- "By Way Of Deception, Thou Shalt Lose Your Empire"
“For nothing is hidden that will not be made manifest, nor is anything secret that will not be known and come to light”
Holy Gospel according to Saint Luke (8:17)“There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.”
George W BushIn April of 2014 I wrote an article entitled “How the Ukrainian crisis will eventually bring down the AngloZionist Empire” in which I made a list of the similarities between the Soviet Union of the 1980s and Obama’s USA and wrote the following:
What the AngloZionist are openly and publicly defending in the Ukraine is the polar opposite of what they are supposed to stand for. That is an extremely dangerous thing to do for any regime and the AngloZionist Empire is no exception to that rule.
Empire often crumble when their own people become disillusioned and disgusted with massive discrepancy between what the ruling elites say and what they do. And as a result, it is not so much that the Empire is faced with formidable enemies as it is the fact that nobody is willing to stand up – nevermind die – in defense of it.
Over two years later, watching the Presidential race between Trump and Hillary I am amazed to see how deep and “in your face” the habit of lying, denying the obvious, deceiving and otherwise misrepresenting has permeated the US political discourse.
First and foremost, there is the absolutely unabashed way the corporate Ziomedia is bashing Trump without even so much as a pretense of objectivity or truthfulness. Of course, I always knew that the US propaganda machine was lying and that the media was owned by the US deep state, but at least there was this thin veneer or pseudo-objectivity, of having “both sides” heard. Now this is over. When dealing with Trump, we have Orwell’s “Two Minutes of Hate” but spread over 24/7. Not that Trump does not deserve some of it, he sure does, but compared to how real scumbags like the Clintons are treated, the lynching of Trump is, I believe, unprecedented and unique. Why does it matter? Because now the masks have been taken off, the pretenses removed, and what you see is the true face of the corporate media as it always was: hateful, hypocritical and totally corrupted. And since a truly free and independent media is central to a functioning democracy, then the total corruption of the media in the USA is also the proof that this country does not have a functioning democracy.
Second, there are the completely surreal events happening in Syria: the US betrayal of the agreement signed with Russia, the US threats to attack Syria (in total illegality), the crocodile tears about the humanitarian situation in Aleppo (and the blind eye to Yemen), the mind-blowing hypocrisy of the USA wanting to take the Syrians and the Russians to an international criminal court for war crimes, the now absolutely open support for al-Qaeda (aka al-Nusra, aka Jabhat Fateh al-Sham aka Daesh) and the threats to arm them, the open threats by Admiral Kirby to have Russian aircraft shot down, Russian cities bombed and Russians soldiers come back in body bags – we now see an Administration which has gone completely “mental” over Syria and which does not even know what it is doing. To say that the 1000-4000 US servicemen and contractors currently deployed in Syria are “serving their country” or “defending democracy” or “our way of life” is simply laughable and everybody knows that. But nobody says a word about it. In fact, their presence in Syria is hardly ever mentioned.
This Kafkaesque slouching towards war with Russia is simply never discussed by any pundit or media outlet. It’s like it’s not happening, but of course it is happening, right before our eyes. The Russian officials speak about this every day, so does the Russian media, it is one of the most discussed topics on TV, and yet in the “land of the brave home of the free” this is a kind of Orwellian “untopic” which, by consensus, has no existence, no reality and no relevance: The Neocons’ crazy policies risk turning the USA into a gigantic pile of radioactive ashes, but the topic which preoccupies everybody is Trump’s potty-mouth about women.
I don’t know about you, but I see more nobility in the Titanic’s chamber orchestra playing the waltz “Songe d’Automne” as long as the ship could still float then in the pathetic spectacle which the (equally sinking) AngloZionist Empire offers to us today.
On the external front, the Empire is also doubling down on its lies. Here are a few headlines which were recently seen in 5th columnist newspapers in Russia and their colleagues abroad:
These are just a few recent examples. Such garbage is published by the pro-western “yellow” press in Russia and by the western corporate media on an almost daily basis.
Of course, the Neocons have always ruled “by way of deception”, as did the Anglo rulers of the British Empire, but in modern Russia they are now hitting a number of obstacles which greatly complicates their work:
1) Putin has done an excellent job slowly but surely booting out the worst russophobes from the main Russian TV and radio channels. Of course, some are left, very deliberately (I explain the reason for that in detail here) but they surely don’t control the media like they did in the 1990s.
2) In the age of the Internet, it takes just days to debunk the lies of Uncle Sam, the Neocons or the Russian 5th columnists (for the latest example see here).
3) Russians remember the 1990s and they follow very closely what is happening across the border in the Nazi occupied Ukraine and they realize that what the Ukraine is undergoing today is what Russia had to suffer in the 1990s and would have to live through again if the pro-western forces ever came back to power. In a way, you could say that the Russians have been “vaccinated” against the AngloZionist propaganda.
I think that while the situation is still much worse in the USA, there are also some very encouraging signs that the lies are beginning to wear off. While there are still millions who believe the Idiot-Box or simply don’t have the energy to think any more, there are also millions who are thoroughly disillusioned, cynical, disgusted and angry at the parasitic elites which rule over them. By and large, the corporate media is deeply distrusted. As for journalists, they are about as respected as lawyers and medical doctors (amazing how these two noble professions got completely discredited by their practitioners in just a few decades!). We can speculate for hours over whether Trump still has a chance to win the next election or not, but I submit that, judging by their panicked actions, the Neocons clearly believe that he might. And that terrifies them. The are clearly afraid that those whom they consider as their dumb serfs might revolt against their rule (as has happened so many times in history).
