Another shelf fits a bar fridge and a microwave next to a galley sink beneath an air conditioner. A tiled bathroom at the end includes a combined shower and toilet.

    Surprisingly, the OPod cost $15,000 to build (though the AP didn’t specify whether this includes the piep, and. Law said he envisions renting them out for less than $400 a month to recent graduates and other low-income individuals. This is increasingly important in Hong Kong, where home prices have reached record highs. Indeed, a recent poll showed Hong Kong is the second most-expensive city in the world, where $1 million will only get you 20 square meters of property in the city center. The most expensive city, meanwhile, was Monaco.

    “My dream is the OPods will be a new kind of living for young people just starting out in life,” Law said.

    …

    “This kind of house is really portable. We (can) actually make it in a construction site and then we lift it onto a truck and we can deliver it anywhere,” Law said. “So it represents a new, affordable architecture.”

    To be sure, the OPod is hardly an ideal long-term solution to Hong Kong’s housing crisis; at the end of the day, it’s really more of a novelty. Though the home’s one major utility is its ability to fit into hard-to-utilize spaces. For example, the pods could be stacked in gaps between existing buildings. They could also be clustered under highway overpasses, or on the roofs of existing buildings.

  • The Pentagon & Hollywood's Successful & Deadly Propaganda Alliance

    Authored by Michael McCaffrey,

    The Pentagon helps Hollywood to make money and, in turn, Hollywood churns out effective propaganda for the brutal American war machine…

    The US has the largest military budget in the world, spending over $611 billion – far larger than any other nation on Earth. The US military also has at their disposal the most successful propaganda apparatus the world has ever known… Hollywood.

    Since their collaboration on the first Best Picture winner ‘Wings’ in 1927, the US military has used Hollywood to manufacture and shape its public image in over 1,800 films and TV shows. Hollywood has, in turn, used military hardware in their films and TV shows to make gobs and gobs of money. A plethora of movies like ‘Lone Survivor,’ ‘Captain Philips,’ and even blockbuster franchises like ‘Transformers’ and Marvel, DC and X-Men superhero movies have agreed to cede creative control in exchange for use of US military hardware over the years.

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    In order to obtain cooperation from the Department of Defense (DoD), producers must sign contracts that guarantee a military approved version of the script makes it to the big screen. In return for signing away creative control, Hollywood producers save tens of millions of dollars from their budgets on military equipment, service members to operate the equipment, and expensive location fees.

    Capt. Russell Coons, director of the Navy Office of Information West, told Al Jazeera what the military expects for their cooperation: “We’re not going to support a program that disgraces a uniform or presents us in a compromising way.”

    Phil Strub, the DOD chief Hollywood liaison, says the guidelines are clear. “If the filmmakers are willing to negotiate with us to resolve our script concerns, usually we’ll reach an agreement. If not, filmmakers are free to press on without military assistance.”

    In other words, the Department of Defense is using taxpayer money to pick favorites. The DOD has no interest in nuance, truth or – God forbid – artistic expression; only in insidious jingoism that manipulates public opinion to their favor. This is chilling when you consider that the DOD is able to use its financial leverage to quash dissenting films it deems insufficiently pro-military or pro-American in any way.

    The danger of the DOD-Hollywood alliance is that Hollywood is incredibly skilled at making entertaining, pro-war propaganda. The DOD isn’t getting involved in films like ‘Iron Man,’ ‘X-Men,’ ‘Transformers’ or ‘Jurassic Park III’ for fun. They are doing so because it’s an effective way to psychologically program Americans, particularly young Americans, not just to adore the military, but to worship militarism. This ingrained love of militarism has devastating real-world effects.

    Lawrence Suid, author of ‘Guts and Glory: The Making of the American Military Image in Film’told Al Jazeera, “I was teaching the history of the Vietnam War, and I couldn’t explain how we got into Vietnam. I could give the facts, the dates, but I couldn’t explain why. And when I was getting my film degrees, it suddenly occurred to me that the people in the US had never seen the US lose a war, and when President Johnson said we can go into Vietnam and win, they believed him because they’d seen 50 years of war movies that were positive.”

    As Suid points out, generations of Americans had been raised watching John Wayne valiantly storm the beaches of Normandy in films like ‘The Longest Day,’ and thus were primed to be easily manipulated into supporting any US military adventure because they were conditioned to believe that the US is always the benevolent hero and inoculated against doubt.

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    This indoctrinated adoration of a belligerent militarism, conjured by Hollywood blockbusters, also resulted in Americans being willfully misled into supporting a farce like the 2003 Iraq War. The psychological conditioning for Iraq War support was built upon hugely successful films like ‘Saving Private Ryan’ (1998), directed by Steven Spielberg, and ‘Black Hawk Down’ (2001), produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, that emphasized altruistic American militarism. Spielberg and Bruckheimer are two Hollywood heavyweights considered by the DoD to be their most reliable collaborators.

    Another example of the success of the DoD propaganda program was the pulse-pounding agitprop of the Tom Cruise blockbuster ‘Top Gun’ (1986). The movie, produced by Bruckheimer, was a turning point in the DoD-Hollywood relationship, as it came amid a string of artistically successful, DoD-opposed, ‘anti-war’ films, like ‘Apocalypse Now,’ ‘Platoon’ and ‘Full Metal Jacket,’ which gave voice to America’s post-Vietnam crisis of confidence. ‘Top Gun’ was the visual representation of Reagan’s flag-waving optimism, and was the Cold War cinematic antidote to the “Vietnam Syndrome”.

    ‘Top Gun,’ which could not have been made without massive assistance from the DoD, was a slick, two-hour recruiting commercial that coincided with a major leap in public approval ratings for the military. With a nadir of 50 percent in 1980, by the time the Gulf War started in 1991, public support for the military had spiked to 85 percent.

    Since Top Gun, the DoD propaganda machine has resulted in a  current public approval for the military of 72 percent, with Congress at 12 percent, the media at 24 percent, and even Churches at only 40 percent. The military is far and away the most popular institution in American life. Other institutions would no doubt have better approval ratings if they too could manage and control their image in the public sphere.

    It isn’t just the DoD that uses the formidable Hollywood propaganda apparatus to its own end… the CIA does as well, working with films to enhance its reputation and distort history.

    For example, as the ‘War on Terror’ raged, the CIA deftly used ‘Charlie Wilson’s War’ (2007) as a disinformation vehicle to revise their sordid history with the Mujahideen in Afghanistan and to portray themselves as heroic and not nefarious.

    The CIA also surreptitiously aided the film ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ (2012), and used it as a propaganda tool to alter history and convince Americans that torture works.

    The case for torture presented in ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ was originally made from 2001 to 2010 on the hit TV show ‘24,’ which had support from the CIA as well. That pro-CIA and pro-torture narrative continued in 2011 with the Emmy-winning show ‘Homeland,’ created by the same producers as ‘24,’ Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa.

    A huge CIA-Hollywood success story was Best Picture winner ‘Argo’ (2012), which ironically is the story of the CIA teaming up with Hollywood. The CIA collaborated with the makers of ‘Argo’ in order to pervert the historical record and elevate their image.

    The fact that this propaganda devil’s bargain between the DoD/CIA and Hollywood takes place in the self-declared Greatest Democracy on Earth™ is an irony seemingly lost on those in power who benefit from it, and also among those targeted to be indoctrinated by it, entertainment consumers, who are for the most part entirely oblivious to it.

    If America is the Greatest Democracy in the World™, why are its military and intelligence agencies so intent on covertly misleading its citizens, stifling artistic dissent, and obfuscating the truth? The answer is obvious… because in order to convince Americans that their country is The Greatest Democracy on Earth™, they must be misled, artistic dissent must be stifled and the truth must be obfuscated.

    In the wake of the American defeat in the Vietnam war, cinema flourished by introspectively investigating the deeper uncomfortable truths of that fiasco in Oscar-nominated films like ‘Apocalypse Now,’ ‘Coming Home,’ ‘The Deer Hunter,’ ‘Platoon,’ ‘Full Metal Jacket’ and ‘Born on the Fourth of July,’ all made without assistance from the DoD.

    The stultifying bureaucracy of America’s jingoistic military agitprop machine is now becoming more successful at suffocating artistic endeavors in their crib. With filmmaking becoming ever more corporatized, it is an uphill battle for directors to maintain their artistic integrity in the face of cost-cutting budgetary concerns from studios.

    In contrast to post-Vietnam cinema, after the unmitigated disaster of the US invasion of Iraq and the continuing quagmire in Afghanistan, there has been no cinematic renaissance, only a steady diet of mendaciously patriotic, DoD-approved, pro-war drivel like ‘American Sniper’ and ‘Lone Survivor.’

    Best Picture winner ‘The Hurt Locker’ (2008), shot with no assistance from the DoD, was the lone exception that successfully dared to portray some of the ugly truths of America’s Mesopotamian misadventure.

    President Eisenhower once warned Americans to “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex.”

    Eisenhower’s prescient warning should have extended to the military industrial entertainment complex of the DoD/CIA-Hollywood alliance, which has succeeded in turning Americans into a group of uniformly incurious and militaristic zealots.

    America is now stuck in a perpetual pro-war propaganda cycle, where the DoD/CIA and Hollywood conspire to indoctrinate Americans to be warmongers and, in turn, Americans now demand more militarism from their entertainment and government. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

    The DoD/CIA-Hollywood propaganda alliance guarantees Americans will blindly support more future failed wars and will be willing accomplices in the deaths of millions more people across the globe.

  • U.S. Navy Medics Prepare For Combat By Treating Gunshot Victims In Chicago

    The U.S. Navy is taking advantage of Chicago’s sky-high murder rate by sending new medics to treat gunshot victims at Stroger hospital on the city’s West Side as part of a pilot program which is currently in its third year. 

    In 2017, 3,561 people were shot in Chicago; one every 2 hours and 27 minutes, while there were 679 total homicides – down from 2016’s total of 808. Of the 679 homicides last year, 92.4% were from gunshots.

    In fact, one-third of the 2016 spike in U.S. homicides came from just five Chicago neighborhoods. 

    The steady flow of shooting victims (which social justice warriors seem to have overlooked for some reason) has proven extremely useful in training combat medics for the battlefield. 

    “The experience here can’t be replicated elsewhere, unless you have a major land invasion,” said Dr. Faran Bokhari, chair of Stroger’s trauma & burn surgery unit.

    The pilot program is set to be expanded under a Department of Defense effort to prioritize civilian and military partnerships. Newly enlisted combat medics rotate into hospital shifts, along with those who need a refresher while home from deployment. The hospital’s 14-bed unit treats more than 6,000 trauma patient a year – with many of the victims suffering penetrating, life threatening wounds similar to those found on the battlefield. 

    In many front-line Marine units, immediate medical care for gunshots, explosions or shrapnel comes from these corpsmen who mostly are young, new to the service and new to seeing up close the wounds they train to treat. The Navy medics, known as hospital corpsmen, typically receive 14 weeks of training in first aid and patient care in Fort Sam Houston in Texas after initial boot camp, and then have the option for additional training. –WSJ

    “[T]he first time a corpsman got any trauma experience was when they were deployed, and some would just freeze up,” said Navy Surgeon, Captain Paul Roach, who heads the program in the Great Lakes region. “We don’t want that to happen anymore.”

    Corpsmen in the program learn skills such as how to scrub in before entering an operating theater, how to operate various machinery in the treatment of gunshot wounds, and how to assist doctors and surgeons with more advanced medical procedures during the trauma unit’s 3 p.m. to 3 a.m. shift. 

    “Corpsmen are not routinely exposed to trauma or critically injured patients during their first assignments,” said DoD spokeswoman Maj. Carla Gleason. The “realistic, hands-on trauma training will allow them to hone their skills and increase their readiness.”

    As the Wall Street Journal notes, Navy corpsmen often find themselves operating alone in combat zones. Operating in the hospital environment helps them learn protocol and procedures which they can replicate in the field. 

    “A lot of it is here’s your training, you learn, it gets drilled in into your head—then it’s just go,” said Andrew Swain, a 26-year old corpsman who has served as a medic in Iraq. During that deployment, in his first “mass-casualty incident,” he and just a handful of other medics had to treat about eight injured at the same time, all with traumatic injuries. –WSJ

    Approximately 30% of patients admitted to Stroger have suffered gunshot wounds – compared to the national average of 4.2% for similar level 1 trauma centers. 

    Corpsman Konrad Poplawski, whose first experience seeing anyone with a gunshot wound was during rotation in the training program at Stroger hospital, says that the program “has prepared me to deal with worse things out in the field,” he said. “I’ll be the only one out there, so I’ll have to learn from this.”

    What the hell is going on?

    Chicago – which has been run by Democrats for 64 of the last 68 years, has been in an economic death spiral for years. The Windy City run by Rahm Emanuel is currently drowning in debt and pension liabilities, along with an education system that’s in shambles. 

    In 2015, IBD noted “(Chicago’s) financial woes have mounted despite Emanuel’s efforts to rein them in. Years, perhaps even decades, of past financial sins all seem to be coming home to roost now. … Moody’s Investors Service estimated in a 2013 report that fixed costs, like pension contributions and debt service, could soon eat up more than half the city’s operating budget, up from about 15 percent of the 2015 budget.”

    As President Trump asked last December, “what the hell is going on in Chicago?”

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    We can’t possibly imagine – as Chicago has some of the toughest gun laws in the country. 

  • As Trump Moves Toward War, "The Resistance" Refuses To Resist

    Authored by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

    Tuesday’s post, It’s Impossible to Overstate How Terrible Mike Pompeo Is, laid out the view that Trump’s firing of Rex Tillerson represents a major shift toward war footing for the Trump administration, with Iran the specific target. This pivot was easily predictable, and I wrote numerous articles doing just that during 2017. Nevertheless, forecasting it and then seeing the disastrous pieces being moved into place are two different things.

    Trump’s push to install Mike Pompeo as U.S. Secretary of State is a crystal clear indication that he’s begun the process of building his war cabinet. The next steps, likely to begin over the course of 2018, is to walk away from the Iran deal. I suspect relentless war propaganda to be unleashed simultaneously as the neocon/neoliberal/mass media war-monger alliance plays its well established role in selling the American public on another pointless and destructive war.

    My prior post discussed Pompeo in detail, so I don’t want to be repetitive, but to revisit: Pompeo has contempt for the First Amendment, referred to torturers as patriots, wants Edward Snowden executed and is an extreme warhawk when it comes to Iran. In other words, he’s your typical neocon lunatic who’s just a bit more rough around the edges publicly. He represents the exact opposite sort of foreign policy to what so many Trump voters thought they were getting.

    Switching gears a bit, today’s piece will zero in on Trump’s other desired appointment, Gina Haspel to head the CIA. Gina’s famous for running a CIA black site in Thailand where detainees were tortured. In fact, she performed her role with such gusto she was nicknamed “Bloody Gina” by colleagues, and also played a key role in destroying videotape evidence of the torture. Her promotion represents a bizarre way to “drain the swamp,” but I digress.

    What’s most interesting and extremely disturbing about the Pompeo and Haspel appointments, is the lack of resistance from “the resistance.” If you’ve been paying attention, this won’t be surprising since the resistance has always been an unholy alliance of neocon/neoliberal war hawks, intelligence agencies and the mass media.

    They don’t want to “resist” any of Trump’s genuinely bad policies, the entire purpose of this psyops of a movement is to ensure Trump continues with the insane imperial policies of his predecessors. Trump’s about to deliver in spades, and you can thank “the resistance” for paving the way for this administration’s upcoming belligerence.

    Here’s what I mean. From The Hill:

    This puts Democrats in a potentially powerful position to swing Haspel’s confirmation.

    Yet early signs suggest that the minority is prepared to offer support, despite her controversial record, fierce opposition from human rights activists and the fact that she is a Trump nominee.

    The top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), on Wednesday cited a “very good working relationship” with Haspel, currently the agency’s deputy director. Sen. Joe Manchin (W.Va.), a red-state Democrat who also sits on the Intelligence panel, said he was “very much open-minded.”

    Even one of the Senate’s harshest critics of “enhanced interrogation techniques” and the architect of the so-called torture report, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), signaled a surprisingly open reception to Haspel that could pull others off the fence.

    “We’ve had dinner together. We have talked. Everything I know is she has been a good deputy director,” Feinstein said on Tuesday, adding, “I think, hopefully, the entire organization learned something from the so-called enhanced interrogation program.”

    Feinstein in 2013 blocked Haspel’s promotion to run clandestine operations at the agency over her role in interrogations at a CIA “black site” prison and the destruction of videotapes documenting the waterboarding sessions of an al Qaeda suspect there.

    Did you catch that? Feinstein blocked Haspel in 2013, but now, under Trump, she’s open to an even bigger promotion.

    A few lawmakers have come out in opposition to Haspel – most prominently Paul and Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Elizabeth Warren  (D-Mass.) – but it’s unclear how much influence they will wield. Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Tuesday that he is not whipping votes to oppose Haspel.

    Ladies and gentlemen, meet “the resistance.”

    It’d be funny if it wasn’t so sad.

    To be fair, Schumer does have some concerns with regard to Pompeo. He might not be belligerent enough toward Russia.

    But Democrats stressed on Tuesday that their previous support for Pompeo did not automatically mean they would support him to be secretary of State.

    Schumer noted he wants to know if the former House member will be tougher on Russia if he’s confirmed to be the country’s top diplomat.

    You seriously can’t make this stuff up. Also, don’t forget that 14 Democrats supported Pompeo for CIA director back in 2016, and Democrats also supported increased surveillance state spying powers late last year. I find it fascinating that when it comes to mass surveillance and torture, suddenly the Democrats don’t want to “resist.”

    Meanwhile, across the Washington D.C. cesspool hordes of “respected leaders” are vigorously defending Gina Haspel using the same defense used by actual Nazi war criminals after WWII.

    From The Intercept:

    During the Nuremberg Trials after World War II, several Nazis, including top German generals Alfred Jodl and Wilhelm Keitel, claimed they were not guilty of the tribunal’s charges because they had been acting at the directive of their superiors.

    Ever since, this justification has been popularly known as the “Nuremberg defense,” in which the accused states they were “only following orders.”

    The Nuremberg judges rejected the Nuremberg defense, and both Jodl and Keitel were hanged. The United Nations International Law Commission later codified the underlying principle from Nuremberg as “the fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.”

    This is likely the most famous declaration in the history of international law and is as settled as anything possibly can be.

    However, many members of the Washington, D.C. elite are now stating that it, in fact, is a legitimate defense for American officials who violate international law to claim they were just following orders…

    Haspel oversaw a secret “black site” in Thailand, at which prisoners were waterboarded and subjected to other severe forms of abuse. Haspel later participated in the destruction of the CIA’s videotapes of some of its torture sessions. There is informed speculation that part of the CIA’s motivation for destroying these records may have been that they showed operatives employing torture to generate false “intelligence” used to justify the invasion of Iraq.

    John Kiriakou, a former CIA operative who helped capture many Al Qaeda prisoners, recently said that Haspel was known to some at the agency as “Bloody Gina” and that “Gina and people like Gina did it, I think, because they enjoyed doing it. They tortured just for the sake of torture, not for the sake of gathering information.” (In 2012, in a convoluted case, Kiriakou pleaded guilty to leaking the identity of a covert CIA officer to the press and spent a year in prison.)

    One who paraphrased it is Michael Hayden, former director of both the CIA and the National Security Agency. In a Wednesday op-ed, Hayden endorsed Haspel as head of the CIA, writing that “Haspel did nothing more and nothing less than what the nation and the agency asked her to do, and she did it well.”

    John Brennan, who ran the CIA under President Barack Obama, made similar remarks on Tuesday when asked about Haspel. The Bush administration had decided that its torture program was legal, said Brennan, and Haspel “tried to carry out her duties at CIA to the best of her ability, even when the CIA was asked to do some very difficult things.”

    Texas Republican Rep. Will Hurd used the precise language of the Nuremberg defense during a Tuesday appearance on CNN when Wolf Blitzer asked him to respond to a statement from Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.: “The Senate must do its job in scrutinizing the record and involvement of Gina Haspel in this disgraceful program.”

    Hurd, a member of the House Intelligence Committee and a former CIA operative as well, told Blitzer that “this wasn’t Gina’s idea. She was following orders. … She implemented orders and was doing her job.”

    Bipartisan support of torture using a literal Nazi defense. Unfortunately, I’m not even surprised.

    Now here’s the best part…

    Notably, Blitzer did not have any follow-up questions for Hurd about his jarring comments.

    Gotta love CNN.

    Fortunately, there’s a small flicker of actual resistance to Trump’s shameless neocon pivot. It just happens to be coming from Rand Paul.

    He held a press conference on the matter, which I suggest everyone watch in full.

    As if all of this isn’t concerning enough, something Jeremy Scahill said in a recent Democracy Now interview really shook me. I discussed it on Twitter earlier today.

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

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

    See how this works? We lose either way.

    In fact, I find Cotton so dangerous, I specially singled him out in last year’s post, Expect Desperate and Insane Behavior From Government in 2018 – Part 3 (War):

    While I’m already sufficiently concerned about the likelihood of another stupid escalation in the Middle East by Trump, there are milestones I’m looking out for to let me know it’s about to get really bad. At the core of any major disaster will be Senator Tom Cotton, a rabid neocon who I unequivocally believe is the most dangerous, anti-freedom person in the U.S. Congress. He reminds me of an American Mohamed bin Salman, and his elevated prominence around Trump earlier this year is what got me increasingly concerned in the first place.

    If Cotton takes on a more senior role in the Trump administration, such as a rumored position as CIA director, you can bet the farm that U.S. foreign policy is about to take the most dangerous turn since George W. Bush. Tom Cotton is a neocon on steroids, and seems to genuinely love conflict and authoritarianism. To get a better sense of what sort of person he is, take a look at him taking Twitter legal counsel to task. He believes U.S. companies act as an active arm of state intelligence.

    What’s going on here is crystal clear. Trump’s setting up a war cabinet because he wants to go to war, and his administration will soon be dominated by the exact same neocon lunatics his populist supporters wanted to get away from in the first place.

    As the saying goes, “if voting made a difference, they’d make it illegal.”

    Brace yourselves, the war sales job is imminent and it’s going to be relentless.

    *  *  *

    If you liked this article and enjoy my work, consider becoming a monthly Patron, or visit our Support Page to show your appreciation for independent content creators.

  • Disillusionment Is Deepening: Most Students See College Campuses Opposing Free Speech

    Self-proclaimed “idealists” on college campuses across the country are growing increasingly intolerant of political views that challenge the liberal establishment or conservative values on topics ranging from homosexuality to immigration.

    Of course, the suppression of conservative views isn’t an officially sanctioned policy (at least, not at most schools, though that is slowly beginning to change). But one thing to remember is that this militant adherence to political correctness is enforced by a tiny minority of students. And the outsize influence that they exert on school administrators, and on school policies, is stoking resentment among more conservative students.

    Students

    A recent Gallup poll measuring attitudes about intellectual freedom on university campuses showed that students are increasingly aware that it’s not acceptable for some students to speak their mind in class or elsewhere on campus. But instead of this trend leading to a backlash, the study showed that a growing number of students have come to accept this strictures.

    Even Democrats Have Their Doubts

    Contrary to what one might expect, students who identify as Democrats (63%) and are even more likely than Republicans (53%) to acknowledge that students can’t speak their minds on their respective college campuses. independents (62%), meanwhile, are about as skeptical as Democrats.

    Gallup

    Per Gallup, these results were gleaned from its 2017 Gallup/Knight Foundation survey of 3,014 randomly sampled US college students about First Amendment issues. The survey is an update of a nationally representative 2016 Knight Foundation/Newseum Institute/Gallup survey on the same topic.

    Disillusionment Is Deepening

    In addition to Republicans, most key subgroups are more inclined now than in 2016 to agree that climate on their campus can inhibit expression. Independents and blacks show slightly greater increases, 13% and 14%, respectively, than other subgroups.

    Gallup

    Fewer Students Prefer Campus That Allows All Types of Speech

    While more students now agree that their campus climate stifles free speech, fewer students now (70%) than in 2016 (78%) favor allowing unfettered free speech, even that which is offensive. In contrast, 29% of students now, up from 22% in 2016, would rather campuses be “positive learning environments for all students” by prohibiting certain speech that is offensive or biased.

    With these findings in mind, we’d like to direct your attention to a report we published early this year showing six things college students were offended about last year.

  • Remembering Bear Stearns & Co

    Authored by Chris Whalen via TheInstitutionalRiskAnalyst.com,

    The failure of Bear Stearns & Co a decade ago illustrates the key lesson of financial markets, namely that non-banks are dependent upon 1) banks and 2) clients, for liquidity.  And no amount of capital will save a non-bank that has a deficit in terms of confidence.  In times of market stress, credibility and character are far more important than capital.

    Like the Crisis of 1907, when JPMorgan had to rescue the trust banks at the behest of President Teddy Roosevelt, the investment banks in 2008 were abandoned by the markets. Lacking stable funding in the form of core deposits, the non-banks failed in droves, starting in 2007 with New Century Financial, once among the largest issuers of subprime mortgages.

    And it can happen again.  Mark Adelson wrote in the Journal of Structured Finance:

    “By the summer of 2007, the prices of subprime mortgage-backed bonds already had begun to plunge. New Century, once a major lender, had declared bankruptcy; two hedge funds run by Bear Stearns were collapsing; and as emails obtained via lawsuits and investigations would later show, the rating agencies were well aware of the problems. In April 2007, one S&P analyst told another, ‘We rate every deal. It could be structured by cows and we would rate it.’”

    We recall sitting in a conference room with a group of investors early in March 2008, listening to people congratulate themselves for not “facing” Bear.  Little did they suspect that the whole non-bank sector was toast and that Lehman Brothers would be next. While JPM took down Bear without a default, Lehman eventually failed and filed bankruptcy because nobody could get comfortable with the firm’s financials.

    The markets today are just as vulnerable to a “run on liquidity,” with Goldman Sachs now the smallest of the universal banks followed by Morgan Stanley. Since 2008, non-banks have grown in residential mortgages and other areas that are totally dependent upon bank financing.  The changes made by the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1998 to Rule 2a-7, which prevents non-banks from issuing their own paper for purchase by money market funds, gave the big banks a monopoly on short-term warehouse credit, thus making the 2008 crisis inevitable. 

    Bear was the smallest and least beloved of the bulge bracket Wall Street securities firms, having figuratively pissed on the floor by not agreeing to help rescue Long Term Capital Management in 1998.  Nobody on the Street forgot that slight.  Governance at Bear was at a minimum.  The firm was run like a bridge tournament in a high school auditorium, with each table representing a different business unit and no overall enterprise management.

    Regulators and members of the academic community like to say that non-banks caused the financial crisis in 2007, but the reality is that banks as well as non-banks failed when liquidity disappeared.  Regulators correctly point to issuers such as New Century, Lehman Brothers and Bear, Stearns as examples of wayward non-banks, but key players in the banking sector such as Wachovia, Washington Mutual and Countrywide also were culpable and vulnerable to runs.

    Jonathan Rose (2014) notes that during the subprime panic in 2007-2009, many large depositories such as Wachovia were subject to runs by institutional investors, both in terms of institutional deposits and even debt. WaMu, for example, lost significant deposits during 2008 leading up to its resolution by the FDIC and subsequent sale to JPMorgan.

    By March of 2008, in another example, Wachovia was seeing a significant outflow of deposits and demands from bond investors for early redemption which led to the bank being acquired by Wells Fargo later that year.  Only the fact of “too big to fail” protected larger names such as Wells Fargo (NYSE:WFC), JPMorgan, Bank America and Citigroup from the contagion.

    The funding support provided to the non-banks and second tier banks by the large depositories, as well as the market demand provided by the mortgage securities issuance of the GSEs and large banks, are important factors that drove the overall demand for subprime mortgages. The eventual collapse of demand led to the failure of both banks and non-banks alike.

    Countrywide’s warehouse was largely financed by Bank of America, which was forced eventually to acquire the crippled institution. Washington Mutual and Bear Stearns were likewise funded by the large banks and money market funding, and were eventually acquired by JPMorgan with support from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Moreover, substantial parts of the balance sheet funding of “banks” such as WaMu and Countrywide were sourced from non-core deposits in institutional money markets.

    Many observers fret about the risk presented by nonbanks, yet the dependence of these institutions on bank financing means that the credit and market risk remains “in the bank.” In the event that a large nonbank financial firm in future experiences liquidity or solvency problems, the lender banks would almost certainly be compelled to acquire the nonbank.  Non-banks, at the end of the day, are the customers of the big banks.  That is the key lesson of the failure of Bear Stearns.

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Mar 15

Today’s News 15th March 2018

  • Facebook Bans Trump-Retweeted 'Britain First' After Leaders Jailed For "Hate Crimes"

    Facebook has taken down the pages of “Britain First”, a far-right group that entered the headlines last year when President Trump retweeted one of its videos, and those of its leaders as the company cracks down on posts that purportedly violate its rules about hate speech.

    Per Bloomberg, Britain First’s Facebook page, and the pages of its leaders Paul Golding and Jayda Fransen, were taken down after they repeatedly posted content that was deemed to be “hate speech.”

    The Britain First page had more than two million likes. Facebook didn’t confirm what posts were specifically responsible for the ban, but did say the group would be barred from creating a new page.

    “We do not do this lightly,” said Facebook, “but they have repeatedly posted content designed to incite animosity and hatred against minority groups, which disqualifies the Pages from our service.”

    …

    “We have community standards that clearly state this sort of speech is not acceptable on Facebook and, when we become aware of it, we remove it as quickly as we can,” the company added. “Political parties, like individuals and all other organisations on Facebook, must abide by these standards and where a page or person repeatedly breaks our community standards we remove them.” The group will also not be allowed to set up any further pages in future.

    Back in December, President Trump bristled at this characterization of Britain First as a “hate” group when he elicited condemnations from UK Prime Minister Theresa May and other world leaders after he retweeted videos initially tweeted by Britain First. One video showed a Muslim migrant attacking a Dutch man; another showed a man smashing a statue of the Virgin Mary. A third showed a man being pushed from the top of a building in Alexandria.

    Trump even canceled what was supposed to be an informal visit to the UK over the backlash.

    As the Guardian reported, Britain First was deregistered as a political party in November 2017.

    Britain First

    And last week, Fransen and Golding (pictured above) were jailed for a series of hate crimes against Muslims. The pair, who received 36 weeks’ and 18 weeks’ imprisonment, were arrested in May 2017 as part of an investigation into the distribution of leaflets and online videos posted during a trial at Canterbury crown court in the same month.

    The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, said:

    “Britain First is a vile and hate-fuelled group whose sole purpose is to sow division. Their sick intentions to incite hatred within our society via social media are reprehensible, and Facebook’s decision to remove their content is welcome.”

    Despite all the backlash, a report released earlier this month by Hope Not Hate, an “anti-hate” group, showed that BF had the “second most liked Facebook page in the politics and society category in the UK – after the royal family.”

    Britain First has nearly twice as many as Facebook likes as Labour – the mainstream party with the most Facebook likes. However, the group’s candidates have always performed poorly in elections.

  • Fatal Quad: Who Is Assassinating MI6 Assets On British Soil?

    Via Oriental Review,

    Last week it was widely reported that a former Soviet and Russian military intelligence officer, Sergey Skripal — who had been working for MI6 since 1995 and had been convicted in Russia of high treason in 2006 before being released to the UK as part of the 2010 US-Russia spy swap — was found unconscious with his daughter on a public bench near a shopping center in Salisbury, Wiltshire, England. In Britain, the media and eccentric foreign minister were swift to blame Russian intelligence services of attempting to assassinate Skripal, who is currently still in coma in Salisbury District Hospital. In the past week the hysteria of the British press has escalated to the point of forcing PM Theresa May to issue an ultimatum to Russian president Putin.

    This tragic case is one more episode in a series of suspicious and unsolved deaths in Britain of valuable MI6 assets from Russia: Alexander Litvinenko (2006), Alexander Perepеlichny (2012), and Boris Berezovsky (2013).

    Alexander Litvinenko

    This former officer in Russia’s FSB intelligence service, who was in charge of the surveillance and later the protection of the oligarch and government official Boris Berezovsky in the 1990s, defected to Britain in November 2000, soon after Russian prosecutors revived the Aeroflot fraud investigation and Berezovsky was once again questioned in court. That was at a time when the oligarch’s empire was being decimated by ongoing legal attacks instigated by the Russian government. Berezovsky clearly realised that he would eventually find himself in prison in Russia and so he began his quest for asylum, which would allow him to continue his political battle against the recently elected young Russian president Vladimir Putin. It is unclear whether Litvinenko defected at Berezovsky’s direct order or merely feared prosecution for crimes he might have committed as part of his collaboration with the oligarch who, according to the late Paul Klebnikov, was one of the kingpins of the Russian criminal world. As Litvinenko was not granted asylum in the UK until May 2001, we suspect that the negotiations over the terms of Litvinenko’s surrender to British intelligence services were not so easy. He did not possess any valuable intelligence, as he specialised in criminal investigation and security at the FSB, therefore he could be utilised only as a propaganda tool. This was the role he eventually accepted, after months of failed attempts to dodge this assignment, and he became a journalist for Chechenpress, supporting the most radical and intractable wing of the separatist movement in the Russian Caucasus, in addition to writing defamatory books and actively participating in every anti-Russia propaganda campaign in the international media.

    From left to right: Alexander Litvinenko, Boris Serezovsky, Chechen leader Ahmed Zakaev, and the hired-gun writer Yury Felshtinsky celebrating Berezovsky’s 60th birthday in London, Jan 2006.

    A few days after receiving his long-awaited British passport in October 2006, he was featured in the headlines of all the mainstream global media as the “polonium victim of Putin’s bloody regime”, thus greatly increasing the global emotional payoff from the modest investments MI6 had put into this miserable figure. An examination of the time line of his stay on “hospitable” British soil suggests that his citizenship was a milestone he had been desperately awaiting so as to free himself of his shameful dependency on Her Majesty’s intelligence service. Once that was obtained, he was off the hook and then became the perfect sacred sacrifice on the altar of the ongoing anti-Russia campaign. Thus they danced on his bones.

    The inquiry into his death, ordered by then-Interior Minister Theresa May in July 2014 (!), was completed by January 2016 and the findings publicly released. William Dunkerley offered an exhaustive diagnosis of that report in his opinion piece, published in the Guardian shortly thereafter. We strongly recommend that our readers reacquaint themselves with his arguments. In a nutshell, he exposes the document as having been heavily influenced by the anti-Russia PR campaign, inconsistent, unreliable, biased, of dubious credibility, and lacking evidence.

    Boris Berezovsky

    The “Godfather” of the Kremlin, as Paul Klebnikov branded him in the book that eventually claimed his life, Boris Berezovsky was the personification of the oligarchy at its ugliest. He acted as the éminence grise to President Yeltsin in the 1990s, raking in vast profits for his business empire and attempting to manipulate the political process in Russia. He even reportedly “approved” the candidacy of Vladimir Putin as Yeltsin’s successor back in 1999, confident that he and his circle would be able to curb and control the neophyte politician.

    His aspirations were soon subjected to a cold shower. Three weeks after Putin’s first inauguration, the Berezovsky-controlled media launched a powerful campaign of opposition to the president’s plans to reform Russia’s federal system, which would deprive Berezovsky and other tycoons of the tools they used to manipulate the regional authorities. These were the first maneuvers in a political war which lasted for more than 12 years. Berezovsky was resolutely and methodically squeezed out of all official positions in Russia, a number of charges were filed against him, accusing him of abusing his powers, financial fraud, and other crimes. In late 2000 he left Russia for good, settled in London, and began his vigorous, costly, but ultimately futile efforts to oust Putin and regain his own influence over the Kremlin.

    Boris Berezovsky in London

    By September 2012, when Vladimir Putin was elected for his third term and after Berezovsky had lost his case against his business rival Roman Abramovich in London’s High Court, he surrendered. He wrote two resentful private letters to President Putin asking for forgiveness and permission to return to Russia without fear of arrest. He did not receive a formal reply of any kind from the Russian president, but perhaps by March 2013 he had been given some kind of other positive signals from Moscow. Those close to him claimed that he was full of life and optimism and plans for the future on the very date of March 23, 2013 on which he was found dead in a bathroom of his home near Ascot. The official investigation concluded that it had been “an act of suicide”, but failed to provide any supporting evidence. The most likely explanation is that he had been about to leave Britain for good, along with his fiancée Katerina Sabirova (she had purchased e-tickets for travel to Israel that were to be used on March 25, 2013), and so the MI6 spymasters, who were in charge of supervising “project Berezovsky” and had been closely monitoring him and were aware of his intentions, could not afford to let out of their reach.

    Alexander Perepеlichny

    Alexander Perepelichny (R) with some of his “clients”, photo taken in 1990s.

    Alexander Perepelichny was a Russian entrepreneur who specialised in what is delicately referred to as “private banking services”. He was laundering money for his clients, huge amounts of money acquired from illegal activities. Among those clients were a number of criminal bosses and corrupt government officials seeking to legitimise their funds by moving them into different types of assets outside Russia, mostly in the UK. Before the global economic crisis he possessed many hundreds of millions of US dollars entrusted to his management. Unfortunately for him, as a result of the Blue Monday Crash, he lost around US$200 million that belonged to his clients. Under increasing pressure from ‘some ‘grim-faced businessmen’ at home, in Jan 2010 he had to escape to Britain, where he quickly found a buyer for the sensitive information he possessed about some corrupt officials in Russia – a British investor and reported MI6 agent named William Browder, who had earned a fortune in Russia in 1990s and early 2000s, only to be later prosecuted there on tax fraud charges. Be it a coincidence or not, Perepelichny left Russia only weeks after the infamous Sergey Magnitsky mysteriously died in prison, an incident which appeared to be the cornerstone of a gargantuan, politically motivated case that resulted in the Magnitsky Act, the “Magnitsky list”, and other examples of gratuitous anti-Russia legal acts.

    We are unable to delve into all the sprawling, amorphous details of the Magnitsky case today, although it deserves a very close look by unbiased researcher. What is really important for this topic is the following episode taken from William Browder’s breathtaking biography:

    It took place in New York on Feb 3, 2015, when marshals from the U.S. District Court in Manhattan tried to serve him a subpoena to give evidence as part of the only trial thus far on US soil proceeding from the Magnitsky Act. (The details of that case can be found here.) The reason for Mr. Browder’s nervous behavior is obvious: his arguments served only political aims and were intended for cases in which the verdict is known from the beginning. But none of his claims could stand up to scrutiny by any experienced lawyer once real business interests were at stake, and this is exactly what happened with Mark Cymrot from BakerHostetler during Browder’s court deposition on Apr 15, 2015.

    Returning to Perepelichny, we have to acknowledge that he was a key witness who could potentially destroy the high-political-stakes scam being conducted with the Magnitsky dossier. As Browder was responding with “I do not recall” and “I do not know” to any real question asked him in court, the US judiciary system might have been very interested in hearing from Perepelichny. This menace to the Magnitsky Act was eliminated one week before the bill passed the US House: on Nov. 10, 2012 Alexander Perepelichny was found dead outside his mansion in London. The police investigation did not yield any tangible results, but the theory of “Russian mafia” involvement was implanted in the international media at the proper time.

    One month later the Magnitsky Act was signed by President Obama…

    Sergey Skripal

    As a public personality Sergey Skripal kept a far lower profile than any of the other three.

    While working as a Russian military intelligence (GRU) officer, he was recruited in Spain in 1995 by MI6 agent Pablo Miller, pressured into cooperating after being threatened with the exposure of his illegal business dealings. For the next few years he was busy selling mountains of classified information about Russian military secrets to Vauxhall Cross, although not everything is clear about his relationship to the SIS. E.g. it is unclear why he resigned from the GRU in 1999 at age 48 to take a position in the Foreign Ministry (and later – the regional government) in which he would have far less access to information. He apparently wanted to terminate this worring relationship and perhaps he succeeded – again, the circumstances of how he was leaked to the Russian security services in 2004 are vague and murky. It looks very much like that same SIS deliberately allowed this leak in order to punish an unruly, poorly controlled asset with no access to any significant information.

    In any event, after serving less than six years of his 13-year sentence, in 2010 he was added to the list of spies whose swaps were being negotiated by the US and Russia. Still we do not know whether the US included his name with the approval of their British partners or if Skripal perhaps arrived in Britain as a surprise guest.

    Since then he had kept a low profile, living in Salisbury but reportedly advising British intelligence personnel about the workings of Russian clandestine operations. He would be of very little use to the Crown unless he were sacrificed as another innocent victim to justify the bugaboo of the “Russian threat” in the UK and worldwide.

    Sergey Skripal with his daughter Yulia at their favorite Zizzi restaurant in Salisbury.

    *  *  *

    The one notable similarity shared by the very different individuals in this this foursome of exposed spies is that they all held an irrational belief in the reliability of the British justice and banking systems, other institutions, and intelligence services.

    None of them seemed to fully appreciate the simple fact that they would only be treated as true gentlemen as long as they served British interests.

    Once they began to represent even a potential threat to Britain’s ongoing political operations or once their current value dropped below a certain threshold, they were easily sacrificed to fulfill their final, “last, but not least” task – to serve as a log to be added to fuel the flames of Russophobia in their new and very temporary homeland.

  • Cryptos Crash: Bitcoin Back Below $8k Into "Mystery Dip-Buyer" Territory

    Today’s weakness in cryptos, driven initially by concerns over Google’s looming ad-ban, is accelerating overnight…

    Hanging over the market still are concerns about next week’s G-20 meetings (and the possibility of a more global standard for cracking down on cryptos) as well as the massive Mt.Gox sale overhang.

    Nobuaki Kobayashi, bankruptcy trustee for Mt. Gox, the largest bitcoin exchange in the world before hackers absconded with tens of thousands of customers’ bitcoins worth billions at recent prices, said he started selling in late September, meaning it’s quite possible he sold at least some of the coins at the highs reached toward the end of last year.

    This is what Kobayashi’s “sells” look like on the chart of Bitcoin…

    Still, Bloomberg reported  that Kobayashi is sitting on another approximately $1.9 billion, which he says he plans to offload soon…

    However, with Bitcoin battered back below $8,000, it has entered the “Mystery Dip-Buyer” Zone.

    As a reminder, according to BitInfoCharts, a mysterious buyer with a Bitcoin address of 3Cbq7aT1tY8kMxWLbitaG7yT6bPbKChq64 purchased an astronomical amount of bitcoins worth $344,000,000 at a blended cost basis around $8,400 from 02-09-18 through 02-12-18.

    In total, this Bitcoin whale doubled down adding nearly 41,000 coins for a new total of 96,000 coins worth somewhere around $900,000,000 at today’s price ($9,400).

     

    Bitcoin address 3Cbq7aT1tY8kMxWLbitaG7yT6bPbKChq64 is number three on the top 100 richest Bitcoin address in the world.

     

    So will “Mystery Dip-Buyer” come back in or will Kobayashi win?

  • Whitehead: "Say No To 'Hardening' Schools With Zero-Tolerance Policies & Gun-Toting Cops"

    Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

    Just what we don’t need: more gun-toting, taser-wielding cops in government-run schools that bear an uncomfortable resemblance to prisons.

    Microcosms of the police state, America’s public schools already contain almost every aspect of the militarized, intolerant, senseless, overcriminalized, legalistic, surveillance-riddled, totalitarian landscape that plagues those of us on the “outside.”

