Jul 26

Today’s News 26th July 2016

  • "Credible Evidence" Shows Turkish Authorities Raped And Tortured Detainees Since 'Failed' Coup

    Via MiddleEastEye.net,

    Human rights group Amnesty International said on Sunday it had "credible evidence" of abuse and torture of people detained in sweeping arrests since Turkey's 15 July attempted military coup.

    The London-based group said some of those being held were being "subjected to beatings and torture, including rape, in official and unofficial detention centres in the country".

    Amnesty said more than 10,000 people have been detained since the attempted coup, and the group called for independent monitors to be granted access to detention sites across Turkey.

    Amnesty raised serious allegations of mistreatment against Turkish police, who they said have held detainees in “stress positions, denied them food, water and medical treatment, verbally abused and threatened them, and subjected them to beatings and torture, including rape and sexual assault”.

    Two lawyers working in the capital Ankara on behalf of detainees told Amnesty they witnessed “senior military officers in detention being raped with a truncheon or finger by police officers”.

    Another source told Amnesty between 650 and 800 soldiers have been detained at the Ankara police headquarters sports hall. The source said “at least 300 of the detainees showed signs of having been beaten”.

    “Reports of abuse including beatings and rape in detention are extremely alarming, especially given the scale of detentions that we have seen in the past week. The grim details that we have documented are just a snapshot of the abuses that might be happening in places of detention,” said Amnesty International’s Europe director John Dalhuisen.

    "It is absolutely imperative that the Turkish authorities halt these abhorrent practices and allow international monitors to visit all these detainees in the places they are being held.”

    A Turkish official, who asked to remain anonymous, told MEE that the government rejects Amnesty's allegations of mistreating detainees.

    "We categorically deny the allegations and encourage advocacy groups to provide an unbiased account of the legal steps that are being taken against people who murdered nearly 250 civilians in cold blood," the official said.

     

    "The idea that Turkey, a country seeking EU membership, would not respect the law is absurd. Just yesterday we released 1,200 military personnel because all we care about is concrete evidence of complicity in this grave assault against our democracy."

    Since the failed coup, a total of 13,165 people have been detained, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said late on Saturday.

    This included 8,838 soldiers, 2,101 judges and prosecutors, 1,485 police officers and 689 civilians.

    At least 123 generals and admirals have also been jailed, Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said.

    Amnesty said that while Turkey has legitimate security concerns in light of the attempted coup, abuses of human rights are never acceptable. 

    "Turkey is understandably concerned with public security at the moment, but no circumstances can ever justify torture and other ill-treatment or arbitrary detention," Dalhuisen said.

    Speaking at a unity rally held in Istanbul on Sunday evening, opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu told huge crowds of people from across the Turkish political spectrum that mistreatment of detainees "shouldn't be allowed".

    The leader of the centre-left CHP said, without specifically mentioning the Amnesty report: "The state cannot be run based on hate and vengeance. The rule of law needs to prevail. Torture, pressure in response will put state and putschists on same page and shouldn’t be allowed."

  • Hillary Clinton Is In Deep Trouble: "Hordes Of Wall Street Executives" Descend Upon Philly

    Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

    Political pundits throughout the land are tripping over each other to compose the latest bland, uninsightful screed proclaiming the death of the Republican Party. This makes sense, because the primary purpose of a political pundit is to state the obvious years after it’s already become established fact to everyone actually paying attention.

     

    Yes, of course, Trump winning the GOP nomination marks the end of the party as we know it. After all, some neocons are already publicly and actively throwing their support behind Hillary. While this undoubtably represents a major turning point in U.S. political history, many pundits have yet to appreciate that the exact same thing is happening within the Democratic Party. It’s just not completely obvious yet.

     

    – From February’s post: It’s Not Just the GOP – The Democratic Party is Also Imploding

    I believe Hillary Clinton lost the Presidency this past week. While the explosive DNC leaks will undoubtably have a long lasting effect, this post will barely reference the leaks. Rather, it will explain how recent decisions by the Hillary campaign played right into Trump’s hands by essentially waving a gigantic middle finger to the 73% of Americans who think the country is headed in the wrong direction.

    What Hillary Clinton did in selecting Tim Kaine as VP was send a clear signal that not only is she the status quo candidate, she is proud of it. She didn’t just double down on being the establishment candidate, she tripled and quadrupled down. There is now no denying that Hillary Clinton is implicitly running on only two themes.

    1. Trump is scary. I am not Trump.

     

    2. Things aren’t really bad. I’ll continue along the path we’ve been on.

    This message will result in a guaranteed loss against an opponent who is telling the American public “I know you’re angry, I’m angry too, and I’m going to blow up the status quo.” Recall that 73% of the U.S. public thinks the country is headed in the wrong direction. As the Wall Street Journal noted:

    Some 73% in the new survey say things have gone off-course, with only 18% saying the nation is headed in the right direction.