I know that there are many out there who do not trust Trump. And I agree with them. I don’t trust him either. However, while I do not “trust” Trump, I admit that it is possible that he really might be a President who would put the interests of the American people first, and the interests of the AngloZionist Empire a distant second. The history of empires is full of situations were one part of the ruling class turned against the other one (SA vs SS, Trotskists vs Stalinists, etc.). There is no reason to dismiss a priori the possibility that there is a schism inside the US deep state, that one part wants to save the Empire as the expense of the USA (the Neocons) and another wants to save the USA at the expense of the Empire (the Trump supporters). Again, I did not say that this is likely, only that I admit that this is possible. And if that is really a possibility, could it not also be possible that the American people would deliberately vote against their own mass media and political elites, just like the British people chose the Brexit in total defiance of the official doxa? That all the Trump-bashing actually could help him get elected?
Could it be that after losing Russia to their lies, the Neocons will now lose the United States to their apparently incurable propensity to rule by deception?
For years I used to dismiss the US Presidential elections like a joke, a fraud and an exercise in collective brainwashing. This time around, and for the first time, I think that there is a possibility, however slim, that something of importance might be decided on November 8. The fact that such a possibility even appeared is, by itself, quite remarkable and it is yet another sign of how deep the systemic crisis of the Empire has become. As for the parasites who form the 1% who run this Empire, they are clearly in a panic mode, probably because they are much better informed than most of us of how truly catastrophic the situation really is.
A Hillary victory will not change any of it. It will only make it much, much more dangerous. With Trump, there is at least a possibility of a gradual, more or less organized withdrawal, a drawdown of sorts, a transition of the USA from being a wannabe World Hegemon into a USA as a major, but “normal”, country. Very much like Russia today, I hope.
With Hillary we can be sure the Empire will double down, continue to lie to itself and the rest of the planet, and deny it all, making the end inevitably very violent, possibly catastrophic. I would not put it past the “crazies in the basement” to prefer a nuclear holocaust (their favorite topic!) to a liberation of the USA, and the rest of the planet, from their demonic power. It is therefore our duty to prevent them from succeeding from destroying our planet.
- BaN THe BRoAD…
- The Real Humanitarian Crisis Is Not Aleppo
Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,
Why do we hear only of the “humanitarian crisis in Aleppo” and not of the humanitarian crisis everywhere else in Syria where the evil that rules in Washington has unleashed its ISIL mercenaries to slaughter the Syrian people? Why do we not hear about the humanitarian crisis in Yemen where the US and its Saudi Arabian vassal are slaughtering Yemeni women and children? Why don’t we hear about the humanitarian crisis in Libya where Washington destroyed a country leaving chaos in its place? Why don’t we hear about the humanitarian crisis in Iraq, ongoing now for 13 years, or the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan now 15 years old?
The answer is that the crisis in Aleppo is the crisis of Washington losing its ISIL mercenaries to the Syrian army and Russian air force. The jihadists sent by Obama and the killer bitch Hillary (“We came, we saw, he died”) to destroy Syria are being themselves destroyed. The Obama regime and the Western presstitutes are trying to save the jihadists by covering them in the blanket of “humanitarian crisis.”
Such hypocrisy is standard fare for Washington. If the Obama regime gave a hoot about “humanitarian crisis,” the Obama regime would not have orchestrated humanitarian crisis in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Yemen.
We are in the middle of a presidential campaign in the US and no one has asked why the US is determined to overthrow a democratically elected Syrian government that is supported by the Syrian people.
No one has asked why the White House Fool is empowered to remove the president of Syria by siccing US-supplied jihadists, which the presstitutes misrepresent as “moderate rebels,” on the Syrian people.
Washington, of course, has no acceptable answer to the question, and that is why the question is not asked.
The answer to the question is that Washington’s strategy for destabilizing Iran and then the Muslim provinces of the Russian Federation, former Soviet central Asia, and the Muslim province of China is to replace stable governments with the chaos of jihadism. Iraq, Libya, and Syria had stable secular societies in which the government’s strong hand was used to prevent sectarian strife between Muslim sects. By overthrowing these secular governments and the current effort to overthrow Assad, Washington released the chaos of terrorism.
There was no terrorism in the Middle East until Washington brought it there with invasions, bombings, and torture.
Jihadists such as those that Washington used to overthrow Gaddafi appeared in Syria when the British Parliament and the Russian government blocked Obama’s planned invasion of Syria. As Washington was prevented from directly attacking Syria, Washington used mercenaries. The prostitutes that pretend to be an American media obliged Washington with the propaganda that the jihadist terrorists are Syrian democrats rebelling against “the Assad dictatorship.” This transparant and blatant lie has been repeated so many times that it now is confused with truth.
Syria has no connection whatsoever to Washington’s original justification for introducing violence into the Middle East. The original justification was 9/11 which was used to invade Afghanistan on the fabrication that the Taliban was shielding Osama bin Laden, the “mastermind,” who at the time was dying of renal failure in a Pakistani hospital. Osama bin Laden was a CIA asset who was used against the Soviets in Afghanistan. He was not the perpetrator of 9/11. And most certainly, neither were the Taliban.