    Now the Trump Administration wants to double down on these totalitarian echo chambers.

    The Justice Department, headed by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, has announced that it will provide funding for schools that want to hire more resource officers. The White House has also hinted that it may repeal “Rethink School Discipline” policies, heralding a return to zero tolerance policies that treat children like suspects and criminals, especially within the public schools.

    As for President Trump, he wants to “harden” the schools.

    What exactly does hardening the schools entail?

    More strident zero tolerance policies, greater numbers of school cops, and all the trappings of a prison complex(unsurmountable fences, entrapment areas, no windows or trees, etc.).

    Just when you thought this administration couldn’t get any more tone-deaf about civil liberties, they prove once again that they have absolutely no regard for the Constitution (especially the Fourth Amendment), no concept of limited government, and no concern for the growing need to protect “we the people” against an overreaching, overbearing police state.

    America’s schools today are already about as authoritarian as they come.

    Young people in America are now first in line to be searched, surveilled, spied on, threatened, tied up, locked down, treated like criminals for non-criminal behavior, tasered and in some cases shot.

    Roped into the government’s profit-driven campaign to keep the nation “safe” from drugs, weapons and terrorism, many schools have transformed themselves into quasi-prisons, complete with surveillance cameras, metal detectors, police patrols, zero tolerance policies, lock downs, drug sniffing dogs, strip searches and active shooter drills.

    It used to be that if you talked back to a teacher, or played a prank on a classmate, or just failed to do your homework, you might find yourself in detention or doing an extra writing assignment after school.

    That is no longer the case.

    Nowadays, students are not only punished for minor transgressions such as playing cops and robbers on the playground, bringing LEGOs to school, or having a food fight, but the punishments have become far more severe, shifting from detention and visits to the principal’s office into misdemeanor tickets, juvenile court, handcuffs, tasers and even prison terms.

    These outrageous incidents are exactly what you’ll see more of if the Trump Administration gets its way.

    Increasing the number of cops in the schools only adds to the problem.

    Indeed, the growing presence of police in the nation’s schools is resulting in greater police “involvement in routine discipline matters that principals and parents used to address without involvement from law enforcement officers.”

    Funded by the U.S. Department of Justice, these school resource officers have become de facto wardens in elementary, middle and high schools, doling out their own brand of justice to the so-called “criminals” in their midst with the help of tasers, pepper spray, batons and brute force.

    For instance, 16-year-old Alex Stone was directed by his teacher to do a creative writing assignment involving a series of fictional Facebook statuses. Alex wrote, “I killed my neighbor’s pet dinosaur. I bought the gun to take care of the business.”

    Despite the fact that dinosaurs are extinct, the status fabricated, and the South Carolina student was merely following orders, his teacher reported him to school administrators, who in turn called the police.

    What followed is par for the course in schools today: students were locked down in their classrooms while armed police searched Alex’s locker and bookbag, handcuffed him, charged him with disorderly conduct disturbing the school, arrested him, detained him, and then he was suspended from school.

    Not even the younger, elementary school-aged kids are being spared these “hardening” tactics.

    Paradoxically, by the time you add in the lockdowns and active shooter drills, instead of making the schools safer, school officials have succeeded in creating an environment in which children are so traumatized that they suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, nightmares, anxiety, mistrust of adults in authority, as well as feelings of anger, depression, humiliation, despair and delusion.

    Instead of raising up a generation of freedom fighters—which one would hope would be the objective of the schools—government officials seem determined to churn out newly minted citizens of the American police state who are being taught the hard way what it means to comply, fear and march in lockstep with the government’s dictates.

    So what’s the answer, not only for the here-and-now—the children growing up in these quasi-prisons—but for the future of this country?

    How do you convince a child who has been routinely handcuffed, shackled, tied down, locked up, and immobilized by government officials—all before he reaches the age of adulthood—that he has any rights at all, let alone the right to challenge wrongdoing, resist oppression and defend himself against injustice?

    Most of all, how do you persuade a fellow American that the government works for him when for most of his young life, he has been incarcerated in an institution that teaches young people to be obedient and compliant citizens who don’t talk back, don’t question and don’t challenge authority?

    As we’ve seen with other issues, any significant reforms will have to start locally and trickle upwards.

    For starters, parents need to be vocal, visible and organized and demand that school officials 1) adopt a policy of positive reinforcement in dealing with behavior issues; 2) minimize the presence in the schools of police officers and cease involving them in student discipline; and 3) insist that all behavioral issues be addressed first and foremost with a child’s parents, before any other disciplinary tactics are attempted.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, if you want a nation of criminals, treat the citizenry like criminals.

    If you want young people who grow up seeing themselves as prisoners, run the schools like prisons.

    If, on the other hand, you want to raise up a generation of freedom fighters, who will actually operate with justice, fairness, accountability and equality towards each other and their government, then run the schools like freedom forums.

    Remove the metal detectors and surveillance cameras, re-assign the cops elsewhere, and start treating our nation’s young people like citizens of a republic and not inmates in a police state.

  • China And Russia Form Uranium Partnership

    China and Russia are teaming up for a joint uranium mining project in Western Russia.

    The ARMZ Uranium holding subsidiary of Russian state owned energy giant Rosatom will be partnering with the Russia-China Investment fund (RCIF) on the $325 million project in the Zabaikalsky region.

    The Priargunsky Industrial Mining and Chemical Union will reportedly own 51% of the new project, while ARMZ will hold the remaining 49%. The majority of the financing will come from the China National Nuclear Corporation with a $282 million investment, while the RCIF will put up the rest. 

    The mine has a total reported reserves of 40,000 tons of uranium ore, with an annual capacity of 850,000 tons expected – and will break ground by 2023. 

    China is the first foreign country allowed to invest in Russian uranium mining, which the Kremlin has been aggressively pursuing as part of a “uranium dominance strategy” uncovered by undercover FBI whistleblower William D. Campbell, who supplied the agency with information from the highest levels of Russia’s nuclear industry.

    The strategy included the purchase of Canadian-based Uranium One, which gave the Kremlin rights to 20% of American yellowcake uranium. 

    Campbell told lawmakers the purchase of the Uranium One assets and the securing of billions of new uranium sales contracts inside the United States during the Obama years were part of the “Russian uranium dominance strategy.” –The Hill

    Campbell, despite being severely ill with cancer, testified before Congress about his undercover work – telling them of a scheme to route millions of dollars to the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) through lobbying firm APCO, which was expected to funnel a portion of its annual $3 million lobbying fee to the charity. 

    “The contract called for four payments of $750,000 over twelve months. APCO was expected to give assistance free of charge to the Clinton Global Initiative as part of their effort to create a favorable environment to ensure the Obama administration made affirmative decisions on everything from Uranium One to the U.S.-Russia Civilian Nuclear Cooperation agreement.“ –William Campbell

    Officials with APCO – the lobbying firm accused of funneling the money to the Clinton Global Initiative, told The Hill that its support for CGI and its work for Russia were not connected in any way, and involved different divisions of the firm. 

    Meanwhile, Russia’s Rosatom expects to sign foreign contracts worth $26 billion in 2018 for the construction and maintenance of nuclear power plants in India, Iran, Egypt, China and several other countries – including 16 plants in Saudi Arabia. 

  • Peak Gold Has Arrived

    Authored by Alex Deluce via GoldTelegraph.com,

    Following the recent market crash, investors lost $5.2 trillion worldwide before the market managed to recover most of the losses. There are hints that certain bubbles are ready to burst as the worlds biggest hedge fund positions accordingly.

    In addition to the stock market, the global gold supply is weakening, leaving investors anticipating higher prices. In 2017, the gold supply plummeted the most since any year since 2008. If the supply of gold is really plateauing, experts are predicting a ‘peak gold’ period.

    China, the world larger miner of gold, produced 453 tons of the metal in 2016. In 2017, China’s production fell by 9 percent. If production of gold continues to fall, a rise in global demand is a certainty. The demand will come from investors and centrals banks unwilling to rely on the dubious strength of the US dollar.

    The Chinese are enjoying a boon economy, and the newly rich who can afford it are looking to buy physical gold in an effort to protect their wealth. China supplies its gold only domestically and does not export the metal. If China’s domestic gold supply is depleting, it will certain seek to buy gold elsewhere. Part of Chinese economic plan is to potentially reduce the global dominance of the dollar with the yuan.

    The US dollar has dominated the global currency market for over 40 years. China, and Russia are actively increasing their gold reserves, which could lead to both economic and political uncertainties as more countries begin to dump US Treasuries. Both Russia and China are planning to use gold-backed currency as payment when trading with each other. This makes gold a critical commodity for both countries.

    China might import gold to meet its own demand. But the available supply of gold is finite. During the past 15 years, global gold deposits have become depleted, and replacement deposits are becoming rarer each year.

    World Gold Council Chairman Randall Oliphant has indicated that global gold production may have reach its peak. The time may come soon when the supply is not expected to meet the demand. The price of gold usually rises during times of economic slowdowns. How will the global financial market react when the supply of gold is running low and gold becomes an even rarer commodity?

    China is not the only country producing less gold. South African and Australian gold deposits are showing signs of becoming depleted. The cost of exploring for new gold has become cost prohibitive and viable deposits are becoming more difficult to reach.

    The potential of a worldwide shortage is good news for investors. Even as mines become exhausted, gold as a commodity will still exist. Gold differs from oil, which, once used up, is physically gone.

    But gold mining and exploration will become more costly. For over 130 years, massive gold deposits were discovered in a number of countries. Gold has been easy to access and produce. During the late 20th century, some mines were producing as much as 50 million ounces of year a year. In the 21st century, mines producing 50 million or even 30 million ounces of gold no longer exist. Gold exploration is down to a few discoveries producing 15 million ounces annually.

    The price of gold has fallen steadily since 2012. Mining companies are unable to fund new explorations. The time between gold discovery and active mining spans an average of seven years. This is a considerable time span between the exhaustion of old mines and the mining of new ones. And mining companies will find it difficult to bear the expense.

    Once productive and seemingly endless gold deposits are depleting quickly. Forty percent of all the gold mined throughout history has come from the Witwatersrand Basin in South Africa. During the 1970s, an excess of 1,000 metric ton of gold was mined each year. In 2017, Witwatersrand Basin’s gold production fell 83 percent compared to 1970, down to 167.1 tons.

    China, is still exploring veins for more gold. But how long will it be able to justify the cost as mining for gold that lays deeper in the earths crust? More capital is needed for further gold exploration globally.

    Until that happens, the supply of gold will remain low and the demand will rise. This means that in the near future, this could serve as a major catalyst moving forward.

  • EU Preparing To Unleash First-Ever Regulations Targeting Search Engines

    Roughly nine months after Google’s parent company Alphabet was slapped with a 2.4 billion euro fine for “abusing its dominance in search,” Brussels bureaucrats are reportedly preparing to take things a step further and unleash Europe-wide regulations for search engines and other online platforms and apps. According to the Financial Times, which broke the story, the regulations are meant to protect companies that rely on Google, Apple or Amazon to sell their services or products.

    European policymakers have been exploring ways to target “harmful” trade practices as many small firms in the region have complained that tech behemoths like Google have skewed search results to favor its own services over the services of its competitors. The issue has so far been left for members states to deal with. Of the largest European states, France has distinguished itself as among the most aggressive in trying to push back against the US-domiciled tech giants and their allegedly anti-competitive tendencies.

    The regulations are also notable in that they represent the most stringent rules governing search engines’ behavior by a developed Western power.

    EU

    Case in point: Earlier today, the French government warned that it could take legal action against Google and Apple over their “abusive” business practices.

    “I believe in an economy based on justice and I will take Google and Apple before the Paris Commercial Court for abusive business practices” against French start-ups, said French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire on a local radio program.

    “I consider that Google and Apple, as powerful as they are, shouldn’t treat our start-ups and our developers in the way they do today,” said Le Maire, calling the situation “unacceptable”.

    The news didn’t have much of an impact on shares of Google, Apple or their megacap-tech brethren.

    The EU’s strike against what it refers to as “online intermediation services” was delayed in December so it could be tweaked to cover search engines, according to the FT, which obtained a draft of the regulations.

    “Online intermediation services can hold superior bargaining power over their business users, enabling them to behave unilaterally in a way that is capable of harming the businesses using them,” the draft says, adding that search engine rankings are also potentially unfair and capable of causing economically significant harm.”

    Under the new rules, tech companies would be required to supply companies with more information about how their ranking algorithms work. They also would need to provide a formal complaint to any company or app if Google decides to demote or de-list them from its search results.

    While these regulations have reportedly been in the works for months – and aren’t entirely unexpected – the timing of Wednesday’s leak is notable. Given that a draft of the rules was quietly leaked to the FT, it could be construed as a tacit warning to the US: The European Union has more than one way to respond to US protectionism.

  • Paul Craig Roberts Goes There: "World War 3 Is Approaching"

    Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

    “In a nuclear war the ‘collateral damage’ would be the life of all humanity.” – Fidel Castro

    The Russians, in their anxiety to show the West how friendly they are, left Washington with a toe hold in Syria, which Washington is using to reopen the war. The Russians’ failure to finish the job has left Washington’s foreign mercenaries, misrepresented in the American presstitute media as “freedom fighters,” in a Syrian enclave. To get the war going again, Washington has to find a way to come to the aid of its mercenaries.

    The Trump regime has found, or so it thinks, its excuse in the revival of the Obama regime’s fake charge of Syrian use of chemical weapons. This made-up lie by the Obama regime was put to rest by Russian intervention that made sure there were no Syrian chemical weapons. Indeed, if memory serves, Russia delivered the chemical weapons to the US for destruction. Little doubt Washington still has them and will use some of them with their Syrian markings for what appears to be a coming false flag attack that can be blamed on Assad. In other words, Washington will create a “situation,” blame Assad and Putin, and with or without congressional authorization introduce US intervention in behalf of Washington’s mercenaries. 

    If we can believe James Mattis, the retired US Marine General who is US Secretary of Defense, Syria, a country without chemical weapons and in need of none in its mopping up operations against Washington’s mercenaries, is using chlorine gas “against its own people,” exactly the same phrase as the Obama regime used when Obama tried to orchestrate an excuse to attack Syria. Mattis said that he is receiving reports of chlorine gas use by Assad while simultaneously saying he has no evidence of gas use, much less by the Syrian Army.

    The US Secretary of Defense actually accused Syria of “targeting hospitals” with chlorine gas even though he admits there is no evidence. Mattis went on to accuse Russia of complicity in killing civilians, an endeavor in which the US excels.

    Stephen Lendman reports that CIA Director Pompeo “suggested a US attack on Syrian forces may be forthcoming, saying Trump won’t tolerate CW [chemical weapons] attacks, adding he hasn’t made a decision on the latest reports about chlorine gas use.” 

    US Secretary of State Tillerson joined the orchestrated allegation even though he admitted there was no evidence. 

    Of course, there has not been any chlorine gas use unless by the Washington-supplied mercenaries. But facts are not important to Washington. What is important to Washington is Israel’s demand that Washington destroy Syria and Iran in order to get rid of Hezbollah’s supporters so that Israel can seize southern Lebanon.

    No doubt that other interests are in on the plot. Oil companies that want to control the location of oil and gas pipelines, the crazed neocons married to their ideology of American World Hegemony, the military/security complex that needs enemies and conflicts to justify its massive budget. But it is Israel’s determination to expand its boundaries and water resources that set all of the Middle East conflict in motion.

    Does Russia understand this, or is the Russian government preoccupied with eventually winning acceptance by the West as a part of the West? If the latter, the world is heading for nuclear war.The Russian government does not seem to understand that its pusillanimous response encourages Washington’s aggression and, thereby, is driving the world to the final war.

    Every time Russia fails to finish the job, as in Syria and Ukraine, Russia does not win Washington’s friendship, but extends to Washington yet another run at prevailing in the conflict that Washington initiated. Washington will not slack off until Washington is halted in its track, something that Russia does not seem willing to do. Consequently, Washington continues to drive the world to nuclear war.

    When will the Russians notice that literally everyone in the Trump regime is issuing threats to Russia – Mattis, Tillerson, Nikki Haley, government spokespersons, the UK PM and UK Foreign Secretary. Yet the Russians still speak about their “partners” and how much they want to get along with the West.

    There is no prospect whatsoever of the British going to war against Russia. The entirety of the UK would be instantly wiped out, yet the UK PM issues ultimatums to Russia.

    Here is what Finian Cunningham has to say about the British prime minister threatening Russia:

    Given their inveterate anti-Russian agenda, the British authorities have much more vested interest in seeing Skripal poisoned than the Kremlin ever would.

    And while we are in “who done it?” mode, another important possible lead is this: if Venomous Agent X (VX) was used to harm the former Russian spy, the perpetrators would have had a convenient source by which to carry out their deed.

    Britain’s top secret chemical weapons laboratory at Porton Down is only six miles away from the location in Salisbury where Skripal and his daughter were apparently attacked last Sunday afternoon. Porton Down is the laboratory where VX was originally synthesized in the 1950s. It remains one of the most deadly chemical weapons ever made. And it is as British as afternoon tea.

    That’s motive and means. But, hey, who needs logic when Russophobia is the name of the game?

    The entire Western world is insane. As Michel Chossudovsky says, the Western politicians and presstitutes who serve them are driving the world to extinction. 

    Note: It appears that the military/security complex is closing its grip on the Trump regime. Secretary of State Tillerson has been fired and is being replaced by CIA Director Pompeo. Gina Haspel, the new CIA Director, is the person who oversaw the CIA’s secret torture prisons in Thailand.

  • Second Trump Organization Lawyer Involved In Silencing Stormy Daniels

    The public relations battle being waged against President Trump by Stephanie Clifford – aka Stormy Daniels – a retired porn star who claims to have had an affair with Trump back in 2006 continued to rage Wednesday night when CNN, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal reported on what they characterized as “the first known link between Trump and the effort to silence” Daniels.

    Specifically, documents from a February arbitration hearing turned over to the media show that a senior Trump Organization lawyer named Jill Martin filed some of the paperwork related to the hearing.

    The documents, filed as part of confidential arbitration proceedings on Feb. 22, were made public Wednesday evening by CNN and the Wall Street Journal. The Washington Post confirmed their authenticity with Michael Avenatti, a lawyer for Daniels.

    In a statement, the Trump Organization said it was not representing anyone in the Daniels dispute and “had no involvement in the matter.” One of its attorneys, Jill A. Martin, filed a document in her personal capacity while awaiting permission for another lawyer, not connected to the company, to practice in California, the statement said.

    Martin has worked at the Trump organization since 2010, per WSJ.

    Ms. Martin, a lawyer for the Trump Organization since 2010, has defended Mr. Trump both in court and in the media. She was a lead attorney for the Trump Organization in lawsuits alleging Mr. Trump’s real-estate seminars, Trump University, had defrauded customers.

    The Trump Organization has so far claimed that it had no involvement in the matter…but Martin’s petition during the arbitration hearing is a direct link between Trump’s business and the Daniels affair.

    In a statement, the Trump Organization said it was not representing anyone in the Daniels dispute and “had no involvement in the matter.” One of its attorneys, Jill A. Martin, filed a document in her personal capacity while awaiting permission for another lawyer, not connected to the company, to practice in California, the statement said.

    In what appears to be a Cohen-like attempt at deflection, Martin emailed WSJ a statement showing that she facilitated the filing “in her individual capacity” until a New York-based lawyer gained approval to practice in California. “The company has had no involvement in the matter,” the statement said.

    Filings from the arbitration battle – which Daniels lost – provided to WSJ by Daniels’ lawyer, Michael Avenatti, confirmed a connection between Essential Consultants and Trump. On Feb. 27, an arbitrator issued a temporary restraining order against Daniels that enforced the terms of the NDA. In response, Avenatti filed the suit in a Los Angeles court challenging the legitimacy of the arbitration agreement.

    The crux of Avenatti’s defense, it seems, is that the agreement should be ruled invalid because Trump – who used the pseudonym David Dennison – neglected to sign the agreement.

    To be sure, as WSJ points out, it isn’t known whether Trump helped organize the payoff. Cohen has said under oath that he made the $130,000 payoff to Daniels on his own initiative. His statement has been heavily scrutinized by a Washington watchdog, which has filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission arguing that the payoff violated FEC rules because it was, in fact, a campaign related expense.

    Daniels

    (Courtesy of WaPo)

    Daniels received the money from Cohen in October 2016 after signing a non-disclosure agreement. According to its terms, Daniels is barred from speaking publicly about her liaison with the president. Violating the agreement could result in a fine of up to $1 million per violation.

    And Martin’s services may be used more in the future, as Daniels’ lawsuit, filed in a Los Angeles court, proceeds. As we reported earlier, a hearing has been scheduled for June 12.

    …And we’re certain we’ll be hearing more from Daniels and her lawyer between now and then.

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Mar 14

Today’s News 14th March 2018

  • These Are The Regions The Ultra Rich Want To Leave

    As part of Knight Frank’s latest Wealth Report, a survey of over 500 leading private bankers and wealth advisers was conducted to gain insights into the mindset of the world’s ultra rich.

    The respondents, who represent roughly 50,000 ‘ultra high net worth individuals’ (UHNWIs), were asked whether their clients planned to permanently emigrate to another country.

    As Statista’s Martin Armstrong shows, the responses varied depending on the region the wealthy individual was currently residing in.

    Infographic: The Regions the Ultra Rich Want to Leave | Statista

    You will find more infographics at Statista

    While the target country could of course be within the same region, the largest share of UHNWIs with itchy feet were from Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States – 45 percent said they planned to emigrate.

  • Russia's Hypersonic Missiles Didn't Surprise America But They Awed The World

    Authored by Andrew Korybko via Oriental Review,

    President Putin unveiled Russia’s hypersonic response to the US’ so-called “missile defense shield” and restored the strategic nuclear balance between the two Great Powers.

    This dramatic announcement came during his annual State of the Nation address which this time included multiple videos showcasing each of the weapons systems that he described in his speech. President Putin was clear, however, that these armaments are for defensive purposes and were created in response to the US pulling out of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 2002 and thereby completely upsetting the erstwhile parity that had hitherto stabilized their relations.

    Now, though, the advantage that the US had hoped to attain over Russia in presumably neutralizing its nuclear second strike deterrence with time and eventually blackmailing Moscow & the rest of the world has been nullified and balance has returned to the highest levels of International Relations. The international reaction to this realization was immediate, with the Mainstream Media decontextualizing key excerpts from President Putin’s speech in order to frame them as aggressively announcing a new arms race, though the Alternative Media was much fairer in their depiction of Russia’s revolution in military affairs by accurately conveying the country’s peaceful and stabilizing intentions in unveiling its state-of-the-art hypersonic weaponry.

    For whatever the reasons, both audiences were left with the distinct impression that this development caught the US completely off guard, but nothing could be further from the truth.

    It’s inconceivable that American intelligence agencies had no idea that Russia was developing these armaments, especially after Moscow announced its intentions over a decade ago like President Putin reminded everyone. This fact debunks the prevailing narrative, advanced for different reasons by the Mainstream and Alternative Medias, that the US was surprised by Russia’s revelation. Instead, it points to President Putin carrying out a clever soft power strategy for improving his country’s image throughout the rest of the world.

    He and his advisors wisely calculated that now would be the best time to announce their military developments to the international community, especially after the disappointment that Trump has proven to be when it comes to restoring bilateral relations due to the fierce “deep state” “civil war”that he’s embroiled in. Moreover, the outstanding job that the Russian Aerospace Forces have done in Syria have made their equipment world-famous, suggesting that there might be a strong demand for the country’s hypersonic weapons exports in the future.

    After all, the recent selling spree of S400s to a multitude of countries, including non-traditional partners such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia, totally changes the strategic military equation and further erodes America’s previous military dominance in the sphere of offensive air and missile capabilities, so it logically follows that Russia would also have an interest in undermining the US’ defensive capabilities in this regard as well. It’ll still likely be some years before Russia even considers selling this technology, but it will inevitably proliferate with time, just like drones and all other game-changing advances before it have done too.

    The US certainly expected for this to happen but likely didn’t anticipate being humiliated on the global stage after President Putin exposed the billions of dollars that American taxpayers invested in their country’s so-called “missile defense shield” as being useless against Russia, so Trump might soon be planning his government’s own reciprocal announcement in order to “save face” and convince the world that his military-driven policy of “America First” will indeed “Make America Great Again”.

  • Bitcoin Sinks As Google Moves To Ban All Crypto, ICO Ads In June

    Mimiccing its biggest rival for ad dollars – Facebook – Google will ban online advertisements promoting cryptocurrencies and initial coin offerings, and “other speculative financial instruments” starting in June.

    Some aggressive businesses found a loophole: purposely misspelling words like “bitcoin” in their ads. A Google spokeswoman said the company’s policies will try to anticipate workarounds like this.

    The reaction was immediate across the crypto space but for now is somewhat subdued…

    Alphabet’s Google said the new policy will become effective in June across ads bought on its search and display-advertising network, as well as its YouTube unit.

    But, as The Wall Street Journal reports, the policy also will restrict ads for nontraditional methods of wagering on the future movements of stock prices and foreign-exchange, such as binary options and financial spread-betting, Google said.

    Google said last year it removed more than 130 million ads that were used by hackers to mine for cryptocurrency. That is a very small percentage of the ads run on Google’s ad network.

    The company’s director of sustainable ads, Scott Spencer, declined to comment on how much potential ad revenue the company would be turning away by enacting the new policy, saying the decision was made to prevent consumer harm.

    One wonders when the crackdown will start on inverse VIX ETFs, or just S&P ETFs, or brokerages? Aren’t they all capable of doing consumers “harm”?

    As a reminder, here is Facebook’s justification:

    We want people to continue to discover and learn about new products and services through Facebook ads without fear of scams or deception. That said, there are many companies who are advertising binary options, ICOs and cryptocurrencies that are not currently operating in good faith.

    This policy is intentionally broad while we work to better detect deceptive and misleading advertising practices, and enforcement will begin to ramp up across our platforms including Facebook, Audience Network and Instagram. We will revisit this policy and how we enforce it as our signals improve.

    We also understand that we may not catch every ad that should be removed under this new policy, and encourage our community to report content that violates our Advertising Policies. People can report any ad on Facebook by clicking on the upper right-hand corner of the ad.

    This policy is part of an ongoing effort to improve the integrity and security of our ads, and to make it harder for scammers to profit from a presence on Facebook.

    Which roughly translated is “because we know what’s best for you!”

  • Retired Green Beret Fears "Marxist Wolves Circling The 2nd Amendment"

    Authored by Jeremiah Johnson (nom de plume of a retired Green Beret of the United States Army Special Forces) via SHTFplan.com,

    There’s no need at this point to pull any punches, and the Marquis of Queensbury rules have already been tossed out the window. The wolves are circling to bring down the 2nd Amendment. Those wolves are the establishment. There are no political parties: the political parties are merely the illusion of choice. The government has been removed from the control of “We the People” for more than a century. The wolves are the Federal Government, the State Governments, the Local and Municipal Governments. The wolves are the Democrats, the Republicans, and the far-left parties (Communists, Greens, etc.).

    The wolves employ the coyotes: the youth, misguided and misled, who are interested in partying and doing the minimal to “get by” in life…an entitlement mindset. They know not that they will be “pruned” by the tree-trimmers…the ones who will rout these saplings out before they become aware…aware of the truth. The tree-trimmers are the ones who would chop down the tree of liberty…that selfsame tree that needs (in the words of Thomas Jefferson) to be watered from time to time with the blood of patriots and the blood of tyrants.

    The youth are critical to the wolves from a voting perspective, because (as de Tocqueville wrote) they enable the wolves to attain victory through “the tyranny of the majority,” in which rights are trampled by using numbers to tip the balance and allow majority rule…no matter how mindless or uninformed. No matter that the mindless vote for one reason, while the wolves have another purpose in mind. Coyotes, the mindless, who will be enslaved and pruned when the right time arises.

    First the guns: they must have the guns.

    On Friday, Governor (in name only) Rick Scott of Florida signed a new, lovely law that is onerous to the Constitution and directly assaults the 2nd Amendment. This excerpt from the AP holds the basic parameters:

    …the law,…raises the minimum age to buy rifles from 18 to 21; extends a three-day waiting period for handgun purchases to include long guns; and bans bump stocks, which allow guns to mimic fully automatic fire.

    As can be seen, the law is onerous to the Constitution. There is nothing that needs to be explained about the wording in the 2nd Amendment “shall not be infringed upon,” regarding the right to keep and bear arms. Marbury vs. Madison established the fact that any law that is onerous to the Constitution is null and void, plain and simple.

    The problem is their “public safety” and “extraordinary circumstances,” that arm the wolves for slashing the throats of the deer in the name of the “public good.”

    Go ahead and take it to court. Go ahead. You’ll automatically open yourself up…come forth before the barbarian hordes. You’ll be identified, monitored, followed, and placed upon their list. You will be marginalized further. You’re already marginalized and outside of normative behavior if you’re a veteran, a patriot, a person who believes in God and freedom of worship, and anyone who is against the national sovereignty of the United States being removed in favor of global governance.

    The paradigm has shifted and is being shifted: the globalist initiative is replacing the Constitution for the new American existing social, political, and economic order.

    Go ahead and take it to court. The NRA is filing a suit to prevent it. Nevertheless, the wheels are in motion. You will be fighting against the State…a “creature” with unlimited resources, with the media in its pocket, with thousands of actors/victims and other “living stage props” to use to garner public sentiment against you.

    Read “The Running Man,” by Richard Bachman (a pen-name used by Stephen King…and read the book, as the movie is BS and was to sell, not to give the true concept of what the Running Man “contest” was about).

    Here’s an excerpt of that excellent work, spoken by the head of the Network, Dan Killian, to the hero/protagonist Ben Richards:

    “Your work record has been spotty and you’ve been fired…let’s see…a total of six times for such things as insubordination, insulting superiors, and abusive criticism of authority.”

    Richards shrugged.

    “In short you’re regarded as antiauthoritarian and antisocial.  You’re a deviate who has been intelligent enough to stay out of prison and serious trouble with the government, and you’re not hooked on anything.”

    Killian then goes on to tell Richards about the Running Man.

    “The program is one of the surest ways the Network has of getting rid of embryo troublemakers such as yourself, Mr. Richards.  We’ve been on for six years.  To date, we have no survivals.  To be brutally honest, we expect to have none.”

    “Then you’re running a crooked table,” Richards said flatly.

    Killian seemed more amused than horrified.

    “But we’re not.  You keep forgetting you’re an anachronism, Mr. Richards.  People won’t be…rooting for you to get away…They want to see you wiped out, and they’ll help if they can.”

    Our society is upon the cusp of a transformation to that one…a society where it is mandatory to have a free television (termed the “FreeVee) in every home…to provide a modern form of the Roman “Games” of the Flavian Amphitheater and the Circus Maximus…enrapturing and distracting the public. A society where drugs are legalized and encouraged. A society of a repressive police state, where a rigid class structure has been established. A society that consists of most of the populace as dumbed-down, dependent upon the government for subsistence. A society where government and the oligarchy openly pollute the skies, while they walk around with filters to protect against it…at taxpayer expense.

    A society of ghettos, of third-world living conditions, with heavily-guarded mansions and office buildings sporadically dotting the megalopolises. A society of economic decay and crony capitalism. A society that presents “freedom” and “patriotism” as binding ribbons in a theatrical manner to ensure conformity and social “groupthink” and actions of the herded. Rigidity of thought, of conformity, and the haves pursue thrills and personal gratification and the have-nots are too dulled, too herded, and too uneducated to enable a shift in the other direction.  A society where the guns are gone…have been gone for a while.

    First, they need to get the guns, and they’re doing it now…with incremental slowness, but the snowball is beginning to build up speed and mass: In the end, they’ll go door to door.

    On Friday night, 3/9/18, the largest Veterans’ home in the country had another shooting.  A 36-year-old former patient of the home went in and killed three psychological workers…whom the President came out on Saturday and praised glowingly as martyrs and heroines…tireless workers who strove for the benefit of veterans. I’m sure there’s more to the story than that…but there’s the narrative, awaiting the crafting of the wolves and their slime of the mainstream media.

    The bill is entitled the “Marjory Stoneman Douglas Public Safety Act,” after the school where the Cruz shooting occurred. The bill in Florida targets the youth…and now they have a pretext to come after the Veterans with this shooting.  Always for a reason of protecting the public.

    But who will protect us from them, from the government?  Well, we will: that is what the 2nd Amendment is for. The right to bear arms is our right…merely affirmed by the Constitution (and wisely so). As explained in the Declaration of Independence, when the “old guards” need to be changed…the guns are when they won’t bow out gracefully.

    Government is when the leaders derive just powers…just, mind you…from the consent of the governed. We haven’t had true stewardship for a long time in the United States…I don’t care about the semantics…it is the end state that matters. The current state that we are in. The government goes against the wishes of the people.

    The government always manages to drum up Republicans who will vote along with the Democrats to ram legislation down our throats.  In Illinois, gun confiscation is going to be finalized with a bill commanding those 18 to 20 years of age to turn in weapons that were legally purchased.  The article is entitled “Gun Confiscation Begins in Illinois,” dated 3/10/18, by Daniel J. Sobieski of American Thinker. Read it. Here are some of the key provisions for that “legislation” as mentioned in the article:

    The bill that will now head to the Illinois Senate, HB 1465,

    Makes it unlawful for any person within the State to knowingly deliver or sell, or cause to be delivered or sold, an assault weapon, assault weapon attachment, .50 caliber rifle, or .50 caliber cartridge to, any person under 21 years of age.

    Makes it unlawful for any person under 21 years of age to knowingly possess an assault weapon, assault weapon attachment, .50 caliber rifle, or .50 caliber cartridge 90 days after the effective date of the bill. Provides exemptions and penalties.

    Provides that it is unlawful for any person within the State to knowingly deliver or sell, or cause to be delivered or sold, a large capacity ammunition feeding device to a person under 21 years of age.

    Provides that it is unlawful for any person under 21 years of age to possess a large capacity ammunition feeding device within the State.

    Proving the line from the movie “The Patriot” with Mel Gibson is the truth of the matter: “An elected legislature can trample a man’s rights as easily as a king.”

    Let’s really think about all of this. The piece “The Running Man” mentioned above can clearly be viewed as a work of dystopian literature, and it’s easy for most people to see the tie-in to our society’s degradation on the slope toward the society in the book.

    How about we take it a step further? The main character in the book, Ben Richards, wanted to make the big dollars to help his sick daughter and enable her to recover. His back against the wall and hemmed in by a society that predetermined his entire existence, “The Running Man” was the only avenue for him.

    How about with these guys, such as the one in the VA home that killed those three women…and then shot himself?

    Everybody always comes out with the same theories…the “hidden Blackhawk helicopters backing up the shooter,” as in Vegas…always the 2nd and 3rd shooters on the grassy knoll. But what if the answer is a lot simpler than that?

    How about the shooter is approached from the government…beforehand…and goes on his rampage with the express (and agreed-upon) end being he (the shooter) blows his own brains out? In exchange, the government, per say, might set up a tax-free account for 5 or 10 million for his family…who are oblivious to the agreement. He frees his family from poverty, and there’s nobody around to question his “insane motives,” and the government has its tool to be able to advance a totalitarian agenda even further…complete with (as in the “Hunger Games”) a list of “the fallen,” now martyred…with cannon fire in the background and a “grieving nation.”

    How about that possibility? Because if anyone discounts the possibility, you better discount everything you have ever seen and/or read about that the government has done. They have the resources, the money, the ability. They have the planning skills to carry it out. They also will always be able to find someone to use in this capacity.

    We are at the cusp of a totalitarian takeover by the government in the guise of governance for the public good and using de facto law that is passed off as de jure. By the time it is challenged in the “legal eagle” manner, it will be too late. Those in power will not relinquish it, and more: they will subvert every right to ensure they are in power and not you. All authority does come from the barrel of a gun: they don’t carry firearms to protect you. They carry them to dominate you, and they can enslave you at a moment’s notice. The 2nd Amendment was to protect the citizens from an out of control government hell-bent on controlling your every action: a tyranny.

    Jefferson: “When the government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny.”

  • "This Was Bad. Obviously She Was Wrong": Former Campaign Manager Slams Hillary Over Absurd Comments

    Hillary Clinton received a harsh rebuke from her own former campaign manager and longtime aide, Patti Solis Doyle, who said that Clinton painting Trump voters as racist or sexist was “not helpful to Democrats going into the midterms and certainly not going into 2020,” and that the party would have to distance themselves from her.

    Speaking to a Mumbai audience on Sunday, Clinton called Trump voters racists and misogynists – a flashback to her disastrous “basket of deplorables” comment during the election. 

    …I won the places that represent 2/3 of America’s gross domestic product. So I won the areas that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward. And his whole campaign “Make America Great Again,” was looking backwards.

    You know, you didn’t like black people getting rights, you don’t like women, you know, getting jobs, you don’t wanna see that Indian American succeeding more than you are. 

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    Solis Doyle, who ran Hillary’s Senate campaigns and her failed 2008 run against Barack Obama until she was replaced by Maggie Williams, told HLN host S.E. Cupp that Clinton seems to be having trouble coming to grips with her 2016 election loss, and wishes that she would “stop doing it so publicly.” 

    Cupp: Based on the reaction of most people… …is this getting lost in translation? ’cause it sounds really bad. 

    Solis Doyle: Look. This was bad. I can’t sugarcoat it. She was wrong and clearly it’s not helpful to Democrats going into the midterms and certainly not going into 2020. She’s put herself in a position where Democrats are going to have to distance themselves from these remarks and distance themselves from her.

    Cupp: I think the remarks were unfortunate…

    Solis Doyle: It seems to me she’s still struggling with coming to terms on how she lost and why she lost, which, you know, is human and normal – particularly this level of loss. I do wish she would stop doing it so publicly.

    Cupp: I don’t wanna beat you over the head with this – The deplorables – the basket of deplorables moment was a turning point in the campaign and should have been a real lesson. Criticize Trump, but going after Trump voters is a no-win proposition.

    Solis Doyle: Look, obviously she was wrong to, with a broad brush, to paint all of the people in the states she lost to paint them as racist or sexist. Obviously that’s wrong. 

    Summing it all up, here is Tucker Carlson:

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  • "Asteroids, WWIII, Or North Korea" – South Dakotans Transform Military Bunkers Into Survivalist Homes

    The motto “always be prepared” is wise advice, but, as RT reports, one man is taking the mantra to the max. He’s got former military bunkers spanning a space that is three-quarters the size of Manhattan, and is selling them to survivalists.

    Survivalists and so-called “preppers” are often the brunt of jokes, with insults ranging from “paranoid” to “weird” and everything in between. But Robert Vicino couldn’t disagree more. He runs a company which is currently focused on transforming military bunkers into doomsday shelters.

    The shelters are in Middle of Nowhere, USA, otherwise known as Edgemont, South Dakota. It’s barely on the map, but it’s about to host the “largest survival community on the planet.” That’s big news for a town with a population of just 774 people.

    Describing the bunker community as “large” is perhaps an understatement. “…This base is 18 square miles (47 square kilometers), about three quarters the size of Manhattan,” Vicino told RT’s Ruptly agency. He says the community has 575 bunkers and will be able to hold between 6,000 and 10,000 residents.

    If the idea has you imagining some kind of “tiny home” situation, think again. “This place is huge,” Vicino said while giving Ruptly a tour of a 2,200 square foot bunker. It’s “bigger than most houses in the world.” That’s likely a good thing, if you’re planning on having to spend the rest of your days inside an underground bunker with your crazy Aunt Martha.

    Vicino says it would be nuts not to prepare for the worst, as each bunker will cost buyers just $25,000. 

    “To not have this and to have a back-up plan for mankind, to have an insurance policy, is crazy. The cost we are able to do this… it’s nothing. It’s crazy not to, it’s nothing more than life assurance.”

    He also had a rebuttal for anyone who thinks those backing the project are crazy. He said those buying such structures “are people that are aware. They are not paranoid, they are highly intelligent, they read a lot.”

    When it comes to possible reasons someone might need to flee to their underground bunker, Vicino’s answers ranged from natural disaster to a nuclear attack by Kim Jong-un. Basically, just about anything that could be scary for Earthlings.

    “The whole world is concerned… some are concerned about North Korea, others are concerned about an economic collapse, others are concerned about World War III… there’s threats from the sun, a coronal mass ejection, there’s threats of asteroids hitting the earth and there`s near misses every week now…”

    But there’s a catch if you decide you want to spend the rest of your days in one of Vicino’s bunkers. The nearest town is 30 minutes away and there’s no mobile connectivity. Of course, if the world is coming to an end, that’s probably the least of anyone’s concerns.

    Vicino’s company also offers luxury survivalist dwellings in the German town of Rothenstein. Those bunkers cost more than $25,000, however, as the complex boasts swimming pools, theaters, gyms, restaurants, and a helicopter service.

  • Pennsylvania Special Election: With 99% Of Precincts Reporting, Lamb And Saccone Are Tied

    Update: Like they say, every vote counts…

    With 99.4% of precincts reporting, Tuesday night’s special election looks like it will come down to a few hundred votes or less. Democrat Conor Lamb has maintained a steady lead all night, though it has narrowed as totals from some of the more rural districts have trickled in.

    According to the New York Times, Lamb has a 0.1% lead:

    Lamb

    As one twitter pundit pointed out, such a close race is bad news for Republicans – especially considering President Trump carried the 18th district by 20 percentage points.

     

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    Meanwhile, RNC spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany defended Saccone by claiming Lamb managed to perform so well by “essentially running as a Republican” in the deep-red district.

    “He’s pro-gun. He says he’s personally pro-life. He says he’s pro-coal, he’s tariff. He says he’s anti-Nancy Pelosi,” McEnany said on ABC News ahead of the election results Tuesday.

    As one reporter reminds us, there’s no automatic recount provision for non-statewide Pennsylvania elections – candidates must request a recount, an outcome that is looking increasingly likely.

     

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    A New York Times chart shows how voting patterns in Washington, Green and Allegheny counties have “evolved” since election night 2016.

    Penn

    Some pundits pushed back against the notion that Tuesday’s race is a harbinger of doom for Republicans.

     

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    And another reporter points out that there are about 1,200 absentee ballots that won’t be counted until tomorrow…so whatever the final outcome is, it won’t be available tonight…

     

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    * * *

    The polls have officially closed in Tuesday’s special election in Pennsylvania’s 18th district – a patch of coal and steel country in southwestern Pennsylvania that includes swaths of suburban Pittsburgh surrounded by many far more rural areas.

    Once a reliably Democratic district, President Trump carried the 18th by 20 percentage points – blowing out Hillary Clinton and even far surpassing the 12-point lead captured by Mitt Romney back in 2012.

    Lamb

    But most polls of likely voters show 33-year-old Democrat Conor Lamb, a Marine veteran who has pledged not to support Nancy Pelosi, and also to oppose gun control, against Republican state House member Rick Saccone, a staunch Christian conservative.

    Trump has twice visited the district – most recently on Saturday night, when he unveiled his 2020 campaign slogan “Keep America Great” to uproarious cheers. And senior Trump surrogates, including Kellyanne Conway and Donald Trump Jr. have also made appearances.

    Trump

    The race the race was triggered when former GOP Congressman Tim Murphy resigned after reportedly urging his mistress to have an abortion.