     

    Numbers such as those are usually seen in times of national crisis, such as during the government shutdown of 2013, when only 14% said the nation was on-course, or during the 2008 financial crisis, when 11% said things were headed in the right direction.

    In this post, I will prove that Hillary is signaling a “business as usual” approach to the status quo, and in return, the status quo is uniformly and excitedly rallying around her. This will disgust most Americans and lead to a Trump victory. People who dislike Trump more than Clinton will vote for him anyway, because they dislike the status quo even more.

    So let’s take a look at Tim Kaine, starting with the topic of banks. Here are a few excerpts from a recent Huffington Post article titled, Tim Kaine Calls To Deregulate Banks As He Campaigns To Be Clinton’s VP:

    Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) is on Hillary Clinton’s short list of potential vice presidential nominees. He’s also actively pushing bank deregulation this week as he campaigns for the job.

     

    Kaine signed two letters on Monday urging federal regulators to go easy on banks ? one to help big banks dodge risk management rules, and another to help small banks avoid consumer protection standards.

     

    As Kaine joins the deregulatory fight, several other lawmakers are pushing the CFPB in the opposite direction. On Wednesday, 28 senators sent a letter to the agency urging them to toughen up their new rule against abusive payday lending. Kaine didn’t sign it.

    Moving along, what about the TPP, where does Mr. Kaine stand there?

    Here’s a hint from the Intercept’s recent article, Hours Before Hillary Clinton’s VP Decision, Likely Pick Tim Kaine Praises the TPP:

    Hillary Clinton’s rumored vice presidential pick Sen. Tim Kaine defended his vote for fast-tracking the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) on Thursday.

     

    Kaine, who spoke to The Intercept after an event at a Northern Virginia mosque, praised the agreement as an improvement of the status quo, but maintained that he had not yet decided how to vote on final approval of the agreement. By contrast, Hillary Clinton has qualified her previous encouragement of the agreement, and now says she opposes it.

     

    Kaine’s measured praise of the agreement could signal one of two things. Either he is out of the running for the vice presidential spot, as his position on this major issue stands in opposition to hers. Or, by picking him, Clinton is signaling that her newly declared opposition to the agreement is not sincere. The latter explanation would confirm the theory offered by U.S. Chamber of Commerce head Tom Donohue, among others, who has said that Clinton is campaigning against the TPP for political reasons but would ultimately implement the deal.

    Banking and fake free trade deals are two topics that get Americans animated across the ideological spectrum, and by selecting Tim Kaine, Hillary is not so subtly telling her donors not to pay attention to any anti-establishement rhetoric that may come out of her mouth during the campaign. She signaling that she knows the status quo has her back, and she has theirs.

    Unsurprisingly, the oligarchs and their lobbyists who run the show and craft policies behind the scenes have gotten the message loud and clear. How can I be so certain? Let me give you a few examples.

    First, let’s take a look at the extent to which lobbyists generally are embracing Clinton as opposed to shunning Trump. From The Hill:

    Lobbyists are being welcomed back into the fold of the Democratic Party as the Obama era draws to a close.

     

    President Obama campaigned heavily against special interests in 2008 and put in place several new policies limiting their service in his administration. The Democratic National Committee (DNC) banned lobbyist contributions, and lobbyists began complaining of a stigma — a “scarlet L” — being attached unfairly to their industry.

     

    Times appear to be changing, though, with the outward hostility to the K Street crowd thawing.

     

    Presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton has accepted more than $9 million in bundled donations from registered lobbyists, while the DNC has rolled back the lobbyist bans that Obama put into place.

     

    “In 2008 and 2012, there was no integration with the [Obama] campaign,” said Al Mottur, a senior Democratic lobbyist at Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, adding that he would have liked to have helped. “Now, the campaign is welcoming — they’re open to us. That’s why I’ve done as much work for her as I’ve done on her behalf.”

     

    Lobbyist bundlers have contributed to Clinton’s massive donor advantage over the Republican nominee, Donald Trump.

     

    Clinton’s bundler policy also gives lobbyists hope that she may reverse Obama’s policies, issued via executive order, that were intended to slow down what he called the “revolving door” between government and the private sector.

     

    “There are a lot of people on K Street who certainly hope she would” reverse or ignore an executive order signed by Obama aimed at limiting registered lobbyists from getting jobs in the White House, said Mary Beth Stanton of Heather Podesta + Partners.

     

    “With the anti-Washington sentiment of this campaign … it wouldn’t be something that would be discussed today,” she added. “That’s a staffing issue, and that’s not something that they’ll decide until they have to.”