But the Western presstitutes covered up for the Bush regime’s lie, and the public was deceived with the phrase that we must “defeat them abroad before they attack us at home.”
Of course, Muslims were not going to attack us at home. If Muslims are a threat, why does the US government keep bringing so many of them here as refugees from Washington’s wars against Muslims?
9/11 was the neoconservatives “new Pearl Harbor” that they wrote they needed in order to launch their wars in the Middle East. George W. Bush’s first Secretary of the Treasury said that the topic of Bush’s first cabinet meeting was the invasion of Iraq. This was prior to 9/11. In other words, Washington’s wars in the Middle East were planned prior to 9/11.
The neoconservatives are zionists. By reducing the Middle East to chaos they achieve both of their goals. They remove organized opposition to Israeli expansion, and they create jihadism that can be used to destabilize countries such as Russia, Iran, and China that are in the way of their exercise of unilateral power, which, they believe, the Soviet collapse bequeathed to the “indispensable nation,” the USA.
Osama bin Laden, the alleged 9/11 mastermind, was dying, not directing a terror war against the US from a cave in Afghanistan. The Taliban were focused on establishing their rule in Afghanistan, not on attacking the West. After blowing up weddings, funerals, and children’s soccer games, Washington moved on to Iraq. There was no sign of Iraqi belligerence toward the US. UN weapons inspectors said that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but Washington did not hear. The whores who comprise the American media helped the Bush regime create the image of a nuclear mushroom cloud going up over America if the US did not invade Iraq.
Iraq had no nuclear weapons and everyone knew it, but facts were irrelevant. There was an agenda at work, an undeclared agenda. To advance its agenda that the government did not dare reveal, the government used fear. “We have to kill them over there before they kill us over here.”
So Iraq, a stable, progressive country was reduced to ruins.
Libya was next. Gaddafi would not join Washington’s Africa Command. Moreover, China was developing the oil fields in eastern Libya. Washington was already troubled by Russia’s presence in the Mediterranean and did not want China there also. So Gaddafi had to go.
Next Assad was set up with faked evidence that he had used chemical weapons against the rebellion that Washington had started. No one believed the transparent Washington lie, not even the British Parliament. Unable to find support to cover an invasion, Killary the Psychopath sent the jihadists Washington used to destroy Libya to overthrow Assad.
The Russians, who until this point had been so naive and gullible as to trust Washington, finally figured out that the instability that Washington was brewing was directed at them. The Russian government decided that Syria was their red line and, at the request of the Syrian government, intervened against the Washington-supported jihadists.
Washington is outraged and is now threatening to commit yet another criminal violation of the Nuremberg Standard with blatant aggression against Syria. Such an ill-advised step would bring Washington into military conflict with Russia and by implication with China. Before Europeans enable Washington to initiate such a dangerous conflict, they had best consider the warning from Sergey Karaganov, a member of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Foreign Policy and Defense council: “Russia will never again fight on its own territory. If NATO initiates an encroachment against a nuclear power like ourselves, NATO will be punished.”
That the government of the United States is criminally insane should frighten every person on earth. Killary-Hillary is committed to conflict with Russia. Regardless, Obama, the presstitutes, and the Democratic and Republican establishments are doing everything in their power to put into the Oval Office the person who will maximize conflict with Russia.
The life of the planet is in the hands of the criminally insane. This is the real humanitarian crisis.
Note: Lt. General Michael Flynn, director of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency stated in an interview that the creation of ISIS was “a willful Washington decision.” See, for example:
https://www.rt.com/usa/312050-dia-flynn-islamic-state/ Also: http://russia-insider.com/en/secret-pentagon-report-reveals-us-created-isis-tool-overthrow-syrias-president-assad/ri7364The DIA warned that ISIS would result in a Salafist principality over parts of Iraq and Syria. http://www.judicialwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Pg.-291-Pgs.-287-293-JW-v-DOD-and-State-14-812-DOD-Release-2015-04-10-final-version11.pdf The warning went unheeded as the neoconservative Obama regime saw ISIS as a strategic asset to be used against Syria.
- Ford To Idle Four Factories Due To Slowing Car Demand, Rising Inventories
Over the weekend we recapped some of the less than impressive moments in the recent US car industry history, which suddenly appears to be bombarded with a
barrage of bad news: starting with Ford’s disastrous August sales when
the company admitted “sales have reached a plateau“, continuing to the surge in delinquent subprime auto borrowers hitting nearly a 7 year high as the marginal creditworthy car buyers disappears, then noting the record $4,000 in industry-wide new car incentives
in September as preventing a plunge in last month’s auto sales, and
recalling last week’s downgrade of the US auto sector by Goldman which said that the US “cycle has peaked“…
…one would almost think that a respite from the bad news was in order. One would be wrong.
As a result of slowing demand and declining US auto sales coupled with growing inventory, Ford Motor is halting one of two plants that builds its top-selling F-150 pickup as it idles four factories this month amid slowing U.S. auto sales.