    Saccone, widely considered a weak candidate with a lackluster local fundraising operation, has benefited from a flood of outside money. Lamb, who is running in a district where Democrats didn’t even field a candidate to oppose Murphy, has been successful raising money locally, and hasn’t received as much help from the Democratic establishment. Indeed, Lamb comes from a prominent local political family: His grandfather was a prominent Democratic politician in the Pennsylvania, and his uncle holds a senior city job in Pittsburgh.

    Regardless of who wins tonight, their tenure in Congress may be short-lived. The 18th district is set to disappear thanks to a Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision forcing the state to redraw its districts. Whoever wins will need to make a difficult choice about which district they will run in.

    So far, with 21% of precincts reporting, Lamb leads with a 15 percentage-point lead over Saccone. In terms of votes, Lamb is up 23,558 to 17,437.

     

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    * * *

    Even if the Democrats triumph tonight, for some, it will feel like a Pyrrhic victory.

    The Bernie Sanders-loving progressive wing of the Democratic Party will be horrified to learn that, if Lamb wins, more Democrats in Trump-positive districts will seek to mimic Lamb’s approach – i.e. run as conservative Democrats who oppose the party leadership, gun control and abortion.

    With that in mind, we’re certain the good people over at Emily’s List will be thrilled to welcome Lamb into the House.

    And to be sure – if Lamb does win – we imagine President Trump will be ready with a tweet disavowing Saccone and deflecting the blame for his defeat.

  • Facebook Blamed By U.N. Investigators For Spreading Hate Speech In "Possible Genocide"

    U.N. human rights experts investigating a “possible genocide” in Myanmar are blaming Facebook for their role in “spreading hate speech.” The criticism, levied on Monday, is a fairly transparent example of the ongoing push to force social media platforms to monitor and regulate opinions deemed unfavorable or controversial (prior to the 2020 U.S. election, we assume, which Putin and Russian spies have surely hacked already).

    Facebook did not immediately respond to the criticism, however the company has previously said it has made efforts to remove hate speech in Myanmar and block people who have consistently shared such content. 

    More than 650,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled Myanmar’s Rakhine state into Bangladesh since insurgent attacks sparked a security crackdown last August. Many have provided harrowing testimonies of executions and rapes by Myanmar security forces.

    The U.N. human rights chief said last week he strongly suspected acts of genocide had taken place. Myanmar’s national security adviser demanded “clear evidence”. –Reuters

    Lawyer and former Attorney General of Indonesia, Marzuki Darusman – who chairs the U.N. Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, says that social media had played a “determining role” in Myanmar.

    “It has … substantively contributed to the level of acrimony and dissension and conflict, if you will, within the public. Hate speech is certainly of course a part of that. As far as the Myanmar situation is concerned, social media is Facebook, and Facebook is social media,” he said. 

    It should be noted that Darusman came under fire in 2011 over a “discredited” report claiming that more than 40,000 civilians were killed in crossfire between Sri Lankan authorities and the Tamil Tiger rebels – with the Sri Lankan government calling the report “erroneous and replete with conjecture and bias.” 

    The Darusman Report’s assertion that ‘a range of up to 40,000’ civilian deaths during the last phase of the war ‘cannot be ruled out,’ was reported in the media as if it was a factual statement that 40,000 civilians died. Some reports went further citing this ‘UN Report’ as having found that ‘over 40,000’ had been killed. –Daily Mirror

    Facebook was a large part of public, private and civil life in Myanmar – used by the government to disseminate information to the public.

    “Everything is done through Facebook in Myanmar,” says U.N. Myanmar investigator Yanghee Lee, nothing that while Facebook had helped the impoverished country, it had also been used to spread hate speech. 

    “It was used to convey public messages but we know that the ultra-nationalist Buddhists have their own Facebooks and are really inciting a lot of violence and a lot of hatred against the Rohingya or other ethnic minorities,” she said.  “I’m afraid that Facebook has now turned into a beast, and not what it originally intended.”

    A prominent critic of Islam, Myanmar monk named Wirathu emerged from a one-year preaching ban on Saturday and claimed that his anti-Muslim sentiment had nothing to do with violence in Rakhine state. 

    Facebook says it suspends and will sometimes remove any user “consistently shares content promoting hate,” when asked last month about Wirathu’s account. 

    “If a person consistently shares content promoting hate, we may take a range of actions such as temporarily suspending their ability to post and ultimately, removal of their account.”

    (*cough* especially before the 2020 U.S. election *cough* as deemed by the hyper-liberal Facebook thought police at the ADL) 

  • Massive X-Class Solar Storm To Slam Earth Tomorrow, Could Knockout Satellites, Power

    A solar storm caused by an X-Class solar flare facing directly towards earth is likely to hit tomorrow. The brunt of the activity will be in the higher latitudes, however the aurora it generates could result in Northern Lights as far south as Michigan and Maine, as well as parts of Scotland and Northern England.

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    The X-class flare was the first of two, according to NASA. It is the largest in 2018, as well as one of the largest in the sun’s current cycle known as the solar minimum which began in 2007. The arrival of the storm could leave commercial flights and GPS systems vulnerable to disruption – however the storm is currently considered a G-1, or “minor geomagnetic storm,” which could become more serious depending on how the charged particles hit the earth.

    Below is a visualization of a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME)

    Coronal holes and coronal mass ejections (CME) visible via x-ray imaging

    The storm also coincides with the formation of “equinox cracks” in the Earth’s magnetic field – which typically occur around the March 20 and September 23 equinoxes every year.

    This is called the the “Russell-McPherron effect,” named after the researchers who first explained it. The cracks are opened by the solar wind itself.  South-pointing magnetic fields inside the solar wind oppose Earth’s north-pointing magnetic field. The two, N vs. S, partially cancel one another, weakening our planet’s magnetic defenses. This cancellation can happen at any time of year, but it happens with greatest effect around the equinoxes. Indeed, a 75-year study shows that March is the most geomagnetically active month of the year, followed closely by September-October–a direct result of “equinox cracks.” –Spaceweatherarchive.com

    NASA and European spacecraft have detected these cracks for several years.

    “We used to think the connection was permanent and that solar wind could trickle into the near-Earth environment anytime the wind was active,” said David Sibeck of the Goddard Space Flight Center in 2008. “We were wrong. The connections are not steady at all. They are often brief, bursty and very dynamic.”

     

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Mar 13

Today’s News 13th March 2018

  • U.S. Spy Drone Spotted Near Crimea After $47 Million Defense Purchase By Ukraine: Report

    A U.S. surveillance drone was spotted flying above Crimea, presumably doing reconnaissance over eastern Ukraine before returning to Naval Air Station Sigonella in Sicily, according to flight tracking services.

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    The RQ-4 Global Hawk’s flyover is the latest in a series of US and NATO air patrols near Russian teritory. Last June a NATO F-16 fighter jet tried to approach the Russian defense minister’s plane above the neutral waters over the Baltic sea. It was warded off by a Russian Su-27, and the flight continued to Kaliningrad for a discussion on security issues.  The F-16 was warded off after the Russian jet tipped it’s wings, showing its armament. 

    And in January, a Russian Su-27 intercepted a Navy EP-3 Aires surveillance plane over the Black Sea – which drew a sharp rebuke from the Pentagon who said the Russian jet flew too close to the U.S. plane. 

    Arming Ukraine

    The latest surveillance flyover comes on the heels of the Trump administration approving a deal to arm Ukraine with 210 Javelin anti-aircraft missiles and 37 launchers for $47 million. The deal was announced in December, however it follows Obama-era legislation to export weapons to the war-torn country. 

    The FGM-148 Javelin Portable Anti-Tank Missile. Image source: US Army. 

    As we noted two weeks ago, the sale marks a significant increase in U.S. military support for Ukraine and another major deterioration US-Russian relations, and is the first lethal weapons sale of its kind since the breakout of a Russian-backed proxy civil war against the central government in Ukraine’s eastern provinces. 

    President Trump approved the plan right before Christmas 2017, and Congress has until the end of March days to sink the deal or it will go through, which is expected. Trump says the sale represents a “tougher” stance on Russia than Obama, however the Special Representative for Ukraine Negotiations tried his best to downplay the comment.

     “There is what I view as an artificial distinction between lethal and non-lethal military equipment,” Ambassador Kurt Volker said in Washington on Monday, comparing anti-tank missiles to a counter-battery radar that improves targeting to attack and kill an enemy firing mortars. “That’s non-lethal and an anti-tank missile, which sits in a box and doesn’t get used unless you have a tank coming at you, is lethal. Both are clearly defensive weapons.”

    Russia’s deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov – the guy NATO buzzed, issued a harsh rebuke in December when the news of the sale first broke. 

    “The United States in a certain sense crossed the line, announcing the intention to transfer weapons of direct damaging action to Ukraine,” the statement said, translated from Russian. “American weapons can lead to new victims in our neighboring country, to which we cannot remain indifferent.“

    Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said then that the sale “will once again motivate the hotheads” in the Ukrainian government and “unleash bloodshed again.”

    Trump’s approval of the arms deal was a major shift from the Republican party platform, which was amended when Trump was the party’s nominee for president, from supporting “lethal defensive arms” to Ukraine to the more vague “appropriate assistance” — language that ran counter to traditional Republican foreign policy.

    Needless to say, Trump himself promised a reset with Russia, but since taking office, relations with Moscow have not improved.

    And after years of covert American involvement in the Ukrainian proxy and civil war which has raged since 2014 – and which a leaked recording confirmed was precipitated by the US State Department – it appears that neocon hawks like McCain, Cotton, and Corker are finally getting their way. 

    Perhaps more scary in terms of escalating an unnecessary war which has already taken more than 10,000 lives since 2014, the Kiev government and some in Washington are already pushing for putting anti-aircraft weapons in the hands of Ukrainian forces.

    “What we are awaiting and have called for is the provision of lethal defense weapons that are more advanced – a larger package that is under consideration right now, including anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles,” a Ukrainian official told ABC News. “We are expecting this decision and would welcome it.”

    Putin, or course, just rolled out a series of brand new nukes. His new “toys” include tactical and hypersonic nuclear devices which are said to be able to overcome missile defense systems. 

    “Efforts to contain Russia have failed, face it,” Putin said in a nearly two-hour address he illustrated with video clips of the new arms, which included underwater drones, intercontinental missiles and a hypersonic system he said “heads for its target like a meteorite.” –Bloomberg

    Russia has also accused the US of violating the nuclear nonproliferation treaty by “preparing the militaries of European states to use tactical nuclear weapons against Russia“

    He [Putin] said Russia had long warned Washington not to go ahead with anti-missile systems that Moscow feared could erode its nuclear deterrent. “Nobody listened to us. Listen now,” he said, to a loud ovation from the crowd of legislators, officials and dignitaries. –Bloomberg

    We won’t hold our breath for the Olympic-level mental gymnastics from anti-Trumpers trying to explain how Putin convinced Trump to sell Ukraine all that hardware which will soon create quite a few Russian army widows.

  • Why The Super-Rich Are Rushing To Buy Nuclear-Proof Bunkers

    Authored by Eric Zuesse via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    The rush amongst the super-rich started after the key event of 2014; this single stunning event suddenly sparked that rush by the super-rich to buy nuclear-proof bunkers, and the rush has been nonstop since that event. Though many news-media in The West have reported on the existence of this suddenly booming market for luxurious and supposedly nuclear-proof bunkers, none has reported on what actually caused it — the event that had sparked it. In fact, that event is still a secret in The West — not publicly mentioned here; it is, practically speaking, bannedfrom being publicly even mentioned, in The West. So: since that event is necessarily mentioned in this article, and is even linked-to here, so that the reader can see videos of it that were posted of it online while it was happening, and there is even “smoking gun” evidence showing government officials actually planning it, and covering it up, and blatantly lying about what they had done, this report, explaining why the super-rich rush now to buy nuclear-proof bunkers, violates that ban. As a consequence, probably none of the hundreds of major news-media in The West that this news-report is being submitted to for publication, will publish it. But perhaps a half-dozen of the small ones will publish it. After all: a few small news-media cannot have much impact. The government and media don’t need to fool everyone in order to succeed, but only to fool the vast majority of people. (However, maybe now they don’t any longer even need to continue worrying about public opinion, at all. So: maybe they no longer need to continue such bans. But they do continue them, perhaps simply out of institutionalized bad habit.)

    Wherever you’re so fortunate as to be reading this: here is the reason why the market for luxurious deep-underground nuclear-resistant bunkers has so suddenly blossomed:

    In February 2014, an extremely violent, and US-engineered but ‘democracy’-masked, coup in Ukraine on Russia’s very doorstep, was successfully culminated by its overthrowing Ukraine’s neutralist and democratically elected leader, and then by its installing there a rabidly anti-Russian government, out for Russian blood, just like Hitler had been, and, in fact, strongly inspired by him, in many ways, including an ethnic-cleansing campaign. Within less than a month, Russia responded to that coup by accepting the still predominantly Russian Crimea back into Russia. (Crimea had been part of Russia until the Soviet dictator had arbitrarily transferred it to Ukraine in 1954.) For Russia’s having done that, US President Barack Obama (and America’s foreign vassals) slapped economic sanctions against Russia and mobilized NATO troops and weaponry onto and near Russia’s borders — as if they wanted to out-do 1962’s Cuban Missile Crisis, which they are doing, but in reverse direction (against not America, but, this time, against Russia). 

    Ever since that singular 2014 event — that coup (which destroyed Ukraine) — the hottest market amongst the super-rich has been nuclear-resistant bunkers deep underground: such as here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here. 

    I think that the three best of these articles about luxury nuclear bunkers, are this (with the best pictures of one of these facilities) and this (with the best commentary about the entire phenomenon), and this, which discusses the increasing number of builders of these facilities. Some billionaires, however, are instead moving to New Zealand. 

    So: ever since 2014, private planning to survive a nuclear war is the most booming field amongst the super-rich. This is a real-estate market that no ordinary person could afford to buy into. These people are either principals themselves in the aristocracy, or else prime agents for them and thus likewise extremely wealthy and already well on their own personal ways to entering the aristocracy — the aristocracy of extreme wealth. They’re thus all well-connected; they’ve got the best contacts and sources inside governments. And, since 2014, they are rushing to prepare: to prepare for a nuclear war.

    If these people aren’t well-informed about the global situation, then no one is. And they’re investing accordingly. Lots of people invest in stocks, bonds, gold, etc, but only the richest few can afford to invest in nuclear-resistant bunkers, and that’s where the boom nowadays especially is, amongst only the super-rich. (We’re not talking here about high government-officials; they’ve got their Spartan nuclear bunkers long-since paid for by US taxpayers; but these are all just private and extremely wealthy individuals.) Maybe their attitude is: if you’ve got three-or-more homes, then at least one of them should be designed for the post-WW-III world and near enough to your main home so that maybe you can reach it before any missiles will be flying.

    A nuclear war between US and Russia would be over within less than 30 minutes, start-to-finish; so, there won’t be any time to plan if the nuclear phase of the NATO-v.-Russia (plus, maybe China) war appears to be imminent — waiting that long in order to depart for one’s private bomb-shelter would already be too late. A quick ‘vacation’ to the secret location would thus necessarily be of the unplanned sort, which means that the system by which the owner will reach the spot, needs to be operational 24 hours every day, and needs to be maintained continuously, until — if and when — the nuclear exchange starts. Therefore, these facilities have airports and helicopter-access, and are continuously staffed, so that the richest people in the US and its allied countries, can arrive there at any moment’s notice and receive the full range of services that they are accustomed to.

    Any of these billionaires and centi-millionaires could have chosen instead to establish (either alone or in combination with one-another) the first foundation or other propaganda-operation to publicize the fraudulence of the US-and-allied case for sanctions against Russia, and the fraudulence of NATO’s continuing assertions after 1991 that it’s a ‘defensive’ military alliance (it’s no longer that, at all), and the fact (contrasted against that fraud) of NATO’s being nowadays purely an alliance for aggression against Russia and China, as if the Cold War had never ended (and it never really did end except on the Russian and Chinese side, which now recognize that the US and its allies had lied in 1990); so, all of these billionaires rather buy private nuclear-bomb shelters, than establish a foundation to expose to the public the US side’s apocalyptic lies, which actually cause the danger that’s heading to destroy the entire world.

    America’s own leading scientists on strategic weaponry have recently (on 1 March 2017) documented that the US nuclear-weapons-modernization program against both Russia and China is “planning to have the capacity to fight and win a nuclear war by disarming enemies with a surprise first strike.” Obviously, only the most-insiders of insiders will know in advance about this “surprise first strike.” (Otherwise, it wouldn’t be a surprise, and the advantage of being the first to attack will be gone.) However, nuclear-proof bunker-space is presumably so limited so that the people who are buying these few spots will be amongst those few. (Of course, high federal officials will be taken care of elsewhere.)

    Ever since at least 2006, America’s Establishment — its billionaires and their agents — have been virtually unanimously and actively supporting the abandonment of the “Mutually Assured Destruction” concept that had long dominated nuclear thinking on both sides (not only on the Soviet and continuing under the Russian side, but also on that of America and its NATO military alliance) and have been replacing that paradigm, the “M.A.D.” paradigm (which has staved off WW III ever since 1945). They replaced it by the US-NATO paradigm (ever since at least 2006) of “Nuclear Primacy,” in which The West’s nuclear weapons are to be used not to stave off WW III, but instead so as to achieve ‘victory’ in an actual US-v.-Russia nuclear war. Ever since 2014, US-and-allied military moves cannot be coherently explained on any other basis than that the US and NATO are planning a blitz nuclear attack against at least Russia — and perhaps also against China.

    Clearly, whoever are buying these luxury-pads for the post-apocalypse, are hoping for a NATO ‘victory’ in WW III, and are certainly not favorably inclined to preventing that armageddon, which they know is based on lies (unless they’re too stupid to be able to distinguish between their own propaganda versus the actual historical reality, which is documented in the links here, which links show that any decent billionaire in The West would instead be publicly exposing the horrific fraud that’s perpetrated by all of themselves, not trying to protect themselves from that fraud’s immediate global consequences).

    Unfortunately, these people are the ultimate “conformists.” It’s clear by their 100% unity on this. They’ve become so gated-community, one-way-glassed, that they’ve no concern remaining (if they ever did) for the billions of people (not to mention entire planet) that they’re placing into the severest form of danger: global annihilation. Instead, their only concern (quite evidently) is to be ‘winners’. Like I had said at that last link: “In military parlance, the side that suffers the less harm is the ‘winner’, regardless of any other factor. That’s the basic reality of military strategy: it’s inevitably win-lose, not win-win.” However, M.A.D. was the first-ever exception to that strategic principle; and, now, it’s gone — as of 2006 in US, and by now also in Russia (if not also in China). M.A.D. is gone; it’s been replaced by a real insanity, which is clearly psychopathic and clearly pervasive amongst the super-rich: “Nuclear Primacy”.

    The psychological reality that had long staved off a WW III is completely gone. And the people who have caused it to end are now buying all these nuclear bunkers for themselves.

    In a rare exception to the unanimity of the US aristocracy’s voices regarding what’s behind this change (which cause is the stifling nazi or racist-fascist ideology at the top in America), the capitol-hill newspaper, The Hill, allowed to be published on 9 November 2017, an article — even with numerous links to high-quality sources — titled “The reality of neo-Nazis in Ukraine is far from Kremlin propaganda”. An indication of just how extraordinarily thorough the takeover of the US Government by nazis has become, is that both under President Barack Obama and under President Donald Trump, the US has been among the only 3 countries (in Obama’s case) and the only two countries (in Trump’s) that officially stood up at the United Nations in support of nazism, even of its Holocaust-denial. On both occasions, Ukraine joined with the US on that vote. On one occasion, Canada also did (thus being the third). This scandal was virtually entirely ignored in the Western ‘news’ media.

    This is the world we are living in today. How many ‘news’ media are reporting this reality? How many have reported it? Just one billionaire standing out from the pack, so as to reach the masses with these truths, could make a whole world of difference. But, instead, perhaps they’re all just buying nuclear bunkers, so as to be amongst the few ‘winners’, in a war on behalf of the global regime that represents, actually, only themselves.

    This is the catastrophe of our times.

  • Visualizing America's Gold-Plated Cabinet

    When President Trump was elected to the Oval Office with a net worth in the billions, it was clear that this presidency would be unique.

    Not only did he himself come a successful business background, but, as Visual Capitalist’s Jeff Desjardins notes, he wanted the people surrounding him to have similar backgrounds as well.

    In 2016, the newly elected Trump was quoted as saying he wanted to have people in his cabinet that “made a fortune”, also stating that he was putting together “one of the great cabinets that has ever been assembled in the history of our nation.”

    COMPARING FIRST-TERM CABINETS

    Today’s chart, which also appears on the back cover of Politico Magazine (web version found here), shows the wealth of initial cabinets put together by the last three presidents: Trump, Obama, and Bush.

    Courtesy of: Visual Capitalist

    Here’s how they stack up, in terms of aggregate wealth:

    Trump’s cabinet is worth a cool $2.33 billion – about 35x the size of Barack Obama’s initial cabinet, and 7x the size of George W. Bush’s first.

    Interestingly, the top four people (in terms of wealth) are all in Trump’s:

    Betsy DeVos ($1.1 billion) sits atop as the wealthiest person in all three initial cabinets – and Wilbur Ross ($506.5 million), Rex Tillerson ($294.5 million), and Steve Mnuchin ($252.0 million) round out the other top spots.

    Meanwhile, Donald Rumsfeld ($151.9 million) was the richest person outside of Trump’s cabinet.

    OBAMA’S SECOND TERM

    While the comparisons in the chart are all for initial cabinets, it is worth noting that Obama’s second cabinet was not so modest.

    He elected to bring in Penny Pritzker as the U.S. Secretary of Commerce, who was worth $2.2 billion – almost the combined net worth of Trump’s cabinet today!

  • Are Nuclear Weapons In A Multipolar World Order A Guarantee For Peace?

    Authored by Federico Pieracinni via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    In the previous article I explained how the invention of the nuclear device altered the balance of power after WWII and during the cold war era. In this second article I intend to explain why nuclear-armed powers decrease the likelihood of a nuclear apocalypse, as counterintuitive as it seems.

    With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, the power that had hitherto counterbalanced the US ceased to exist. The world order changed again, this time becoming unipolar, bringing in its wake 30 years of death and destruction to practically every corner of the globe, particularly to the Middle East, Europe and Asia. With the end of a balance of power, the prospect of an American century (PNAC), so cherished by the neoconservatives and other fanatics of American exceptionalism, became real (see parts 2, 3 and 4 of an earlier series). For policymakers in Washington, the world was transformed into a battlefield, and the quest for global hegemony was the new (unrealistic) goal to be achieved.

    What has happened over the last thirty years is still fresh in everybody’s minds, with the United States ready to invade and bomb dozens of countries, in particular Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Serbia, Syria and Libya. Further chaos was wrought on the globe through the Arab Spring, armed coups and color revolutions. Every means was used to spread the influence of the United States across the globe, from the financial terrorism of bodies like Wall Street and the IMF, to the real terrorism of battalions of neo-Nazi extremists in Ukraine or fanatical Islamists in Syria and Libya. Washington’s actions have placed continuous pressure on those it deems its mortal enemies, particularly over the last 10 years. Iran and North Korea have been living under this pressure for decades. China and Russia, thanks to economic growth and military power, have been able to put to a halt the attempts of American neoconservatives and liberal interventionists to alter the balance of power in the world. Until only recently, Washington did not even recognize any peer competitors. But we could suggest that since Crimea returned to being part of the Russian Federation in 2014, the America’s unipolar moment has been fading.

    The focus of this analysis therefore concerns the current state of international relations that is passing into a new phase. Rather than focusing on the two Eurasian powers (as has been done in the past), attention is brought to the entirely new multipolar world order together with the need to take into account the existence of nuclear weapons. This is a new situation never seen before: multiple world powers contending with the famous doctrine of MAD.

    In fact, if we look at the world since the introduction of nuclear weapons, we recognize three distinct periods. The first one goes from 1945 to 1949; the second from 1949 to 1989; and the third from 1989 to 2014. Undoubtedly the greatest danger existed during the first phase, even if history has managed to hide it well. The US intended during that time to eliminate the USSR while it still enjoyed a monopoly on nuclear weapons. Fortunately, the Soviet acquisition of its own nuclear weapons took this option away from the United States. It was only after the disappearance of the world’s other balancing power that the remaining hegemonic power felt free to do as it wished, acting like a bull in a China shop and unleashing conflagrations around the globe.

    The new era before us opens up many risks, with the rivalry between Russia and the United States escalating and with Beijing and Washington at loggerheads in Southeast Asia. But it could also be the beginning of an era of absolute strategic parity. The major point is that we have never seen a similar situation in history, where contending powers have the ability annihilate each other in the space of a few minutes, probably bringing humanity to extinction in the process. Such a destructive scenario is improbable precisely because of its destructiveness. If it is not to be outright excluded as a possibility, then it ought to be considered highly unlikely. The famous One Percent ruling over and controlling much of our lives would have a hard time thriving with five to six billion less human beings on the planet. The prospect of Armageddon cannot be contemplated by countries whose primary objective is survival. Trump, Putin and Xi Jinping must ensure the survival of their societies at any cost, and the use of nuclear weapons against other nuclear powers does not cohere with the natural instinct for survival.

    In recent years, the impetus for a multipolar order must be attributed to Washington’s continuous quest for global hegemony, spreading wars and terror across the globe in the process. Given that national survival is the priority of states, it is easy to see why counterweights to American domination have arisen in Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Small countries have seen the need to rely on more powerful countries like Russia and China to help protect them from the playground bully. Recent developments in the Middle East, Europe and Asia have had something to do with the confrontation between Washington and Beijing or Moscow and its regional allies. In the Middle East, Iran is targeted as well as other countries within Tehran’s orbit. In Europe, countries that are politically close to Moscow are frowned upon. And in Asia, Washington’s priority seems to be to undo any alliances Beijing has managed to create with its neighbours.

    The delusive quest for global hegemony, combined with continuous US military failures, has led to the emergence of a multipolar reality, with two new poles now opposing Washington. Twenty years after the end of the bipolar era, the unipolar era has also come to an end.

    The tension has continued to build up in recent years, with Moscow and Beijing responding with various countermeasures, especially in the field of delivery vehicles for nuclear weapons and anti-ballistic missile systems. The efforts of Beijing and Moscow have been notable in the creation of nuclear systems able to overcome any recent missile-defence systems. Likewise, US nuclear deterrence is being questioned in the recently released US nuclear doctrine. Trump wants to spend nearly $1 trillion over 10 years to upgrade and replace many of the essential elements of the US nuclear package, ranging from ICBMs and strategic bombers through to nuclear submarines. Even Beijing plans to create stealth bombers that can deflower America’s virgin skies and devastate the country. In the experimental field are included such things as the Russian nuclear-powered underwater drone, as well as other systems as yet unknown to the public. Another important note is to assess a country’s defence capabilities against a nuclear attack.

    This is a military program that Russia, the United States and China have worked hard on, given the importance of advancing technologically with anti-ballistic missile (ABM) systems. The primary objective of governments is the defence of their country. In a context where other nations are armed with nuclear devices, ABM systems become a priority to impede foreign aggressions with nuclear weapons. Fortunately for the human race, the ability to stop a nuclear attack is not the sole reserve of any one nation, and it will be difficult to change certain balances of power in the short term. Acquiring a fully functional missile shield as the ABM intend to be is understandably on the bucket lists of Moscow, Beijing and Washington. Contrary to what one would think, it is precisely because ABM systems are unable to stop nuclear strikes that a nuclear war is highly improbable.

    The multipolar world order exists in an environment that contains nuclear weapons, representing an unprecedented situation for humanity, one that could entail a new balance between powers. The same reason that led NATO not to participate directly in the Ukrainian crisis of 2014 also led Washington to be reluctant to arm its Islamist proxies on the ground in Syria with particularly effective weapons like surface-to-air missiles. The reason was to avoid entering into a direct conflict with Moscow in both Ukraine and Syria. The prospect of such a clash raises fears of an escalation that could easily get out of hand and become nuclear.

    Such a prospect of a clash between powers that could lead to an escalation that is unacceptable highlights what has been discussed thus far. In a multipolar world order, instability is a constant factor, the actions of one’s opponents being unpredictable. But when nuclear weapons are a factor, uncertainty is replaced with certainty, such that a decapitating strike by Washington on Moscow or Beijing would certainly entail a nuclear response by the latter. With such certainties, the likelihood of direct or indirect contact between peer competitors becomes highly unlikely. Even when involving smaller countries, confrontation can advance only to a certain level, becoming untenable once it threatens the involvement of bigger, nuclear-armed powers. The recent shooting down of an Israeli aircraft, and the exchange of missiles between Israel and Syria, shows how a regional clash, even if limited, is ruled out by the danger of Russia and America becoming involved. The same situation obtains in Asia, with tensions being present between Pakistan and India, India and China, and the DPRK and the United States. Mutually assured destruction is certainly an effective means of keeping a lid on things and maintaining regional balances.

    The next fifty years are likely to continue under a multipolar world order, with the four possible poles of Beijing, Moscow, New Delhi and Washington. These four great powers, with strong nationalistic sentiments, reminds one of the situation in the early twentieth century. Normally we would be in a World War I scenario, with powers struggling with each other for dominance. But because of the likely escalation of confrontation between powers into nuclear warfare and Armageddon, the contemporary world order seems to promise a return to political realism and the balance between powers.

    We are facing an unprecedented situation for humanity, one where a stability lasting several decades may be achievable. The greatest danger comes from placing too much stock in ABM systems, which beguiles the foolhardy with the delusion that a decapitating strike may be possible thanks to a magic shield that protects the aggressor from any nuclear retaliation. As long as the principle of MAD remains intact, we will avoid a global catastrophe. Which is fortunate for humanity.

  • Hillary: Trump Voters "Didn't Like Black People Getting Rights" or "Women Getting Jobs"

    Taking a break from her girls’ trip to India with top aide Huma Abedin and an unknown blonde woman, Hillary Clinton told a Mumbai audience that Americans don’t “deserve” Donald Trump as President, and that Trump voters hate black people, women, and Indian Americans.

    “I would have to say, no, we did not deserve that,” said Clinton at the Saturday event, adding “He ran the first reality TV campaign and he was the first reality TV candidate.”  

    “If you watch reality TV, you know it means that the person who is the most outrageous, the person who says the politically incorrect things, the person who’s insulting and attacking, drives big ratings,” said the failed presidential candidate. 

    Hillary then called Trump voters racists and misogynists: 

    …I won the places that represent 2/3 of America’s gross domestic product. So I won the areas that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward. And his whole campaign “Make America Great Again,” was looking backwards.

    You know, you didn’t like black people getting rights, you don’t like women, you know, getting jobs, you don’t wanna see that Indian American succeeding more than you are. 

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

    Perhaps Clinton – whose “charitable” foundation paid top executive women $190,000 less than men, and had an average gender pay gap of $81,000 – forgot that black unemployment recently hit at an all time low under President Trump. But hey, all the racist Trump voters are why she lost…

    Speaking of excuses, the Daily Mail has created a handy list of all the other reasons Hillary failed to win the White House that’s simply too comprehensive not to share:

    JAMES COMEY

    Clinton is furious that Comey, then the FBI director, publicly revealed the re-opening of the secret email server investigation just before election day – and has said so time after time after time.

    THE FBI  

    Comey’s entire organization does not escape her wrath. 

    ‘The FBI wasn’t the Federal Bureau of Ifs or Innuendoes. Its job was to find out the facts,’ she writes in What Happened.

    VLADIMIR PUTIN

    ‘There’s no doubt in my mind that Putin wanted me to lose and wanted Trump to win,’ she told USA Today in September last year while promoting What Happened. 

    It was hardly a new theme. As early as December the New York Times obtained audio in which she told her donors: ‘Putin publicly blamed me for the outpouring of outrage by his own people, and that is the direct line between what he said back then and what he did in this election.’  

    THE RUSSIANS

    Putin’s entire apparatus gets a name-check. In May she told the Codecon convention how ‘1,000 Russian agents’ had filled Facebook with ‘fake news’.

    She told NPR ‘my path toward November was being disrupted with Russians’.

    WIKILEAKS 

    The ‘transparency website’ is consistently ranked along with Comey by Clinton at the top of her blame list.

    She told NPR : ‘Unfortunately the Comey letter, aided to great measure by the Russian WikiLeaks, raised all those doubts again.’

    And she writes of its founder Julian Assange in What Happened: ‘In my view, Assange is a hypocrite who deserves to be held accountable for his actions.’

    LOW INFORMATION VOTERS

    ‘You put yourself in the position of a low information voter, and all of a sudden your Facebook feed, your Twitter account is saying, “Oh my gosh, Hillary Clinton is running a child trafficking operation in Washington with John Podesta.”,’ she told the Codecon convention in May.

    ‘Well you don’t believe it but this has been such an unbelievable election, you kind of go, ‘Oh maybe I better look into that.”

    THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE

    ‘We have an electoral college problem. It’s an anachronism,’ she told Vox. 

    ANTI-AMERICAN FORCES

    ‘I think it’s important that we learn the real lessons from this last campaign because the forces that we are up against are not just interested in influencing our elections and our politics, they’re going after our economy and they’re going after our unity as a nation,’ she told Codecon in May.

    ‘What is hard for people to really accept – although now after the election there’s greater understanding – is that there are forces in our country – put the Russians to one side – who have been fighting rear guard actions for as long as I’ve been alive because my life coincided with the Civil Rights movement, with the women’s rights movement, with anti-war protesting, with the impeachment.

    EVERYONE WHO ASSUMED SHE WOULD WIN

    ‘I was the victim of a very broad assumption that I was going to win,’ she told the Codecon convention.

    BAD POLLING NUMBERS

    Clinton says polls in key states did not serve her. 

    ‘I think polling is going to have to undergo some revisions in how they actually measure people,’ she told the Codecon convention.

    ‘How they reach people. The best assessments as of right now are that the polling was not that inaccurate, but it was predominantly national polling and I won nationally.’

    BARACK OBAMA 

    Clinton has two beefs with Obama: one of them being that he won two terms. Clinton says that succeeding an incumbent is almost impossible for a Democrat.

    ‘No non-incumbent Democrat had run successfully to succeed another two-termer since Vice President Martin Van Buren won in 1836,’ she writes in What Happened.

    But she also says his response to the Russian campaign of interference wasn’t enough.

    ‘I do wonder sometimes about what would have happened if President Obama had made a televised address to the nation in the fall of 2016 warning that our democracy was under attack,’ she writes in What Happened. 

    WHITE WOMEN

    ‘I believe absent Comey, I might’ve picked up 1 or 2 points among white women,’ she told Vox in September.

    ‘White woman… are really quite politically dependent on their view of their own security and their own position in society what works and doesn’t work for them.’

    THE NEW YORK TIMES

    The newspaper was blamed as early as May at the Codecon conference in Rancho Palos Verde, California.

    She singled out its managing editor Dean Baquet – the paper’s most senior editor – and said of coverage of her email issue under his direction: ‘They covered it like it was Pearl Harbor.’

    JOE BIDEN

    Biden could have run against her and didn’t. But Clinton writes: ‘Joe Biden said the Democratic Party in 2016 ‘did not talk about what it always stood for—and that was how to maintain a burgeoning middle class.’

    ‘I find this fairly remarkable, considering that Joe himself campaigned for me all over the Midwest and talked plenty about the middle class.’

    BERNIE SANDERS

    ‘His attacks caused lasting damage, making it harder to unify progressives in the general election and paving the way for Trump’s ‘Crooked Hillary’ campaign,’ she writes in What Happened.

    ‘I don’t know if that bothered Bernie or not.’

    BERNIE BROS 

    ‘Some of his supporters, the so-called Bernie Bros, took to harassing my supporters online. It got ugly and more than a little sexist,’ she writes in What Happened. 

    PEOPLE WANTING CHANGE

    ‘I thought, at end of day, people would say, look, we do want change, and we want the right kind of change, and we want change that is realistic and is going to make difference in my life and my family’s life and my paycheck,’ she told Vox.

    ‘That’s what I was offering. And I didn’t in any way want to feed into this, not just radical political argument that was being made on other side, but very negative cultural argument about who we are as Americans.’

    MISOGYNISTS

    Asked by CNN’s Christine Amanpour at the Women for Women International event in new York in May if misogyny was to blame she said: ‘Yes, I do think it played a role.’  

    TELEVISION EXECUTIVES

    ‘When you have a presidential campaign and the total number of minutes on TV news, which is still how most people get their information, covering all of our policies, climate change, anything else was 32 minutes, I don’t blame voters,’ she told The View.

    ‘They don’t get a broad base of information to make decision on. The more outrageous you are, the more inflammatory you are, the higher the ratings are.’

    NETFLIX

    Hillary does not do Netflix and chill – or if she does, she doesn’t find it very relaxing.

    ‘Eight of the top 10 political documentaries on Netflix were screeds against President Obama and me,’ she claimed at the Codecon convention.

    FACEBOOK

    ‘If you look at Facebook the vast majority of the news items posted were fake. They were connected to as we now know the 1,000 Russian agents who were involved in delivering those messages,’ she told Codecon.

    TWITTER

    Usually mentioned in the same breath as Facebook, the micro-blogging site is seen by Clinton as one of the reasons for her loss. 

    She told the Codecon convention in may that Trump had a method in his tweets.

    ‘They want to influence your reality. That to me is what we’re up against, and we can’t let that go unanswered,’ she said.

    CONTENT FARMS IN MACEDONIA

    ‘Through content farms, through an enormous investment in falsehoods, fake news, call it what you will – lies, that’s a good word too – the other side was using content that was flat out false,’ she told the Codecon convention in May. 

    ‘They were conveying this weaponized information and the content of it, and they were running, y’know there’s all these stories, about y’know, and you know I’ve seen them now, and you sit there and it looks like you know sort of low level CNN operation, or a fake newspaper.’

    CAMPAIGN FINANCE

    ‘You had Citizens United come to its full fruition.’ she told Codecon in May.

    ‘So unaccountable money flowing in against me, against other Democrats, in a way that we hadn’t seen and then attached to this weaponized information war.

    THE MEDIA

    ‘American journalists who eagerly and uncritically repeated whatever WikiLeaks dished out during the campaign could learn from the responsible way the French press handled the hack of Macron,’ she writes in What Happened. 

    Now-president Macron had a massive tranche of his emails hacked and released shortly before the French voted. Many outlets did not report on their contents.  

    STEVE BANNON AND BREITBART

    ‘Provided the untrue stories,’ she told the Codecon convention in May. 

    THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY 

    ‘I set up my campaign and we have our own data operation. I get the nomination. So I’m now the nominee of the Democratic Party. I inherit nothing from the Democratic Party,’ Clinton said told the Codecon convention in May.

     ‘I mean, it was bankrupt. It was on the verge of insolvency. Its data was mediocre to poor, nonexistent, wrong. I had to inject money into it.’

    THE REPUBLICAN PARTY

    The Republicans were far better prepared for a campaign than the Democrats she claimed, when it came to money and data, telling the Codecon convention: ‘So Trump becomes the nominee and he is basically handed this tried and true, effective foundation.’ 

    CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA

    The data-targeting firm ultimately owned by Robert Mercer, the billionaire Breitbart backer, and his family, is said to have targeted voters to drive them away from Clinton.

    ‘They ultimately added something and I think again we’d better understand that. The Mercers did not invest all that money for their own amusement,’ she told the Codecon convention.

    WOMEN PROTESTERS

    The massive demonstrations in Washington and other cities in the wake of the election were organized as an immediate response to Clinton’s shock defeat.

    But that did not stop Clinton from writing in What Happened: ‘I couldn’t help but ask where those feelings of solidarity, outrage and passion had been during the election.’

    MATT LAUER

    The NBC Today show anchor quizzed both candidates at a ‘commander-in-chief forum’ on board Intrepid in New York. 

    But Clinton – who went first in the back-to-back interviews, complained about Lauer focusing on her secret server and whether it raised questions over her trustworthiness.

    ‘Lauer had turned what should have been a serious discussion into a pointless ambush. What a waste of time,’ she writes in What Happened. She later delighted in his firing for sexual misconduct, saying in December: ‘Every day I believe more in karma.’ 

    WHITE VOTERS

    ‘White voters have been fleeing the Democratic party ever since Lyndon Johnson predicted they would,’ she told Vox.  

    DEMOCRATIC DOCUMENTARY MAKERS 

    ‘We’re not making the documentaries that we’re going to get onto Netflix,’ she told Codecon.

    She was asked by the interviewer: ‘This is because Hollywood isn’t liberal enough?’

    ‘No, it’s because Democrats aren’t putting their money there,’ she replied. 

    BENGHAZI INVESTIGATORS

    The attacks on the U.S. diplomatic compound in the Libyan city of Benghazi on September 11, 2012, happened when Clinton was Secretary of State. It claimed four American lives, and was the focus of intense investigation by Congress.  

    Clinton told the Today show: ‘Take the Benghazi tragedy – you know, I have one of the top Republicans, Kevin McCarthy, admitting we’re going to take that tragedy – because, you know, we’ve lost people, unfortunately, going back to the Reagan administration, if you talk about recent times, in diplomatic attacks.

    ‘But boy, it was turned into a political football. And it was aimed at undermining my credibility, my record, my accomplishments.’

    VOTER SUPPRESSION

    Suppressing her voters was named by Clinton as one of the major factors in her defeat in her interview on the Today show when she rattled off her laundry list. ‘What was at work here?’ she said.

    ‘In addition to the mistakes that I made, which I recount in the book, what about endemic sexism and misogyny, not just in politics but in our society, what about the unprecedented action of the FBI director,  what about the interference of an adversary nation, what about voter suppression?’ 

    It was a return to a theme – she suggested it was a problem in Wisconsin in an interview in May with New York magazine.

    ‘I would have won had I not been subjected to the unprecedented attacks by Comey and the Russians, aided and abetted by the suppression of the vote, particularly in Wisconsin,’ she said. 

    ‘Republicans learned that if you suppress votes you win.’

    MITCH McCONNELL

    The Senate majority leader is accused of stopping the Obama administration from revealing what Clinton says the Russians were up to, helping tip the balance against her because he did not want a third successive Democratic term in the White House.  

    ‘Mitch McConnell, in what I think of as a not only unpatriotic but despicable act of partisan politics, made it clear that if the Obama Administration spoke publicly about what they knew [on Russia], he would accuse them of partisan politics, of trying to tip the balance toward me,’ she told the New Yorker.   

    THE SUPREME COURT

    Clinton claims the Supreme Court watered down the Voting Rights Act at the Codecon convention.

    ‘You had effective suppression of votes,’ she said.

    ‘I was in the senate when we voted 98-0 under a Republican president, George W Bush, to extend the Voting Rights Act and the Supreme Court says ‘oh we don’t need it any more’ , throws it out, and Republican governors and legislatures began doing everything they could to suppress the votes.’

    Clinton appears to be referring to Second 4(b) of the Act being ruled unconstitutional by the court in 2013, because it relied on out of date data which meant it was not in line with the 15th Amendment. 

    FATHERS, HUSBANDS, BOYFRIENDS, AND MALE BOSSES

    Clinton says that James Comey’s actions in re-opening the FBI investigation allowed men to influence their wives or girlfriends.

    ‘Women will have no empathy for you because they will be under tremendous pressure – and I’m talking principally about white women – they will be under tremendous pressure from fathers, and husbands, and boyfriends and male employers, not to vote for ‘the girl’,’ she told NPR. 