    In other words, we know she’ll have our back in office even if she has to pretend to dislike us to get elected.

    For 2016, the DNC reversed the prohibition on lobbyist cash entirely, both for the party and the convention, giving corporations and lobbyists the opportunity to participate fully.

     

    Trump’s controversial campaign had a tangible effect on the Republican convention last week in Cleveland.

     

    Many companies skipped the event and declined to make donations for fear of being associated with the businessman’s controversial rhetoric. Several Republican lobbyists who did come to Cleveland told The Hill that they would be taking care of business for clients and out as quickly as possible.

     

    Clinton’s candidacy is also a draw for those on K Street, many of whom have been involved with the family for years.

     

    “The community is supporting her, there is no question about that,” said David Castagnetti of Mehlman Castagnetti Rosen & Thomas. His firm is also kicking off the convention with a party on Monday.

    While disgusting, that’s nothing compared to the following excerpts from the Politico article titled, Wall Street Takes a Road Trip to Philadelphia. Brace yourselves…

    NEW YORK — Wall Street is taking the Acela down to Philadelphia this week.

     

    Hordes of industry executives will descend on the city to celebrate Hillary Clinton’s nomination for president and renew close associations that vexed the Democratic standard-bearer throughout her primary battle with Bernie Sanders.

     

    Goldman Sachs, which paid Clinton millions for private speeches, will be well represented in Philadelphia with executives Jake Siewert, a former Bill Clinton press secretary, making the trip along with Steven Barg, Michael Paese, Joyce Brayboy and Jennifer Scully, who was a major fundraiser for Bill Clinton in New York in 1992.

     

    Blackstone, one of the nation’s largest private equity firms, will hold an official reception in Philadelphia on Thursday featuring its president, Tony James, sometimes mentioned as a possible Treasury Secretary in a Clinton administration. 

    Recall: Here Come the Cronies – Buffett and Blackstone President Launch $33,400 a Plate Hillary Clinton Fundraiser

    Hedge fund managers and top Democratic donors including Avenue Capital’s Marc Lasry and Boston Provident’s Orin Kramer will also be on the scene as will Morgan Stanley executive and former top Clinton aide Tom Nides. Executives from Citigroup, JPMorganChase and other large banks will also prowl the streets and bar rooms of Philadelphia.

     

    The financial contingent will be in an especially good mood following Clinton’s selection of Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine as her running mate. Kaine has shown a willingness to fight for regional bank relief from the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. But more than that, he’s not Elizabeth Warren, the potential VP pick that long had Wall Street terrified.

     

    Republicans with ties to the financial industry will also be there, a sharp contrast to Donald Trump’s convention in Cleveland, which Wall Street largely shunned over fears of the GOP nominee’s populist agenda on trade, immigration and Wall Street reform.

     

    The banker anxiety only grew during Trump’s convention as the party rolled out a platform plank calling for the re-imposition of a Depression-era Glass-Steagall law that could force banks to break up into smaller pieces. 

    See: GOP Includes Reinstatement of Glass-Steagall Into Party Platform

    Wall Street groaned as Clinton moved to the left during the primary —especially on trade — but the industry remains far more comfortable with the idea of another President Clinton in the White House than a President Trump.

     

    “I think she has shown perhaps ironically that she has a better understanding of business and Wall Street than Donald Trump does,” said Steve Rattner, an investment banker and Democratic donor who will make the short Acela ride down to Philly. “The GOP platform includes reinstating Glass-Steagall. And when you watched that [Trump acceptance] speech, Bernie Sanders could have given half of it. Putting partisanship aside, most of my Republican business friends are appalled at the thought of Donald Trump in the White House.” 

     

    What braindead Rattner fails to understand is the majority of the American public despise him and his crony “business friends,” and will actively vote to keep them as far away from power as possible.

    So while the Clinton camp won’t boast about it given the continuing unpopularity of Wall Street and the populist tilt of the electorate, the City of Brotherly Love will be the City of Banker Love this week. The Clinton campaign did not respond to a request for a comment.

     

    Trump is likely to try to continue to exploit Clinton’s connections to the banking industry. On Saturday following the Kaine selection, Trump Tweeted: “Tim Kaine is, and always has been, owned by the banks. Bernie supporters are outraged, was their last choice. Bernie fought for nothing!”

     

    “Wall Street doesn’t really side with a party based only on where regulation is going. We live in an environment where we know there is regulation and that we are under scrutiny,” said Robert Wolf, an investment banker and major Democratic fundraiser who will be in Philadelphia. “The bottom line is that if the economy does better, finance does better and everyone does better.”