As Bloomberg reports, starting this week, Ford is shutting its Louisville, Kentucky, factory building the Escape and Lincoln MKC sport utility vehicles, as well as two plants in Mexico that make the Fusion sedan and Fiesta subcompact, according to an e-mailed statement. Next week, the second-largest U.S. automaker will close the F-150 factory near Kansas City for seven days. And starting Oct. 31, the Louisville plant will be idled for another week.
The plant closings follow last week’s shutdown of Ford’s Mustang factory in Michigan after sales of the sports car plunged 32% in September.
Contrary to the popular refrain of a strong economy, US auto sales are slowing as many analysts predict the industry won’t match last year’s record of 17.5 million cars and light trucks. As we reported recently, Ford CEO Mark Fields has said the U.S. auto market has plateaued and that showroom sales are weakening. “We said we expected the overall retail industry to decline in the second half of the year,” Kelli Felker, a Ford spokeswoman, said in the statement. “We also said to expect to see some production adjustments in the second half — this is one of them.”
At least they stick to their word.
As a race to the bottom begins amogn the carmakers – F-series sales fell 2.6% last month as a pickup price war heated up – consumers will be the winners, able to pick up vehciles at increasingly lower prices. Escape sales dropped 12% in September as Ford faced competitive pressure from the Toyota RAV4 and Honda CR-V. Fusion sales plunged 18% and Fiesta was off 40% as car sales continue to languish with low fuel prices pushing buyers into trucks and SUVs.
So far trucks, picksups and SUVs have been the silver lining in an other wise dreary automaker landscape, rising as the rest of the lightvehicle segment stagnated, However, should gasoline prices keep rising, that too is about to change in adverse direction.
Meanwhile, Felker said Ford is trying to match production with demand. Inventories have been swelling on the models the automaker is idling. The company had 93 days supply of F-series pickups, which includes the F-150, at the end of September, up from 83 days a year earlier, according to researcher Autodata Corp.
According to Bloomberg, Escape inventory grew to 64 days, from 50 a year earlier, while Lincoln MKC climbed to 96 days from 91 last year, according to Autodata. A 60-day supply is considered optimal. Ford had 72 days supply of Fusion sedans at the end of last month, up from 51 a year earlier, and it had enough inventory of the Fiesta to last 77 days, up from 56 in September of 2015, according to Autodata.
Worst of all, while the rest of the US manufacturing sector has been in secular decline, the auto industry was perhaps the last shining light for battered US manufacturing during the past several years. However, if demand for cars continues to collapse, forcing supply to follow suit, it is only a matter of time before the US manufacturing recession returns with a vengeance, and at the worst possible time: when not even the US service sector can hinder the realization that the US economy is on the verge of contracting.
Finally, here are some auto-related charts courtesy of Goldman Sachs.
- A Vote For Treason
Submitted by TL Davis via ChristianMerc blog,
It has taken several months and a number of email dumps from Wikileaks to finally figure out what this presidential election is all about. There are only two ways to vote, for Donald Trump or for Hillary Clinton. But neither of those are what one would be voting for.
A vote for Donald Trump is a vote to resist the massive corruption of government, a vote against globalism, against "global warming" or "climate change" theology; it is a vote against media collusion and interference in politics. A vote for Donald Trump is not a vote for the person at all, that is why despite the media onslaught of negative stories about him as a person carries no weight with those who support him, because they don't support him at all, they support what he represents, which is a chance to hold Hillary Clinton responsible for her crimes and therefore all of the crooked politicians of 2012 who coerced votes out of their Republican base only to turn on them the next day.
Likewise, a vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote for a transformed America, a quasi-police state where the government intervenes in business and forces some out of business while subsidizing other businesses that could not possibly sustain themselves without massive graft and media brainwashing. All of those businesses would be held hostage to a criminal organization originating from the White House. It would be a vote to end forever the concept of individual rights. Hillary Clinton would do no less than continue the work of the Obama Administration to destroy individual rights and nearly half of the nation is in favor of just that. It would be a continued replacement of the voters who value the principles of the founding of this nation with those who have no like expectation. It is a vote for the sudden disappearance of websites like this one.
The outcome is bigger than that. The next president will likely be a true war-time president. As Vladimir Zhirinovsky claimed a vote for Hillary Clinton would be a vote for war. War with Russia may be inevitable and irrespective of the election as it seems likely that war will begin before the next president can take office. But, there is the question of who would be more likely to effectively fight that war. More than that, would our military leaders be willing to follow the orders of a criminal like Hillary Clinton running a crime organization out of Washington? Would they put their lives in jeopardy knowing the cold-blooded actions she demonstrated in Benghazi? Or, would they likely recognize that their lives meant nothing to the Commander in Chief?
So many things are now known about the media establishment and the collusion it shares with the Clinton campaign. More things are being found out every day as Wikileaks provides proof of the public perception. The people were right, there is a conspiracy to keep them uninformed and misinformed to protect Democrat politicians from facing scandals. It is clear now that there will never be a Democrat held accountable for their actions and therefore the only time Americans can expect to get anything other than abusive and criminal officeholders is if they elect a Republican.
This is where we get back to a vote for Donald Trump is nothing other than a vote for accountable leadership. A vote for Hillary Clinton is giving up on that ideal. A vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote to abolish the very principles of elected officials, because if their misdeeds can never be told and their abuses never aired, what have we? That we have so many in this nation willing to vote for Hillary tells us all we need to know about the other side, that they have already given up, that they would rather have a totalitarian system. A vote for Hillary is, in effect an act of treason.