    THE INVISIBLE STATE

    The newest addition to the list: named by her confidante Lanny Davis as the reason she lost at a reading of his book while Hillary nodded along in approval. 

     

  • Synchronized Global Growth is Ending: Shocks Come Next

    Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com,

    Economic pleasant surprises are in the past, as is the buildup of the balance sheet. The future is deleveraging.

    Alarm bells are ringing. No one cares. By now, everyone knows stock only go up.

    For those in tune with other ideas, Financial Times writer Stephen King suggests the Global Economy is Due for a Downswing.

    Jim Bianco at Bianco Research comments on synchronized growth in his report Concerted Economic Growth is in Jeopardy of Ending.

    Summary

    Less than 50% of the world’s economies are now producing economic data surprises. Realized economic data following suit in the months to come would remove the tailwind of ‘concerted economic growth’ for risk assets and central banks. Emerging markets may be first on the list to experience higher volatility.

    Comment

    We have all been discussing ‘concerted global economic growth’ since early 2017 as a tailwind to risk assets and central bank policies. The chart below shows the percentage of the world’s economies producing economic data surprises (orange line) and above-average data changes (blue line) since 2004.

    Over 90% of economies were indeed posting realized data changes at above-average growth rates in mid-2017. However, reported data has slowed its ascent over the past month led by the Eurozone and Canada. The percentage of economies with upside surprises has fallen to 44%, which has been a leading indicator for actual data changes like payrolls, industrial production, and durable goods orders. Above-average data changes have also rolled over to 67%. A break below 50% would mean ‘concerted economic growth’ should no longer be proclaimed.

    Economic Misses

    The next chart offers the median returns by major asset classes after the percentage of economies growing above-average falls below 60%. The impact is not immediate, but higher volatility and drawdowns do ensue over the following months.

    We expect U.S. Treasuries will slow their climb in this event, helping promote more steady, positive returns by the likes of municipal bonds. Emerging markets, U.S. high yield, and the S&P 500 are not necessarily expected to tumble, but higher volatility will remain the theme.

    That’s a portion of the article, click on the link for a free trial and the rest of it. No credit cards required.

    Optimistic View

    Compared to me, John Hussman, GMO, and a handful of others, Bianco presents an optimistic view. Then again, I am not watching the next 3-4 months. I am concerned about the next seven years.

    What most caught my eye is Bianco’s view on the MSCI World Index and US treasuries.

    Typically, rot starts at the periphery, the spreads to the core. Anyone remember subprime? Eventually, it all became subprime.

    It’s going to happen again.

    Arithmetic of Risk

    Stocks are tremendously overvalued. In Sucker Traps and the Arithmetic of Risk I noted that some expect equities to decline as much as 67% from here.

    I think we are somewhere in the box as shown.

    Unlike Bianco, I won’t put a timeframe on much of anything. But note his big winner: 10-year US treasuries.

    This is at a time when most of the rest of the world is screaming inflation.

    My view is that Inflation is in the Rear-View Mirror.

    Debt-deflation is on the way and gold will be the beneficiary. If you disagree, please read the above article before moaning.

    My definition of inflation may not be the same as yours. Mine is based on real-world economics, and we are in for a world of hurt.

  • Russia Retires "Satan": Moscow Replaces Massive Soviet-Era ICBM With Hypersonic Nuke

    Just as the US is in the process of modernizing its nuclear arsenal  (at a cost which could be north of $1 trillion), Russia too will begin scrapping its family of outdated Soviet-era R-36M ICBMs, better known by their NATO designation “Satan“, according to the Russian Defense Ministry. The replacement missile will be the recently introduced RS-28 Sarmat, which we learned two weeks ago boasts cutting-edge, hypersonic capabilities.

    The video below showcases the original “Satan” in its glory days:

    And here is the RS-28 Sarmat, aka “Satan II.”

    “[The Satan missile] is at the end of its life span, and we are about to start discarding that missile,” the Russian Deputy Defense Minister Yury Borisov said. Borisov did not elaborate on the exact model though.

    The R-36M intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) was first deployed in 1975, becoming the most powerful silo-based strategic nuclear munition in the world. Two further modifications of the missile were made since then, and its booster stage also received tweaks according to RT.

    The latest modification of the liquid-propelled missile is known in Russia as R-36M2 Voevoda, but in the West it’s dubbed with the fearsome name, “Satan.” The aging weapon will be replaced with new-generation Sarmat missiles, which are to become the latest additions to Russian arsenal, Borisov said.

    “There is no doubt that by the end of Voevoda’s resource capabilities, we will get new Sarmat missiles,” he said.

    The ICBM is capable of overcoming missile defense systems and has already completed tests, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced during his state of the nation address on March 1.

    The missile has “practically no range restrictions” and is capable of carrying a wide range of nuclear weapons. Sarmat missiles are compatible with existing R-36M silos and can fit into them with just some minor modification.

    Just hours after Russia showcased its latest nuclear ICBM, a Darpa director demanded  much more funding to avoid falling behind Russia (and China) in the hypersonic arms race.

  • America's Troll Farm Media

    Authored by Gerald Sussman via CounterPunch.org,

    Despite all the smoke and mirrors, most Americans seem to see where the stenographers of corporate capitalism are taking us. A recent Gallup poll found that while 84% of Americans see media as “critical” or “very important” to democracy, only 28% see the corporatist mainstream news media (MSM) as actually supporting democracy. They’re right on both counts of course.  The quality of a democracy is only as good as the information people have to make informed judgements about public policy and politicians.

    Even as the mainstream news media continue to lose street cred, they persist in a rumor-saturated full court press against the “Trump-Putin presidency,” which only further exposes their lack of professionalism and increasing vulgarity. MSM management and their boardroom bosses have long understood that as long as they spice up their “nothing burger” news, ratings and advertising rates will keep them in business and please their commercial and government clients. Tabloid journalism, which can describe most American mainstream media these days, even when wrapped up as “all the news that’s fit to print,” is in constant search of sensation, scandal, gossip, and profit – and only occasionally in public-oriented investigative integrity.

    What else does the citizenry have to say? A mere 18% have “a lot” of trust in the MSM, while 74% see them as “biased” (Pew Research, July 2016). A study by the Harvard-Harris polling organization in May 2017 confirmed this, finding that 65 percent of Americans consider the so-called “free press” biased, obsessed with scandal, and full of “fake news” and therefore cannot be trusted. Among the concurring are a majority of both Democrats (53%) and Independents (60%) as well as 80% of Republicans. Amongst the “informed public,” trust in American institutions in general, that is, the government, business, NGOs, and the MSM, is going through the worst crisis in recorded history, according to the marketing firm Edelman in 2018. The US is the lowest rated of the 28 countries surveyed by the firm on this measure. This is not consistent with the image of a serious “democracy.”

    On the MSM coverage of national politics, Americans are equally skeptical. A June 2017 Rasmussen survey of likely American voters indicated that 50% think most reporters are prejudiced against the president, and only 4% believe most reporters are biased in Trump’s favor. Although this is weighted by the 76% of Republicans who support this view, the study also found that 51% of independent voters and even 24% of Democrats also agree. Aided by the billions of dollars of free, almost all negative, publicity the MSM provided, with apparent reverse effect during the presidential campaign, Trump’s standing is also supported by the 47 million American shock troops that faithfully follow him on Twitter.

    On January 27, 2018, the Washington Post editorial board issued this statement: “A foreign power interfered in the 2016 presidential election. U.S. law enforcement is trying to get to the bottom of that story. Congress should be doing everything possible to make sure the investigation can take place.” Obviously referring to Russia, the Post’s declaration, as the late investigative journalist Robert Parry and many other independent and respected writers have pointed out, was and remains without a shred of evidence. It’s WMD time all over again, only this time the propaganda is being trumpeted mainly by the Democrats. It would better serve the cause of democracy to investigate the Post for its covert coalition and collusion with the deep state and the Clinton (right) wing of the Democratic Party. The Post and the rest of their pack have constructed a wicked Russia foil in order to undermine Moscow’s presumed ally Trump and boost bigger Pentagon budgets. It’s an extremely dangerous game that is headed toward military confrontation and massive annihilation by the yahoos in government and the liberal media.

    But it’s not a new game, because despite their “free press” claims, American major news media have long been instruments of state propaganda. In the 1970s, Carl Bernstein exposed the fact that the overseas branches of US MSM had long served as eyes and ears of the CIA’s “Operation Mockingbird,” and it’s very likely than many amongst their ranks remain agency assets. Back then, Philip Graham, publisher of the Post, ran the agency’s media industry operations, a fact not mentioned in the currently showing eponymous film. During the GW Bush presidency, the Pentagon recruited over 75 military generals to spread propaganda in the mass media, fed in camera by leaders at the Defense Department, the State Department, the Justice Department, and the White House. Their responsibilities included their employment as “objective” foreign policy and war analysts for major network and cable news channels, many of them concurrently receiving pay by military contracting firms. The Pentagon referred to the on-air military propagandists as “surrogates” and “message force multipliers.”

    The Russians are Coming

    In February 2018, former CIA director John Brennan, the man who fed the Russian “hacking” story to the House Intelligence Committee, became a senior national security and intelligence analyst for NBC and MSNBC in what has become standard revolving door practice between government and the corporate world. Brennan was a well-known advocate for the CIA’s rendition and torture program, spying on its critics, and its use of drone bombings and assassinations in the Middle East. And he certainly knows something about hacking, as he was forced to admit, after first lying about it, that his CIA hacked the computers of Senate staffers who were investigating the agency’s role in torturing prisoners. A man the MSM apparently regard as having impeccable credentials for truth telling.

    If the Russia “hacking” story has no legs, the more interesting piece of news is the organized efforts of the Democrats and some Republicans to bring down Trump and turn over the White House to theocrat Mike Pence. Mainstream pundits and reporters are churning out unsubstantiated speculations about Russia and Trump by the hour. A number of Democrats, military brass, and mercenary journalist (and former country club caddy) Thomas Friedman have characterized alleged Russian intervention as a new “Pearl Harbor” or “9/11,” thereby building a case for war and for treason against the president. There’s no downside to making even the most absurd claims about Russia and Trump, no penalty for fabrications, misrepresentations, or getting facts wrong. If they were honest, their ledes might read: “This fictional news report is loosely based on a true story.” Or: “Any resemblance in this story to real people and events is merely coincidental.”

    There’s room in the inferno for the Democrats’ deep state allies. Starting in mid-2015, Peter Strzok, the FBI’s H. Clinton personal email scandal investigator before taking the lead in the probe of Russian election interference, sent emails to his lover, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, which  clearly revealed that both of them were actively working for the Clinton campaign to undermine Trump in any way possible. The pair also exchanged references to a “secret society” that was operating within the Department of Justice and the FBI to block a Trump victory. Until their exposure, Strzok had been Robert Mueller’s right hand man on the Trump-Russia investigation.

    Meanwhile, two years later, the hunt for the smoking Kalashnikov continues. The best the MSM have come up with is that a St. Petersburg outfit called Internet Research Agency (IRA) placed $100,000 in ads on Facebook (compared to the $81 million Facebook ad spending by the Trump and Clinton campaigns), some of the Russian ads actually directed against Trump. As Jeffrey St. Clair pointed out in the pages of CounterPunch, in the key states where Clinton lost the election, the traditional Democrat strongholds of Michigan ($832 spent on token IRA buy ads), Pennsylvania ($300), and Wisconsin ($1,979), all but $54 of this amount was spent beforethe party primaries even started.

    Facebook’s vice president for advertising Rob Goldman said that in fact most of the total Russian ad buys occurred after the presidential election. “We shared that fact,” he tweeted, “but very few [news] outlets have covered it because it doesn’t align with the main media narrative” about Trump’s election victory. Winning the election for Trump was simply not the Russian objective, Goldman says. Alex Stamos, Facebook chief security officer, concurred. The ads, he said, were more about sowing discord, with messages about guns, immigrants, and racial strife, than on pushing a particular candidate. Think about all the blockbuster American (and British) movies that portray Russians as sinister, violent, and criminal. For starters, remember über-teutonic Ivan Drago, Sgt. Yushin, the many sadistic “Russian” mafia nogoodniks, along with the Cold War-for-children cartoon characters, Boris Badanov and Natasha Fatale? Among the many Russophobic films and TV shows over the decades: The Americans, Air Force One, The Peacemaker, The Saint, Rambo III, Red Dawn, Red Heat, the James Bond flicks, and the 2018 Oscar for documentaries, Icarus. Soviet and Russia-era films, not well tutored in ethnic caricatures, have no comparable stereotypical American counterparts.

    There are a few signs of life in mainstream journalism. New York Times correspondent Scott Shane was one of the few journalists who happened to notice that the US intelligence agency (the CIA, NSA, and FBI) report of January 6, 2017 on Russian “hacking” actually offered no evidence. “Instead,” he said, “the message from the agencies essentially amounts to ‘trust us.’” It took the mainstream media 6 months before they acknowledged that the Obama administration claim that 17 intelligence agencies backed the hacking claim was false, the real number was only 3, and even the NSA had only “moderate confidence” in the finding. Last January, the NSA made a significant alteration in its mission statement: it removed the words “honesty” and the pledge to be truthful from its list of priorities.

    Even if there were genuine evidence that Russian officials had hacked the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign manager John Podesta emails, as originally claimed by the intelligence agencies, one should put this in context of the long history of the CIA’s efforts to overthrow many democratically elected leaders who had the temerity to stand up to the superpower. These would include Allende, Arbenz, Mossadeq, Lumumba, Chavez, Goulart, Ortega, and others. The list of US interventions in foreign elections just since 1948 (Italy) is voluminous. Do the mainstream media suffer amnesia about Victoria Nuland and John McCain’s presence in the Maidan, egging on the coup against Yanukovych or her infamous leaked phone call to the US ambassador in Kiev in which she dictated the ousted president’s successors? And is it reasonable to expect Russia to be passive about a hostile NATO putting troops along its borders and reacting to efforts to install an anti-Russian regime next door in the Ukraine? In this recent historical context, US accusations of Russian political interference smack of complete hypocrisy.

    A study by Carnegie Mellon professor Dov Levin found that between 1946 and 2000 alone, the US intervened in foreign elections 81 times, which does not include its invasions, blockades, sanctions, assassination attempts, and other regime change initiatives. “The U.S. is no stranger to interfering in the elections of other countries,” he wrote. In 1996, the US intervened in the Russian election to prevent the Communist Party from returning to power. Have the MSM also forgotten the lies the government and the CIA told about Saddam Hussein’s WMD and connections to terrorist movements? Or that, thanks to Edward Snowden’s exposés, we know that Obama’s NSA bugged the phones of 35 foreign political leaders?

    If the MSM are still confused, perhaps they should listen to former CIA director James Woolsey. Interviewed by Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, Woolsey was asked directly whether the US ever interfered with other countries’ elections. He initially said, “probably, but it was for the good of the system in order to avoid the communists from taking over.” Ingraham followed up with the question, “We don’t do that now?” To this Woolsey responded, “nyum, nyum, nyum, nyum, nyum, only for a very good cause,” a rather frank admission that merely amused Ingraham, who failed to follow up with this obvious statement of US double standards. After leaving the CIA, Woolsey became chairman of Freedom House, a right-wing government-supported private NGO that putatively supports human rights causes and has been active in regime change operations around the world – far more actively than merely doing Facebook postings.

    William Binney, formerly with NSA as a high-level intelligence operative, subsequently becoming a whistleblower on the agency’s illegal surveillance operations, called the alleged Russian attacks on the DNC “a charade.” Speaking to Daniel Bernstein at Consortium News, Binney said that had any bulk transmissions come from across the Atlantic, the NSA would have known about it, as they tap every communication from abroad. The data from “Guccifer 2.0,” was a download “not a transfer across the Web,” which “won’t manage such high speed.” The intelligence agencies “have been playing games with us.  There is no factual evidence to back up any charge of hacking here.” It was likely no more than a USB transfer, he said.

    Is there any hope for the mainstream media to change? It would take a revolution to get the MSM to become more democratic. A Harvard Shorenstein Center report found that media coverage of the 2016 US party conventions contained almost no discussion of policy issues and instead concentrated on polling data, scandals, campaign tactics, and Trump and Russia bashing. Leslie Moonves, CEO of CBS, spoke for the media establishment: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS …. The money’s rolling in …. It’s a terrible thing to say. But bring it on, Donald.”

    As Walter Cronkite would say, “And that’s the way it is.”

  • Krieger: "Foreign Government Lobbying Is An Abomination, Should Be Eradicated Immediately" – Part 2

    Authored by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

    The sensitivities are especially important when it comes to the Qatari government — the single biggest foreign donor to Brookings.

    Brookings executives cited strict internal policies that they said ensure their scholars’ work is “not influenced by the views of our funders,” in Qatar or in Washington. They also pointed to several reports published at the Brookings Doha Center in recent years that, for example, questioned the Qatari government’s efforts to revamp its education system or criticized the role it has played in supporting militants in Syria.

    But in 2012, when a revised agreement was signed between Brookings and the Qatari government, the Qatar Ministry of Foreign Affairs itself praised the agreement on its website, announcing that “the center will assume its role in reflecting the bright image of Qatar in the international media, especially the American ones.” Brookings officials also acknowledged that they have regular meetings with Qatari government officials about the center’s activities and budget, and that the former Qatar prime minister sits on the center’s advisory board.

    Mr. Ali, who served as one of the first visiting fellows at the Brookings Doha Center after it opened in 2009, said such a policy, though unwritten, was clear.

    “There was a no-go zone when it came to criticizing the Qatari government,” said Mr. Ali, who is now a professor at the University of Queensland in Australia. “It was unsettling for the academics there. But it was the price we had to pay.”

    – From the 2014 New York Times article: Foreign Powers Buy Influence at Think Tanks

    The purpose of this short series is to give readers a small glimpse of how foreign governments spray around enormous sums of money throughout the Washington D.C. swamp to influence U.S. foreign policy.

    Part 1 discussed the role of lobbyists in this grotesque and dangerous scheme. Specifically, lobbyists who work on behalf of a foreign government are supposed to register as foreign agents under the 1938 Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA), but the law has no teeth in practice and is riddled with gigantic loopholes that ensure the sums of foreign lobbying happening is far beyond numbers reported under FARA.

    As despicable as lobbyists running around D.C. as hired guns for foreign interests are, think tanks doing essentially the same thing are even more pernicious. At least lobbyists who register under FARA aren’t hiding what they do under an aura of respectability and academic rigor. Think tanks, on the other hand, act like prestigious paragons of policy formation and analysis, while taking enormous sums of money from foreign governments.

    In some cases what’s expected from these think tanks is explicitly stated and documented, while other times the expectations, while implicit, clearly exist. It’s the arrogance and dishonesty of many of these major think tanks that really gets under my skin.

    Bottom line.

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

    One of the more comprehensive articles on how foreign governments essentially pay for policy, access and research via think tanks was published back in 2014 in the New York Times titled, Foreign Powers Buy Influence at Think Tanks.

    Let’s take a look at some excerpts from that piece for some background on what’s going on:

    More than a dozen prominent Washington research groups have received tens of millions of dollars from foreign governments in recent years while pushing United States government officials to adopt policies that often reflect the donors’ priorities, an investigation by The New York Times has found.

    The money is increasingly transforming the once-staid think-tank world into a muscular arm of foreign governments’ lobbying in Washington. And it has set off troubling questions about intellectual freedom: Some scholars say they have been pressured to reach conclusions friendly to the government financing the research.

    The think tanks do not disclose the terms of the agreements they have reached with foreign governments. And they have not registered with the United States government as representatives of the donor countries, an omission that appears, in some cases, to be a violation of federal law, according to several legal specialists who examined the agreements at the request of The Times.

    As a result, policy makers who rely on think tanks are often unaware of the role of foreign governments in funding the research.

    The arrangements involve Washington’s most influential think tanks, including the Brookings Institution, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the Atlantic Council. Each is a major recipient of overseas funds, producing policy papers, hosting forums and organizing private briefings for senior United States government officials that typically align with the foreign governments’ agendas.

    Most of the money comes from countries in Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere in Asia, particularly the oil-producing nations of the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Norway, and takes many forms. The United Arab Emirates, a major supporter of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, quietly provided a donation of more than $1 million to help build the center’s gleaming new glass and steel headquarters not far from the White House. Qatar, the small but wealthy Middle East nation, agreed last year to make a $14.8 million, four-year donation to Brookings, which has helped fund a Brookings affiliate in Qatar and a project on United States relations with the Islamic world.

    Some scholars say the donations have led to implicit agreements that the research groups would refrain from criticizing the donor governments…

    The scope of foreign financing for American think tanks is difficult to determine. But since 2011, at least 64 foreign governments, state-controlled entities or government officials have contributed to a group of 28 major United States-based research organizations, according to disclosures by the institutions and government documents. What little information the organizations volunteer about their donors, along with public records and lobbying reports filed with American officials by foreign representatives, indicates a minimum of $92 million in contributions or commitments from overseas government interests over the last four years. The total is certainly more.

    As noted above, the think tanks apparently do not disclose the terms of the agreements they’ve reached with foreign governments, which seems problematic since it provides a ripe environment for corruption and intellectual dishonesty. This also seems to be why Norway is so central to the NYT exposé — its relatively transparent open records laws provide much needed detail about how these relationships are structured.

    For example:

    The agreement signed last year by the Norway Ministry of Foreign Affairs was explicit: For $5 million, Norway’s partner in Washington would push top officials at the White House, at the Treasury Department and in Congress to double spending on a United States foreign aid program.

    But the recipient of the cash was not one of the many Beltway lobbying firms that work every year on behalf of foreign governments.

    It was the Center for Global Development, a nonprofit research organization, or think tank, one of many such groups in Washington that lawmakers, government officials and the news media have long relied on to provide independent policy analysis and scholarship…

    “In Washington, it is difficult for a small country to gain access to powerful politicians, bureaucrats and experts,” states an internal report commissioned by the Norwegian Foreign Affairs Ministry assessing its grant making. “Funding powerful think tanks is one way to gain such access, and some think tanks in Washington are openly conveying that they can service only those foreign governments that provide funding.”…

    The country has committed at least $24 million to an array of Washington think tanks over the past four years, according to a tally by The Times, transforming these nonprofits into a powerful but largely hidden arm of the Norway Foreign Affairs Ministry. Documents obtained under that country’s unusually broad open records laws reveal that American research groups, after receiving money from Norway, have advocated in Washington for enhancing Norway’s role in NATO, promoted its plans to expand oil drilling in the Arctic and pushed its climate change agenda…

    But Norway’s agreement imposed very specific demands on the Center for Global Development. The research organization, in return for Norway’s money, was not simply asked to publish reports on combating climate change. The project documents ask the think tank to persuade Washington officials to double United States spending on global forest protection efforts to $500 million a year.

    Don’t let the fact that it’s Norway and the issues involved are deforestation and Arctic drilling let you take your eye off the ball. The reason Norway is central to the exposé is because its open laws offer transparency into the details of these partnerships. If Norway’s doing it, you can be sure viciously brutal and autocratic regimes are doing the same.

    Moreover, the money being thrown around has real world consequences. Take, for example, what happened to Michelle Dunn:

    Michele Dunne served for nearly two decades as a specialist in Middle Eastern affairs at the State Department, including stints in Cairo and Jerusalem, and on the White House National Security Council. In 2011, she was a natural choice to become the founding director of the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East, named after the former prime minister of Lebanon, who was assassinated in 2005.

    The center was created with a generous donation from Bahaa Hariri, his eldest son, and with the support of the rest of the Hariri family, which has remained active in politics and business in the Middle East. Another son of the former prime minister served as Lebanon’s prime minister from 2009 to 2011.

    But by the summer of 2013, when Egypt’s military forcibly removed the country’s democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi, Ms. Dunne soon realized there were limits to her independence. After she signed a petition and testified before a Senate Foreign Relations Committee urging the United States to suspend military aid to Egypt, calling Mr. Morsi’s ouster a “military coup,” Bahaa Hariri called the Atlantic Council to complain, executives with direct knowledge of the events said.

    Ms. Dunne declined to comment on the matter. But four months after the call, Ms. Dunne left the Atlantic Council…

    Ms. Dunne was replaced by Francis J. Ricciardone Jr., who served as United States ambassador to Egypt during the rule of Hosni Mubarak, the longtime Egyptian military and political leader forced out of power at the beginning of the Arab Spring. Mr. Ricciardone, a career foreign service officer, had earlier been criticized by conservatives and human rights activists for being too deferential to the Mubarak government.

    Surely just a coincidence.

    Let’s now fast forward to 2018. As the mass media bombards the U.S. public with Russia conspiracy theories nonstop, foreign interests have become more aggressive when it comes to influencing U.S. policy and personnel. Take for instance what we just learned regarding the UAE’s apparent attempt to get Rex Tillerson fired for his skepticism regarding the idiotic Saudi-UAE blockade against Qatar.

    The BBC reported:

    The BBC has obtained leaked emails that show a lobbying effort to get US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson sacked for failing to support the United Arab Emirates against regional rival Qatar.

    Major Trump fundraiser and UAE-linked businessman Elliott Broidy met US President Donald Trump in October 2017 and urged him to sack Mr Tillerson, the emails reveal.

    In other emails, he calls the top US diplomat “a tower of Jello”, “weak” and says he “needs to be slammed”…

    Mr Broidy’s defence company Circinus has hundreds of millions of dollars worth of contracts with the UAE, according to the New York Times newspaper.

    He had recently returned from the UAE when he met Mr Trump at the White House in October.

    According to a memorandum he prepared of the meeting, Mr Broidy urged continued support of US allies the UAE and Saudi Arabia and advised Mr Trump against getting involved in last year’s row with Qatar…

    He also said he advised the president on Mr Tillerson – who was “performing poorly and should be fired at a politically convenient time”.

    What have we learned? There’s simply too much money being thrown around the D.C. swamp by foreign governments to buy influence. Understanding this helps explain why U.S. foreign policy is so consistently wasteful, insane and suicidal.

    Unfortunately,  you won’t hear much about this from the mass media. Pointing it out isn’t particularly profitable.

    Part 1 if you missed it: Foreign Government Lobbying is an Abomination and Should Be Eradicated Immediately – Part 1

    *  *  *

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Mar 12

Today’s News 12th March 2018

  • Fly Or Drive? Audi Unveils AI-Controlled Flying Smart-Car

    Considerable improvements in battery technologies and technological advances in manned electric flight have spurred established automakers to begin examining the feasibility of flying automobiles, as both Audi and Porsche have mentioned their plans to develop flying cars to avoid congested highways.

    During the 87th Geneva International Motor Show, Audi and Airbus partnered with Italdesign to premiere Pop.Up Next, the first modular, fully electric, zero-emission concept vehicle system designed to alleviate traffic congestion in large populated areas.

    Pop.Up Next is a modular system for multi-modal transportation that can travel on roadways and across the skies.

    Audi, Airbus, and Italdesign developed the unmanned drone system that attaches itself to an electric vehicle – turning it into a flying passenger aircraft, as a joint reflection on how to address mobility challenges of large cities.

    With traffic congestion projected to hugely increase by 2030, the companies decided to combine their engineering expertise to tackle how to best achieve a sustainable, modular and multimodal urban mobility system – giving rise to the Pop.Up concept.

    Pop.Up Next consists of a three layers concept:

    • an Artificial Intelligence platform that, based on its user knowledge, manages the travel complexity offering alternative usage scenarios and assuring a seamless travel experience;

    • a vehicle shaped as a passenger capsule designed to be coupled with two different and independent electric propelled modules, the ground module and the air module. Other public means of transportation (e.g. trains or hyperloops) could also integrate the Pop.Up capsule;

    • – an interface module that dialogues with users in an entirely virtual environment.

    The vehicle is a two-seat pod that can quickly snap into a chassis with four wheels and autonomous driving technology for roadway travel, or easily converts to a quadcopter drone for flying. While Audi has yet to release details on speed, altitude or range, the overall progress of flying cars seems to be a reality in the not too distant future.

    Dr. Bernd Martens, Audi board member and president of Italdesign, said in a statement: “Creativity is needed where new mobility concepts for cities and people’s diverse needs are concerned. Italdesign is an incubator for innovative technologies and radical prototyping.”

    “Pop.Up Next is an ambitious vision that could permanently change our urban life in the future,” his statement added.

    Here are a few illustrations of the vehicle concept displayed at the Geneva Auto Show:

    Jörg Astalosch, CEO of Italdesign, said: “Various players will define the rules of urban mobility in the future. We are proud to collaborate with Airbus, the leading company in the aerospace industry, to investigate solutions for future mobility.”

    Here is how Italdesign’s Official YouTube channel describes the flying car:

    Pop.Up Next reflects the philosophy driving Italdesign’s 50th anniversary celebrations, anticipating the challenges that the next fifty years will bring. It represents a vision of the potential offered by future technologies, the new concept of transportation and the new solutions for resolving the problems linked to city planning and traffic in large urban centres that are increasingly becoming one of the priority aspects for safeguarding our planet. Next is evidence of the success achieved by Pop.Up over the past year amongst the main players in the transportation world, the municipalities and institutions worldwide.

    Earlier this week, Porsche R&D chief Michael Steiner told Reuters at the Geneva show that his team of researchers are in the process of developing flying taxis for urban use. Interesting to note, Audi and Porsche, are both owned by the Volkswagen Group, which it seems, the European automobile manufacturer is pushing their brands into the flying car space.

    Meanwhile, in the United States, Boeing and Uber are developing a flying taxi which could be zipping around the skies of America within the next ten years.

    That is according to Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenberg, who said, “it [flying taxis] will happen faster than any of us understand,” in a Bloomberg interview.

    According to the latest research by Deloitte, more than a dozen drone and flying automobile manufacturers have already passed conceptualization/design phase, and a majority of the manufacturers are currently exiting the prototype stage into the testing phase, with most manufactures targeting launch/delivery by 2020.

    “If safety and regulatory hurdles are cleared, passenger drones are expected to get wings by 2018–2020, and traditional flying cars by 2020–2022, while revolutionary vehicles could be a reality only by 2025,” Deloitte reported.  

  • With World Focused On North Korea, Japan Quietly Expands Its Military Might

    Authored by Peter Korzun via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    Washington claims China is rapidly expanding its military might, posing a threat to the US and its allies in the Asia Pacific region. Beijing is one of the focal points of America’s national security plan that was unveiled in January, singled out along with Russia. The US military brass hats have raised the alarm over China’s recent defense budget hike, despite the fact that its per capita defense spending is lower than that of other major world powers. They say China is not transparent enough and that this further complicates the problem.

    Transparency is a good thing but it may not reveal the whole picture. One may appear to be open and above-board but still be hiding one’s real plans and intentions. For instance, Japan is ranked among the world’s ten most peaceful nations. Threatened by N. Korea and China, it appears to be an innocent victim looking to the US for protection.

    That’s one side of the coin. But there is also another side.

    The Japanese constitution forbids offensive weapons.

    Aircraft carriers are generally considered to belong to this category, and for this reason they are called “helicopter destroyers” in Japan. For instance, the Izumo-class air-capable destroyers are as big as British Invincible-class aircraft carriers. The warships can be modernized to turn them into real flat tops and that’s exactly what the Japanese government plans to do. Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera said on March 2 that the military is considering the possibility of deploying US-made F-35B short takeoff and vertical landing (STOVL) fighters on the helicopter carriers. China has already expressed its concern over the plan.

    The F-35 Lightning II supersonic stealth aircraft can be easily configured to carry nukes. Arming the air-capable warships of a non-nuclear state with nuclear-capable aircraft constitutes a violation of the NPT Treaty, which prohibits nuclear states from transferring nukes to other recipients. It also bans non-nuclear states from acquiring them.

    The first land-based nuclear-capable F-35A variant fighter was delivered to Japan in late February. US military instructors would train Japanese military personnel to operate this offensive weapon. South Korea also plans to follow Japan’s example and put American aircraft on its aviation-capable ships. That’s how the policy of nonproliferation slowly begins to crumble.

    Japan uses Pyongyang’s nuclear ambitions to justify its plans to acquire US-made Tomahawk sea-based cruise missiles – another weapon that could potentially be nuclear tipped. The plans also include the acquisition of JASSM-ER and LRASM missiles, each of which has a range of roughly 900 km (559 mi). These are not defensive weapons.

    Last year, US President Trump said at a joint press conference with Japanese PM Abe that “Japan is going to be purchasing massive amounts of military equipment.”

    Tokyo is also looking into developing its own standoff cruise missile that can be launched from ships, aircraft, and land launchers to strike ground and sea targets. Any new long-range cruise missile could be integrated with Aegis Mk-41 launchers. It’s almost certain that ground-based Aegis Ashore systems will be at least partially operated by US military personnel. So, a medium-range missile with nuclear capability and operated by American servicemen will be deployed near Russia’s and China’s borders. Is this not a cause for legitimate concern?

    The 2,100-member Amphibious Rapid Deployment Brigade is expected to be operational this month, enabling first-strike capability. The Japanese military already has amphibious assault ships as well unmanned aerial vehicles to support such operations.

    Plans are underway to build a three-tier missile defense. The Japanese government decided to acquire US Aegis Ashore systems, in order to join the American global BMD effort. The Aegis Mk-41 launcher can fire long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles that could be nuclear tipped.

    Japan is to establish a space and cyberspace command center that will also be responsible for electronic warfare. The unit is already operational and will expand by about 40%, bringing it up to 150 members, in FY 2018, which starts on April 1. That command center has confirmed Japan’s intention to extend its military operations into space. A network of radar for monitoring space is expected to be operational in FY 2022.

    Japan possesses almost 47 tons of separated plutonium. That’s enough to produce 6,000 nuclear devices. The idea of going nuclear has not been abandoned and it even enjoys support from the US. Sharing nuclear capability is an option.Japan’s Epsilon rocket that is used for its civilian space program could be used as an intercontinental nuclear-delivery vehicle with a range of 12,000 km. Experts believe the conversion would take less than a year, including the acquisition of a multiple independent reentry vehicle. There are no technical obstacles.

    North Korea’s nuclear program is being adroitly used by Tokyo as a pretext for militarization that will threaten Russia and China. While the global media “cry wolf” over Iran’s and N. Korea’s nuclear programs, they are surprisingly quiet when it comes to nuclear capability Japan could acquire in just one year. Tokyo is also clearly well on its way to boosting its conventional capabilities—thus changing the balance of power in the Asia Pacific. This is not a high-profile issue. But it should be.

  • China Reveals Largest Defense Budget In Three Years

    China’s government has been relatively vocal in transforming itself into a serious threat against the West — by modernizing its military in anticipation of future wars with Washington. It it therefore not surprising when the official Xinhua news agency reports that China will increase its defense budget by 8.1 percent in 2018, up marginally from last year’s 7 percent.

    China has undoubtedly given America’s military-industrial complex and clueless politicians in Washington a stern message, by increasing its defense budget to the highest levels in more than three years, even as the country insists it does not mean harm.

    According to the annual budget report, submitted to the first session of the 13th National People’s Congress Monday, the 2018 defense budget will be 1.11 trillion yuan (approximately 175 billion U.S. dollars). In 2017, the country spent roughly 1.02 trillion yuan (approximately 161.87 billion dollars) on its military budget in 2017, or about 1.3 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP).

    The United States is the only country that outpaces China in defense spending, with the Pentagon’s expenditures exceeding four times Beijing’s, according to the latest report of the 2018 Military Budgets via the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS).

    In a speech at an annual Meeting of China’s National People’s Congress, Premier Li Keqiang suggested the country faced “profound changes in the national security environment,” requiring a stronger military.

    As we stated before the conference, geopolitical strategists are concerned about President Xi Jinping aggressive military buildup and power grab, which has put Beijing on a crash course for military conflict with Washington.

    “In the Asia-Pacific, the dominant role of the United States in a political and military sense will have to be readjusted,” said Cui Liru, former president of the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, a think tank under the Ministry of State Security that often reflects official thinking. “It doesn’t mean U.S. interests must be sacrificed. But if the U.S. insists on a dominant role forever, that’s a problem.”

    Cui added that it was “not normal for China to be under U.S. dominance forever. You can’t justify dominance forever.”

    “China’s military objective is to break through the first chain of islands,” said Mr. Cui, referring to the waters beyond Japan and Taiwan where the Chinese military wants to establish a presence. -NYT

    According to the latest research from Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, China defense spending is around 1.9 percent of gross domestic product in 2016, when compared to 3.3 percent for the United States.

    National Public Radio (NPR) signals that the increased military budget comes as the National People’s Congress scraps constitutional term limits for President Xi Jinping:

    “The new military budget comes as the NPC abolishes term limits for China’s President Xi Jinping, a move that hearkens back to the era of autocratic rule under Mao Zedong and was signaled in October when Xi broke with precedent and failed to name a successor at China’s Communist Party Congress. ASIA USS Carl Vinson Will Spend The Next Few Days In Da Nang, Vietnam.

    It also comes amid increased tension with the U.S., as Washington beefs up its naval presence in the South China Sea and Beijing has shown an increasing willingness to flex its muscles there, much to the chagrin of many of its maritime neighbors.”

    Xinhua cites Major General Chen Zhou, a research fellow at the Academy of Military Sciences affiliated with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) as stating:

    “Steady and appropriate growth of defense spending is necessary because the Chinese armed forces have been modernizing to keep up with the country’s development. A large part of the increased spending is for upgrading equipment, supporting military reforms and improving the welfare and training conditions of servicemen and women.”

    As we have noted before, China has set many goals to complete the modernization of its national defense and armed forces in the coming decades and transform its military into a world-class war machine by the mid-21st century.

    In the past few years, China has been rapidly modernizing its armed forces that will enhance its equipment, tactics, technology, and combat readiness for the next conflict. Recently, the country has been vocal in its rollout of stealth jets, hypersonic aircraft and weapons, rail guns, and militarized islands.

    “China’s emerging weapons developments and broader defense-technological progress mean that it has become a global defense innovator,” says Dr. John Chipman, Director-General and Chief Executive of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS).

    “[While] a great power war is not inevitable, states are systematically preparing for the possibility of conflict,” he said, adding that China’s “land and naval forces are modernizing and progress in defense aerospace remains remarkable.”

    * * * *

    Following Trump’s initiation of a trade war, China is preparing to retaliate to Trump’s proposed new tariffs. Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio said Monday that a trade war is avoidable, but “tit-for-tat escalations” could be harmful to the global economy.

    “It seems to me that good deals are to be had for both countries, while a trade war has the risk of tit-for-tat escalations that could have very harmful trade and capital flow implications for both countries and for the world,” Dalio wrote in a LinkedIn blog titled “A US-China Trade War Would Be a Tragedy.”

    Nevertheless, perhaps now we understand why China is modernizing its military, because after trade wars comes hot wars…

  • Former CIA Officer Exposes Clinton Charity Fraud As Biggest Scandal In US History

    Via Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com,

    Former CIA Officer and whistleblower Kevin Shipp says the reason for all the crime and treason at the FBI and DOJ all boils down to one thing – the Clinton’s so-called “charity.”

    Shipp explains, “Hillary Clinton was running and is running a global financial criminal syndicate.  She was using these secret servers to conduct Clinton financial money laundering business.”

    “The shocking thing about that is all the former directors of the CIA that have come out to support her, from Clapper to Brennan to Morell to Robert Gates supporting her being elected, knew about this criminal syndicate.  Comey was protecting it.  Lynch was protecting it.  Weissmann was protecting it.  And that is the big why.  What’s she got on these people?  Are they financial ties?  They had to be aware of this, especially the counter-intelligence units.  We know it was hacked into by foreign intelligence services because it was just hanging out there.  Hillary Clinton was running a secret server outside the Department of State for the purposes of laundering money through the criminal Clinton Foundation.”

    Are the crimes and treason of the Clinton Foundation the anvil that is about to drop? Shipp says,

    “It’s not just an anvil, I think it is a mountain and the nexus of everything.  This “Clinton Global Initiative” (CGI) is worldwide, and it’s been out there for a couple of decades.  It has now intertwined former Directors of the CIA and FBI.   George Soros is a part of it.  It’s connected to all kinds of global financial institutions…

    It is at least a $100 billion…

    All these people protecting and defending Hillary Clinton and knowing about her criminal syndicate, this goes into the so-called ‘Deep State’ of our government, and it is connected, involved and intertwined in the global criminal crime syndicate called the Clinton Foundation.  This is probably going to be the biggest scandal in U.S. history–once it’s busted.  I think they are quietly working on it now, and I think they have been for the last year.  It is so huge the arrests and indictments could cause a Constitutional crisis with some people being removed.  Maybe that’s why they are moving slowly.  It all comes back down to the Clinton Foundation and the criminal syndicate.”

    Is former President Obama involved with the Clinton crime syndicate? Shipp says,

    “Yes, I am absolutely convinced of it.  George Soros gave $30 million to Obama’s campaign.  Then he gave $27.1 million to Hillary Clinton’s campaign.  Both Obama and Clinton are tied directly into George Soros.  Obama was put into office with millions of dollars that came out of nowhere. 

    Yes, he’s part of this cabal.  Yes, he’s part of this global syndicate, and in my opinion, the subversion of our government.”

    In closing, Shipp contends,“There could be a Constitutional crisis in that we could see Congressmen, Senators, former Directors of the FBI and the CIA perp walked after they receive charges.”

    “Could you imagine if senior DOJ officials were arrested, some Congressmen and Senators were arrested and other government officials were arrested on charges and walked out of office?  That’s the Constitutional crisis I am talking about.  Those kind of high level arrests would shake up this nation.  It would be huge, and that’s why it has taken so long and methodical in doing this.”

    Join Greg Hunter as he goes One-on-One with CIA whistleblower Kevin Shipp…

  • Aramco IPO Delayed Until 2019 As New York Listing Grows Increasingly Remote

    For more than two years, investment bankers in the US and London have been salivating over the prospect that Aramco, the state-owned Saudi oil company that’s believed to be one of the most valuable companies in the world, could choose to list shares representing a 5% stake in the company on the London Stock Exchange, New York Stock Exchange, or Nasdaq.

    But despite reports that the royal family had “shortlisted” New York, London and Hong Kong as possible venues for the offering – news that intensified an already escalating geopolitical “Game of Thrones” between bankers and politicians – the Kingdom is continuing with a Financial Times-assisted campaign of mixed messaging, suggesting that the IPO could either be delayed for another year or two, or possibly being shelved indefinitely in favor of a direct sale to a coterie of Asian sovereign wealth funds or possibly even directly to the Chinese government (much to the US’s chagrin).

    Saudi

    In its latest inside-baseball report on the endlessly fraught back-and-forth, the Financial Times is saying a public offering won’t happen until 2019 at the earliest – if it happens at all. However, in an unusual twist, the paper is sourcing its story to UK officials, not the Saudis, as has often been the case in the recent past.

    Saudi Aramco’s listing is unlikely to go ahead this year, according to British officials who have been warned by their Saudi counterparts that the world’s biggest flotation was expected to be delayed.

    Several people briefed on the talks said London still had a good chance of securing the listing, which Riyadh said could value the state energy company at $2tn, but any foreign flotation was likely to happen in 2019 at the earliest.

    Saudi Arabia wants to sell 5 per cent of the world’s largest oil-producing company as part of an economic reform programme driven by Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince, who visited the UK this week.

    As we’ve pointed out many times in the recent past, there is one overwhelming impediment to the deal, and that’s the price of oil.

    Saudi Arabia has dominated world oil supply for half a century, but in recent weeks, US crude production has overtaken The Kingdonm.

    With global oil prices repeatedly faltering around the $60 a barrel mark, bankers are having a hard time swallowing the $2 trillion valuation that the Saudis have ascribed to what many consider to be the Kingdom’s “crown jewel” asset.

    At that valuation, a 5% stake would be worth $100 billion – but bankers in all three potential venues have raised doubts about this price, with some reportedly claiming the stake would be worth half that number.

    Delays on IPO decision-making come as advisers have struggled to achieve the $2tn valuation that Prince Mohammed wants. Saudi Aramco’s finances and internal operations have been shrouded in secrecy for decades and its close relationship with the state has raised financial, legal and regulatory challenges.

    MbS visited the UK last week – a visit that undoubtedly included some discussion about the IPO – and is planning to embark on his second Trump-era White House visit later this month. But despite President Trump doing everything he can to lobby on the US’s behalf (who could ever forget that indelible shot of him touching the orb?) the chances of an offering coming to the US are looking increasingly remote…as Aramco’s leaders have expressed reservations about the possibility of a legal crackdown, as OPEC price cuts and other state-sanctioned maneuvers to bolster the price of oil could be interpreted by US regulators as blatant market manipulation. Plus, there’s also the question of that pesky lawsuit brought by the families of 9/11 survivors who are seeking to hold the Kingdom accountable amid suspicions about its role in the World Trade Center attacks.

    Khalid al-Falih, the energy minister, told CNN this week:

    “I would say litigation and liability are a big concern in the US…

    …Saudi Aramco is too big and too important to be subjected to that kind of risk.”

    Initially, Aramco had targeted a late-2018 offering, with shares slated to list on both the Tadawal – Saudi Arabia’s domestic exchange, which was only recently opened to foreign investors – and one of the three venues mentioned above.

    The FT also broke the news about the possibility of a sale to the Chinese government, or possibly a group of private investors.

    UK officials said if Riyadh decided to list abroad they expected a domestic and foreign listing to take place around the same time. One person close to the talks said this could take place in the first or second quarter of 2019.

    …

    London, New York and Hong Kong are among foreign bourses competing for the share sale. A private sale to strategic investors has been another option under consideration.

    Saudi officials have been split on where to list. Prince Mohammed, ultimate head of the kingdom’s oil affairs, has ambitions to list in New York and is hoping US officials will make regulatory concessions to pave the way for a deal there when he visits this month.

    But senior ministers and Saudi Aramco executives have said privately that London might be a better fit.

    Aside from low oil prices, a dispute between MbS and the officials in charge of Aramco has also contributed to the sale’s delay:

    Amin Nasser, Saudi Aramco’s chief executive, said at a conference of British and Saudi business leaders on Thursday in London that all preparatory work required from the company would be completed in the latter half of 2018.

    This is a shift from previous comments from the kingdom’s officials who had said that preparations had already been completed and any final decision lay with the highest authorities in Saudi Arabia.

    Indecision in Riyadh about the IPO structure has caused frustration among company executives and advisers. Decision-making timelines have slipped and other options for a privatisation have emerged, as the complexities of executing the IPO have become clear — from legal risks to disclosure rules.

    Of course, these details are probably a distraction; the price of oil is the paramount factor. As it climbs, Saudi officials will have more leverage to demand the coveted $2 trillion valuation. Given MbS’s strongman posturing (remember his “corruption purge”) it’s likely that Saudi Arabia will resort to increasingly desperate measures to push the price of oil higher.

    …And what better way to boost the oil price than an armed conflict between KSA and its regional archrival Iran. The two powers are already engaged in a proxy war in Yemen, and Saudi has reportedly been developing an unlikely partnership with Israel to counter Iran’s growing influence in the region.

    Indeed, the money gleaned from MbS’s shakedown of the country’s corporate elite (including dozens of his own family members) will quickly run out as the $100 billion he’s believed to have acquired is barely enough to plug this year’s budget shortfall.

    With MbS’s US visit looming, look out for some more “developments” pertaining to this conflict in the coming weeks…

    As Bloomberg notes, Aramco’s IPO will put a price tag on the future of petroleum just as Saudi Arabia is fixing its sights on the end of its own oil age.

  • Japan Markets Roiled As Moritomo Scandal Returns, Abe May Be Forced To Resign

    It was exactly one year ago that the previously unshakeable administration of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was rocked by a crisis which prompted some to ask if Abe’s government was on the rocks, and with it – Abenomics: the crisis was not one of bungled economic policies, party in-fighting or any of the other calamities that have brought down Japanese leaders in the past, including Abe’s first administration as prime minister. No, Abe was struggling to shake off a scandal involving a kindergarten.

    As we reported last March, Abe had been riding high in the polls and making plans to run for an unprecedented third term as head of the dominant Liberal Democratic Party, when questions first began to be asked about Moritomo Gakuen, a kindergarten operator in Osaka with what was initially described as a conservative curriculum, prompting  the prime minister to declare that he shared many of the philosophies of the school’s president, Yasunori Kagoike.

    It would emerge in swift succession that the premier’s wife, Akie Abe, had been named honorary principal of a new school being planned by Kagoike; that the school was being built on land purchased from the government by Moritomo Gakuen for a fraction of its estimated value; that Abe’s wife Akie allegedly donated 1 million yen to the foundation in September 2015 on behalf of her husband, and that the operator’s philosophies imposed upon his young pupils were not just conservative, but tended towards far-right pre-war nationalism. 

    The scandal raged for several months, resulting in Abe’s approval rate tumbling, however at the last possible moment, Kim John Un’s ICBM launches successfully distracted the Japanese population, and Abe’s militant response was sufficient for the public to forgive and forget the entire Moritomo incident.

    Until now…  because as the Japanese press reported over the weekend, the Moritomo scandal involving PM Abe’s connections with the operators of the right-leaning school implicated in fraud are again roiling markets in Japan.

    As NHK reports, while Abe is not the focus of the current investigation and his position remains secure for now, fresh allegations that tax authorities involved may have even fabricated reports in favor of Moritomo could force the resignation of Deputy PM and Finance Minister Aso as the National Tax Bureau reports directly to him.

    Specifically, Japan’s Finance Ministry will admit to the Diet on Monday that alterations were made to documents on the controversial state land deal. As we reported a yea ago, the land in Osaka Prefecture was sold to private school operator Morimoto Gakuen in 2016 for only a fraction of its market value. The transaction sparked allegations of favoritism in part because the wife of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was acquainted with the school operator.

    After the scandal came to light last year, the Finance Ministry submitted to the Diet settlement documents for the deal. But, earlier this month, a newspaper alleged that the papers had been altered before being submitted to the Diet. The ministry has since questioned its employees involved in the matter and concluded that changes were made to some wording in the documents.

    In reaction to the Morimoto scandal coming back from the dead, six of Japan’s opposition parties will demand Finance Minister Taro Aso step down to take responsibility for the matter, NHK reports. They also plan to demand the government release all related documents and that Nobuhisa Sagawa, who resigned last week as head of the National Tax Agency, be summoned to give testimony at the Diet. He was the ministry’s Financial Bureau chief when the land deal was made.

    Meanwhile, the ruling parties are urging the opposition parties, which have been boycotting Diet sessions since last week, to make facts clear through the debate in the Diet.

    Meanwhile, analysts have already warned that a resignation by Aso would take the legs out of the current Abe administration, perhaps even forcing the PM to eventually resign as well, and forcing changes at the BOJ.

    Furthermore, hitting much closer to home, Kyodo reported that Abe’s wife Akie was among names deleted from altered Finance Ministry documents pertaining to the sale of public land to Moritomo, putting Abe himself in jeopardy.

    And one look at Japanese markets shows that investors are starting to get spooked with the USDJPY suddenly sliding taking a hit from concern that deepening of a scandal over alleged favors to a school with connections to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe may prompt a retreat of Abenomics, said David Lu, director at NBC Financial Markets Asia in Hong Kong…

    … while Japanese stocks are paring some of their strong early gains; while the implications of any Aso resignation are hard to fathom at this point, many believe the Nikkei would plunge, and risk-off sentiment could return fast, sending the JPY higher once again.

    This, according to Reuters, would be especially the case now, with investors already nervous over possible trade wars and recent stock market volatility.

  • Paul Craig Roberts Explores "Make-Believe America"

    Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

    Americans live a never-never-land existence. The politicians and presstitutes make sure of that.

    Consider something as simple as the unemployment rate. The US is said to have full employment with a January 2018 unemployment rate of 4.1 percent, down from 9.8 percent in January 2010.

    However, the low rate of unemployment is contradicted by the long-term decline in the labor force participation rate. After a long rise during the Reagan 1980s, the labor force participation rate peaked in January 1990 at 66.8 percent, more or less holding to that rate for another decade until 2001 when decline set in accelerating in September 2008. 

    Today the labor force participation rate is the lowest since February 1978, reversing all of the gains of the Reagan years.

    Allegedly, the current unemployment rate of 4.1 percent is the result of the long recovery that allegedly began in June 2009. However, normally, employment opportunities created by economic recovery cause an increase in the labor force participation rate as people join the work force to take advantage of employment opportunities. A fall in the participation rate is associated with recession or stagnation, not with economic recovery.

    How can this contradiction be reconciled? The answer lies in the measurement of unemployment. If you have not looked for a job in the last four weeks, you are not counted as being unemployed, because you are not counted as being part of the work force. When there are no jobs to be found, job seekers become discouraged and cease looking for jobs. In other words, the 4.1 percent unemployment rate does not count discouraged workers who cannot find jobs.

    The US Bureau of Labor Statistics has a second measure of unemployment that includes workers who have been discouraged and out of the labor force for less than one year. This rate of unemployment is 8.2 percent, double the 4.1 percent reported rate.

    The US government no longer tracks unemployment among discouraged workers who have been out of the work force for more than one year. However, John Williams of shadowstats.com continues to estimate this rate and places it at 22 or 23 percent, a far cry from 4.1 percent.

    In other words, the 4.1 percent unemployment rate does not count the unemployed who do show up in the declining labor force participation rate.

    If the US had a print and TV media instead of the propaganda ministry that it has, the financial press would not tolerate the deception of the public about employment in America.

    Junk economists, of which the US has an over-supply, claim that the decline in the labor force participation rate merely reflects people who prefer to live on welfare than to work for a living and the current generation of young people who prefer life at home with parents paying the bills. This explanation from junk economists does not explain why suddenly Americans discovered welfare and became lazy in 2001 and turned their back on job opportunities. The junk economists also do not explain why, if the economy is at full employment, competition for workers is not driving up wages.

    The reason Americans cannot find jobs and have left the labor force is that US corporations have offshored millions of American jobs in order to raise profits, share prices, and executive bonuses by lowering labor costs. Many American industrial and manufacturing cities have been devastated by the relocation abroad of production for the American consumer market, by the movement abroad of IT and software engineering jobs, and by importing lower paid foreign workers on H1-B and other work visas to take the jobs of Americans. In my book, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism, I give examples and document the devastating impact jobs offshoring has had on communities, cities, pension funds, and consumer purchasing power.

    John Williams of shadowstats.com questions whether there has been any real growth in the US economy since the 2008 crisis that resulted from the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. Williams believes that the GDP growth rate is an illusion resulting from the understatement of inflation. Just as unemployment is under-counted, so is inflation.

    Two “reforms” were introduced that result in the under-measurement of inflation.

    One is the substitution principle. When the price of an item in the basket of goods used to measure inflation goes up, that item is thrown out and a cheaper substitute is put in its place. The “reformers” argue that consumers themselves behave in this way. Thus, they claim this practice is reasonable. However, the old way of measuring inflation measured the cost of a constant standard of living. The new way measures the cost of a falling standard of living.

    The other reform is to classify some price rises as quality improvements rather than as inflation. The consumer has to pay the higher price, but he is said to be getting a better product, and so it is not inflation. There is some truth to this, but it appears it is over-used in order to report low inflation rates. Both of these reforms are suspected of being motivated by holding down Social Security costs by denying cost-of-living (COLA) adjustments to Social Security recipients.

    If inflation is under-measured, the use of the measure to deflate nominal GDP in order to arrive at real GDP leaves some price rises in the GDP measure. Therefore, price rises or inflation are counted as increases in real goods and services. John Williams suspects that most of the GDP growth reported since the alleged recovery is simply price rises, not increases in real goods and services.

    The historically high stock averages are another feature of make-believe America. The high price/earnings ratios do not reflect strong fundamentals, such as high rates of business investment, strong growth in real retail sales fueled by strong growth in consumer incomes. The Federal Reserve has used an increase in consumer debt to fill in for the missing growth in consumer income for so long that consumers have no more room to take on more debt. Without growth in wages and salaries or in consumer debt, consumer demand cannot drive the economy and business profits.

    What explains the high stock prices? The answer is the trillions of dollars the Federal Reserve has created in order to stabilize the large “banks too big to fail” and bail out their extremely poor investment decisions. All of this liquidity found its way into the financial sector where it drove up the prices of stocks and bonds, enriching equity owners and denying retirees any interest income on their savings. The values of financial instruments are supported by money creation, not by underlying fundamentals. Yet, the stock averages are treated as proof of economic recovery and America’s first place in the world.

    As I said, it is never-never-land in which we live.

    *  *  *

    PCR’s website is committed to giving you the counter-narrative to the official BS you get from the presstitutes and the junk economists. Truth is hard to come by and is getting harder. To support PCR’s website, donate: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/pages/donate/

  • California High-Speed Rail Is A Budgetary Trainwreck As Cost Soars 20% To $77 Billion

    California’s bullet train will be coming in over budget and behind schedule, after its estimated cost was revised from $64 billion to $77 billion – a 20% increase, and an estimated completion date of 2033, four years later than originally projected. The new estimates, contained in a 114-page business plan, was issued in draft form on Friday by the rail authority ahead of public hearings and a formal legislative review in approximately two months. 

    The rail authority previously argued that it had just enough money to build the grade-separated tracks for its route between San Francisco and Los Angeles at speeds of up to 220 mph. 

    The new estimates will force California’s leadership to double down on its political and financial commitments if it wants to see the system completed, against a backdrop of rising costs, years of delays, strident litigation and backlashes in communities where homes, businesses, farms and environmental preserves will have to give up land to the rail’s right-of-way. –LA Times

    The revised plan will leave California legislators scrambling to grapple with higher costs amid an uncertain economic future in the state with the nation’s worst poverty rate and already strained balance sheet.

    statedatalab.org

    While the endgame will be to connect Northern and Southern California, from upper San Francisco to San Diego – the new plan is to focus on the track between San Francisco and the Central Valley – the primarily agricultural and less populated region of California, which is set to be completed in 2029. 

    One of the current hurdles is how to content with traveling through California’s mountainous regions – which designers are still trying to figure out. 

    The $77 billion cost, a 20 per cent increase, is a baseline estimate, but Kelly also included high and low ranges in the plan based on potential risks.

    It says 119 miles (192 kilometres) of track in the Central Valley is scheduled to open by 2022, which would make it the first operational segment. That’s 14 years after voters approved a $10 billion bond for high-speed rail in November 2008.

    A summary of the plan reviewed by The Associated Press offers limited details on the portion from Central Valley to Los Angeles. The agency hopes to complete all necessary environmental reviews for the entire line by 2022, a delay from initial timelines that planned for environmental clearance by 2017 for most parts of the track.

    …

    The state has spent $2.5 billion in federal stimulus money and has an additional $930 million in federal money on the table. That’s on top of the $10 billion bond from voters. –CNBC

    So – they’ll basically make it up as they go along. 

    The largest near-term driver of the cost increase has been the Central Valley section, where 119 miles of track between Wasco and Madera will cost $10.6 billion, up from an original estimate of around $6 billion. Senior consultant Roy Hill told the rail authority board, “The worst-case scenario has happened.” 

    [insert: monorailguy.JPG]

    Some legislators aren’t so excited at this point. 

    “Let’s cut our losses and use the billions not yet wasted on (high-speed rail) to instead improve freeways, highways and roads and perhaps improve existing rail systems throughout California,” Said state Sen. Andy Vidak (R). 

    “Heavy sigh” tweeted Elon Musk following Friday’s announcement. Musk pitched 

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    Of note, Musk pitched a “Hyperloop” – an sealed tube with a “pod” traveling from San Francisco to Los Angeles at 760 MOH, allowing for a 35 minute commute. 

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    Musk says it would cost around $7.5 billion for a passenger version of the Hyperloop, however critics argue there’s no way that’s reasonable considering that part of the California high-speed rail’s enormous budget is approximately 1,100 pieces of land they have to acquire. 

    The Hyperloop concept has been “open-sourced” by Musk and SpaceX in the hopes that the technology will be further developed by companies and interdisciplinary student-led teams.

  • Lawrence Solomon: The Real Reason For Trump's Steel Tariffs? He's Preparing For War

    Authored by Lawrence Solomon via Financial Post,

    Those who see Trump as threatening a free market in steel should see the world as it really is and welcome, rather than berate Trump’s initiative…

    President Trump’s decision to apply steep tariffs to steel imports on grounds of national security met with a loud chorus of protests at home and abroad, by many trying to divine what could possibly be going through Trump’s mind. Trump is an economic illiterate, he’s a protectionist, some reasoned; he’s targeting Canada to get concessions on NAFTA, he’s playing to his base, others pronounced.

    These explanations miss the mark. Though Trump doubtless sees taunting Canada on NAFTA and playing to his political base as furthering his agenda, these are but freebies, sideshows to the main event. Trump is acting sincerely, and legitimately, in the national security interests of the United States. Canada isn’t his target; China is.

    Trump is old enough to know that during the Korean War, president Harry Truman seized the U.S. steel industry to maintain production for America’s then-vulnerable wartime economy. During the Second World War, when the U.S. dominated the world’s steel production, rationing was nevertheless needed – the public was even exhorted to donate their automobile bumpers to the war effort as scrap steel.

    Today, the U.S. has not only lost much of its steel capacity, it’s at risk of losing the balance, making it dependent on a host of countries: Canada, its largest and most reliable foreign supplier, meets just five per cent of U.S. needs. According to the U.S. Commerce Department, the United States is now at risk of finding itself “in a position where it is unable to be certain it could meet demands for national defense and critical industries in a national emergency.” If dependent on a foreign country, the department warns, the U.S. would not have the legal authority to commandeer supplies as it could within the U.S.

    “Our steel industry is in bad shape,” Trump tweeted. “IF YOU DON’T HAVE STEEL, YOU DON’T HAVE A COUNTRY!”

    Those who believe war is for the history books, never to inconvenience us in our daily comforts, naturally view Trump as some kind of madman, senselessly protecting a few steelworkers in an economically irrelevant industry at a great cost to the rest of the labour force and economy. But those with a longer time frame and a sense of history — and especially those who can sense the gathering storm of war — make different calculations.

    Trump, like president Ronald Reagan before him, believes in peace through strength. He wants a military so dominant, and an economy so robust, that no adversary would ever dare challenge it. At the same time, Trump wants to take on today’s Evil Empire, the country that represents a future existential threat to the U.S. — China. An uncompromising ally in this project to neuter China — a man Trump calls a visionary — is Peter Navarro, his chief trade adviser, formerly a professor of economic and public policy at University of California and the author of Death by China, a 2011 book that warns, “China’s perverse form of capitalism combines illegal mercantilist and protectionist weapons to pick off American industries, job by job. China’s emboldened military is racing towards head-on confrontation with the U.S.” Navarro’s other China book, The Coming China Wars published in 2006, described China as a ruthless emerging power likely to succeed in its ambitions of dominance.

    The Trump-Navarro policy of confronting China through tariffs on grounds of national security is not a cynical excuse to justify protectionism. It reflects profound alarm over America’s preparedness in confronting a China that through government subsidies has acquired a stranglehold over the global steel industry: China now accounts for half of the world’s entire steel production. Without countering foreign steel subsidies in general and those from China in particular, the U.S. steel industry will be unable to survive.

    The world’s steel exporters will doubtless challenge Trump’s claim that he’s acting in the interest of national security before the WTO. They will need to wait in line: The U.S. currently has 169 antidumping and countervailing duty orders in place on steel, 29 of them against China, along with 25 ongoing investigations. And the world’s steel exporters should also be prepared to lose. Under WTO rules, national security is a valid ground for levying tariffs and both the U.S. Commerce Department and the U.S. Department of Defence agree that national security is at stake.

    Those who see Trump as threatening a free market in steel should see the world as it really is and welcome, rather than berate Trump’s initiative. He is now the world’s best hope — perhaps only hope — for bringing a semblance of free-market discipline to the global steel industry.

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Mar 11

Today’s News 11th March 2018

  • Trump: "You Would Be So Bored" If I Acted "Presidential"; Unveils 2020 Slogan

    President Trump slammed critics, talked up tariffs, unveiled his 2020 slogan, brought up executing drug dealers (again) and noted how “bored” people would be if he acted like a regular old president at a Saturday night rally for Republican Rick Saccone in Moon Township, PA.

    “Remember I used to say how easy it is to be presidential?” Trump reminded the audience. “But you would all be out of here right now. You would be so bored. I’m very presidential.”

    Trump then gave a mock-campaign speech where he robotically delivered “boring” presidential remarks.

    “See, that’s easy. That’s much easier than doing what I have to do,” said Trump. “But this is much more effective. This got us elected. If I came like a stiff you guys wouldn’t be here tonight.”

    Trump also slammed “sleeping son of a bitch” Chuck Todd, and “very low IQ” Maxine Waters and Nancy Pelosi.

    “It was 1999. I was on “Meet the Press” a show now headed by sleepy-eyes Chuck Todd. He’s a sleeping son of a bitch. I tell you.”

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    “We have to defeat Nancy Pelosi and Maxine Waters, a low IQ individual,” Trump then said – going back into another impression, this time of Waters: 

    “Do you ever see her? We will impeach him!” President Trump said mockingly.

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    New slogan

    Trump also rolled out his 2020 slogan during the rally; “Keep America Great!” 

    “But we can only do that if we elect people who are going to back our agenda and fight for our values,” he added.

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    More highlights from Saturday night:

    • Trump warned voters “We need Republicans. We need the vote,” warning that Democrats would take away “your Second Amendment Rights” to bear firearms, among other things.
    • There should be a national discussion about executing major drug dealers because each one is responsible for thousands of deaths. “I don’t know if that’s popular. I don’t know if that’s unpopular,” Trump told the crowd. 
    • Trump says his new economic are paying off, saying that his 25% tariffs on steel imports would boost Pennsylvania’s economy. “Your steel is coming back. It’s all coming back,” Trump said. 
    • Trump vowed to resist retaliatory trade measures by – as an example, slapping imported European cars with taxes. 
    • Oprah Winfrey better watch out if she runs for president in 2020. “I’d love to beat Oprah. I know her weakness,” said the President, who added that the upcoming presidential race “would be a painful experience for her.“
    • Trump singled out his wife Melania amid an ongoing scandal involving an alleged affair with porn star Stormy Daniels – who CNN recently stalked at a live strip club performance, and says she’s “more in demand” due to the recent controversy. “You think her life is so easy folks? Not so easy,” Trump said of the First Lady. 

     

  • Watch: Colonel Says Israel Is Dragging The United States Into World War III

    Authored by Darius Shahtahmasebi via TheAntiMedia.org,

    Israel is in the process of plunging America into a war with Iran that could destroy what’s left of the Middle East and ignite a third world war, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, warned in Washington approximately a week ago.

    Wilkerson, a retired army colonel who now teaches at Washington-area universities, didn’t hold back in his critique of where the status quo is leading the United States via its client state, Israel.

    At the annual Israel lobby conference at the National Press Club, sponsored by the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and Institute for Research: Middle East Policy, Wilkerson explained that Israel is headed toward “a massive confrontation with the various powers arrayed against it, a confrontation that will suck America in and perhaps terminate the experiment that is Israel and do irreparable damage to the empire that America has become.”

    One of the principal antagonists begging for a war with Iran that Wilkerson identified was none other than Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s Russian-born Defense Minister. Wilkerson stated:

    “Lieberman will speak in April in New York City at the annual conference of the Jerusalem Post. The title is, ‘The New War with Iran.’ It is clear that he’s [at] the forefront of promoting this war.

    “And nowhere does my concern about such a war focus more acutely at the moment than Syria. As [the] president of France Emmanuel Macron described it recently, ‘The current rhetoric of the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and Israel is pushing the region toward conflict with Iran.’”

    Despite Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s incessant denigrations of Iran, including claiming the greatest danger facing the Jewish state is the Islamic republic — a country he accuses of fanning the flames of anti-Semitism — Wilkerson blew these accusations out of the park using simple logic. He said:

    “This antisemitism bit, of course, as we’ve heard today, is almost always a weapon of choice for Israeli politicians under stress hurled, in this case, at the country whose Jewish population — by the way, the largest in the Middle East outside of Turkey and Israel — lives in Iran in reasonable peace.”

    He continued:

    “And don’t forget that these words were uttered by the man who, as we’ve heard today, is doing everything he can to expel dark-skinned African refugees largely from Eritrea and Sudan from Israel, where most have come as legitimate refugees.”

    Wilkerson highlighted the hypocrisy of Netanyahu and his cohorts in more ways than one. For example, Wilkerson referred to Netanyahu’s grandiose speech at the Munich Security Conference in which he directly challenged Iranian Minister of Foreign Affairs Mohammad Javad Zarif while holding remnants of a drone allegedly downed over Israeli airspace. Israel claimed the drone was Iranian-manufactured. Wilkerson noted that in response, Iran found itself being rescued by Lebanon’s Defense Minister, who said he had an Israeli drone over his head virtually 24 hours a day.

    Further, the mainstream media and the governments that benefit from their narratives pay close to zero attention to the fact that Israel routinely violates Lebanese airspace with its sophisticated aircraft. Rather, Iran is constantly painted as the major threat and violator of international law.

    “Of late of course,” Wilkerson continued, “Tel Aviv is increasingly using Iran’s presence in Syria, its support for Bashar al-Assad, and its alleged drive– and I love this one, and my military comrades love it, too– for a Shia corridor from Tehran to Aden, as the hoary beast that must not be at any cost, including of course America’s treasure and lives, as his probable cause and existential prompt for action.”

    But why is there a danger that the U.S. will be dragged into this war, and why does Israel need America’s help? As Wilkerson explains:

    “I believe the answer is fairly clear once you push aside the cobwebs that surround it. The legitimacy of great power is what I call it. And that is precisely what Netanyahu and Lieberman desire.

    “It’s also what Riyadh desires, especially with the new boy king Mohammed bin Salman, now an erstwhile ally of Israel.

    “In short, the IDF could defend Israel but it could not attack Iran. Not successfully, anyway. And were it to do so, it would be damned internationally and thus isolated even more than it already is today, perhaps devastatingly so.”

    Last year, a top Israeli general tasked with writing his country’s defense policy admitted that Israel cannot take on Iran’s military alone if the day should come that the regional powers face off in a direct military confrontation, saying they would need to rely on the U.S. for assistance

    According to a Politico report, during the Obama years, Israel drew up a military strike option but never really used it. Deep down, Israel knew its effectiveness lied in its ability to pressure the U.S. government into taking further action of its own lest it be dragged into a catastrophic war with Iran that it may or may not be prepared to fight. From the Politico report:

    “They [the Israelis] ordered the Israel Defense Forces and the intelligence arms to prepare for a huge operation: an all-out air attack in the heart of Iran. Some $2 billion was spent on preparations for the attack and for what the Israelis believed would take place the day after – a counterattack either by Iranian warplanes and missiles or by its proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah. The latter could use either the 50,000 missiles it had stockpiled (by 2018, Israeli intelligence estimated the number had increased to 100,000), or it could activate its terror cells abroad, with the assistance of Iranian intelligence, to strike at Israeli or Jewish targets. This is what it did in 1992 and 1994 when it responded to Israeli attacks in Lebanon by blowing up the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires and the Jewish community center AMIA in that city, with a massive number of casualties in both attacks.”

    The strike plan never took place, of course, but according to Politico, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continued to use it to put pressure on the U.S. government to achieve its anti-Iranian objectives. Every day, the likelihood that a war might erupt between Israel and Iran, in turn involving the United States, which has sworn to come to Israel’s defense if attacked by Iran, continues to inch that much closer to reality.

  • Pentagon Official: China's Hypersonic Missiles Could Threaten US Navy's "Entire Surface Fleet"

    As we have discussed previously, “hypersonic aircraft and missiles are being developed and tested by the United States, Russia, and China at an accelerating pace. While the race for hypersonic technologies has certainly flourished among global superpowers, who realize that the first to possess these technologies will not just revolutionize their civilian and military programs, but will also dictate the future path for civilizations on planet earth.”

    According to the Washington Examiner, Undersecretary of Defense for Research Michael Griffin presented last week at the McAleese-Credit Suisse Defense Conference in which he warned, “when the Chinese can deploy tactical or regional hypersonic systems, they hold at risk our carrier battle groups. They hold our entire surface fleet at risk. They hold at risk our forward deployed land-based forces.”

    Griffin emphasized that Beijing has administered “20 times as many of hypersonic weapons tests as has the United States over the last decade.” He stated Beijing is spending billions to develop and test non-nuclear versions of hypersonic weapons that could render the United States Navy’s nuclear-powered aircraft carriers unprotected against a hypersonic strike.

    In December 2017, Reuters reported that Griffin was nominated by President Donald Trump to be Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering. The U.S. Senate confirmed his nomination on February 15, 2018, which means he has been on the job for less than two weeks and has already declared — developing hypersonic weapons is his “highest technical priority.”

    Griffin stressed that Beijing is transforming into a global superpower and America’s worst enemy, while President Xi Jinping modernizes the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) with railguns, hypersonics, and stealth fighter jets. Detailed in the beginning paragraph, the American empire could unquestionably be dethroned if countries like Russia and China field hypersonics before Washington.

    “Without our ability to defend and without at least an equal response capability on the offensive side, then what we’ve done is we have allowed a situation to exist where our deployed forces are held at risk. We cannot do the same for them,” Griffin said.

    “And so our only response is either to let them have their way or to go nuclear. Well, that should be an unacceptable situation for the United States,” he added.

    Here is a crash course on what does it mean to fly at hypersonic speeds:

    Defense News details the Pentagon’s budget for hypersonic development:

    The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency budget for hypersonic weapons has increased steadily over the last two years, but more funding would inevitably be welcomed by supporters of the technology. In FY17, Congress appropriated $85.5 million for hypersonics. That went up to $108.6 million in the FY18 request, a 27 percent increase. And for the recently released FY19 request, the figure shoots up to $256.7 million — a whopping 136 percent increase, but still a fairly low figure by Pentagon standards.

    Griffin further stated, “the advantage of hypersonic systems is broadly speaking, irrespective of their range, that they underfly missile defense and they overfly air defense. That’s a niche we haven’t spent much time in recently, and if I had to pick my highest technical priority responding that that, both offensively and defensively, that would be my highest technical priority. If our response is either let them win or go nuclear, that’s a bad place to be. It invites bad behavior on the part of adversaries.”

    When it comes to hypersonic development, Griffin has critical players deep inside the Pentagon’s swamp…

    Lt. Gen. Samuel Greaves, the Director at Missile Defense Agency, said the speed at which Russia and China are “researching, developing, testing, delivering weapons systems” requires his agency to take the hypersonic threat seriously.

    Also, Gen. Paul J. Selva, the 10th Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned on Janurary 30, “we [U.S.] have lost our technical advantage in hypersonics,” but “we haven’t lost the hypersonics fight.”

    It is startling to observe how Pentagon officials are now openly admitting that foreign hypersonic threats could be a major headache to the American empire in the not too distant future. Nevertheless, the reality of a decaying American empire is starting to set in, as officials understanding the Pentagon’s hypersonic program(s) are way behind the eight ball.

    The one question we ask: Could hypersonic weapons make the US Navy’s nuclear-powered aircraft carriers obsolete? 

    *** 

    Perhaps, the Pentagon’s maintenance of the 800 military bases around the world, and endless hybrid military conflicts has diverted much-needed resources to fund critical technologies [hypersonics] that would keep America in the running as a superpower. Falling behind in the supersonics race is a symptom of an over-extended empire… We’ve seen this before —- Rome is burning.

  • Sierra Leone Holds World's First "Free And Fair" Blockchain-Backed Election

    Cryptocurrency investors have endured a difficult week as reports that Japanese regulators are cracking down on local exchanges following a massive heist at CoinCheck – an unregistered local exchange – and the SEC is demanding that US-based cryptocurrency exchanges register with the agency, sent virtual currency prices reeling, eventually pushing bitcoin to a multiweek low on Friday below $9,000.

    Bitcoin

    But in the world of blockchain technology, where even crypto skeptics like Jamie Dimon (who now regrets calling BTC a fraud) and Ray Dalio see a promising future, it was truly the best of times. Earlier this week, the town of South Burlington, Vermont became the first town in the US to record a real estate transaction by registering the deed transfer on a blockchain-based system.

    SierraLeone

    And in another triumph, the first national election to be tracked and verified using blockchain technology unfolded in Sierra Leone this week. The votes are still being tallied, but blockchain voting startup Agora is supervising the first beta test of its vote-monitoring blockchain tech, as Coindesk reported.

    As voters lined up to cast votes in what had been a heated campaign between 16 candidates, unbeknownst to them, blockchain voting startup Agora was helping keep track of it all, and through its proprietary distributed ledger, providing unprecedented insight into the process.

    In what, by all accounts, appears to be a world’s first for the emerging technology, Agora used a private, permissioned blockchain – one inspired by the technology that backs bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies – to oversee the results of a national election in real time. It then relayed the data to individuals entrusted to oversee and verify the nation’s democratic process.

    Of course, the technology is still very rudimentary, and required Agora employees to physically verify paper ballots before accurately entering their content into the company’s blockchain database.

    The company’s tech – which it calls “skipchain” – is what’s known as a “permissioned” blockchain – where only some of the data being entered into the database is visible to the public (in this case, the names and personal information of the voters will remain hidden, while the results of the vote and all non-personal associated metadata should be available for all to see).

    As this article was being completed, Agora, a Switzerland-based foundation, was in the process of manually counting the votes and logging them on a blockchain.

    “Voters complete their votes on paper ballots and then our team with impartial observers register them on the blockchain,” explained Lukasiewicz, who formally joined the company in January after first joining as an advisor.

    Stepping back, though, not only is this the first time blockchain has been implemented in a national election, it’s also the first live implementation for Agora’s stack of blockchain services – what the company calls “skipchain” technology, designed to reach consensus with each node only seeing part of the blockchain.

    In some respects, Sierra Leone had a number of advantages that made Agora’s beta testing feasible. For instance, since the end of its civil war in 2002, the country has conducted a number of largely “free and fair” elections. But this year’s vote was also fraught with complications that are still being worked out. Several episodes of political violence preceded the ballot, and already, before the official vote tally has even been released, two opposition parties are expressing “grave concerns” about the fairness of this year’s vote, per Africa News. The Coalition for Change and National Grand Coalition told AN  that their agents were evicted from some polling stations when the counting of votes started…

    But in its preliminary report, the Economic Community of West African States, or ECOWAS, noted that while the election was largely peaceful, free and fair, there were some issues, including the heavy presence of security at polling stations that reportedly intimidated some reporters.

    In summary, the blockchain-backed vote is a first and important step toward deploying a seamless system of balloting on the blockchain that would allow voters to record their choices directly onto Agora’s blockchain, without the paper intermediary. And with a handful of other African states interested in working with Agora for future elections, that day might arrive sooner than some skeptics expect.

    For those who are still unfamiliar with how the technology works, this two-minute explanation could offer some insight.

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  • Most Limits Exist Only In Our Minds

    Authored by Adam Taggart via PeakProsperity.com,

    Roger Bannister died last week.

    Even if you don’t recognize his name, you’re aware of his legacy: he was the first human to run a mile in under 4 minutes.

    It was a mind-blowing feat. Ever since the Ancient Greeks set their sights on attaining this “perfect” goal 3,000 years ago, no runner on the planet had been able to run that fast for that long.

    For millennia of sport, breaking the 4-minute barrier was widely regarded as physically impossible.

    But Bannister, a busy medical student at the time with often only 30 minutes available to train per day, had an unorthodox view — one rooted in skepticism of the conventional training techniques and mindset.

    He began with the assumption that the 4-minute mile was possible, and then challenged himself to develop a science-based regimen for attaining it.

    During a brief lull on the otherwise blustery day of May 6, 1954, Roger Bannister made history by completing the mile-run in 3 minutes 59.4 seconds. The impossible had been achieved.

    Photo of Roger Bannister breaking the 4-minute mile

    (Bannister crossing the finish line at the Iffley Road track, Oxford)

    But what ensued next was equally momentous.

    Just a month after Bannister first broke the 4-minute barrier, both he and another runner (John Landry) broke it again. The next year, 3 more runners (all in the same race) followed suit.

    By the end of 1957, a total of 16 runners had achieved sub-4-minute mile times.

    How could so many people suddenly overcome a challenge that had thwarted the best runners in the world for three millennia? The transition was so immediate and abrupt that it can’t be attributed to advancements in technology, training or diet. Yet something changed that enabled this new era for speed.

    What changed was Belief.

    Prior to Bannister’s shocking feat, elite runners just didn’t believe it was possible to run that fast.

    But once freed from that limiting mindset, those very same athletes found that not only could they match Bannister’s record, they could beat it.

    Today, 60 years later, over 1,300 people have run the mile in under 4 minutes. The fastest of them completed it in 3 minutes 43.13 seconds (Hicham El Guerrouj, July 7, 1999)

    More than simply breaking a record, Roger Bannister’s greater legacy was proving to the world that limits are largely set by the mind. When we fail (or more accurately put, fail to try hard enough), it’s often because we believe we can’t succeed.

    Bannister’s example showed us that by changing our mindset — by being open-minded to success — we can change our universe of potential outcomes. The ‘impossible’ becomes possible.

    Others, before and after Bannister, have validated this to us time and again. Here are but a few of them:

    • Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay summiting Mount Everest, the world’s tallest mountain, in 1953

    • Billie Jean King defeating Bobby Riggs in The Battle of the Sexes in 1973, proving women can perform at the same level as men

    • Alan Turing cracking the “unbreakable” Nazi Enigma code during WW2 (and developing the first modern computer in the process)

    • Inexperienced novelist and near-penniless single parent J. K. Rowling in the early 1990s, writing a manuscript in various Scottish coffee shops that would become Harry Potter and ultimately make her a billionaire

    Each refused to accept conventionally-defined limits as true. Each started with the belief that success was possible, and that they just needed to find the right path to unlock it.

    A Mindset Needed More Today Than Ever

    Today’s world bombards us with dire headlines and intractable issues that can easily make us feel defeated and powerless. Rather than being retired by the march of progress, in many ways it feels like the limits on our future are multiplying.

    Declining opportunity for the 99%, cartel-style rackets controlling much of industry, and an accelerating wealth gap between the elites and the rest of society define our economic situation.

    Our political system prioritizes fear, divisiveness and war mongering — getting precious little accomplished save a continued chipping away at our civil liberties. Social discord is growing in response.

    Meanwhile, we’re despoiling the natural systems we depend on. The past few decades have seen more mass species die-offs, pollution, climatic shifts, and chronic health epidemics than ever before. Our insatiable exploitation of resources and prioritization of quick profits have become existential threats.

    Given the above, it’s understandable to feel hopeless; that we’re all simply screwed. 

    But as Bannister, Hilary, Turing et al have showed us, we have much more control over our destiny than we realize. Even in the face of nation-wide, even planetary, issues like those listed above, we have agency to change our situation for the better.

    On the individual level, we work hard here at PeakProsperity.com to surface and showcase models we deem worthy of your consideration. Here are several that have helped many of our readers improve their quality of life today, while simultaneously improving their resilience against any challenges tomorrow may bring:

    • Looking to improve your health and longevity? Learn how nutrition, functional exercise, sleep hygene and stress management are key success ingredients.
    • How can humans grow (more) food by regenerating rather than depleting our soils? No-till farming practices are enabling just that.
    • How can you become better valued and more supported by those around you? Here are a number of community-building steps that work.
    • Want to protect and grow your money? Read this.
    • How can you remain positive, and even thrive, in the face of adversity? By using these psychological strategies.

    These are but a few examples of the very real pathways available to each of us to build better futures for ourselves. But to benefit from them, we need to first start with the belief that a better future is indeed possible for us.

    If we do, then it becomes simply a math formula. With enough courage, discipline, and hard work, almost any goal is attainable within time.

    And make no mistake, the world is in dire need of self-directed saviors. Too much of the population is mindlessly marching along to the status quo, blind to its dangers and unsustainability.

    Chris Martenson’s “giant canoe” parable captures our predicament well:

    Our Giant Canoe

    Think of our situation as if humanity were all together in a giant canoe and nearly everybody is paddling as hard as they can.  After all, we’re trying to get somewhere: to improve ourselves, to grow our economy and increase our prosperity. There are goals to be met!

    Along the way we’ve convinced ourselves that this canoe is the best one ever built and it cannot fail us. It is the very pinnacle of achievement.  It looks great, and there are creature comforts and pleasant distractions galore.   Food has never been more abundant or easier to obtain, new gadgets keep showing up, and (in theory, at least) you can determine for yourself where you want to sit in the canoe.

    The people in the front love being there, as they feel powerful and in control. Ironically, though, it’s the few people in the stern who are actually secretly and rather effortlessly steering, but nobody in the rest of the canoe seems to notice or care.

    There’s only one thing wrong with this canoe. It’s headed for a gigantic waterfall, and if it tips over the lip, very few will survive. It will be like going over Niagara Falls without a barrel.

    A few in the canoe have woken up and noticed this. But their protests are limited to either pulling their paddles out of the water and refusing to propel the canoe any faster, or even trying to futilely paddle backwards against the rest of humanity’s combined efforts.

    Neither approach is a solution, mind you. But at least for these ‘awake’ souls, it feels better than paddling mindlessly towards the roaring falls. 

    As it stand today, humanity’s canoe is destined to speed right over the edge. Unless we consciously do something about it. Which we could, if we really wanted to.

    As there’s nothing preventing us from steering the canoe safely to land, I find this one of the most interesting and fascinating times to be alive. We are currently playing the role of our own destroyer, but the savior role is still there for the choosing.

    But what stops us?  What keeps us paddling furiously ahead even as the sound of the roaring falls gets louder and louder?  The answer is at once both very simple and devilishly hard. 

    It’s our egos.

    To save ourselves from ourselves, we have to begin doing things very, very differently.  Truthfully, the only way we can save ourselves is to shift our consciousness.  

    Chris’ follow-on report, How To Be, reveals the elements of psychology, neuroscience, behavioral economics and human culture that lie at the root of our self-limiting behavior, yet also hold the keys to our salvation. It explains why to start living differently, we first need to start thinking differently.

    There’s an emerging huge body of work here that goes deeply into the ‘Being’ and Emotional Capital areas of our ongoing efforts to help people live with greater resilience.  We’re talking about real inner change here. If you want things to be different on the outside in your life, the only certain way to go about doing that is to change things on the inside first.

    If this line of exploration resonates at all with you, click here to read the ‘How To Be’ report (free executive summary, enrollment required for full access)

  • "Bitcoin Misery Index" Flashes 'Buy' Signal

    Authored by Ana Alexandre via CoinTelegraph.com,

    Wall Street strategist and co-founder of Fundstrat Global Advisors Thomas Lee has developed a ‘contrarian index’ that lets investors know how ‘miserable’ Bitcoin (BTC) holders are based on current prices, CNBC reports.