- Deutsche Bank Pays $38 Million To Settle Silver Manipulation Lawsuit
2016 is shaping up as the year when countless conspiracy theories will be confirmed to be non-conspiracy fact: from central bank rigging of capital markets, to political rigging of elections, to media rigging of public sentiment, and now, commercial bank rigging of silver.
In short, tinfoil hat-wearing nutjobs living in their parents basement have been right all along.
Two weeks ago we reported that “In A Major Victory For Gold And Silver Traders, Manipulation Lawsuit Against Gold-Fixing Banks Ordered To Proceed,” however one bank was exempt: Deutsche Bank. The reason why was known since April, when we first reported that Deutsche Bank had agreed to settle the class action lawsuit filed in July 2014 accusing a consortium of banks of plotting to manipulate gold and silver. Among the charges that Deutsche Bank effectively refused to contest were the following:
- employment of a manipulative device claims
- bid-rigging, and unjust enrichment.
- price fixing and unlawful restraint
- price manipulation claims
- aiding and abetting and principal-agent claims.
Briganti’s affidvait provides some more information on the settlement process:
The negotiations with Deutsche Bank over the material terms of the Settlement took place over several months starting in December 2015 and continuing until the Deutsche Bank Settlement Agreement was executed on September 6, 2016.
Following initial phone calls with Deutsche Bank’s counsel in December 2015, Lowey and Grant & Eisenhofer engaged in lengthy negotiations with Deutsche Bank’s counsel over the material terms of the settlement, including the amount of the settlement consideration, the scope of the cooperation to be provided by the Deutsche Bank Defendants, the scope of the releases, and the circumstances under which the parties would have the right to terminate the settlement.
During the course of the negotiations, Class Counsel presented what we perceived to be the strengths and weaknesses of the claims and defenses, as well as Deutsche Bank’s litigation exposure.
In February 2016, we reached an agreement with Deutsche Bank on the amount of the settlement, subject to the negotiation of other material terms of the deal. For example, given that this is the first settlement in the case, it was our view that the cooperation provisions of the deal were extremely important to our ability to maximize the overall recovery for the class against the Non-Settling Defendants. The negotiations as to the scope of the cooperation provisions continued for several months.
On April 13, 2016, counsel for Deutsche Bank and Class Counsel signed a Binding Settlement Term Sheet (“Term Sheet”). The Term Sheet set forth the terms on which the parties agreed, subject to the negotiation of a full Settlement Agreement, to settle Plaintiffs’ claims against Deutsche Bank. At the time the Term Sheet was executed, Class Counsel was well-informed about the legal risks, factual uncertainties, potential damages, and other aspects of the strengths and weaknesses of the claims and defenses asserted.
By letter dated April 13, 2016, the Parties reported to the Court via ECF that the Term Sheet had been executed, and advised the Court that the Term Sheet would be superseded by a formal settlement agreement. ECF No. 116.
The parties negotiated the Deutsche Bank Settlement Agreement over the course of the next several months. The negotiations over the terms of the Deutsche Bank Settlement Agreement included various material terms over which the parties had substantial disagreement, requiring significant give and take on both sides. To that end, drafts of the Deutsche Bank Settlement Agreement went back and forth between the parties, and numerous contested issues were raised, negotiated and resolved, including without limitation, continuing negotiations over the scope of Deutsche Bank’s cooperation (see ¶ 4(A)-(G)), the scope of the releases (see ¶ 12 (A)-(C)), and the circumstances under which the parties could terminate the Settlement (see ¶ 21).
Thus, the Deutsche Bank Settlement Agreement, which was executed (along with the Supplemental Agreement) on September 6, 2016, was the culmination of arm’s-length settlement negotiations that had extended over many months.
The Deutsche Bank Settlement was not the product of collusion. Before any financial numbers were discussed in the settlement negotiations and before any demand or counter-offer was ever made, we were well informed about the legal risks, factual uncertainties, potential damages, and other aspects of the strengths and weaknesses of the claims against Deutsche Bank.
The Deutsche Bank Settlement involves a structure and terms that are common in class action settlements in this District. The consideration that Deutsche Bank has agreed to pay is within the range of that which may be found to be fair, reasonable, and adequate at final approval.
There was just one thing missing: the settlement amount. This afternoon, that too was revealed when according to court filings, Deutsche Bank had agreed to pay $38 million to settle U.S. litigation over allegations it illegally conspired with other banks to fix silver prices at the expense of investors. The settlement, disclosed in papers filed in Manhattan federal court, concludes one of many recent lawsuits in which investors have accused banks of conspiring to rig the precious metal markets. However, until now there was never any formal closure. Today, that closure cost Deutsche Bank $38 million.
While the amount is tiny for the German bank, now that it is enshrined in case law, it will unleash dozens of similar class action lawsuits, each tweaked a little, and each demanding tens of millions from the gold and silver rigging banks. As Reuters adds, the settlement had been expected since April, though terms had yet to be disclosed. In court papers, lawyers for the investors say the deal will likely be an “ice breaker” that will serve as a catalyst for other banks to settle.
Vincent Briganti, a lawyer for the investors, said the deal provides “substantial monetary compensation plus cooperation from Deutsche Bank in the continued prosecution of this important case against the non-settling defendants.”
As a reminder, in the litigation profiled here most recently, investors claimed Deutsche Bank, HSBC Holdings Plc and Bank of Nova Scotia (ScotiaBank) rigged silver prices through a secret daily meeting called the Silver Fix, and accused UBS AG of exploiting that fix. The alleged conspiracy started by 1999, suppressed prices on roughly $30 billion of silver and silver financial instruments traded each year, and enabled the banks to pocket returns that could top 100 percent annualized, the investors said.
Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Valerie Caproni ruled the investors had sufficiently, “albeit barely,” alleged that Deutsche Bank, HSBC and ScotiaBank violated U.S. antitrust law by conspiring to depress the Silver Fix from 2007 to 2013. At the same time, the judge dismissed UBS from the case, saying there was nothing showing it manipulated prices, even if it benefited from distortions.
The Judge added that the investors could amend their complaint, including against UBS, and a lawyer for the investors has said they planned to do so.
So who gets to benefit from the settlement?
We have reason to believe that there are at least hundreds of geographically dispersed persons and entities that fall within the Settlement Class definition. The Settlement Class includes traders of COMEX Silver Futures contracts, anyone who traded in physical silver based on the Silver Fix, and traders in various silver derivatives.
The other beneficiary, of course, is the class of investors, people and “conspiracy theorists” who claimed all along that gold and silver were subject to rigging in various forms throughout the years. Well, you were right. However, we wouldn’t hold much hope for getting any substantial monetary rewards. By the time the settlement is done, there will likely be a few hundred dollars per claimant.
The good news, however, is that this will only unleash many more such lawsuits, now that the seal has been broken.
As for the remaining two banks in the class action, HSBC and Bank of Nova Scotia, the next pretrial conference in that lawsuit which was greenlighted two weeks ago is scheduled for October 28, 2016. Those who wish to be present should appear at 3:00 p.m. in courtroom 443 of the Thurgood Marshall Courthouse, 40 Foley Square, New York, NY 10007.
The Vincent Briganti Declaration is below
- New Voter Fraud Allegations Surface In Chicago As Multiple People "Offered Bribes For Votes"
Allegations of voter fraud continue to surface all over the country with the latest example coming from Kankakee County, just outside of Chicago. According to the Kankakee County State’s Attorney’s office and the Kankakee Daily Journal, multiple people reported being offered “bribes for votes” while the county is also investigating what appears to be “fraudulently executed” mail-in ballots.
The Kankakee County State’s Attorney’s office says it is investigating possible voting fraud after the clerk’s office reported three complaints from people who said they were offered bribes for votes.
In a news release issued late Tuesday afternoon, Jamie Boyd, the state’s attorney, also said “several” vote-by-mail applications seem to have come from people living outside of Kankakee County.
“This unprecedented action was taken in response to reports of individuals from Chicago offering gifts to potential voters in exchange for a vote for Kate Cloonen, Hillary Clinton and others,” Boyd said in the news release. “Our office takes seriously the obligation to protect the rights of citizens to vote for the candidate of their choice, and to do so without undue influence from special interest groups.
“The investigation will also focus on the authenticity of vote by mail requests. Several applications have been filed with the election authority that appear to be fraudulently executed.”
“These reports of voter fraud in Kankakee are incredibly disturbing,” Pankhurst said. “Fair and honest elections are the bedrock of our democracy. It is truly deplorable when people try to corrupt our system in this manner.”
Of course, democratic officials in the county responded with their usual defense which is to ignore the voter fraud and instead allege voter suppression by republicans looking to disenfranchise low-income and minority voters.
Cloonen has not responded to the allegations, but local Democrats Gary Ciaccio and Mike Smith, both union reps, and former state Rep. Lisa Dugan, released their own statement on Tuesday, alleging that voters have been illegally turned away from the polls.
“We know many legally registered voters have been turned away from voting over the last few days,” they said in that joint statement. “Since early voting for the 2016 General Election began just a few short days ago, there have been numerous reports and eyewitness accounts of harassment and intimidation by local government officials of residents trying to participate in the democratic process of voting.”
As we’ve noted several times recently, there have been numerous instances of potential voter fraud surface over the past couple of weeks with dead people found to be voting in Colorado and a Democratic get out the vote operation re-registering dead voters in Virginia.
Isn’t it curious that all the dead voters seem to be pulling for Democrats?
Below are a couple of other instances of voter fraud that we’ve noted over just the past couple of weeks.
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A previous investigation by CBS Denver found that dozens of deceased Colorado citizens continued voting multiple years after their death…even though Colorado Secretary of State Wayne Williams assured CBS that “it is impossible to vote from the grave legally.” While we’re disturbed by the voter fraud in Colorado, we’re so glad that the legality of the issue could be cleared up so easily.
According to CBS, one of the most glaring cases of voter fraud they found was of Sara Sosa who lived in Colorado Springs. Sosa died on Oct. 14, 2009 but CBS found that she continued to cast her ballot in 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013. Likewise, her husband, Miguel, died on Sept. 26, 2008 but voted later in 2009.