    The Bitcoin Misery Index says now is the time to buy from CNBC.

    The index is called the Bitcoin Misery Index (BMI) and was designed as a trading tool for investors to take advantage of volatility in BTC exchanges. BMI is calculated on a scale of zero to 100, taking into account factors such as volatility and the number of winning trades out of the total. When the indicator is low, the buying opportunity is at its best, and vice versa.

    “When the bitcoin misery index is at ‘misery’ (below 27), bitcoin sees the best 12-month performance. A signal is generated about every year,” Lee explained to CNBC in a Friday report.

    “When the BMI is at a ‘misery’ level, future returns are very good.”

    At the moment, the Bitcoin index is at 18.8, which is an absolute minimum since Sept. 6, 2011, the report said.

    Lee’s comments follow a significant cryptocurrency market fall in which BTC lost almost 27 percent just after hitting a weekly high of $11,675 on Monday, March 5. A series of negative news resulted in heightened concerns about more regulations on crypto markets.

    On March 7, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued a statement saying that all platforms trading securities are required to register with the agency as an exchange. Additionally, Japanese authorities temporarily halted the activities of two cryptocurrency exchanges and issued “punishment notices” to seven more, as reported on March 8.

    Despite Bitcoin currently trading at more than 50 percent of its December 2017 high of over $20,000, Lee has not abandoned his optimistic forecast of $25,000 by the end of 2018.

    Tom Lee is known for his bullish outlooks for BTC and as the “only major Wall Street strategist to issue regular reports and formal price targets on bitcoin”, according to CNBC.

  • Why Is This Microsoft Co-Founder Building The World's Largest Airplane?

    The twin-fuselage Stratolaunch airplane, the world’s largest aircraft, is designed to carry three space rockets up to the ceiling of the Troposphere, and then conduct an air launch of the rockets — blasting a satellite or spacecraft into outer space.

    Paul Allen, the founder of Stratolaunch (as well as co-founder of Microsoft), progressed one step closer to flight last week, when his aircraft practiced taxing down the airstrip, reaching a top speed of 46 mph, according to the Washington Post.

    Paul Allen established the aerospace startup in 2011. More than seven years later from inception, the experimental six 747 jet engine behemoth plane has yet to take flight, which has a wingspan greater than any previous aircraft on record; even more significant than business tycoon Howard Hughes’s famed Spruce Goose from the 1940s. The plane is designed to tether three space rockets to the center wing, then fly up to 35,000 feet to conduct an air launch of the rockets (demonstrated below).

    Back in 2016, Stratolaunch signed an exclusive agreement with Orbital ATK, a Dulles, Virginia-based company, for its aircraft to use Orbital rockets to air-launch satellites into low earth orbit. Under the multi-year production-based partnership, Orbital ATK will provide “multiple” Pegasus XL air-launch missiles for the Stratolaunch aircraft.

    In an exclusive interview last summer, Washington Post’s Christian Davenport sat down with Allen and Jean Floyd, Stratolaunch System’s chief executive, about their future ambitions for the aircraft. The interview was part of Allen’s forthcoming book called The Space Barons.

    “I would love to see us have a fully reusable system and have weekly, if not more often, airport-style, repeatable operations going,” Allen said in an interview in his Seattle office.

    Internally, the company calls the shuttle proposal “Black Ice.” Here is how Davenport describes the proposed shuttle program launched from a Stratolaunch:

    The Black Ice space plane — should it be built — would be about as big as the former space shuttle developed by NASA and capable of staying up for at least three days. It could be launched from virtually anywhere in the world, as long as the runway could accommodate Stratolaunch’s size. And it would be capable of flying to the International Space Station, taking satellites and experiments to orbit, and maybe one day even people — though there are no plans for that in the near-term. Then it would land back on the runway, ready to fly again.

    “You make your rocket a plane,” Floyd said.

    “So, you have an airplane carrying a plane that’s fully reusable. You don’t throw anything away ever. Only fuel,” he added.

    Davenport indicates the company is focused on the maiden flight of Stratolaunch, which could come in the second half of 2018. Once the Stratolaunch conducts a successful test flight, Allen could then initiate the Black Ice program.

    “If you caught the bug back in the Mercury era, of course, it’s in the back of your mind, but I think you’re seeing right now, other than [space station] resupply missions, most spaceflights are about launching satellites. That’s the reality. And they are extremely important for everything from television to data all over the world. You can get data in the Kalahari Desert because there’s a satellite up there,” Allen said in the interview.

    Allen offered limited technical details but did explain that the Black Ice program could produce a shuttle about the seize as NASA’s space shuttle, which has roughly a 24-meter wingspan. Because of the Stratolaunch aircraft’s mobility, the shuttle can launch from any large airport in the world. Further, the system is fully reusable, with the airplane serving as the first stage and the Black Ice shuttle serving as the second stage — blasting spacecraft into outer space.

    Last summer, Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson stopped by to visit the Stratolaunch aircraft, writing on Twitter that she had “the chance to see firsthand how Stratolaunch is developing an air-launch platform to make space more accessible.”

    Last Fall, Vice President Pence visited the plane in its hangar and was absolutely stunned by how many throttles the aircraft had.

    “With the shift from large to small satellites, the smallsat market could reach $30.1B in the next 10 years,” said Straolaunch’s Twitter.

    The one big question: Who will finance the Black Ice project?

    Paul Allen’s net worth is somewhere around $21.7 billion, but perhaps, as shown above, Vice President Pence and Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson have taken huge interest into the giant airplane, which could allude to the taxpayer ultimately footing the bill.

    According to Geek Wire, Stratolaunch was recently a hot topic at a House subcommittee hearing on NASA’s budget. U.S. Rep. Steve Knight, R-Calif., asked NASA’s acting administrator, Robert Lightfoot, whether he saw the prospect of “a good partnership” with companies like Stratolaunch.Lightfoot said NASA’s approach to commercial launch services “really allows new entrants to come in.”“We have a really good on-ramping way for them to demonstrate their capability, and become part of our toolbox to get our missions done,” he said. “So, yeah, absolutely, we see an opportunity for those folks.”

    Stratolaunch could soon offer a low-cost solution for corporations and government entities in launching satellites and or spacecraft into outer space. So far, Elon Musk has yet to respond to this startling development which could derail his SpaceX program.

  • Abolishing ICE Looks Likely To Become 2020 Campaign Issue For Democrats

    Authored by Peter Hasson via The Daily Caller,

    Left-wing pundits and activists are increasing pressure on Democratic politicians to embrace the fringe position of abolishing ICE.

    Once an idea limited to the far-left fringes, abolishing the nation’s immigration enforcement agency now looks likely to become a campaign issue in the Democrats’ 2020 presidential primary.

    Former Hillary Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon came out for abolishing the agency in January. “ICE operates as an unaccountable deportation force,” Fallon argued. “Dems running in 2020 should campaign on ending the agency in its current form.”

    A U.S. Border Patrol agent watches over a group of undocumented immigrants on February 23, 2018 in McAllen, Texas. The agents captured the group of Central American immigrants shortly after they rafted across the border from Mexico into Texas. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)

    “Should ICE exist?” MSNBC host Chris Hayes asked Democratic California Sen. Kamala Harris on Thursday. Harris’s answer — “certainly” ICE should exist — sparked a backlash among some liberals.

    Liberal writer Jack Mirkinson on Friday slammed Harris for her answer in an article titled, “Not Good Enough, Kamala Harris.”

    “Any serious defender of undocumented people in this country would look at ICE and know that it is a cancer that needs to be excised from the U.S. Pretending that the most diseased levers of state power can be molded into something better is a useless fantasy. ICE must be abolished. Anything less is not good enough,” Mirkinson wrote on Splinter, a left-wing website.

    “Kamala Harris is very likely running for president in 2020. It should be a political problem for her that she is not willing to take her criticisms of ICE to their logical conclusion and call for its abolition. She should be asked, over and over again, why exactly she is willing to uphold the legitimacy of such a racist, corrupt, and thuggish organization,” Markinson concluded.

    “Anyone else who decides to run—Bernie Sanders, Kirsten Gillibrand, Elizabeth Warren, Eric Garcetti, you name it—should be asked the same question.”

    Left-wing publication The Nation on Friday pushed out a similar piece, entitled “It’s Time to Abolish ICE.”

    “The idea of defunding ICE has gained traction among immigrant-rights groups horrified by the speed at which, under President Donald Trump, the agency has ramped up an already brutal deportation process,” The Nation’s Sean McElwee claimed.

    Major donor-funded groups on the Left, including Indivisible Project, the Center for Popular Democracy and Brand New Congress, now support abolishing the ICE, McElwee noted.

    “ICE​ is terrorizing American communities right now,” Angel Padilla, policy director of the Indivisible Project, told The Nation.

    “They’re going into schools, entering hospitals, conducting massive raids, and separating children from parents every day. We are funding those activities, and we need to use all the leverage we have to stop it.”

    “This is a growing position on the left, and I imagine 2020 Democratic presidential aspirants will have to grapple with it,” Hayes, the MSNBC host, wrote on Twitter. He linked to McElwee’s article.

    Acting ICE Director Tom Homan said Thursday that Democrats are being misleading about the illegal immigrants that his agency is deporting.

    https://video.insider.foxnews.com/v/embed.js?id=5747581490001&w=466&h=263

    “Nine out of every 10 aliens we arrested [in the last fiscal year] did have a criminal history,” Homan told Fox News.

    “They don’t want to know the facts. They want to keep playing this political game and put smoke and mirrors up about what ICE is actually doing.”

  • Visualizing 35 Years Of American Protectionism In One Chart

    Judging by the ‘end of the world’ rhetoric and ‘catastrophic’ scare-mongering gushing forth from every orifice of the establishment, one might be forgiven for believing that Trump is the first president to ‘dare’ to impose tariffs on unfair trade ‘bad actors’ in recent decades… he is not!

    As BofAML details in the table below, Presidents Obama, Bush, and Reagan have all imposed sizable tariffs on steel in the past…

     

    And here is the performance of the S&P 500 during the Reagan administration’s era of protectionist lashings on the world…

    Notice the rise then drop after each of the times Reagan imposed tariffs on Steel products.

    As GoldMoney’s Alasdair Macleod concludes, the back story appears to be far deeper than some relatively minor tariffs on steel and aluminium would suggest. It comes after a prolonged period of shadow-boxing between America in the blue corner and Russia and China in the red. To pursue the boxing analogy, China and Russia have been soaking up America’s punches on the basis America would simply tire herself out. It has been a replay of Muhammed Ali’s dope-on-a-rope strategy in the rumble-in-the-jungle, with America cast as George Foreman.

    However, in the last few days, China and Russia seem to have lost patience with America. Instead of patiently letting America gently decline through her own errors, the Asian superpowers are accelerating their own agendas regardless.

    We do not know the real reason China and Russia appear to have changed their generally patient approach to American aggression. Perhaps it was inevitable that at some stage the internal politics in President Trump’s administration would lead to this conclusion. Perhaps it’s a twist in the financial war, with China’s oil and commodity suppliers pushing for of greater yuan liquidity in financial markets. China has finally agreed to this by setting a date for the new yuan-denominated oil futures contract to start trading. Anyway, the inevitable has happened: President Trump has finally decided to impose trade restrictions on China, and the Asian powers are accelerating their imperial plans.

    America’s trade wars could have unintended consequences. They could end up with the two economic titans, the US and the EU, imposing destructive tariffs against each other. The effect on both economies will be to simply increase prices for consumers, when other price-inflationary factors are also coming into play.

    Fortunately for the rest of the world, the days when the dollar was tied to gold and trade protectionism by America threw the world into the 1930’s depression no longer apply. The dollar can be expected to decline instead of commodity prices falling, as they did in the depression. The impact of America’s protectionism on the global economy today is therefore likely to be significantly less than following the Smoot-Hawley Act. But from an American standpoint, the principal victim of the trade war that commenced this week will be America herself.

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Mar 10

Today’s News 10th March 2018

  • Why Canada Defends Ukrainian Fascism

    Authored by Michael Jabara Carley via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    Canada has a reputation for being a relatively progressive state with universal, single-payer health care, various other social benefits, and strict gun laws, similar to many European countries but quite unlike the United States. It has managed to stay out of some American wars, for example, Vietnam and Iraq, portrayed itself as a neutral “peace keeper”, pursuing a so-called policy of “multilateralism” and attempting from time to time to keep a little independent distance from the United States.

    Behind this veneer of respectability lies a not so attractive reality of elite inattention to the defence of Canadian independence from the United States and intolerance toward the political and syndicalist left. Police repression against communist and left-wing unionists and other dissidents after World War I was widespread. Strong support for appeasement of Nazi Germany, overt or covert sympathy for fascism, especially in Québec, and hatred of the Soviet Union were widespread in Canada during the 1930s. The Liberal prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, hobnobbed with Nazi notables including Adolf Hitler, and thought that his British counterpart Neville Chamberlain had not gone far enough in appeasing Hitlerite Germany. Mackenzie King and many others of the Canadian elite saw communism as a greater threat to Canada than fascism. As in Europe, the Canadian elite—Liberal or Conservative did not matter—was worried by the Spanish civil war (1936-1939). In Québec French public opinion under the influence of the Catholic Church hoped for fascist victory and the eradication of communism. In 1937 a Papal encyclical whipped up the Red Scare amongst French Canadian Catholics. Rejection of Soviet offers of collective security against Hitler was the obverse side of appeasement. The fear of victory over Nazi Germany in alliance with the USSR was greater than the fear of defeat against fascism. Such thoughts were either openly expressed over dinner at the local gentleman’s club or kept more discrete by people who did not want to reveal the extent of their sympathy for fascism.

    The Liberal prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, hobnobbed with Nazi notables including Adolf Hitler, and thought that his British counterpart Neville Chamberlain had not gone far enough in appeasing Hitlerite Germany

    Even after the Nazi invasion of the USSR in June 1941, and the formation of the Grand Alliance against the Axis, there was strong reticence amongst the governing elite in Canada toward the Soviet Union. It was a shotgun marriage, a momentary arrangement with an undesirable partner, necessitated by the over-riding threat of the Nazi Wehrmacht.

    “If Hitler invaded Hell,” Winston Churchill famously remarked, “I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.” Once Hitler was beaten, however, it would be back to business as usual. The Grand Alliance was a “truce”, as some of my students have proposed to me, in a longer cold war between the west and the USSR. This struggle began in November 1917 when the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd; it resumed after 1945 when the “truce”, or if you like, the Grand Alliance, came to a sudden end.

    This was no more evident than in Canada where elite hatred of communism was a homegrown commodity and not simply an American imitation. So it should hardly be a surprise that after 1945 the Canadian government – Mackenzie King was still prime minister – should open its doors to the immigration of approximately 34,000 “displaced persons”, including thousands of Ukrainian fascists and Nazi collaborators, responsible for heinous war crimes in the Ukraine and Poland. These were veterans of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), the Waffen SS Galicia and the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), all collaborators of Nazi Germany during World War II.

    Chrystia Freeland, the current Canadian minister for external affairs

    The most notorious of the Nazi collaborators who immigrated to Canada was Mykhailo Chomiak, a mid-level Nazi operative in Poland, who came under US protection at the end of the war and eventually made his way to Canada where he settled in Alberta. Had he been captured by the Red Army, he would quite likely have been hanged for collaboration with the enemy. In Canada however he prospered as a farmer. His grand-daughter is the “Ukrainian-Canadian” Chrystia Freeland, the present minister for external affairs. She is a well-known Russophobe, persona non grata in the Russian Federation, who long claimed her grandfather was a “victim” of World War II. Her claims to this effect have been demonstrated to be untrue by the Australian born journalist John Helmer, amongst many others.

    In 1940 the Liberal government facilitated the creation of the Canadian Ukrainian Congress (UCC), one of many organisations used to fight or marginalise the left in Canada, in this case amongst Canadian Ukrainians. The UCC is still around and appears to dominate the Ukrainian-Canadian community. Approximately 1.4 million people living in Canada claim full or partial Ukrainian descent though generally the latter. Most “Ukrainian-Canadians” were born in Canada; well more than half live in the western provinces. The vast majority has certainly never set foot in the Ukraine. It is this constituency on which the UCC depends to pursue its political agenda in Ottawa.

    The Canadian Ukrainian Congress (UCC) president Paul Grod

    After the coup d’état in Kiev in February 2014 the UCC lobbied the then Conservative government under Stephen Harper to support the Ukrainian “regime change” operation which had been conducted by the United States and European Union. The UCC president, Paul Grod, took the lead in obtaining various advantages from the Harper government, including arms for the putschist regime in Kiev. It survives only through massive EU and US direct or indirect financial/political support and through armed backing from fascist militias who repress dissent by force and intimidation. Mr. Grod claims that Russia is pursuing a policy of “aggression” against the Ukraine. If that were true, the putschists in Kiev would have long ago disappeared. The Harper government allowed fund raising for Pravyi Sektor, a Ukrainian fascist paramilitary group, through two organisations in Canada including the UCC, and even accorded “charitable status” to one of them to facilitate their fund raising and arms buying. Harper also sent military “advisors” to train Ukrainian forces, the backbone of which are fascist militias. The Trudeau government has continued that policy. “Canada should prepare for Russian attempts to destabilize its democracy,” according to Minister Freeland: “Ukraine is a very important partner to Canada and we will continue to support its efforts for democracy and economic growth.” For a regime that celebrates violence and anti-Russian racism, represses political opposition, burns books, and outlaws the Russian language, “democracy” is an Orwellian portrayal of actual realities in the Ukraine. Nevertheless, late last year the Canadian government approved the sale of arms to Kiev and a so-called Magnitsky law imposing sanctions on Russian nationals.

    The Harper government allowed fund raising for Pravyi Sektor, a Ukrainian fascist paramilitary group

    There is no political opposition in the House of Commons to these policies. Even the New Democratic Party (NDP), that burnt out shell of Canadian social democracy, supported the Harper government, at the behest of Mr. Grod, a Ukrainian lobbyist who knows his way around Ottawa. In 2015 the UCC put a list of questions to party leaders, one of which was the following: “Does your party support listing the Luhansk People’s Republic and the Donetsk People’s Republic as terrorist organizations?” The Lugansk and Donetsk republics are of course anti-fascist resistance movements that emerged in reaction to the violent coup d’état in Kiev. They are most certainly not “terrorist” organisations, although they are subjected to daily bombardments against civilian areas by Kiev putschist forces. Nevertheless, the then NDP leader, Thomas Mulcair, who would have agreed to almost anything to win power, answered in the affirmative. This must have been a moment of dismay for Canadians who still harboured illusions about the NDP as a progressive alternative to the Liberal and Conservative parties. How could it support a US/EU installed putschist regime which governs by intimidation and violence? In fact, it was a Conservative electoral strategy to obtain the votes of people of Ukrainian and East European descent by backing putschist Kiev and denouncing Russia. Mulcair was trying to outflank Harper on his right, but that did not work for he himself was outflanked on his left.

    Some Canadians harboured illusions about the NDP as a progressive alternative to the Liberal and Conservative parties

    In the 2015 federal elections the Liberals under Justin Trudeau, outwitted poor Mr. Mulcair and won the elections. The NDP suffered heavy electoral losses. Mulcair looked like someone who had made a Faustian bargain for nothing in return, and he lost a bid to remain as party leader. The Liberals campaigned on re-establishing better relations with the Russian Federation, but that promise did not hold up. The minister for external affairs, Stéphane Dion, tried to move forward on that line, but appears to have been stabbed in the back by Mr. Trudeau, with Ms. Freeland guiding his hand in the fatal blow. In early 2017 Dion was sacked and Freeland replaced him. That was the end of the Liberal promise to improve relations with the Russian government. Since then, under Freeland, Russian-Canadian relations have worsened.

    The influential Mr. Grod appears to keep the Canadian government in his hip pocket. There are photographs of him side by side with Mr. Harper and then with Mr. Trudeau, with Ms. Freeland on his left. Mr. Grod has been a great success in backing putschist Kiev. Last summer Mr. Trudeau even issued a traditional Ukrainian fascist salute, “SlavaUkraini!”, to celebrate the anniversary of Ukrainian independence. The prime minister is a great believer in identity politics.

    The influential Mr. Grod appears to keep the Canadian government in his hip pocket

    The latest gesture of the Canadian government is to approve $1.4 million as a three year grant to promote a “Holodomor National Awareness Tour”. Ukrainian “nationalists” summon up the memory of the “Holodomor”, a famine in the Ukraine in 1932-1933, deliberately launched by Stalin, they say, in order to emphasise their victimisation by Russia. According to the latest Stalin biographer, Steven Kotkin, there was indeed a famine in the USSR that affected various parts of the country, the Ukraine amongst other regions. Kazakhstan, not the Ukraine suffered most. Between five and seven million people died. Ten millions starved. “Nonetheless, the famine was not intentional. It resulted from Stalin’s policies of forced collectivization…,” Kotkin writes, himself no advocate of the Soviet Union. Compulsion, peasant rebellion, bungling, mismanagement, drought, locust infestations, not targeting ethnicities, led to the catastrophe. “Similarly, there was no ‘Ukrainian’ famine,” according to Kotkin, “the famine was [a] Soviet[-wide disaster]” (Stalin, 2017, vol. 2, pp. 127-29). So the Liberal government is spending public funds to perpetuate a politically motivated myth to drum up hatred of Russia and to support putschist Kiev.

    Identity politics and Canadian multiculturalism are now invoked to defend Ukrainian fascism celebrated in the streets of Kiev with torchlight parades and fascist symbols, remembering and celebrating Nazi collaborators and collaboration during World War II

    The Canadian government also recently renewed funding for a detachment of 200 “advisors” to train Ukrainian militias, along with twenty-three million dollars—it is true a pittance by American standards—for “non-lethal” military aid, justified by Ms. Freeland to defend Ukrainian “democracy”. Truly, we live in a dystopian world where reality is turned on its head. Fascism is democracy; resistance to fascism is terrorism. Identity politics and Canadian multiculturalism are now invoked to defend Ukrainian fascism celebrated in the streets of Kiev with torchlight parades and fascist symbols, remembering and celebrating Nazi collaborators and collaboration during World War II. “Any country sending representatives to Russia’s celebration of the 70th anniversary of their victory against Adolf Hitler,” warned putschist Kiev in April 2015, “will be blacklisted by Ukraine.”

    *  *  *

    “The further a society drifts from the truth,” George Orwell once said, “the more it will hate those that speak it.”

    Well, here is one truth that Mr. Trudeau and Ms. Freeland will not want to hear, hate it or not: 42,000 Canadian soldiers, not to mention 27 million Soviet citizens, died during the war against the Axis. Memories must be fading, for now we have come to this pass, where our government is supporting a violent, racist regime in Kiev directly descended from that very enemy against which Canada and its allies fought during World War II.

  • A Dire Warning From The "Doomsday Vault"

    Climate change alarmists are taking full advantage of the “Sudden Stratospheric Warming” (SSW) event, which occurred above the Arctic in mid-February, as further evidence that the world’s unpredictable and sometimes chaotic weather is jeopardizing humanity’s food security.

    The split of the polar vortex, otherwise known as an SSW event, shifted the Arctic airmass to most of Europe as well as Western parts of North America. Climate alarmist pointed out that massive snowstorms in Europe, dangerous weather patterns in the United States, and rain in the Arctic demonstrates how extreme weather is altering seasonal growing patterns.

    Here is what Bloomberg said, “the world was upside down: it was raining in the Arctic Circle and snowing in Rome,” as explained above, the SSW event has been the primary driver of chaotic weather since mid-February.

    Researchers, activists, executives and government officials gathered in Longyearbyen, a small coal-mining town on Spitsbergen Island, in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, to commemorate the 10-year anniversary of what has become known as the “Doomsday Vault,” which is an underground bunker buried deep inside a mountain where the world stores its plant seeds from apocalyptic consequences of climate change and war, said Bloomberg.

    Last month, we reported how the Norwegian government is planning to allocate 100 million kroner ($13 million) in technical improvements to enhance the facility after it sprung a leak from melting permafrost — officials warned that climate change could put the facility at risk.

    “Biodiversity is the building block to develop new plants and because of climate change we’re in a terrible need to quickly develop new varieties,” said Aaslaug Marie Haga, executive director of Crop Trust, a group established to support gene banks. “The climate is changing quicker than the plants can handle.”

    The “Doomsday Vault” is a secure seed bank buried deep inside a mountain on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen near Longyearbyen in the remote Arctic Svalbard archipelago. The underground bunker is a long-term seed storage facility, built to keep its three vaults cool for 200-years — and can survive natural or human-made disasters.

    The “Doomsday Vault” serves as a storage facility for more than 850,000 seed samples, according to the Bloomberg, which the three vault rooms are cooled to -18 °C (-3 °F).

    Bloomberg describes the organizations behind the “Doomsday Vault:”

    The vault is run by NordGen, the Nordic gene bank. A total of 74 institutes globally have deposits, and only those that send seeds have access. One notable exception is China, which has not signed the treaty, and is creating its own seed and gene banks outside the international cooperation. Participants say the real fight to preserve biodiversity is at the local level. Crop Trust is seeking to build an $850 million fund to finance its efforts, a long way to go from its current level of $285 million. Its largest donors are the U.S., Germany and Norway, but it’s now looking more to private business for funding.  

    “We have to be prepared for the unknown,” Jon Georg Dale, Norway’s food and agriculture minister, said in his hotel in Longyearbyen during the event, where he was stuck after canceling a snow-scooter trip because of the thaw gripping the Arctic.

    Some researchers, activists, executives, and government officials at the conference said there are no signs that the United States is backing away from its enviormental commitments, but did stress, Trump’s climate skepticism is concerning.

    Ann Tutwiler, a former Obama-administration official who’s now head of Bioversity International, a global research group backed by more than 50 governments said, “businesses are becoming more aware of the problems of losing biodiversity.”

    “The narrative of the 20th century was that we have to produce more food and that was all about a very narrow range of crops,” said Tutwiler. “Now because we have other issues we are trying to solve, such as climate and nutrition there’s a recognition you can’t do that with just those crops.”

    Patrick Mulvany, an agriculturalist and adviser on biodiversity and food sovereignty said, ” the real efforts aren’t being made where they are needed the most: on the ground with the farmers who are not getting adequately compensated.”

    “Unless that happens our future food is very insecure,” he said. “You can have as many seeds as you want locked up in the vault here but they deteriorate a little bit over time and they aren’t adapting to climate and new social pressures.”

    It the minds of a climate change alarmist, well, never let a serious crisis go to waste. With the recent wild swings in weather across Europe and the United States, alarmists have come out of the woodwork — pushing their fear-mongering rhetoric of impending climate doom. But why? Well, perhaps, in the case of the “Doomsday Vault,” officials are looking for more government handouts to fund operations.

    And there it is, the ah-ha moment: climate change alarmist preying on fear [climate change] to extract money from governments. 

  • Fourth Turning's Neil Howe: "Today's Demographics Defy Conventional Wisdom"

    John Mauldin interviewed Fourth Turning best-selling author and demographics expert, Neil Howe about generational changes and their effect on the markets, during a session at the Strategic Investment Conference 2018.  Howe said that demographics and generational factors have a huge impact on equity prices in the long run. Not only that, he thinks that there’s now a generational shift in wealth distribution that could spark major political and economic disruption.

    Today’s Demographics Defies Conventional Wisdom

    The main example Howe shared is that people in the 75+ age bracket still dominate stock ownership by far. This defies conventional wisdom that people reduce risk as they retire and leave the workforce. Meanwhile, Millennials have lower income and stock ownership levels than previous generations did at the same age.

    This is a key change as senior adults once had the highest poverty rates. Younger people are now challenging that once-safe assumption.

    Neil Howe

    Howe also pointed out striking differences between early and late Baby Boomers. Those born in the mid/late 1940s inherited some of the Silent Generation’s wealth and good fortune. Late-stage Boomers born in the early 1960s score lower in all kinds of metrics.

    Major Political and Financial Disruption Is Ahead

    Neil Howe ended  with an update on his Fourth Turning generational theory. He thinks we are about midway through it. From an economic standpoint, he foresees inflation fear and Fed tightening, which will be followed by a painful recession.

    Politically, Millennials desperately want civic re-engagement. They are seeking to completely restructure institutions. The right wing is a brick wall on this subject and numbers have let them hold off the pressure so far. This will change as Millennials grow older and Boomers die.

    Howe also pointed out that generational wealth transfer is going to be highly concentrated, reflecting current wealth inequality. Boomer wealth will flow to younger generations but the vast majority of Generation X and Millennials will get very little.

    As that happens, Howe anticipates major disruption, by which he means ugly inter generational conflict.

    For this an more presentations tune in to the SIC 2018 live blog.

     

  • Forbes Removes 10 Saudis From "100 Richest" List After MbS's "Corruption Crackdown"

    Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman reportedly extracted $100 billion late last year from a group of dozens of Saudi royals and businessmen – many of whom were his own cousins – in a “corruption crackdown” that had all the makings of a naked cash grab.

    After confining his countrymen to the Ritz Carlton Riyadh for months – even torturing some of those who initially refused to cooperate – the Prince won plaudits from the New York Times, but has been vilified elsewhere for his willingness to commit egregious human rights abuses – all to fill a hole in the Saudi budget.

    Given the Saudi government’s reticence about the crackdown, it’s impossible to tell how much money was taken from each individual prisoner, making external evaluations of their post-crackdown wealth nearly impossible.

    So perhaps it’s unsurprising that Forbes Magazine has decided to exclude all Saudi Arabian businessmen from this year’s list of the world’s 100 richest people. Last year, 10 Saudi nationals made the cut.

    Talal

    Out of the 10 Saudi billionaires who made the Forbes list last year, at least four were detained – the most recognizable being Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, pictured above, whose net worth last year was close to $20 billion.

    As Forbes explains, given the Saudi government’s reticence, it’s impossible to tell how much money and assets were expropriated from each individual businessman.

    Alwaleed and many others have been released, but checking out of the Ritz-Carlton cost billions. (Sources also told Forbes that Alwaleed is now banned from granting media interviews.) The Saudi government’s reported goal was to gather $100 billion to plug a hole in the budget that’s been growing amid years of low oil prices.

    There are a thousand and one stories about what precisely happened, making it impossible to know definitively who gave how much to whom when. Forbes learned that at least one tycoon who was not detained handed over assets to the government.

    Given these shifting sands of truth, we’ve chosen to leave all ten Saudis off our billionaires list this year; none would comment. With greater clarity regarding their wealth, some might eventually return to the ranking.

    Here’s the list of Saudis that Forbes removed from this year’s list, accompanied by their last confirmed net worth (courtesy of Forbes)

    * * *

    Prince Alwaleed bin Talal

    $18.7 billion

    Chairs publicly traded Kingdom Holding, which has investments in Lyft, Twitter, Citigroup and the Four Seasons.

    Mohammed Al Amoudi

    $8.1 billion

    Assets include a Swedish refinery, Saudi gas stations and an Ethiopian conglomerate (gold mining, farming, construction).

    Prince Sultan bin Mohammed bin Saud Al Kabeer

    $3.8 billion

    His publicly traded Almarai dairy company is among the largest in the Middle East.

    Mohammed Al Issa

    $2.6 billion

    His Assila Investments has stakes in a bank, a food processor and hotels.

    Saleh Kamel

    $2.3 billion

    Founded Dallah Albaraka conglomerate (real estate, food, health care).

    Abdullah Al Rajhi

    $1.9 billion

    With brothers, built Al Rajhi Bank, one of world’s largest Islamic banks.

    Abdul Majeed Alhokair

    $1.2 billion

    Salman Alhokair

    $1.2 billion

    Fawaz Alhokair

    $1.2 billion

    The three brothers’ real estate empire includes 19 shopping malls.

    Mohammed Serafi

    $1.1 billion

    Real estate investor.

     

  • Peace In Our Time? Only If America Is "Agreement Capable"

    Authored by Tom Luongo,

    Those who have followed this blog for the past year know that I feel Presidents Trump and Putin are working towards a Middle East Peace Agreement.  Brick by brick, day by day, the foundation for this agreement is being built.

    Last night’s nigh-historic statement by the South Korean National Security Adviser Chung Eui-yong is another piece of that foundation.  You can read the entire statement here, but I’ll highlight the important part:

    “I told President Trump that in our meeting North Korean leader Kim Jong-un said he is committed to denuclearization. Kim pledged that North Korea will refrain from any further nuclear or missile tests; he understands that the routine joint military exercises between the Republic of Korea and the United States must continue.  And he expressed his eagerness to meet President Trump as soon as possible.”

    “President Trump appreciated the briefing and said he would meet Kim Jong-un by May to achieve permanent denuclearization.”

    This is the breakthrough that everyone was waiting for.  Once Trump gets involved in the negotiations, a deal will be made.  That’s his wheelhouse, making deals.  Everyone walks away a winner in their minds.

    We can argue about the effectiveness of Trump’s sanctions until we are blue in the face. But the reality is that 1) Koreans no longer want separation and 2) North Korea is not the economic basket case we are constantly told it is in the media.

    I remember meeting with Jim Rogers in 2015 at a conference and the two areas of the world he was most bullish on were Kazakhstan and North Korea.

    Because North Korea, under Kim Jong-Un, is moving towards a more open society, not a closed one.  The sincere desire for reunification of the Korean peninsula, if only symbolically through a more open border, is the animating principle here.

    And that only happens with a North Korea entering the modern world economy.

    More Neocon Dreams Dashed

    Neoconservative pipe dreams of encirclement of Russia and China to dominate and destroy them are ending.

    Over the weekend chief Neocon “man-baby’ Lindsay Graham had his Madeline Albright moment saying that war with North Korea would be worth it to rid it of nuclear weapons.  The millions of dead Chinese, Japanese and Koreans that would result don’t matter because Americans wouldn’t die.

    “All the damage that would come from a war would be worth it in terms of long-term stability and national security.” 

    And they say Kim Jong-Un is crazy.

    Now the good news is that Trump is far more rational than either Albright or Graham.

    Solving North Korea’s drive towards nuclear weapons would be a major feather in Trump’s cap.  It would stop the braying of Democrats about his incompetence, or at least make their cries of such less resonant with rational people, i.e. most voters.

    The neocons are waging global war against Russia, China and Iran, but primarily Russia.  Some believe it is the only way to secure Israel’s future.  Others are simply playing a bad game of RISK.

    But, the reality is that Israel’s security is a secondary benefit (which is why it goes along with this) of the larger plan of global geopolitical and economic domination that begins and ends with subjugating Russia.

    Peace in the Middle East that begins with ending a nuclear weapons threat from North Korea would get Israel’s attention. If Trump pulls this off, along with his firm commitment to Israel, Israel can calm down as it would feel far more secure.

    Now you know why Trump is moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem.  The goal is to break deadlocks which are all open wounds designed to create future flashpoints.

    The Iran/Israel Reality Show

    But,  would also solve another problem. As I’ve talked about multiple times, North Korea’s nuclear program is also Iran’s nuclear program.

    As is the case with Iran’s ballistic missile program.

    We’re not the only country that engages in outsourcing, by the way.

    This is why solving North Korea helps to solve the Middle East.  Israel simply wants a secure future.  It can’t have that with a nuclear-armed Iran.  But, Iran wants to survive as well.

    And it can’t do so with American troops building bases all around it and U.S. ships patrolling its coasts.

    Taking North Korea’s nukes off the table, takes them off of Iran’s table as well.  The neocons have been in charge of foreign policy for months and it has resulted in more troops in both Syria and Afghanistan.

    As well, it has brought us into direct conflict with Russia on multiple occasions and only Putin’s prudence and patience has kept us out of a full-fledged shooting war with Russia.

    This is something that no sane person wants.

    So, first you solve North Korean nukes and, by extension, you solve Iran’s nukes.  Assad’s forces continue winning in Syria, ousting ISIS from eastern Ghouta and near Deir Ezzor.

    The Turks are straining the U.S./Kurdish relationship in the northern part of Syria. And Putin has Netanyahu cowed thanks to Syria shooting down an F-16I.  Do the math.

    The neocon rodeo is becoming a clown show.

    Are We Agreement Capable?

    I always come back to Putin and his Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov who have said on multiple occasions that the U.S. is ‘not agreement capable.’  In diplomatic terms it means that negotiating with us is pointless because we do not keep to the agreements we sign.

    And instead use the agreement as a stalling tactic to launch a new offensive in the near future.

    By agreeing to talks with Kin Jong-Un Trump is doing what was always in the cards, backing off on direct conflict.  We were never going to attack North Korea.  Despite Lindsay Graham’s insanity, the cost would definitely outweigh the benefits.

    The potential for war there to go global would be too high for any serious person to contemplate.  And Trump is no crazed war-monger.

    Remember what Putin just unveiled at his State of the Union address.  Weapons that can nullify our military logistical superiority around the world.   The U.S. military power is in logistics.

    So, don’t think for a moment that Trump is acting here out of strength.  Most of our military assets are, as of right now, sitting ducks.  Yes, they can do damage, but the risks of wipe out are incredibly high.

    That’s the theatre part of this.  The reality is the neocon game is almost lost.

    And humanity would be the winner.

    Putin is happy to let Trump take the credit here, even though it is his hard work which brought us to this point.  By allowing Trump to take the lead Trump can firm up his domestic political support and marginalize the neocons in both parties.

    But, that said, are we going to give up our drive to encircle China and Russia?  Does Trump have enough control over his intelligence and military command structure to abide by any agreement he signs?

    Are the neocons on the run?  Or just playing ‘Possum?

    Encirclement is why we still have troops in Japan and South Korea.  So, to be honest, I don’t know how far these talks go if the U.S. isn’t ready to pull the Seventh Fleet back from the South China Sea and/or remove our troops from the Korean Peninsula.

    Because that’s exactly what Kim Jong-Un will want as a starting point for any discussions of giving up his nuclear weapons.

    Given our recent history, if I was him I wouldn’t sign anything until I see troops packing up in the DMZ.  Then I’ll know Trump can deliver on whatever he promises.

    *  *  *

    To support more commentary like this as well as advice on how to invest in these tumultuous times, sign up for my Patreon and subscribe to the Gold Goats ‘n Guns Investment Newsletter for just $12/month.

     

  • "We Will Not Sit Idly By" – Here's How China Might Retaliate Against US Tariffs

    As we highlighted last night, China has threatened to respond to President Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs with unspecified actions that Chinese officials said could “seriously hurt the international trade order.”

    And as Axios warned in a piece published Friday, investors shouldn’t interpret their lack of details as a sign of an empty threat: Rather, China actually has far more leverage with which to retaliate against the Trump tariffs than it did when George W Bush briefly imposed tariffs on imported steel in the early aughts. Back then, Bush rescinded the tariffs, it’s widely believed, because the European Union threatened targeted sanctions that would hurt swing states like Michigan and Florida – states that Bush needed to carry during his 2004 campaign. Unsurprisingly, the EU is embracing a similar strategy this time around.

    But today, China’s ability to retaliate now rivals that of the entire European Union – which means this could be the last time the US can “set the agenda” in terms of its relationship with its largest economic rival.

    Back in 2002, China produced less than 200 million tons of steel. As of 2016, China could churn out 1 billion tons, forcing Beijing to pare back production or risk a destabilizing glut.

    China

    Given President Xi Jinping’s decision to abolish term limits, effectively clearing the way for him to serve as dictator for life, the country has the wherewithal and the political will to strike back. Mark Wu, a professor of international trade law at Harvard, said the country needs to do something – if only to save face.

    “China has to do something [in response to Trump’s tariffs] just to signal its own resolve,” Wu said.

    However, as Wu said, they likely won’t retaliate with the full brunt of their capability, as China would probably be content with watching the Westerners fight it out among themselves.

    Ahead of Thursday’s announcement, Zhang Yesui, a top diplomat and former ambassador to the U.S., said:

    “China does not want a trade war with the US … [But] we will not sit idly by and will take necessary measures if the US hurts China’s interests.”

    Since the earliest days of his campaign, Trump has bashed China, citing the US’s massive trade deficit with China as a sign that naive leaders and the “free trade” globalist establishment were allowing the US to be ripped off…all to benefit the coffers of wealthy elites. Meanwhile, in a sign that the US could be softening its stance, the Trump administration has reportedly asked China for a plan to shave $100 billion off the US’s trade deficit with the No. 2 economy (also known as China’s trade surplus).

    Trade

    As Axios sees it, there are two routes China can take: 1) it could retaliate by acting against US projects in China, denying US companies permits to operate in China, essentially blocking US companies from one of the world’s most lucrative growth markets…2) it could engage in tit-for-tat retaliatory tariffs against specific US industries and products – much like the EU has threatened to do.

    However, not everybody is convinced that China will follow through with a response beyond mere rhetoric: Nathan Chow, a strategist at DBS Group, wrote in a March 9 report that he doesn’t expect the US’s steel and aluminum tariffs to spark a “trade war” with China. Steel and aluminum account for only 3% of China’s total exports (though this figure masks the rampant trans-shipping whereby Chinese steel is dumped into other countries to mask its origins) and 0.6% of its GDP. Chow also argued that Chinese steel exports to the US are much smaller than the country’s top three steel export destinations: South Korea, Vietnam and the Philippines.

    Steel

    But one key difference between the Bush tariffs and the Trump tariffs is that Trump invoked Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act – the so-called “national security” justification, which leaves the door open for other WTO members to use a similar argument to justify retaliatory tariffs that COULD escalate into a trade war…

  • The FBI Now Admits It Could Have Prevented The Florida High School Shooting

    Authored by Carey Wedler via TheAntiMedia.org,

    Amid the fallout from the February 14 school shooting in Parkland, FL, that left 17 dead, the FBI and local law enforcement received widespread criticism for their inability to prevent the shooting despite multiple warning signs and opportunities.

    On Tuesday, the FBI admitted these failures to the House Judiciary Committee during a hearing focused on how the bureau handled tips about Nikolas Cruz prior to the massacre.

    FBI Deputy Director David Bowdich met with members of the House Judiciary Committee and House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, acknowledging that, as the House Judiciary Committee’s press release put it, “opportunities were missed.”

    That release summarized the takeaways, which have already been highlighted in media reports:

    “In September 2017, the FBI received an Internet tip from a video blogger about a threatening comment posted to a YouTube video the blogger had posted. The comment stated, ‘I am going to be a professional school shooter,’ and was posted under the username ‘nikolas cruz.’”

    According to the hearing, an FBI office in Mississippi received that tip, but after officials investigated it, they closed the case because “it lacked personal identifiable information on the user who posted the threatening comment” (the username “nikolas cruz” was evidently not enough for the agents to go on).

    Apparently, however, the agents could have done more:

    “The agents tasked with the case could have requested assistance from YouTube to attempt to identify the user who left the comment, but determined that the United States Attorney’s Office in that region was unlikely to agree to such a request.”

    On another occasion, a friend of the Cruz family called the FBI tip line and, according to Bowdich, provided sufficient information for the bureau to follow up. But as the press release noted, “the call taker did not ask any standard investigative probing questions during the call” despite the caller saying she worried Cruz “going to explode” and that she feared him “getting into a school and just shooting the place up.”

    The agent who took the call spoke to their supervisor, but that conversation was not documented. Worse, as the press release summarized:

    “At the time, the call taker was able to connect information about Nikolas Cruz to the September 2017 tip about the threatening YouTube comment. Despite these connected dots, the call taker and supervisor decided to not pursue the matter further and the case was closed.”

    They also declined to contact local authorities even though the caller told them Parkland police were also aware of the threat Cruz posed. “Better information sharing between federal and local law enforcement may have prevented the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School,” the summary of the hearing noted.

    Bowdich admitted “there were failures and that corrective actions will be taken,” including conducting separate reviews of the two above instances and providing better training for call takers working the tip line.

    Though the FBI is often glorified in entertainment and has received increased support in recent months thanks to its its pursuit of potential corruption within the Trump administration, the government agency has a long history of nefariousness.

    Though it is successful in using informants to instigate potential terror attacks, then foiling them and taking credit for keeping the public safe, it appears that despite its tip line, widespread surveillance methods, and immense manpower, the agency continues to fail to live up to its reputation.

  • Stormy Daniels Tapes "60 Minutes" Interview With Anderson Cooper

    Ever since news broke that Trump lawyer Michael Cohen won an arbitration hearing meant to stop Stephanie Clifford – aka Stormy Daniels, the adult film star who reportedly had a brief affair with Donald Trump after meeting him at a golf tournament in 2006 – it’s been nonstop Daniels news, as the White House announced that President Trump has hired a lawyer exclusively to handle Daniels-related matters (like enforcing an NDA that she’s claiming is invalid because President Trump never signed it, even though his lawyer paid her the agreed-upon $130,000).

    Daniels has also claimed that, by admitting to the payoff during public testimony, Trump lawyer Michael Cohen had violated the NDA, and that it is no longer binding.

    CNN, meanwhile, has been all over the Daniels beat, with White House reporter Jim Acosta reporting that Trump is displeased with Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ handling of a reporter’s question during a Wednesday press conference where she acknowledged that Trump had won the arbitration proceeding against Daniels.

    Indeed, it appears that, instead of fading away, like most scandals involving the White House, the Trump-Daniels affair is about as persistent as a case of herpes.

    Case in point: Today, CNN is reporting that Daniels has filmed a segment for ’60 Minutes’ with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, who is also a regular contributor to ’60 Minutes.’

    In January, Daniels appeared on Jimmy Kimmel live, where she shockingly appeared to deny sleeping with Trump, before later denying her denial.

    As of Friday, the 60 Minutes feature didn’t have an air date for the segment, saying only that it’d be “soon.”

    Cohen has said that “the payment to Ms. Clifford was lawful, and was not a campaign contribution or a campaign expenditure by anyone,” but several election watchdogs have filed complaints with the Federal Election Commission, arguing that the Daniels payment could constitute an unreported campaign expense.

    Stormy

    Daniels has shared intimate details of her affair with Trump – which lasted roughly 18 months and ended after he failed to secure a spot on “The Apprentice” for the adult film actress (it was network TV, after all). During an interview with “In Touch”, she dished that the sex was “textbook generic” and that Trump once confided in her that he hates sharks, and would never donate to a charity that helps them.

    Meanwhile, the president’s supporters in the evangelical community continue to have his back, arguing that whether or not Daniels’ allegations or true makes no difference to them, per the Hill…

    “Evangelicals know they’re not compromising their beliefs in order to support this great president,” Pastor Robert Jeffress said on Fox News Thursday. “And let’s be clear, evangelicals still believe in the commandment ‘thou shalt not have sex with a porn star.’”

    “However, whether this president violated that commandment or not is totally irrelevant to our support of him,” he continued.

    Jeffress said evangelicals knew they “weren’t voting for an altar boy” when they voted for Trump and maintained they supported Trump for his “policies and strong leadership.”

    The pastor, who runs the First Baptist Church in Dallas, reminded reporters that evangelicals understand “the concept of sin and forgiveness…”

    …Oh, and let’s not forget their appreciation for his Supreme Court picks.

  • "The Parasites Must Be Stopped" – A Letter From Ukraine To 'All Good People Of America'

    Authored by Russell “Texas” Bentley,

    To My Family and Friends, and All Good People of the USA,

    You may not know it yet, but the world changed on March 1st, 2018, an old era was ended, and a new era begun. In very great part, the meaning of this new era is up to you.

    On that historic day, Vladimir Putin revealed to the world that the US military is now obsolete, and no longer capable of “projecting power”, committing war crimes, or intimidating and destroying smaller nations around the world. That day has ended forever, one way or another.  The US military is still completely capable of the mission it needs and deserves to do, which is to defend the territory and people of the United States of America.  You are safe. There is no threat.  But the days of your government threatening and destroying other countries is over. I hope you understand this.

    Putin’s revelation of Russia’s game-changing weapons, against which the US military is literally defenseless, is not a threat or a bluff. Only liars and fools speak of “Russian aggression”, and the stupidity of anyone who says or believes “Putin is bluffing” is beyond measure. Russia’s weapons are real, and the US military industrial complex (that Dwight Eisenhower warned about 57 years ago) has absolutely no defense against them. In spite of plundering and squandering literally trillions of dollars from the US treasury and the American People in the name of  “defense”, they are defenseless.

    Russia’s new weapons present no threat to the American People, unless you allow the people who own and control your government to to start a world war and force the Russians to use them. But if you do allow that to happen, the American people will get exactly what the “good Germans” got in 1945. And you will deserve it, just as much as they did. For the exact same reasons.

    Russia is not your enemy. We seek only cooperation for the mutual benefit of all Mankind. But since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990, 28 years ago, the USA, NATO and the EU have sought to plunder and rule the world. They have been the enemies, the enslavers, the destroyers of the world. No reality based person can dispute that fact. There is no place that the US or NATO has gone into in the last 4 decades that is better off. Not one. In fact, there is no place that NATO or the US have intervened, (usually against international law) that hasn’t become a failed state, hell on Earth for the citizens, and a genuine danger to the surrounding regions and the world. It is the US government and NATO, and the people who own and control them, who are the threats and the enemies to the future of Humanity. But their days of disregarding international law and destroying weaker nations with impunity are now over, as of March 1st, 2018.

    The good people of America now have a huge opportunity, and a huge challenge. Russia spends less than one tenth what the USA spends on military and defense, but their military and weapons are superior in every measurable way. The waste, corruption and abject venality of the US military industrial complex has wasted trillions on weapon systems that are now literally useless, and which have left the US military (and by extension the American people) defenseless before the power of Russia’s weapons, which are  designed and produced to be effective rather than profitable.  The opportunity is this – the USA can now reduce its military spending (the highest in the world) by 90% and still be safer than you are right now, spending almost a trillion dollars a year on useless weapons and a defenseless military.  Safer, because as soon as the American People take control of their government enough to reduce your spending to ONLY as much as Russia spends, Russia will stop having reason to see the USA as an existential threat. The less you spend, the safer you will be. The more you spend, the more likely World War Three, which will see you as the instigators and the losers. This gives the USA, starting as soon as you want, an extra $800 billion, per year, to spend on things that have actual worth, things you really need.  Health care, free college education, fixing the rotting economy and infrastructure that are daily becoming more of a threat to the American people than Russia has ever been.

    Your challenge is that you must root out an entrenched  and ruthless kleptocracy, built on deceit and oppression, and which is bent on war, and will stop at nothing to cling to its power. It is a huge task, an historic task, but in it lies your only hope. These parasites must be stopped, and if the American People are not up to the challenge, if they fail in their historic mission, they will leave it to the armies of the world, led by Russia, who will no longer tolerate those who want to rule the world. Your rulers are leading you to a war you cannot win, a war from which you, your families and your nation, and perhaps the world, will never recover.  If the American People do not prevent their rulers from starting World War Three, there will be war.   Peace and prosperity or death and desolation. These are your only choices, and now is the time to make your choice and act accordingly.

    An annual windfall of $800 billion is yours for the taking, if you have the wisdom, courage and determination to take it back from the charlatans and scammers who have been robbing and wasting your trillions for years.  Already these vermin claim the only possible solution is to give them even more money, as if those who fail when they out-spend their competitors ten to one might succeed by spending twenty to one.  At some point, the host must rid itself of its parasites, or risk being bled dry.

    When the American People stand up to their oppressors, rid themselves of their parasites, the people of Russia and of the world will stand with you, will applaud and support you. All good people in the world are on the same side. Those who oppress and exploit you do the same to us. Your enemies are our enemies, and ours are yours. Stand up, as we have, throw off your chains and illusions, see for yourself who your real enemies are, and together let’s defeat them, before they destroy the world and all that is good in it. Only you can stop them without a global war. If you don’t, there will be war, and we will stop them. But those who live in the USA will suffer the fate of those who start and lose a world war. It is not a fate to be desired.

    America, that time has now come for you. The choice is stark and clear, and you must make it soon.

    Either bring your rulers to heel,  stop the war they are bent on starting, and reap the benefits of stopping the most egregious and wasteful scam in history, or do nothing, allow your parasites to consume you, and let them lead you and your children and your nation to Armageddon and a fiery death in a war that you now know you can never win. The choice is yours. And so is the responsibility.

    *  *  *

    Please consider a donation via Paypal, for a one-time or monthly contribution to our work. Please contact me at russellbbentley@gmail.com for both, or visit via the donation page. 

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Mar 09

Today’s News 9th March 2018

  • Trump Administration To Release Obama-Era Fast And Furious Documents

    Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

    We may finally get some answers to the high-level Obama administration’s gun-running scandal dubbed “Fast and Furious.”  The Trump administration is promising to release the documents pertaining to that scandal that were withheld by former Attorney General, Eric Holder.

    Operation Fast and Furious was the Obama-era operation in coordination with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) in which the federal government allowed criminals to buy guns in Phoenix-area shops with the intention of tracking them as they were transported into Mexico. But the agency lost track of more than 1,400 of the 2,000 guns they allowed smugglers to buy.

    “For over six years, the House Oversight Committee has fought for additional documents related to Operation Fast and Furious. Today, the Committee finally reached a conditional settlement with the Department of Justice,” Amanda Gonzalez, spokeswoman for the House Oversight Committee, said in a statement to Fox News.

    “The Committee seeks all relevant facts so we can learn from the mistakes made by the Justice Department. We have a responsibility to uncover why they worked so hard to hide this information from the Committee, the family of [slain border patrol agent] Brian Terry, and the American people.”

    Brian Terry was killed in 2010 by an illegal immigrant with a weapon used in the botched Operation Fast and Furious. Terry died in a gunfight between Border Patrol agents and members of a six-man cartel “rip crew,” which patrolled the desert along the U.S.-Mexico border looking for drug dealers to rob. The cartel member suspected of killing Terry was apprehended in 2017.

    Terry’s brother, Kent Terry also wants the scandal investigated.

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

    “We need to find out the truth, exactly what happened, how it happened, why it happened,” Kent Terry said on Fox & Friends Tuesday.

     

    “We need Mr. Trump, President Trump, to unseal the documents, reverse executive privilege so that we know what happened, and that we can hold the people accountable that are responsible.”

    According to Fox News, the Justice Department entered into a conditional settlement agreement with the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. The settlement agreement was filed in federal court in Washington D.C. and ends six years of litigation arising out of the previous administration’s refusal to produce records requested by the committee.

    “The Department of Justice under my watch is committed to transparency and the rule of law,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a statement Wednesday. “This settlement agreement is an important step to make sure that the public finally receives all the facts related to Operation Fast and Furious.”

    The White House has yet to release an official statement on the Justice Department’s settlement.

  • Pentagon "Disappointed" That Putin Will Use New Weapons To "Intimidate And Coerce" The US

    During a Wednesday meeting with members of Congress to testify about the Pentagon’s latest budget request, one US military leader told lawmakers that he was “disappointed” with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent unveiling of a powerful nuclear weapon, adding that the Russian leader will likely use it to “further intimidate” the US and its NATO allies, per RT.

    “I think the statements made by Russian president Putin while not surprising were nonetheless disappointing. While we have been aware of the development of Russia’s capabilities and watching with concern some of the development that has occurred in terms of Russia’s doctrine and exercise program, it is nonetheless disappointing to see that the president of the Russian Federation chose to feature these capabilities in a way that he did,” John Rood, under secretary of defense policy, told the House Subcommittee on Strategic Forces, during the discussion.

    Another leader, Commander of US Strategic Command Gen. John Hyten, said Putin’s declarations were “not surprising”.

    “Putin’s statements are not surprising and only reinforce Russia’s commitment to develop weapons designed to intimidate and coerce the US and its allies,” Hyten said.

    During his annual state-of-the-nation address to Russian lawmakers last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin shocked the world – grabbing headlines in US and other western media – by unveiling a new intercontinental missile that Putin claimed is capable of evading US missile defenses. Putin accompanied this announcement with a presentation showing footage of weapons testing, as well as digital representations of what a launch would look like.

    Putin once again blamed the US for Russia’s decision to develop its newest weapons, claiming that George W Bush’s decision to withdraw from the anti-ballistic missile treaty in 2002.

    In response to Putin’s demonstration, a Pentagon spokeswoman said last week saying that “the US has known for a long time that Russia has been developing destabilizing weapons systems…” and that the US is “fully prepared” to handle the advances threat. On Wednesday, Hood echoed that statement, admitting that Russia’s new weapons systems had probably been in development for “quite some time.

    “Those capabilities have obviously been in development for quite some time. President Putin talked about their maturity. They are clearly not the capabilities that were developed in the last few months or the last year,” Rood admitted.

    Perhaps more surprisingly, he also claimed that US-led NATO missile defense systems were “never intended” to neutralize either the Russian or the Chinese strategic nuclear arsenal. “That has not been our plan in focus and the capabilities developed do not enable us to do that,” he said.

    Still, the US still has enough nuclear and conventional-weapons heft to counter what he referred to as “revisionist powers” that are seeking to “reshape the world order and change territorial borders.”

    Hyten agreed, and warned lawmakers that, without massive investment in defense, the existing American arsenal could only support the “mutually assured destruction” doctrine for about a decade before the US’s current systems reach the end of their natural lives.

    “There is nothing they can do besides a massive attack against our country that we will not have the ability to respond to,” Hyten explained. “But we have to modernize these capabilities because 10-12 years from now all the capabilities that I operate today will be reaching end of life.”

  • Flying Homes And Floating Cities: How Billionaires Travel

    Authored by David Craggen via Safehaven.com,

    In the early 1900s, John Jacob “Jack” Astor IV was thought to be among the richest people in the world, with a net worth of nearly $87 million when he died, equivalent to $2.21 billion in 2017. In April 1912, he was traveling back home to New York after holidaying in Egypt, accompanied by his wife. Naturally, he was the richest passenger on the RMS Titanic.

    We’ve come a long way since the Titanic, and now the rich travel alone–and in unimaginable style.

    By Plane

    Clearly the most efficient way of transport for everyone, wealthy included, is by air. Nowadays, private-jet makers like Gulfstream, Bombardier, and Embraer are taking their offerings to new levels of luxury, technology, and performance.

    At $66.5 million, the G650ER is Gulfstream’s flagship product. It has a range of more than 7,500 miles, meaning it can complete flights across the Pacific Ocean.

    From the outside, it’s about a smooth and sleek as they come…

    Source: Tyrolean Jetstream

    And on the inside, it’s luxury all the way…

    Source: Tyrolean Jetstream

    Next on our winged luxury list is the Bombardier Global 7000, designed to be the ultimate long-distance, purpose-built private jet.

    It’s not in the air yet, though. This $73-million aircraft is set to enter service in the second half of this year.

    From the ‘living room’, to the formal dining and master suite, the Bombardier makes trans-Atlantic travel a breeze…

    Source: Bombardier.com

    By Car

    Not all luxury is in the sky, and limousines have always been the epitome of class, screaming wealth, stability and style.

    They’re also the easiest way to demonstrate wealth: Unlike planes, helicopters and yachts, these luxury toys are easy to show off in public.

    While the most popular limousines can run upwards of $300,000, a top-end customized version can cost up to $4 million.

    The Mercedes Benz Maybach, with an average price tag of around $700,000, is our favorite, and its most expensive model runs for around $1.4 million.

    There’s even a bullet-proof version:

    Source: Daimler

    Still, Mercedes doesn’t have the market cornered when it comes to luxury limousines. The entry-level price for the Rolls-Royce Phantom “for icons” is $400,000, with the most expensive model sold for $3.8 million.

    (Click to enlarge)

    Source: EconomicTimes

    By Boat

    By far the showiest form of ‘transportation’ that exists, is designed for wealth on water.

    Modern yachts, one of the oldest badges of wealth, are not just for sailing or for the banal task of getting from one place to another. Today’s most expensive yachts boast swimming pools, helipads and VIP suites.

    The most expensive yacht, the Streets of Monaco, is still under construction and will soon be unveiled. With a $1-billion price tag, this beast is the size of a small, floating city – complete with streets and famous Monaco landmarks such as the Monte Carlo Casino.

    In case you don’t believe us, here is the mock-up:

    (Click to enlarge)

    Source: Curbed

    The ‘floating city’ eclipses even the … Eclipse the world’s second-most expensive yacht, featuring two helicopter pads, 24 guest cabins, two swimming pools, several hot tubs, and a disco hall.

    Source: Yachtcharterfleet.com

    Oh, and it also features bullet-proof glass and a German missile defense system—just in case.

    What could possibly be next?

    That’s easy: Luxury space rides.

    Leading giants like Amazon, SpaceX, Microsoft, Virgin Group, Google, and Facebook are all getting in on the action.

    A study published last summer by Bloomberg profiled some of the world’s wealthiest entrepreneurs who’ve invested in space travel startups and technology innovations. There are a handful of companies at work on rockets fit for human travel.

    We can only imagine how luxurious the future of space travel will be…

  • February Payrolls Preview: Watch The "Hours Worked"

    With the February jobs report due at 830am ET on Friday morning, here is a recap of Wall Street expectations.

    While recent macro economic data has been solid, and suggests a strong number, remember: nobody cares  about the actual payrolls number any more, after all the US is about to have sub-4% unemployment with over 95 million Americans not in the labor force. The only thing that matters is what is the average hourly earnings, and whether in February the BLS can pull off the same trick it did last month when it was hours worked that dropped, giving the market the impression that hourly pay had risen when actually just the denominator shrank.

    And even if actual wages don’t rise, and they probably won’t, the other thing to remember is that wages aren’t actually important – so ignore all you read above – what is important is the “intention” to raise wages, something company CEOs have learned very well.

    Below is a quick summary of Wall Street expectations via RanSquawk  and Goldman.

    PREVIEW: Non-farm Payrolls (Feb 2018)

    • Non-farm Payrolls: (EXP +200k, PREV +200k)
      • Private Payrolls: (EXP +191k, PREV +196k)
      • Manufacturing Payrolls: (EXP +15k, PREV +15k)
      • Government Payrolls: (PREV +4k)
      • Unemployment Rate: (EXP 4.00%, PREV 4.10%)
    • Average Earnings Y/Y: (EXP +2.8%, PREV +2.9%)
    • Average Earnings M/M: (EXP +0.20%, PREV +0.30%)
    • Average Work Week Hours: (EXP 34.4hrs, PREV 34.3hrs)
    • U6 Unemployment Rate: (PREV 8.20%)
    • Labour Force Participation: (PREV 62.70%)

    PAYROLL TRENDS: Trend rates remain firm. Payroll growth has averaged 176k/month over the last 12-months, 180k/month over the six-months, and 192k/month over the last three-months, and the consensus view expects 200k in February.

    PAYROLL GROWTH: ADP reported another solid increase in February (235K vs expected 193K; previous revised up), above what was suggested by surveys and hard data. Pantheon Macroeconomics says that it may imply that the third element of ADP’s model (the data which ADP collects itself from firms that use its payroll services) was stronger than expected. Accordingly, Pantheon’s forecast for NFP has been nudged up to 225K from 200K.

    EARNINGS GROWTH: The February CB Consumer Confidence indexes’ “jobs plentiful” measure increased, while jobs “hard to get” dropped; the difference between the two consequently improved to a 16-year high, consistent with a jobless rate around 4%, according to Capital Economics, which also adds that labour market conditions are tight, and beginning to put upward pressure on wages. Meanwhile, respondents expecting incomes to increase hit a 15-year high; based on historical relationships, CapEco says, it hints that average hourly earnings growth will reach 3.5% by early 2019.

    EARNINGS CAUTION: Some are treating last month’s rise in AHE with caution. RBC points out that wage growth was not broad-based (production and non-supervisory workers, making up 80% of the workforce, saw no rises). Others argue that weather-related factors may have been in play. It is worth noting that in January, the U6 measure of unemployment (‘underemployment’) ticked up by 0.1ppts to 8.2% despite the rate of participation remaining stable.

    BUSINESS SURVEYS: ISM non-manufacturing survey’s employment component fell 6.6 points in February, down to 55.0 points. While the monthly drop appears large, it merely returns the employment index to its average level for 2017, Oxford Economics points out, adding the index remains safely in expansionary territory, indicative of a healthy labour market. ISM manufacturing survey’s employment component rebounded 5.5 points to 59.7 in February, after falling 3.9 points in January, consistent with solid payroll growth. Some respondents cited labour shortages as their ‘biggest challenge’ and OxEco says this may present an obstacle for continued gains in the employment component ahead.

    UNEMPLOYMENT CLAIMS: Weekly claims rose slightly to 231k in the latest week, but we came off levels last seen since 1969. The four-week moving average is currently knocking around 222.5k, slightly below the 225k (w/e 3/Feb). While claims data usually is subject to the usual caveats regarding its ‘noisiness’, analysts are giving credence to the data amid other evidence of tight labour markets, making it tough to fill vacancies. Indeed, this was alluded to in the Fed’s latest Beige Book, with several districts noting worker shortages in most sectors. (It is also worth noting that the latest Beige Book made 11 references to “wage pressures”, up from eight mentions a year ago, as UBS points out).

    LAYOFFS: Announced job cuts remain low, Challenger reported, with announced job cuts falling to 35.369k (prev 44.653k). So far this year, Challenger says, employers have announced 80,022 cuts, 3.5% lower than through February last year, and the lowest number of announced job cuts between January and February since 1995. The consultancy also adds that announced job cuts have been under 50k for 22 straight months, the longest streak in its tracking.

    * * *

    Focusing next on Goldman – which is usually the lead penguin in the sellside analyst procession and everyone else follows – the bank expects 210k jobs in February, 10k above consensus as a result of “warmer weather and unseasonably light snow during the survey week…. Labor market fundamentals also appear solid and may have improved further, given new cycle records for initial claims and Conference Board job availability.”

    Following a 4th consecutive 4.1% reading, Goldman also estimates the unemployment rate fell to 4.0% in February, which probably means another half a million people dropped out of the labor force. Additionally, a sharp unexplained rise in African American jobless rates seems likely to reverse, after adding a tenth to the January unemployment rate.

    On the most important thing, hourly earnings, Goldman estimates a 0.3% month-over-month increase in average hourly earnings: “We anticipate a boost to average hourly earnings from favorable calendar effects in February. However, we see the risks to this estimate as skewed to the downside as the calendar effect is not particularly large, and we estimate the year-over-year rate fell a tenth to +2.8%.”

    Some more details from Goldman, first arguing for a stronger report:

    • Weather. NOAA weather-station data indicate that snowfall during the survey week was unseasonably low, both on an absolute basis and relative to January. As shown in Exhibit 1, our measure of population-weighted snowfall would suggest a boost to job growth relative to trend of around 15-35k (the right axis is inverted).

    Exhibit 1: Snowfall Was Below Seasonal Norms and Declined from Survey Week to Survey Week

    • Jobless claims. Initial jobless claims fell to a new cycle low during the five weeks between the payroll reference periods (227k vs. 244k for January), and the absolute level suggests a very low pace of layoffs. Additionally, continuing claims edged lower, falling 6k from survey week to survey week.
    • Manufacturing-sector surveys. Manufacturing-sector surveys generally improved in February, and the ISM employment component in particular rose 5.5 points to 59.7. Our manufacturing employment tracker rose 1.8pt, also to 59.7, suggesting a solid pace of job gains in that sector. Note also that the payroll reference period preceded the steel and aluminum tariff announcement by the Trump administration. Manufacturing payroll employment rose 15k in January and has increased by 22k on average over the last six months.
    • ADP. The payroll processing firm ADP reported a 235k increase in February private payroll employment, 35k above consensus expectations. While some of the February strength may have reflected firmness in the financial and economic indicators used as inputs in the ADP model, we think the strong report nonetheless provides incremental evidence that the pace of job growth remained firm.
    • Job cuts. Announced layoffs reported by Challenger, Gray & Christmas pulled back 2k to 32k (SA by GS), its third consecutive decline. On a year-over-year basis, announced job cuts also declined by 2k.

    Arguing for a weaker report:

    • Job postings. The Conference Board’s Help Wanted Online (HWOL) report showed a 3.8% decline in online job postings (mom sa), the first outright drop in 5 months. We place limited weight on this indicator, in light of research by Fed economists that suggests the HWOL ad count has been depressed by higher prices for online job ads. The Conference Board is currently reviewing its methodology accordingly.

    Neutral factors:

    • Service-sector surveys. Service-sector employment surveys improved on net in February, as our non-manufacturing employment tracker rose 0.9pt to 56.0. However, the sharp drop in the ISM non-manufacturing employment component (-6.6pt to 55.0) highlights the lack of consistency across measures. Encouragingly though, 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 to a new 16-year high (+3.8pt to +24.7). Service-sector job growth picked up to 139k in January and has increased 127k on average over the last six months.

    Here again, for your amusement, is Goldman trying to refute how the drop in the hours worked had nothing to do with the increase in wages per hour:

    We estimate average hourly earnings increased 0.3% month over month. In the last employment report, average hourly earnings rose 0.34% and the year-on-rate improved to 2.9%, four tenths above the pace in the December report. While average hourly is noisy and often mean-reverting, there are no obvious distortions that can explain last month’s upside surprise. Calendar effects should have been negative, one-off tax reform bonuses are outside the scope of average hourly earnings, and while minimum wage hikes probably boosted the month-to-month change at the margin, the strength was concentrated among higher-paid supervisory and nonproduction workers.

    One popular narrative in the marketplace is that the firming wages in the last report were the result of a weather-related decline in the workweek. While we have argued that the total dollar value of payrolls tends to be “stickier” than hours, we believe these effects primarily relate to calendar configurations and payroll-system reporting, as opposed to weather. And as shown in Exhibit 3, the January wage strength was not concentrated in industries with a declining workweek (retail trade being the key exception). In fact, wage growth was relatively strong among industries with a flat workweek, most notably the large professional services and education and health categories. We instead expect a boost from favorable calendar effects. However, we view the risks to our 0.3% estimate as skewed to the downside, as the boost we expect from favorable calendar effects (the survey week ending on the 17th) is not particularly large. Reflecting this, we forecast a one tenth decline in the year-over-year rate to 2.8%.

    Exhibit 3: No Compelling Relationship between January Wage Growth and the Workweek

    Finally… the flu?

    Relatedly, we note that elevated flu activity in January (relative to seasonal norms) may have played a role in the decline in the workweek last month, and indeed the household survey “Not at Work: Own Illness” series showed a sizeable increase (+198k to 1,283k). However, we find no compelling relationship between this series and average hourly earnings growth (or with nonfarm payrolls). We suspect this reflects the inclusion of paid sick leave in the payrolls and earnings statistics (as well as in the workweek). Taken together, we do not expect a significant unwind in average hourly earnings in tomorrow’s report.

    Translation: as hourly worked rebounds hard, average hourly earnings will slide, and the 10Y and stocks will surge as the great and fake wage inflationary scare of February is finally long forgotten.

  • No, Russians Do Not Hack The FCC's Public Comments

    Via MoonOfAlabama.org,

    A member of the Federal Communications Commission, Jessica Rosenworcel, wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post.

    It is unlikely that the headline was chosen by the author of the op-ed. The editors of the Washington Post opinion page wrote it. I also doubt that she would have chosen a picture of the FCC head to decorate her piece.

    For the record: The headline is false.

    The op-ed is about a request for comments the Federal Communications Commission issued last year in preparation of its net-neutrality decision. Anyone, and anything, could comment multiple times. Various lobbying firms, political action groups and hacks abused the public comment system to send copy-paste comments via single-use email accounts or even without giving any email address.

    But this had and has nothing to with Russia or Russians.

    Here are the top graphs of the the WaPo op-ed with the “Russia-did-it” headline:

    What do Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), deceased actress Patty Duke, a 13-year-old from upstate New York and a 96-year-old veteran from Southern California have in common?

    They appear to have filed comments in the net neutrality record at the Federal Communications Commission. That ought to mean they went online, submitted their names and addresses, and typed out their thoughts about Internet regulatory policy. But appearances can be deceiving. In fact, each of these individuals — along with 2 million others — had their identities stolen and used to file fake comments.

    These fake comments were not the only unnerving thing in the FCC net neutrality record. In the course of its deliberations on the future of Internet openness, the agency logged about half a million comments sent from Russian email addresses. It received nearly 8 million comments from email domains associated with FakeMailGenerator.com with almost identical wording.

    I have emphasized the only words in the whole op-ed that are related to Russia. They are wrong. The author of that op-ed does not understand the FCC public comment system. Public comments are made by filling out a form on the FCC website leaving ones comment, some address data and an email address. Public comments are not “send” by email. Thus the FCC did not log any comments “sent from Russian email”. It logged comments made in a web form where the human (or program) making the comment provided a Russian email address as a means of contact. (It is obviously not expertise on communication issues that qualifies Jessica Rosenworcel for her position as FCC commissioner.)

    At least 12-13 million of the 21.7 million comments to the FCC were fake. 8 million email addresses entered in the form the FCC had set up were generated with www.fakemailgenerator.com, half a million were entered with *.ru Internet domains.

    FakeMailGenerator can use foreign domains for generating throw-away email addresses. In the screenshot below it generated an Hungarian one for me.

    If I would comment at the FCC and enter Reephy@fleckens.hu into the FCC form I would be counted as Hungarian. I would not have “send” that comment from an Hungarian email address. Nor would entering the comment make me Hungarian. Neither do *.ru email domains mean that the people (ab-)using them have anything to do with Russia.

    The Pew Research Center analyzed the 21.7 million comments the FCC received:

    Fully 57% of comments used temporary or duplicate email addresses, and seven popular comments accounted for 38% of all submissions

    The FCC and other agencies are required by law to accept public comments. But, as the op-ed says, it is utterly useless to request such public comments on the Internet without having some authentication system in place. The FCC had some email address verification system in place, but it did not use it. As the Pew Center writes:

    [T]he Center’s analysis shows that the FCC site does not appear to have utilized this email verification process on a consistent basis. According to this analysis of the data from the FCC, only 3% of the comments definitively went through this validation process. In the vast majority of cases, it is unclear whether any attempt was made to validate the email address provided.

    As a result, in many cases commenters were able to use generic or bogus email addresses and still have their comments accepted by the FCC and posted online.

    It is obvious that the FCC had no interest at all in receiving legitimate public comments. But the FCC at least did not blame Russia. The Washington Post editors do that when they chose a headline that has no factual basis in the piece below it. They abuse the op-ed which has the presumed authority of an FCC commissioner to reinforce their anti-Russian propaganda campaign.

    C. J. Hopkins notes that the cult of authority is systematically used to make the lunatic claims of Russiagate believable.

    Matt Taibbi writes that the aim of the Russiagate campaign was and is to target all dissent:

    If you don’t think that the endgame to all of this lunacy is a world where every America-critical movement from Black Lives Matter to Our Revolution to the Green Party is ultimately swept up in the collusion narrative along with Donald Trump and his alt-right minions, you haven’t been paying attention.

    That’s because #Russiagate, from the start, was framed as an indictment not just of one potentially traitorous Trump, but all alternative politics in general. The story has evolved to seem less like a single focused investigation and more like the broad institutional response to a spate of shocking election results, targeting the beliefs of discontented Americans across the political spectrum.

    Some commenters here lamented about my posts about the Steele dossier and or Russiagate issues. “It’s enough already.” But the issue is, as Taibbi points out, much bigger. In November 2016 the Washington Post pushed the ProPornOT campaign which denounced some 200 non-mainstream websites as “Russian propaganda”. This website is an “primary initial” target of that campaign.

    If the campaign succeeds to its full intent, Moon of Alabama will no longer be accessible.

    The Russiagate nonsense has do be debunked at each and every corner to prevent its further abuse against dissent on everything else.

  • BoJ Leaves Policy Stance Unchanged, Optimistic On Global Economy

    Having briefly injected some anxiety into markets over reported comments last week about paring back easing in 2019 (which were swiftly denied), Kuroda is likely to err on the dovish side in his comments after BoJ left all monetary policy levers unchanged.

    Consensus expectations are that the BOJ to leave all its key policy settings unchanged:

    • likely to keep the short-term rate at -0.1% and target for the 10-year JGB yield at around 0%

    • also likely to maintain the current pace of purchases of exchange-traded funds and real estate investment trusts

    • The BOJ is likely to retain its guideline on the annual pace of JGB accumulation at 80 trillion yen

    • Post-meeting comments by Kuroda are likely to be calibrated to avoid stoking upward pressure on the yen. That means he’s likely to avoid specifics if asked again about how or when the BOJ could manage an exit from extreme stimulus.

    And that is what we got. All policy levers unchanged.

    There was one dissenter – same as before – this guy not only wanted more NIRP, but also more QE, clearly unaware that the BOJ already owns more than half of all Japanese govt bonds.

    • BOJ Board Member Kataoka Votes Against Keeping Rates Unchanged

    • BOJ Kataoka: Should Take Additional Easing if Delay in Hitting Inflation Target

    • BOJ Kataoka: BOJ Should Lower Yields on JGBs of 10-Years and Longer

    Language surrounding the global economy is more optimistic.

    And don’t forget there lots of new faces on the BoJ…

    For now, Kuroda has made clear the bank remains committed to powerful easing and will stay the course until the inflation target is met. Even though the economy grew better than expected in the fourth quarter, there’s no shortage of worry spots.

    And as Bloomberg’s Chris Anstey concludes, all in all, very little change here, as we expected. The news on the BOJ, if any, today is going to come from Governor Kuroda’s press briefing this afternoon. The key questions there will be about his recent comments about starting to think about exiting from stimulus around next year.

    Of course, do not forget, The BOJ’s purchases of exchange-traded funds have helped boost Japanese stocks. Bloomberg’s Min Jeong Lee and Nobuyuki Akama show the effects on the Nikkei 225 Stock Average against a history of the BOJ’s ETF buying.

     

    Nikkei 225 jumped after-hours on the back of US-Korea headlines but that has all faded…

     

     

  • Baltimore Mayor Pledges 60 Taxpayer-Funded Buses To Drive Students To D.C. Gun Protest

    Kevin Rector, a crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun Newspaper, recorded Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh on Tuesday outside City Hall, shouting through a bullhorn to several hundred zombified students, of how she wants to provide 60 taxpayer-funded buses – to send more than 3,000 students to the March For Our Lives rally in Washington, D.C., scheduled for March 24.

    “We are providing at least 60 buses so that our students from our city can take their voices to Washington D.C. so that they can hear what we have to say,” Pugh said while standing next to the new Baltimore City Police Commissioner Darryl De Sousa. “We believe as you believe, that there should be no guns…”

    Earlier in the day, hundreds of Baltimore school students walked out of their classrooms onto the most dangerous streets in America, where the per capita homicide rate is on par with Venezuela, a country that is currently experiencing economic collapse.

    We ask the question: Why haven’t city students protested Baltimore’s out of control murders?

    The students wanted their voices heard and politicians to act regarding gun violence in schools, said WBAL Radio. The walkout is in response to the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, which left seventeen people killed and seventeen more wounded, making it one of the world’s deadliest school massacres.

    “We’re trying to stop gun violence trickling down to the youth. We see gun violence not just in schools, but all over Baltimore City, and we think it really needs to stop because it’s affecting the youth a lot. So we’re here to say something because we’re not going to be silenced,” said Amee Rothman, a student organizer.

    “We all need to come together and protest, so that something can change,” said Talia Jackson, a student. “I’m marching today because I think what is happening is unacceptable and it’s very disturbing.”

    City students had no issue leaving their classrooms and walking over to City Hall. Along the way, students passed strip clubs, homeless encampments, and methadone clinics. Nevertheless, since those things are typical in Baltimore, the students blindly passed some of the real issues that are leading Maryland’s largest city towards a collapse.

    Students came well prepared. Rector, who was videotaping the underage group, said the students were chanting “This Is What Democracy Looks Like!”

    Where have we heard that before?

    Well, that phrase is part of a pool of chants that are generally shouted at Soros-funded rallies. It is still unclear who funded the student walkout, but for one thing, the school system and Mayor’s office were well informed that these students were going to walk out. Marches like these take a great deal of city planning through various government entities — regarding permits and coordination with law enforcement. To sum up, this was not a spontaneous walkout by students, it was well planned and organized through community groups working with city officials. That is undeniable…

    It is rumored that protesting will be added to Baltimore City Schools’ curriculum next semester.

    Fox News host Laura Ingraham blasts Baltimore Mayor for her decision to send 60 buses of 3,000 students to an anti-gun protest in DC on the taxpayer’s money. Throughout the interview, Ingraham confirms our thoughts of how Baltimore is on the verge of imploding, but it is evident, the mayor has other priorities…

  • Rhode Island Wants To Tax Pornography

    Authored by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

    The government hasn’t yet figured out how to tax having sex. But Rhode Island at least wants to tax pornography.

    Yes I’m serious.

    It starts with censorship: two Rhode Island state senators just introduced legislation that would require Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block all “sexual content and patently offensive material.”

    We have no idea, of course, what is considered “offensive”. But in an age of cry-bullies where even the word “man” offends delicate university students, we can only imagine this covers a lot of ground.

    Rhode Islanders could then unblock this ‘offensive’ content with a written request, presentation of government-issued ID which proves they’re over the age of 18, and then making a one-time payment of $20.

    Internet Service Providers must collect the money and send it to the Rhode Island Treasury every quarter.

    Enforcing this law rests solely on the shoulders of the ISPs. If they fail to respond to reports of unblocked pornography or sexual content, they will be fined $500 for each instance.

    We can only begin to imagine what other genius ideas these politicians will come up with next.

    And to continue learning how to ensure you thrive no matter what happens next in the world, I encourage you to download our free Perfect Plan B Guide.

  • China Threatens Tariff Response That "Could Seriously Hurt The International Trade Order"

    Despite President Donald Trump’s promises to “be flexible” for “friends” of the US when considering exemptions to the steel and aluminum tariffs that the he’s planning to impose in two weeks, China – the explicit target of the taxes – and the European Union are not at all pleased – and they’re threatening retaliation, per RT.

    In a response to today’s announcement, China’s Commerce Industry urged the US to withdraw the planned-for tariffs while threatening to take “strong measures” that could “seriously hurt the international trade order.”

    Kim

    Adding insult to injury, President Trump boasted on twitter that trade wars are “good and easy to win,” triggering an outraged response from Donald Tusk, president of the European council, who responded, saying the truth is trade wars are “bad and easy to lose” and that the EU’s goal is to keep world trade alive and, if necessary, to protect Europeans  with a “proportionate response.”

     

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

     

    EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmström said thousands of jobs would be in jeopardy because of Washington’s import tariffs. In response, Europeans have threatened to retaliate by targeting US products such as whiskey, peanut butter, orange juice and motorcycles in retaliation, a group of products that amounts to $3.5 billion in trade annually.

    Earlier in the week, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi warned that trade wars “harm the initiator,” according to the Guardian.

    “As for our trade frictions, history teaches that trade war is never the right solution. In a globalized world it is particularly unhelpful as it will harm the initiator as well as the target country,” China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi said.

    “Given today’s globalization, choosing a trade war is a mistaken prescription. The outcome will only be harmful,” he added on the sidelines of an annual meeting of the national parliament. “China would have to make a justified and necessary response.”

    Beijing said nothing about how, exactly, it would retaliate for curbing its metals trade with the US, but, as RT reports, US products like soybeans, aircraft and cars present likely targets for counter-tariffs. However, China has previously used its economic heft to punish US allies. Last year, China lashed out at the South Korean tourism and retail industries after Seoul agreed to host American anti-ballistic missiles on its territory, a move that Beijing described as a threat to its national security.

    While the US only imports a small percentage of its steel from China (if one looks at the official data), the country’s rapid growth and debt-fueled expansion of its industrial sector have caused a worldwide glut of steel thanks to trans-shipping (or cheating as Navarro and Trump would say).

    South Korean officials also expressed regret at the US tariffs, adding that they would probably inhibit Korean steel exports. The US said it would make exceptions for Mexican and Canadian steel and aluminum while Nafta negotiations are ongoing…

    Steel

    The Japanese struck a more amenable tone, with Finance Minister Aso said he’d work to get Japanese companies excluded from the tariffs. Though he added that the measures are “extremely regrettable” and that they would have a “big effect” on the global economy, according to Bloomberg.

    While Trump prepares to implement the “negotiable” tariffs, plenty of Republicans, Democrats and other critics in the domestic economy are doing everything they can to kill the tariffs. Several US states are also bracing for tariffs, including Connecticut and Louisiana, which are among the states that will be hit the hardest.

    States

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Today’s News 8th March 2018

  • Paul Craig Roberts Fears "A Stalinist Purge In America?"

    Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

    This year could turn out to be a defining year for the United States. It is clear that the US military/security complex and the Democratic Party aided by their media vassals intend to purge Donald Trump from the presidency. One of the open conspirators declared the other day that we have to get rid of Trump now before he wins re-election in a landslide.

    It is now a known fact that Russiagate is a conspiracy of the military/security complex, Obama regime, Democratic National Committee, and presstitute media to destroy President Trump. However, the presstitutes never present this fact to the American public. Nevertheless, a majority of Americans do not believe the Democrats and the presstitutes that Trump conspired with Putin to steal the election.

    One question before us is: Will Mueller and the Democrats succeed in purging Donald Trump, as Joseph Stalin succeed in purging Lenin’s Bolsheviks, including Nikolai Bukharin, who Lenin called “the golden boy of the revolution,” or will the Democratic Party and the presstitutes discredit themselves such that the country moves far to the right.

    Stalin didn’t need facts and could frame-up people at will as he had absolute power. In the US the presstitute media, like Stalin, does not concern itself with facts, but the presstitutes do not have absolute power. Indeed, few people trust the presstitutes, and even fewer trust Mueller.

    Many are puzzled that President Trump has not moved against his enemies as they have no evidence for their charges. Indeed, Mueller’s indictments have nothing whatsoever to do with the Russiagate accusations. Why are not Mueller, Comey, Rosenstein, and all the rest indicted for their clear and obvious crimes?

    America’s future turns on the answer to this question.

    Is it because the Trump regime is letting the presstitutes and the Democrats destroy their credibility, or is it because Trump is weak, confused, and doesn’t know how to use the powers of his office to slay those who intend to slay him?

    If it is the former, then America will move far to the right.

    If it is the latter, America will have had its own Stalinist purge, and the purge is likely to follow the Stalin model and to extend down to those who voted for Trump.

    The failure of the integrity of the liberal/progressive/left has left the US facing two unpalatable outcomes. One is a right-wing government empowered by the left’s self-defeat. The other is the rise of the Identity Politics state in which oppression will be based on gender, race, and beliefs.

    This is not the only issue that could be resolved in 2018. There are others, and the other two major ones are the economic situation and the military situation.

    For a decade the central banks of the West and Japan have printed money far in excess of the increase in real goods and services. This money printing has not caused massive inflation of consumer prices. Instead it has caused inflation in financial instruments and real estate.

    The high Dow Jones average is the product of this money printing. Can the central banks stop printing money and allow interest rates to rise, thus collapsing equity prices and pension funds? What would be the consequences?