Colorado’s Secretary of State confirmed the cases of voter fraud discovered by CBS, saying:
“We do believe there were several instances of potential vote fraud that occurred. It shows there is the potential for fraud. It’s not a perfect system. There are some gaps.”
Meanwhile, there is also the case of Andrew Spieles, a student at James Madison University, and apparently “Lead Organizer” for HarrisonburgVOTES, who recently confessed to re-registering 19 deceased Virginians to vote in the 2016 election cycle.
While this should come as a surprise to precisely 0 people, Spieles just happens to be Democrat who, accorded to a deleted FaceBook post, apparently recently ran for Caucus Chair of the Virginia Young Democrats.
Of course, we’re quite certain that the Soro’s machine will keep throwing massive sums of money at defeating voter I.D. laws while arguing that there is no evidence of voter fraud…facts apparently have no place in a court room.
- Podesta's Iran Deal Admission Exposes Tragic Results Of AP's 2013 Treachery
Submitted by Tony Blumer via NewsBusters.org,
A search at the Associated Press's main national site on "Podesta Iran" (not in quotes) returns no items relating to a Wikileaks-released email exposing how Hillary Clinton 2016 campaign manager John Podesta agreed with a Republican senator in July 2015 that the deal which had been "negotiated" by the Obama administration with Iran would lead to "a nuclear war in the Persian Gulf." (The word "negotiated" is in quotes because, other than releasing hostages it never should have captured or held, Iran appears not to have given up anything.)
There's a reason beyond the routine journalistic negligence for which AP is so well-known why it has ignored this (excuse the pun) bombshell. The AP's own self-congratulatory actions contributed to the situation Podesta tersely acknowledged.
In 2013, the AP hid what it knew about the existence of secret discussions between the Obama administration and Iran concerning the latter country's possession and use of nuclear materials. The Obama administration asked a journalist at another outlet and the AP to keep quiet about what they knew — and they did.
The AP's Julie Pace went on national TV in November 2013 to revel in how the wire service had kept talks between the U.S. and Iran secret for eight months, leading to what was described then as "The Geneva deal."
Perhaps the journalists and management at the wire service believed that they were serving some kind of higher good. Everybody with an ounce of common sense knew that Iran was (and still is) interested in building and using nuclear weapons. So maybe they believed that an agreement between the U.S., Iran and other countries might prevent that, and, ultimately, prevent a war involving the use of nukes which might otherwise have occurred.
What's wrong with keeping a secret about something so important? The starry-eyed idealists at AP, if that was indeed their motivation (one shudders when considering other possible motivations), should know now that they were played.
Twenty months later, Podesta reacted to a harsh July 2015 statement by Senator Mark Kirk of Illinois about the "deal" Iran and the U.S. had just "negotiated" to, in essence, allow Iran to continue doing almost all of what it had been doing while having the U.S. lift economic sanctions which had been in place on that country for decades. A correspondent with Podesta quoted Kirk, and Podesta responded in a single word: "Yup":
Podesta's honesty lays bare the sham nature of the Iran "deal."
The related November 2013 AP story (excerpted at the related NewsBusters post), which appeared at the time Pace went into her bragging routine on Fox News Sunday, reveals the full extent of what the AP knew — and sat on:
SECRET US-IRAN TALKS SET STAGE FOR NUKE DEAL
The United States and Iran secretly engaged in a series of high-level, face-to-face talks over the past year, in a high-stakes diplomatic gamble by the Obama administration that paved the way for the historic deal sealed early Sunday in Geneva aimed at slowing Tehran's nuclear program, The Associated Press has learned.
The discussions were kept hidden even from America's closest friends, including its negotiating partners and Israel, until two months ago, and that may explain how the nuclear accord appeared to come together so quickly after years of stalemate and fierce hostility between Iran and the West.
… President Barack Obama personally authorized the talks as part of his effort — promised in his first inaugural address — to reach out to a country the State Department designates as the world's most active state sponsor of terrorism.
The talks were held in the Middle Eastern nation of Oman and elsewhere with only a tight circle of people in the know, the AP learned. Since March, Deputy Secretary of State William Burns and Jake Sullivan, Vice President Joe Biden's top foreign policy adviser, have met at least five times with Iranian officials.
The last four clandestine meetings, held since Iran's reform-minded President Hassan Rouhani was inaugurated in August, produced much of the agreement later formally hammered out in negotiations in Geneva among the United States, Britain, France, Russia, China, Germany and Iran, said three senior administration officials. All spoke only on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss by name the highly sensitive diplomatic effort.
The AP was tipped to the first U.S.-Iranian meeting in March shortly after it occurred, but the White House and State Department disputed elements of the account and the AP could not confirm the meeting. The AP learned of further indications of secret diplomacy in the fall and pressed the White House and other officials further. As the Geneva talks appeared to be reaching their conclusion, senior administration officials confirmed to the AP the details of the extensive outreach.
As I wrote at the time: "Translation: They didn't report it until the Obama administration said it would be okay to report it."
That comment and related posts by others elsewhere generated pushback from the AP's Paul Colford, its Vice President and Director of Media Relations, the very next day. Colford's copout is intensely amusing in light of how willing the wire service has been to act on unsubstantiated stories during this presidential election year:
Contrary to a number of accounts since Sunday, AP did not sit on the story for several months. We aggressively pursued the story throughout that period, trying everything we could to get it to the wire. In fact, some of the information we were tipped to in March turned out to be inaccurate.