    Militarily, since World War II Washington has relied on its armed predominance to dictate to the world. But now the President of Russia has announced possession of what are from the US perspective super weapons that do not, as some claim, give Russia parity with the US, but give Russia immense military superiority over the US, indeed over the entire Western alliance.

    Russia’s capability, which the US has no chance of matching any time soon, means that Washington’s policy of intimidation has no chance of intimidating Russia. If Washington’s policy toward Russia continues in a hostile demeanor, Russia is likely to kick Washington’s teeth out.

    The cat has been belled. America is no longer “the sole superpower.” It is a second-rate power whose hubris is likely to do it in. Will it happen in 2018?

    *  *  *

    If you continue to support his website, you will continue to receive honest analysis of our dangerous times. Paul Craig Roberts’ website is your portal on reality. There is no reality in the presstitute media or in the voices in Washington except the reality of the special interests who rule you for their own gain. Stand up for the truth. Donate here: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/pages/donate/

  • Meet The 'Man' Who Crashed Bitcoin In 2018

    Bitcoin’s Tokyo Whale (not to be confused with that Tokyo Whale) revealed on Wednesday that he has sold off about $400 million in bitcoin and bitcoin cash since late September.

    Nobuaki Kobayashi, bankruptcy trustee for Mt. Gox, the largest bitcoin exchange in the world before hackers absconded with tens of thousands of customers’ bitcoins worth billions at recent prices, said he started selling in late September, meaning it’s quite possible he sold at least some of the coins at the highs reached toward the end of last year.

    Kobayashi made his disclosure in the report from the 10th creditors’ meeting, which took place Wednesday.

    In the report, he said he’d started selling off the bitcoin and bitcoin cash to raise money for disbursements that the trustee will soon need to begin making as bankruptcy claims are being evaluated, per Bloomberg.

    Which brings us to the crash of Bitcoin from December 2017 through February 2018.

    Matt Odell (@Matt_Odell) presents the full list of transfers out of their wallet.

    h/t @alistairmilne

    As Odell points out “More than half of the bitcoin they sold (18k btc) was transferred to an exchange on Feb 5th. The day before bitcoin hit its 3 month low of ~$6000. They panicked and sold the bottom. Market absorbed it well.”

    This is what Kobayashi’s “sells” look like on the chart of Bitcoin…

    Odell explains “The arrows on the chart above mark the dates of each Gox wallet transfer. Worth noting, these aren’t the dates of the sales, those most likely happened right after, these are the dates of the transfers to the exchange.“

    So that explains – or reveals – the mysterious man on the offer-side of Bitcoin for two months.

    Still, Bloomberg reports that Kobayashi is sitting on another approximately $1.9 billion, which he says he plans to offload soon…

    *  *  *

    Notably, buried deep in the report, Kobayashi disclosed that he’s asked US prosecutors for more information about the arrest of Alexander Vinnik, a Russian national who was charged with laundering $4 billion in stolen Mt. Gox profits through his old exchange, BTC-e.

    It’s unclear whether Kobayashi is planning on trying to recover some of these funds…

    Read the full report below:

    2018.03.07mtgox by Anonymous JJ6eerL on Scribd

     

     

  • Stockman Celebrates The End Of The Goldman Sachs Regency At The White House

    Authored by David Stockman via Contra Corner blog,

    The financial commentariat and the robo-machines are all in a tizzy this morning because Gary Cohn up and quit. But we say good riddance: The man gave Trump bad advice on nearly every single issue—trade, taxes, fiscal policy and the Fed.

    We didn’t make any bones about that viewpoint during our appearance on Fox Business this AM. When Maria Bartiromo asked us about Cohn’s departure, our reply was: Hallelujah, the Goldman Sachs Regency in the White House is finally over!

    The fact is, we do have a trade crisis, but Gary Cohn and the Wall Street pseudo-free traders don’t care and never have. That’s because they fiercely support a perverted, self-serving monetary regime that systematically and massively inflates financial assets, even as it strip mines and deflates the main street economy.

    As we have been pointing out in this series, there is a perverse symbiosis between the Fed and the Dirty Float central banks of the 10 major countries (China, Vietnam, Mexico, Japan, etc), which account for 90% of the nation’s $810 billion trade deficit (2017). Together they have ripped the guts out of the US industrial economy—effectively sending jobs and production abroad and cash flow and liquidated capital to Wall Street.

    For its part, the Fed has monkey-hammered US competitiveness. That’s the result of its insensible 2.00% inflation policy, which has fatally inflated nominal dollar wages in a world market drowning in cheap labor priced in artificially under-valued currencies.

    At the same time, its massive interest rate repression and price-keeping operations in the stock market have turned the C-suites of corporate America into financial engineering joints. So doing, they have slashed real net business investment by nearly 3o% since the turn of the century, by 20% from the 2007 pre-crisis peak and, actually, to a level in 2016 that barely exceeded real net investment two decades earlier in 1997.

    Meanwhile, the C-suites shuttled upwards of $15 trillion of cash flow and debt capacity during the last decade alone into stock buybacks, vanity M&A deals and excess dividends and recaps. As we said in today’s Fox interview, America’s business leaders will not stop strip-mining their companies in order to juice Wall Street and goose their own stock options until they are taken to the woodshed by a stern task-master at the Fed.

    By that we mean a central bank that is willing to get out of the financial asset price propping and pegging business, and to thereby permit the kind of stock market collapse that would finally expose the folly of  corporate America’s endless financial engineering. Indeed, at this point nothing else will stop them except being run out of their jobs for massive dissipation of corporate resources and piling their balance sheets high with unproductive debt.

    Yet until there is a clean sweep at the Fed and a purging of today’s crop of financial engineers and speculators from the C-suites, there is no possible way to reverse the nation’s faltering trade accounts. Doing so would require a major revival of investment in facilities, equipment, technology, people and business innovation that simply isn’t in the cards in today’s casino.

    Yesterday we mentioned that the US has incurred a massive and widening trade deficit for 43 years running, and that the cumulative shortfall totals $15 trillion. But much of that reflects long-ago dollars that have since been inflated away by the Fed’s relentless effort to stimulate more inflation.

    Accordingly, if that 43-year string of trade deficits is re-priced in 2016 dollars of purchasing power, the horror shows is just all the more stunning. To wit, the US economy has incurred nearly $19 trillion of cumulative trade deficits since 1975 in today’s purchasing power.

    Is there any wonder that US manufacturing output is still 2.5% below its pre-crisis level of late 2007, and that total industrial production including energy, mining and utilities has barely returned to the flat line?

    In this context, one of the chief culprits responsible for those dismal results is the trillions of cheap debt-fueled M&A deals that occur annually, and which cause massive layoffs, facility closures and asset reductions in the name of short-run “synergies”.

    Of course, all of this booming M&A is supposed to represent the noble work of productivity enhancement and the efficiencies fostered by the so-called market for “corporate control”. And it would in a world of honest money and free market financial discipline.

    But just the opposite is true under the Fed’s destructive regime of financial asset inflation. Overwhelmingly, M&A has become a vanity project of empire-building boards and CEOs, who then slash investments and necessary operating costs in order to deliver paint-by-the numbers “synergies” and to service their bloated debts. In effect, they shrink the GDP, not expand it.

    Image result for images of us mergers and acquisition levels since 2000

     

    At length, of course, these so-called synergies get lost in the fog of time and new deals, even as they eventually morph into reduced capacity for long-term growth, employment, competitiveness and profits. And when M&A deals eventually fail, the mountains of goodwill created by these over-priced transactions get written off, while plants, equipment and people get “restructured” into what Wall Street is pleased to call “one-time costs” that are to be added-back to ex-items “earnings”.

    Likewise, the fetish of share-buybacks is not reflective of the free market at work, either, even as Wall Street risibly proclaims that companies are “returning capital to shareholders” because it is the “highest and best” use of available cash.

    No it’s not!

    In a technologically dynamic world where continuous heavy investment is a prime facie condition for sustainable growth, the cult of stock buybacks would better be described as the grim reaper of corporate finance. In fact, it is part and parcel of the ultra-speculative climate on Wall Street and in the corporate C-suites alike that has been fostered by the Bubble Finance policies of central bankers.

    It is now almost universally the case that scalping short-term profits and virtually overnight trading gains is what is driving the casino. So how in the world did Trump get convinced that borrowing $1.5 trillion to slash the corporate tax rate to 21% would “stimulate” anything except an orgy of stock buybacks and financial engineering?

    Indeed, if any exclamation mark was needed on the departure of Goldman’s current plenipotentiary in the White House, this morning’s announcement that February brought an all-time record of $153 billion of stock buyback announcements was surely it.

    At the current annualized run rates, stock buybacks at $800 billion plus upwards of $2 trillion of domestic M&A deals and hundreds of billions more of LBOs, leveraged recaps and special dividends will pump $3.5 trillion of cash back into the canyons of Wall Street this year.

    Did Gary Cohn explain this to the Donald?

    Nah, it was his job to make sure nothing got in the way.

    At the same time that corporate America is being strip-minded by Wall Street and the C-suites, US workers also have one foot on the banana peel of inadequate corporate investment  in productivity enhancing tools, technology and training; and one-arm tied behind their backs owing to the drastic inflation of nominal wages.

    But the latter has done nothing more than help some keep up in part or whole with the Fed’s 2.00% inflation, while relegating many others to outright jobs losses—owing to them being off-shored to the China Price for goods and the India Price for services.

    Thus, since the year 2000, nominal wages of US production and nonsupervisory workers (blue line) are up by nearly 60%, which has not helped them one bit because consumer price inflation (green line) has been nearly as high.

    Accordingly, real weekly wages of prime age male workers (orange line) have actually flat-lined for the past 17 years.

    In the interim, of course, US goods and services production has been massively off-shored. And this trend has been acutely compounded by the systematic under-valuation of currencies by the 10 great trade offenders described yesterday.

    To repeat, the US does $4 trillion of combined export and import business with the rest of the world each year. About $2 trillion of that is spread among approximately 150 countries where trade is evenly balanced as between about $1 trillion of imports and exports each.

    For the most part, the counties involved such as Canada, the UK, the Scandinavian nations, Brazil etc. have not attempted to trash their own currencies any faster than the Fed has inflated its own dollar liabilities. That means they defended themselves from the Fed’s rampant expansion of US dollar liabilities, but did not take advantage of it to justify outright exchange rate suppression and mercantilist export promotion.

    By contrast, the other $2 trillion of trade is accounted for by just 10 countries, of which China, Vietnam and Mexico account for over half. Yet among the Dirty Float Ten, US exports in 2017 amounted to only $625 billion, while imports from these countries were more than double that figure at $1.352 trillion.

    Stated differently, US exports to the Dirty Float 10 amounted to just 46% of imports from them. And that absurd imbalance is not remotely due to faltering capitalist enterprise on main street or bad trade deals made in Washington.

    To the contrary, the real US trade problem is a monetary problem that can only be cured by regime change in the Eccles Building.

    While we have little hope that this reality will ever penetrate the orange comb-over, there is still a double dose of “good news” (of sorts) in today’s contretemps.

    To wit, Gary Cohn didn’t get the Fed Chairman’s job, which would have made all of this far worse. And Goldman Sachs has finally been purged from the Oval Office.

    There’s that—and it’s at least something.

  • China Reports Outbreak Of Highly Contagious Bird Flu

    A dangerous strain of bird flu that has been circulating in 2013 could be on the verge of snowballing into a global pandemic.

    The Paris-based Organization for Animal Health said Wednesday that a farm in Shaanxi province has reported an outbreak of a highly dangerous pathogen, while a separate farm in Guangxi province has reported an outbreak of H5N6, another dangerous strain of bird flu.

    Birdflu

    The H5N6 virus killed 23,950 ducks out of a flock of 30,462 ducks, according to the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture. The remaining birds were all slaughtered..

    In Shaanxi, the H7N9 virus killed 810 layers out of a flock of 1,000 birds.

    Last year, the number of bird flu cases in China spiked as the annual outbreak was much worse than normal. It also saw the virus split into two distinct strains that are so different, they no longer respond to the same vaccines, according a Reuters report from late last year. H7N9 is becoming increasingly pathogenic, meaning it possesses the capacity to kill infected birds.

    According to the South China Morning Post, Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin and a colleagues tested a version of the new H7N9 strain taken from a person who died from their infection last spring. They found that the virus replicated efficiently in mice, ferrets and non-human primates, and that it caused even more severe disease in mice and ferrets than a low pathogenic version of the same virus that does not cause illness in birds.

    But perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the virus is its ability to spread easily from cage to cage. When placed in cages adjacent to healthy ferrets, the virus will spread easily from infected animals and health animals, suggesting the virus can be transmitted by respiratory droplets such as those produced by coughing and sneezing.

    As one expert pointed out, “the work is very concerning in terms of the implications for what H7N9 might do in the days ahead in terms of human infection,” said Michael Osterholm, an infectious disease expert from the University of Minnesota.

    Since 2013, the H7N9 bird flu virus has sickened at least 1,562 people in China and killed at least 612. Some 40 percent of people hospitalized with the virus die.

    And the number dying during each epidemic has increased dramatically in recent months.

    In the first four epidemics, the virus showed few changes. But last flu season, there were some 764 cases – nearly half of the 1,562 total.

    Which is why a new risk assessment tool from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ranks H7N9 as the leading animal flu strain with the potential of causing a human pandemic.

     

  • Police: We're The Experts – Don't You Dare Criticize Us

    Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

    One of the most surprising developments in the wake of February’s Florida school shooting is the willingness by many generally police-friendly commentators to denounce the lack of action by local police against the shooter. 

    From National Review, to The Federalist, to Donald Trump, many of the law enforcement officers involved in the shooting are being accused of outright “cowardice.” 

    Part of this is agenda-driven. The inaction on the part of law-enforcement organizations demonstrates that it is not enough to “call 911” and hope the police show up to protect the victims. As Michael Graham notes, the Florida situation is part of a “pattern of police cowardice” which was also apparent at the 2016 Orlando shooting and at the Newtown, Connecticut shooting. In both cases, police stood outside while gunmen worked freely inside the building in question. 

    Thus, if police are going to protect themselves while victims are at the mercy of gunmen, this illustrates that private gun ownership is perhaps the only reliable defense — whether in the hands of professional private security or even amateurs. Opponents of a police monopoly on gun ownership have seized upon this police failure as a helpful illustration of their position. 

    In the past, however, the right-wing’s knee-jerk tendency to always defend the police would likely have prevented much direct criticism of police agencies themselves. That reticence, however, appears to be falling away, and the cowardice of government law enforcement officials has now become become an open question. 

    Naturally, this does not bode well for the position of police agencies in the political hierarchy. Law enforcement agencies have long depended on their “hero” status as an important factor in ensuring that police organizations get whatever they want from local governments and state legislatures.

    “We’re Experts, Do What We Say”

    In response, many defenders of police have become testy and defensive, resorting to slipshod arguments that amount to little more than “you people who aren’t police should just shut up.” 

    A typical example of this can be found in USA Today where Tim Vogt, a former border patrol officer and current instructor at a “law enforcement academy,” denounces any criticism of the sheriff’s deputies involved.

    Vogt’s argument? Police should not be subject to criticism “from the unqualified and spineless peanut gallery.”

    In other words, Vogt holds that government agents are unassailable experts who ought not be forced to suffer commentary from the ignorant taxpayers who, it seems, aren’t good for much other than paying the bills for law-enforcement agencies. 

    Vogt’s article resorts to perpetuating myths about police agencies, as well. He claims that “we also take more risks than most of you choose to on a daily basis,” implying that most Americans can’t fathom the risks that police officers take. In reality, millions of Americans are employed daily in lines of work that are more dangerous than being a police officer — including truck drivers, landscape maintenance workers, farmers, roofers, and construction workers. 

    Vogt resorts to outright deception when he claims that police “risk their lives on behalf of others each day, all for a lower middle-class wage.” This is not true outside the tiniest, most rural police forces. A typical police organization pays police well above median wages, and benefits are even greater when the extremely generous police pensions are included in the calculation. Scot Peterson, the police officer that Vogt is specifically defending, was being paid double the local median income.

    This sort of lashing out, however, is nothing new for defenders of law enforcement after rank police incompetence becomes apparent. 

    In his book defending the police response to the Columbine Massacre, former SWAT officer Grant Whitus declared: “I want to say to the critics: Okay, if you think it’s so damn easy, then you go patrol a beat…I bet you wouldn’t make one day with me before you pissed yourself.”

    Alan Pendergast, in a review of Whitus’s book notes: 

    It’s a standard cop refrain: You haven’t been where I’ve been, so shut your piehole.

    Significantly, Whitus invokes the movie A Few Good Men as an illustration of how police actions should be immune to criticism. 

    In the film, when questioned about his abuse of military power, the Jack Nicholson characters screams “You can’t handle the truth!” and goes on to explain how the general public is too yellow-bellied and ignorant to understand the real threats that are out there in the world. Thus, the military, his reasoning goes, should be left unquestioned in regards to how it goes about doing its business. 

    It is not surprising that Whitus wants this same rationale to apply to police work as well. The pain-in-the-neck general public doesn’t possess the secret wisdom government agents have, so the public’s opinions are all just the idle speculations of a “worthless peanut gallery.”

    Should Police Be Immune from Political Opposition?

    In foreign and military affairs, those who want citizens and taxpayers to keep quiet and do as their told invoke the phrase “politics stop at the water’s edge.” 

    It is a sentiment often expressed by advocates for more foreign intervention and ever more taxpayer funding for military institutions. The idea is the taxpaying public is too stupid or too ignorance to have anything other than worthless opinions when it comes to military and foreign affairs beyond the borders of the United States. Modern Americans have typically caved to this bullying tactic. Writing in the 1990s, however, at the end of the Cold War, Samuel Francis noted that such an attitude is incompatible with a free society:

    The self-sufficiency, the civic independence, of the citizens of a republic, the idea that the citizens should support themselves economically, should be able to defend themselves,educate themselves, and discipline themselves, is closely connected to the idea of public virtue…A self governing people is simply too busy, as a rule, with the concerns of self-government to take much interest in other peoples’ business…A self-governing people generally abhors secrecy in government and rightly distrusts it. The only way, then, in which those intent upon…the expansion of their power over other peoples, can succeed is by diminishing the degree of self-government in their own society. They must persuade the self-governing people that there is too much self-government going around, that the people themselves simply are not smart enough or well-informed enough to deserve much say in such complicated matters as foreign policy…We hear it…every time an American President intones that “politics stop at the water’s edge.” Of course, politics do not stop at the water’s edge unless we as a people are willing to surrender a vast amount of control over what the government does in military, foreign, economic, and intelligence affairs.

    Francis’s critique applies to police matters as well, of course. Politics do not stop at the front door of the police station or sheriff’s office unless we are “willing to surrender a vast amount” of citizen control over what the government does to us. 

    Many Americans are willing to surrender their civic responsibility to others, though. Francis contends that the modern American government relies heavily on citizen deference to the state’s “incumbent managerial elite.” This elite asserts it deserves a special exalted status above the taxpayers because the elites are, well, elites. And they know best. 

    This is the same claim now being made by current defenders of the police. 

    Deference to the “experts” in police and military organizations, however, has not always been a given in America.

    Indeed, among citizens in the nineteenth century, it was considered unbecoming to step aside and allow government agents to set the terms of national defense and public safety. 

    In the nineteenth century, critics of excessive deference to state “expertise” on matters of keeping the peace spoke in terms of “manliness” in resisting usurpation of privately-supplied community order. This measure of things never quite went away, although now the bravado comes largely from defenders of government agents. Thus, we see that critics of police are denounced as “spineless” nobodies who will “piss themselves” if faced with the dangers police face. On the surface, the debate is about courage, but the subtext behind apologists like Whitus and Vogt is one of “we’re real men, and the rest of you aren’t.” 

    Indeed, how voting citizens — all of whom were men through most of the nineteenth century — viewed themselves in relation to government agents with guns varied in earlier eras.  As noted by Bret Carroll in American Masculinities: a Historical Encyclopedia, deference toward military power “clash[ed] with the equally masculine virtues of independence and individualism.” The ideal citizen was a “citizen-soldier who was a frontiersman, a yeoman farmer, or a shopkeeper.”2 

    Standing armies were viewed with “suspicion,” and much of this grew out of ideas passed down from Revolution-era opposition to occupying British soldiers who were seen as being of “low moral character.” 

    It was only after the Civil War, Carroll notes, that the very large numbers of veterans in the general population began to create a “mystique” around military service, and to encourage a culture that “glorified military service” above activities in the private sector.  

    Because law enforcement agencies in their modern form were extremely rare in the US before the late nineteenth century, the functions of police were also largely viewed as a matter of private self-defense, and not a matter for “experts” who were to be unquestioned by the general public. 

    Today, the language of “manliness” or “virtue” has been replaced by the language of “expertise.” And, from the government’s point of view, expertise is even better as a standard of police and military power because it can be readily used to exclude all outsiders from exercising influence over internal government matters. 

    The attempt at having the experts take over, of course, has not been totally successful. There is still a well-established tradition in the United States of civilian oversight for military affairs, and non-police oversight for law-enforcement. County sheriffs are subject to voters and police forces are subject to civilian mayors and city councils. 

    Nevertheless, the claim that critics of police inaction are part of a unqualified “peanut gallery” has been successful for decades. It is an indication of a cowed and passive citizenry, but we may be finally witnessing some pushback from the non-experts who aren’t buying the pro-government myths any longer. 

  • ECB Preview: Draghi Set To "Avoid Any Sudden Moves" But Watch Forward Guidance

    Recent news events, including an anti-establishment surge in Italy, and President Trump’s tariff tirade, underpin the argument for Mario Draghi to avoid any sudden moves in tomorrow’s ECB statement and press conference.

    “Draghi is likely to err on the side of caution at the meeting of the Governing Council on March 8. The next major change to forward guidance probably won’t materialize until June — only concessionary tweaks are likely this month.” -David Powell and Jamie Murray, Bloomberg Economics

    With the euro having traded somewhat sideways for a month as most of the European equity markets collapsed, analysts suggest that Draghi may take his currency-strength-jawboning foot off the pedal and tweak forward guidance estimates to signal the beginning of the end for easing.

    SocGen’s Kit Juckes pointed out, “If we get a slight language tweak on Thursday and a drop in average hourly wage growth in the U.S., we’ll be above $1.25 by the weekend.”

    As Ransquawk notes, last time round, the central bank refrained from providing much of a blueprint as to how they intend to unwind their current stimulus program after its current end-date of September with Draghi stating that no discussion took place with regards to tapering. When asked about EUR appreciation, Draghi stated that it was a source of uncertainty and it is too early to say whether FX moves have had a pass-through effect.

    ECB JANUARY MINUTES: The highlights from the January minutes saw policymakers state that changes in communications were viewed as premature with some expressing the preference for dropping their current easing bias.

    SOURCE REPORTS: In the immediate aftermath of the previous meeting, source reports revealed that ECB rate setters were split about the next move as the Euro’s rise complicates the outlook. Thereafter, further reports suggested that the Bank’s PSPP will conclude with a short taper and some officials want clearer guidance on interest rate hikes. However, the most pertinent of the sources for the March meeting came last week with ECB policymakers seen to be unlikely to signal a policy shift this time round but could discuss a dropping of their current easing bias. 

    ECB RHETORIC: Perhaps the most significant recent contribution from ECB policymakers came from ECB’s Coeure who noted the ECB might end its net purchases even before it can see a sustained rise in inflation. However, this is likely to be more relevant for meetings later in the year than this time round. Elsewhere, Draghi highlighted last week that inflation is yet to show more convincing signs of sustained upward adjustment while the Euro area economy is expanding robustly.

    DATA: From a growth perspective, Q4 GDP figures printed at 0.6% and thus in-line with the Bank’s current forecasts. On the inflation front, prelim Eurozone CPI slipped to 1.2% from 1.3% during the month of February with core measures still uninspiring. However, prospects for wage growth will likely appease some policy makers. Elsewhere, survey data via Markit saw the EZ composite figure slip to 57.1 from Jan’s 58.8 but remains firm by historical standards nonetheless.

    Ransquawk points out that potential adjustments to the forward guidance are as follows:

    RATES: No adjustment expected on this front until details of the curtailing of asset purchases have been announced later in the year. N.b., at the previous meeting Draghi stated that he sees “very little chance” that the ECB will raise interest rates this year.

    ASSET PURCHASES: As revealed by the latest ECB source reports, a discussion around dropping the easing bias for asset purchases is expected to take place. After the notion being rejected by policymakers in January on the basis that fundamentals had not changed enough to warrant such an adjustment, this meeting might be too soon for consensus at the Bank to adopt such a change in communication. Note, consensus before the source reports suggested that this will not be actioned by the bank until June with the Bank to not reveal their method of curtailing bond purchases until the following meeting in July.

    GROWTH: No adjustment expected on this front.

    INFLATION: No adjustment expected on this front.

    And here is what to watch out for…

    ECB STAFF PROJECTIONS: Changes are widely expected to be particularly minor/non-existent with information since the previous forecasts unlikely to provide much incentive for the Bank to make any major adjustments.

    From a growth perspective, Pictet suggest that there is some minor upside risk to the 2018 forecast but ultimately any changes are likely to be tweaks rather than the mass adjustments seen in December. On the inflation front, the firmer EUR is set to negate any upside pressure from the climb in oil prices and upside in food prices. However, BAML believe that 2018 inflation could see a minor nudge higher on the basis that the Dec projections were too soft at the time. See below for the December projections.  

    PRESS CONFERENCE: Ultimately, aside from the macroeconomic projections and potential tweaks to the introductory statement, this week’s press conference could be one of the more uneventful presentations by the ECB President with Draghi set to ‘kick the can down the road’ on unveiling any major clues as to how and when the ECB will conclude their asset purchase programme. 

    In terms of subjects the ECB President will likely be quizzed on by journalists, aside from the future path of the PSPP, Draghi will likely be questioned on the ECB’s view of ‘trade wars’ during the Q&A after the recently announced measures by US President Trump. This comes in the context of the ECB Jan minutes stating that “…the balance of risks to the global economic expansion was considered to remain tilted to the downside… uncertainty regarding the policy outlook in some major economies, including the risk of an increase in trade protectionism, continued to constitute downside risks.” However, as if often the case with Draghi it is likely that he will adopt a non-committal tone and state that the ECB are monitoring events abroad.

    As far as other political issues are concerned, Sunday’s inconclusive Italian election result will also likely be a talking point given the success of the populist ‘anti-Euro’ parties. However, both the Northern League and MS5 have scaled back their desire for a EUR-referendum with the leader of the former stating that a vote on the issue would be ‘unthinkable’. That’s not to say that both parties (should they obtain power) wouldn’t opt for reform of the Euro-area but it is unlikely to impact the ECB’s thought process at this stage with the matter currently more of an issue for domestic Italian assets. 

    There’s also a possibility that Draghi will be asked about the Bank’s view on the EUR exchange rate given how much of a focus it was last time round. However, since then, the EUR has seen little deviation from Jan levels on a trade-weighted basis and as such, Draghi may opt to reiterate his previous stance of labelling it as “a source of uncertainty and it is too early to say whether FX moves have had a pass-through effect”.

    Here is a selection of analysts’ views on bonds and the euro ahead of the meeting, via Bloomberg:

    Barclays

    Changes to forward guidance are coming but in “small doses,” strategist Cagdas Aksu writes in a note

    Sees ECB dropping the asymmetric forward guidance in QE first, coming as early as this week

    Societe Generale

    The meeting should confirm a gradual shift in the policy outlook, loosening forward guidance slightly, according to strategists including Jorge Garayo

    Remain bearish on euro rates, with the belly of the curve having further room to re-price

    NatWest Markets

    Minor alterations are in the cards for forward guidance, but base case is for no change, according to analysts including Anna Tokar

    “It appears there is little reason to disrupt the markets at the moment, when the ECB views the current pricing as fair”

    See Draghi making further mention of the strong euro in the question and answer session

    Rabobank

    “Any adjustment to the forward guidance will have a minimal impact given the market has already accepted the fact that the program will be wound down between end-September and December this year,” said strategist Matthew Cairns

    “The material lack of wage growth and still-low inflation expectations will serve to keep a lid on a sustained, significant rise in yields”

    In summary:

    • Unanimous expectations look for the ECB to leave its three key rates unchanged

    • ECB set to discuss a dropping of their current easing bias

    • Macro projections unlikely to be subject to major revisions

    And finally here is ING’s guide to trading tomorrow’s ECB meeting…

  • Trump Trade Wars Are A Perfect Smokescreen For A Market Crash

    Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,

    First, I would like to say that the timing of Donald Trump’s announcement on expansive trade tariffs is unusual if not impeccable.

    I say this only IF Trump’s plan was to benefit establishment globalists by giving them perfect cover for their continued demolition of the market bubbles that they have engineered since the crash of 2008.

    If this was not his plan, then I am a bit bewildered by what he hopes to accomplish. It is certainly not the end of trade deficits and the return of American industry. But let’s explore the situation for a moment…

    Trump is in my view a modern day Herbert Hoover. One of Hoover’s first actions as president in response to fiscal tensions of 1929 was to support increased tax cuts, primarily for corporations (this was then followed in 1932 by extensive tax increases in the midst of the depression, so let’s see what Trump does in the next couple of years).  Then, he instituted tariffs through the Smoot-Hawley Act.  His hyperfocus on massive infrastructure spending resulted in U.S. debt expansion and did nothing to dig the U.S. out of its unemployment abyss. In fact, infrastructure projects like the Hoover Dam, which were launched in 1931, were not paid off for over 50 years. Hoover oversaw the beginning of the Great Depression and ended up as a single-term Republican president who paved the way socially for Franklin D. Roosevelt, an essential communist and perhaps the worst president in American history.

    This is not to say Hoover was responsible for the Great Depression.  That distinction goes to the Federal Reserve, which had artificially lowered interest rates and then suddenly raised them going into the economic downturn causing an aggressive bubble implosion (just like the central bank is doing right now).  But Hoover did actually aid the Fed in their undermining of economic stability by pursuing policies which were poorly timed.

    I’m hitting readers with all of this because I am growing rather tired of the contingent of Trump apologists in the liberty movement scrambling to defend every single Trump action no matter how illogical. These people should know better.  Sorry, but Trump is not “playing 4D chess” against the globalists.  His primary initiatives have only served so far to create a useful distraction away from the globalists.

    The disturbing key to all of this is the fact that many of Trump’s policies are things that I and many others have argued for in the past. The problem is, he is implementing them out of order and with bad timing, which will only make such policies appear destructive in the end, rather than constructive.

    In terms of the implementation of tariffs, the people who are defending this action at this time do not seem to understand the basics of international trade. Tariffs can only be enacted from a position of economic strength and resource development. This strength comes from internal self-sufficiency in production; meaning, in order for the U.S. to force a trade balance (which is what tariffs are supposed to do) the U.S. must have a strong industrial base and MUST be capable of producing most if not all necessary goods and goods in broad demand.

    The fact is, U.S. manufacturing has been utterly outsourced by the very corporations Trump just gave a 10% tax cut to, and rebuilding that industrial base would take decades. Why? Because there are no incentives for corporations to bring manufacturing back.

    As I already stated, Trump is instituting potentially solid policies but he is doing so out of order. Tax cuts for corporations should have been enacted only as an incentive for manufacturing jobs to be returned to America. Instead, corporations got tax cuts for absolutely nothing. And will those tax cuts go towards more jobs or innovation? Nope. They will be going to pay off unprecedented corporate debts, and stock buybacks, most of which were accrued through borrowing from the Federal Reserve.

    Will this stock buyback bonanza even generate new highs in the Dow? Probably not. But I’ll explain why that is later.

    If Trump had given tax incentives for corporations to bring manufacturing back into the U.S., and then given those corporations a few years to make the shift, only then would tariffs have been an effective action. But as the situation stands now, we have minimal tangible production in this country, and, historic debts held by the same overseas competitors that Trump is now seeking to “teach a lesson.”

    Debt is the next issue which needs to be addressed before tariffs can ever be implemented in a practical way. In terms of national debt, rather than setting up a plan to reduce U.S. debt expenditures, Trump is increasing debt by reducing taxes while at the same time increasing spending. Trump did not take a hard stand on the debt ceiling debate as he originally claimed he would, and so, the debt train continues unabated.

    Who is going to purchase this debt, I wonder? Over the past several years the largest buyer of U.S. treasury debt was the Federal Reserve through fiat money creation. Now, the Fed has tapered quantitative easing and is dumping their balance sheet at a rate faster than anyone expected. The Fed is pulling the plug on its artificial support of the economy.

    The next largest buyers are major foreign central banks in countries like China, Japan and to some extent the supranational EU. If the debt buyers of last resort are now the very same countries Trump is seeking to enact tariffs over, how do you think this little theater will end? Yes, with a dump of U.S. treasury bonds and perhaps the dollar as world reserve by those nations.

    But what about the U.S. consumer? Isn’t the consumer market in America so enticing that nations like China would “never dare” dump U.S. debt or the dollar? No, not really. If we are talking about a trade “war,” then a country like China, which has a vast manufacturing base and which has also been building up its own domestic consumer market, would be willing to make the sacrifice. America would be hurt far more by the threat of debt default and the loss of the dollar’s international buying power than China ever would be by the loss of American consumers.  With tariffs being implemented, they may lose the American consumer anyway.

    Our retail market is hardly as appetizing as it was 10 years ago given the decade of drudgery Americans have endured, with the largest number ever of working age citizens no longer participating in the jobs market, as well as real worker wages in continued decline while the American consumer is now more indebted than at any other time in history.

    All of these negative effects are weighing down our economy while the Federal Reserve is quickly deflating the fraudulent markets that the establishment used during the Obama administration to argue that America was “in recovery.” Of course, alternative economists have known since the beginning that this was a lie, and that the only thing propping up the economy and stock markets was central bank manipulation.

    The Fed under Jerome Powell has made it crystal clear that they WILL be raising interest rates and cutting the Fed balance sheet, perhaps more than their dot plots had indicated in the past. Without low rates and a steadily rising balance sheet we have already seen the results. Stocks in particular have gone crazy compared to the past few years, dumping nearly 10% one week, spiking about half that the next week. One thing is certain, the supposedly endless bull market induced by the Fed years ago is now over. Stocks are in heart attack mode.

    It is no coincidence that the first two times the Fed reduced its balance sheet the Dow plunged over 1,000 points. The latest dump of $23 billion at the end of February resulted in a drop of around 1,500 points. It is too early in this process to know what the trend will be, but it seems to me that stocks are being steam valved down every month. With a marked decline just after a balance sheet dump, followed by a less impressive dead cat bounce the week after.

    In the meantime, Trump’s “trade war” is now being blamed in the mainstream for the decline in stocks that the Fed is actually responsible for. As I have always said, Trump is the ideal scapegoat for the inevitable economic crisis the central bankers have staged.  Trump’s tariffs might exacerbate the problem, just as Hoover’s policies did in the beginning of the Great Depression, but the blame rests squarely on the Federal Reserve and central banks around the world.  Will the average person understand this dynamic once the dust settles on our financial system?  Probably not.

    So, to summarize, while Trump has indeed set in motion policies that conservatives in general tend to approve of, he has done so in an impractical way that will ultimately be blamed for a market crash the Fed created.  If conservative ideals such as limited government and sovereign trade protection get the blame for an unprecedented economic crisis then this could sabotage conservatism for generations to come.  If elections are still even a factor as this crisis unfolds, the chances of the public accepting a socialistic nightmare regime after Trump exits the White House are high. And, the banking elites that conjured the whole mess will escape once again without any punishment.

    The question we must ask is this – Is Trump aware that his policies are creating a perfect distraction for those same banking elites? I believe we will know for certain the answer to that before 2018 is over.

    *  *  *

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  • John Kerry, State Dept In Crosshairs As House Intel Committee Enters "Phase Two" Of Investigation

    The House Select Committee on Intelligence has John Kerry in its crosshairs – as Congressional investigators explore what involvement, if any, the former Secretary of State had in the unverified “Steele dossier” which relied on intelligence from high level Kremlin officials at a time when US-Russia relations were deteriorating.

    Assembled by former British spy Christopher Steele, the “dossier” is actually a collection of memos which contain both wildly salacious claims and loosely factual information – much of it based on hearsay or public knowledge. 

    Steele was paid $168,000 by opposition research firm Fusion GPS, while Fusion was funded by the DNC and the Clinton campaign. The FBI, however, had previously agreed to pay Steele $50,000 if he could verify the dossier’s claims – which he was unable to do. 

    Still, the FBI used Steele’s dossier – a collection of 17 memos, in their application for a FISA warrant to spy on Trump advisor Carter Page – and via “unmasking,” his associates.

    After the House Intel Committee majority released their four-page “FISA memo” detailing how senior officials at the FBI and DOJ used the unverified and highly biased Steele dossier to obtain a FISA warant, and the House Intel Committee minority released their own “counter memo,” the investigation moved into Phase II. 

    Phase II

    House Intel Committee chair Devin Nunes (R-CA) gave us a peek behind the curtain in early February, telling Fox’s Bret Baier “We are in the middle of what I call phase two of our investigation, which involves other departments, specifically the State Department and some of the involvement that they had in this.” 

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

    While it is unclear what role the State Department may have in surveillance abuses, the Washington Examiner‘s Byron York noted last month that former MI6 spy, Christopher Steele, was “well-connected with the Obama State Department,” according to the book Collusion: Secret meetings, dirty money, and how Russia helped Donald Trump win” written by The Guardian correspondent Luke Harding.

    Harding notes that Steele’s work during the World Cup soccer corruption investigation earned the trust of both the FBI and the State Department: 

    The [soccer] episode burnished Steele’s reputation inside the U.S. intelligence community and the FBI. Here was a pro, a well-connected Brit, who understood Russian espionage and its subterranean tricks. Steele was regarded as credible. Between 2014 and 2016, Steele authored more than a hundred reports on Russia and Ukraine. These were written for a private client but shared widely within the State Department and sent up to Secretary of State John Kerry and to Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, who was in charge of the U.S. response to the Ukraine crisis.

    Shedding more light on the subject is longtime Kerry colleague and Steele pal, Jonathan Winer – who penned a Feb. 8 op-ed in the Washington Post entitled “Devin Nunes is investigating me: Here’s the Truth”

    From Winer – along with a Senate Judiciary Committee criminal referral of Christopher Steele – we learned that several Clinton allies were also connected to both the dossier and the Kerry State Department. 

    Winer notes that “in late September [2016], I spoke with an old friend, Sidney Blumenthal, whom I met 30 years ago when I was investigating the Iran-contra affair for then-Sen. Kerry and Blumenthal was a reporter at The Post. At the time, Russian hacking was at the front and center in the 2016 presidential campaign. The emails of Blumenthal, who had a long association with Bill and Hillary Clinton, had been hacked in 2013 through a Russian server.

    While talking about that hacking, Blumenthal and I discussed Steele’s reports. He showed me notes gathered by a journalist I did not know, Cody Shearer, that alleged the Russians had compromising information on Trump of a sexual and financial nature.”

    Winer also describes a meeting with Christopher Steele during which he learned that Steele’s sources were pointing to collusion between Trump associates and the Kremlin – which also allegedly hacked the DNC.

    In September 2016, Steele and I met in Washington and discussed the information now known as the “dossier.” Steele’s sources suggested that the Kremlin not only had been behind the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign but also had compromised Trump and developed ties with his associates and campaign.

    Winer’s op-ed corroborates the series of events outlined in a criminal referral for Steele issued by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC), which asks the DOJ to investigate Steele for allegedly lying to the FBI about his contacts with the media. 

    Winer gives Blumenthal’s memos to Steele…

    While we’ve known for a while that Steele used Kremlin officials for information contained in the infamous “Steele dossier,” Winer’s op-ed reveals that he gave Steele memos from Clinton operative Sydney Blumenthal – which originalted with Clinton “hatchet man” Cody Shearer. 

    Winer claims he didn’t think Steele would share the Clinton-sourced information with anyone else in the government.

    “But I learned later that Steele did share them — with the FBI, after the FBI asked him to provide everything he had on allegations relating to Trump, his campaign and Russian interference in U.S. elections,” Winer writes. 

    Deeper Kerry Connections

    As Journalist Sara Carter notes, “Also in September, 2016 Steele briefed Winer on the dossier at a Washington Hotel, according to an expose recently published in The New Yorker. Winer prepared his summary and shared it with former Assistant Secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland and Jon Finer, who was then chief of staff Kerry. Kerry was then briefed by Finer several days later, according to the report. 

     

  • Northeastern Study: Schools Safer Than In '90s, Shootings "Not An Epidemic"

    Authored by Barry Donegan via TruthInMedia.com,

    Northeastern researchers James Alan Fox and Emma Fridel released a new study claiming that mass school shootings are not on the rise, that mass shootings are happening at a historically typical pace, and that shooting deaths in schools have been on the decline since peaking in the 1990s.

    The study entitled “The Three R’s of School Shootings: Risk, Readiness, and Response” by Lipman Family Professor of Criminology, Law, and Public Policy James Alan Fox and doctoral student Emma Fridel, which is set to be published in The Wiley Handbook on Violence in Education: Forms, Factors, and Preventions in June of 2018, compiled data on school shootings from USA Today, the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Report, Congressional Research Service, Gun Violence Archive, Stanford Geospatial Center and Stanford Libraries, Everytown for Gun Safety, a Mother Jones compilation of shooting statistics, and an NYPD active shooters report.

    While each of those reports define a mass and school shooting differently, Fox said that according to his examination of the totality of the data, since 1996, 16 multiple-victim shootings have taken place in schools, defined as shooting incidents in which there were 4 or more victims and at least 2 fatalities excluding the perpetrator. Fox defined 8 of those shootings, involving deaths of 4 or more victims excluding the perpetrator, as mass shootings, which mirrors the 1980s FBI definition of mass murder, The Washington Post noted.

    Fox also said that, including school shootings below the threshold of a mass shooting, four times as many children were fatally shot in schools in the 1990s compared to the present day. He also added that an average of 10 students per year die to gunfire in schools in the United States, meaning that bicycle accidents and pool drownings are significantly greater threats to the lives of schoolchildren.

    source: Northeastern University

    “There is not an epidemic of school shootings,” said Fox.

    Incidentally, Professor Fox is a supporter of gun control legislation and said that he believes that banning bump stocks and raising the legal age to purchase tactical rifles from 18 to 21 could help reduce overall gun crime. However, he claimed that these policy changes would do little to impact mass shootings.

    “The thing to remember is that these are extremely rare events, and no matter what you can come up with to prevent it, the shooter will have a workaround,” he said. Fox also noted that there have only been five times in the past 35 years in which a person between the ages of 18 and 20 used a tactical rifle along the lines of an AR-15 to carry out a mass shooting.

    Fox slammed the idea of arming teachers, calling it “absurd” and said, “I’m not a big fan of making schools look like fortresses, because they send a message to kids that the bad guy is coming for you—if we’re surrounding you with security, you must have a bull’s-eye on your back. That can actually instill fear, not relieve it.”

    Emma Fridel pointed out that many security policies aimed at stopping mass shootings have been ineffective. She said that mass shooting drills have not been shown to work in studies and that students find them traumatizing. She also noted that many mass shootings have taken place at schools with metal detectors and other security precautions, as shooters have found ways around them, such as targeting students outside during fire drills or ambushing security guards at the front door to gain entry.

    “These measures just serve to alarm students and make them think it’s something that’s common,” Fridel claimed.

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