… The AP routinely seeks and requires more than one source. Stories should be held while attempts are made to reach additional sources for confirmation or elaboration. In rare cases, one source will be sufficient – when material comes from an authoritative figure who provides information so detailed that there is no question of its accuracy.
The credibility of Colford's post was shredded by Laura Rozen, a reporter for Al-Monitor. Rosen acknowledged in a tweet that "we both had versions of it (the story of talks occurring) independently and were asked not to publish til end of Iran talks":
As I wrote at the time:
… if it had been covering any administration other than the current one, AP would have reported that it had evidence that such meetings or talks were or had been taking place, and that administration officials (depending on their actual response) either denied their existence, or would not confirm or deny them.
That would have been no different than taking an unsubstantiated claim by a woman who says she was groped by Donald Trump and asking him to confirm or deny it, and making the fallout from the claim and the denial the story.
Thus, it should be obvious that the AP's deference to the Obama administration in 2013 in keeping the Iran talks secret had no purpose but to help the administration advance a deeply unpopular agenda. If AP had done its job and indirectly exposed the existence of the talks in the frequently employed manner just described, the blowback would have been intense and bipartisan — and it knows it.
Meanwhile, as I wrote, the wire service "deliberately kept their readers, listeners, viewers, subscribing news organizations, and the public they claim to serve in the dark … and did so at the request of … the governments involved."
As seen in its November 2013 story above, the AP congratulated itself for giving its choice to keep the U.S.-Iran talks secret partial credit for "how the nuclear accord appeared to come together so quickly."
Now that John Podesta has admitted that even people on the left acknowledge the Obama administration's Iran "deal" will lead to "a nuclear war in the Persian Gulf," I expect the AP to take partial credit when Iran begins engaging in nuclear blackmail in the region — and when the bombs fall.
Heck of a job, guys.
- Former German Central Banker Reveals "The Real Danger In Finance"
How can anyone make sense of today’s markets? That was the oft-asked question at last week's IMF meetings in Washington. As we noted at the time, one of the smarest and most honest answers came not from any finance minister or any IMF report but at a presentation privately offered on the sidelines of the IMF meetings by Axel Weber, former head of the Bundesbank, now chairman of UBS. Weber warned that monetary intervention is causing international spillovers and major disturbances in global markets.
"They (central banks) have taken on massive interventions in the market, you could almost say that central banks are now the central counterparties in many markets. They are the ultimate buyer,"
"So I think the central bankers need to be very careful that they do not continue to produce disturbances in the markets, which they acknowledge – it's a known side effect – but the perception that the underlying impact of monetary policy outweighs the potential side effect in my view is starting to be wrong," he added.
Since the global financial crash of 2008, central bank policy has focused on buying up bonds in large quantities and cutting interest rates to record lows. The Federal Reserve has since looked to unwind its own policy which focused on the Treasury market and the yield curve, but the Bank of Japan and the ECB's large-scale bond-buying programs continue.
"I don't think a single trader can tell you what the appropriate price of an asset he buys is, if you take out all this central bank intervention," Weber warned, adding that it often meant investors were making bad choices with where to put their money.
However, as The FT's Gillian Tett details, Mr Weber also believes that, while the banking system looks healthier, markets do not.
The issue that investors need to understand now is that many “markets” are not true market not true, free, markets because of heavy government intervention.
To Tett's mind, this point needs to be proclaimed with a megaphone. It is evident in government bond markets, where the central banks of Japan, US and eurozone currently hold a third, a fifth and a tenth of the outstanding local government bonds.
These distorted markets are increasingly hostage to unfathomable political risk. A decade ago, investors thought (or hoped) they could price western assets by analysing underlying economic values with spreadsheets; political risk was only something that emerging market investors worried about.
Now investors holding US, Japanese or European assets need to ponder questions such as: how much further can central banks take quantitative easing? Are the US and UK governments becoming anti-business? Does the rise of Donald Trump, as well as the Britain’s vote to leave the EU, herald new protectionism?
Most investors are not well equipped for an analysis of this kind. They built their careers by crunching numbers, not pondering social science. They now face an unpredictable and unfathomable world.
To put it another way, the real danger in finance is the not one that tends to be discussed: that banks will topple over (as they did in 2008). It is, rather, the threat that investors and investment groups will be wiped out by wild price swings from an unexpected political shock, be that central bank policy swings, trade bans, election results or Brexit.
“Investors have been driven into investments where they have very little capability for dealing with what is on their plate,” Mr Weber observed. “You can nowadays see the entire return that you expect for a year being wiped out for a single day move in the market. And that is an unprecedented situation.”
This is just one banker’s view. But it comes from a man who has been at the centre of the system for decades and is not a natural alarmist. Investors, in other words, would ignore this three-part list at their peril. So would Weber’s former colleagues — at central banks.
Still we are sure this is probably nothing to worry about…
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On Hillary Clinton’s campaign website, her racial-justice plan is almost twice as long as her economic plan. You will also find racial notes dotted throughout all her various proposals: “African Americans hold only 1.1 percent of energy jobs and receive only 0.01 percent of energy sector profits,” in case you were wondering.
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