     

    Clinton has not showed Sanders’ ability to tap into a massive grassroots network of small donors and remains reliant on Wall Street cash to fund her campaign, making it difficult for her to shun bankers at her convention.

     

    According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Clinton and outside groups supporting her have raised $375 million so far in the 2016 cycle. The securities and investment industry is one of her top sources of cash, donating $40 million to her cause so far, according to the CRP.

     

    But in the background, the “Rubin wing” of the Democratic Party, named for Wall Street executive and former Bill Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, will be circulating through panel discussions, Democratic party committee events and cocktail parties.

     

    Larry Summers, a Harvard professor and former Rubin protégé who also served as Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton, will take part in a POLITICO discussion on the economy on Wednesday along with Neera Tanden, a close Hillary Clinton adviser and president and CEO of the Center for American Progress, a think-tank some on the left now view as too centrist.

    Make no mistake about it, if you think the Obama administration represents a bunch of oligarch-coddling banker puppets, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

    But there’s more. Incredibly, the DNC has decided it would be wise to have billionaire New York City oligarch, Michael Bloomberg, speak at the convention. This is a man with extraordinarily deep ties to big finance, a  man who was a fierce proponent of “stop and frisk” while mayor of NYC, and the biggest Wall Street apologist alive. Yet this is the man Hillary Clinton’s team is parading out as some sort of hero.

    As Bloomberg itself reports:

    Michael Bloomberg will endorse Hillary Clinton in a prime-time speech at the Democratic National Convention on Wednesday, a timely boost as the candidate prepares to accept her party’s nomination for president.

     

    “As the nation’s leading independent and a pragmatic business leader Mike has supported candidates from both sides of the aisle,” said Howard Wolfson, an adviser to Bloomberg and a former spokesman for Clinton’s 2008 campaign. “This week in Philadelphia he will make a strong case that the clear choice in this election is Hillary Clinton.”

    Of course Bloomberg has supported Republicans and Democrats. That’s what oligarchs do.

    The endorsement from the former mayor of New York City could resonate with swing voters and Republicans who haven’t warmed to their party’s nominee, Donald Trump.

     

    “Given her demographic targets, Bloomberg is good get for @HillaryClinton,” David Axelrod, chief strategist for Barack Obama’s two successful presidential campaigns, said on Twitter.

    The above paragraphs demonstrate perfectly just how mired in a bubble of corruption and cluelessness these people really are. Despite Trump winning the Republican nomination, despite him now leading Hillary in the polls, they still don’t get it. The idea that Wall Street cheerleader and billionaire oligarch Michael Bloomberg has any appeal to the 73% of Americans who think the country is headed in the wrong direction is absolutely preposterous.

    But the cluelessness extends to those who are not merely Hillary Clinton sycophants. For example, take this excerpt from a recent post by Robert Reich, who fiercely supported Bernie Sanders in the primary:

    This week’s essay: Does Hillary Get It?

     

    Does Hillary Clinton understand that the biggest divide in American politics is no longer between the right and the left, but between the anti-establishment and the establishment?

    I worry she doesn’t – at least not yet.

    I’m sorry Robert, but could you possibly be more delusional? How can you think someone who doesn’t understand the above at this point in time is qualified to be President.

    Then, later on in the post, he makes the following suggestion:

    Hillary Clinton doesn’t need to move toward the “middle.” In fact, such a move could hurt her if it’s perceived to be compromising the stances she took in the primaries in order to be more acceptable to Democratic movers and shakers.

     

    She needs to move instead toward the anti-establishment – forcefully committing herself to getting big money out of politics, and making the system work for the many rather than a privileged few.

    Here was my Twitter response to this absurd notion:

    Meanwhile, it’s time to admit that a material percentage of Bernie Sanders supporters will not be rallying behind Clinton. A combination of her choice of Tim Kaine as VP, and the DNC leaks, virtually guarantee that this will not happen.

    Indeed, I thought the following paragraph from a Wall Street Journal article summed it up perfectly:

    But at the pro-Sanders rally, attendees were more than eager to list the reasons that Mrs. Clinton deserved to be incarcerated. At least once during a four-mile march from City Hall to Roosevelt Park, rallygoers began loudly chanting “Lock her up!” — the same chant heard on the floor of the RNC.

    Interestingly, it appears the only thing an extremely polarized American public actually agrees on is that Hillary Clinton should be locked up.

    Going forward, I fully expect Hillary to get a bump after Obama speaks at the DNC convention later this week. Moreover, with a guy as volatile and disliked as Trump as her opponent, there will be many ups and downs in the months ahead. Nevertheless, I think Hillary Clinton lost both the momentum and the election this past week, never to fully recover.

  • Snowden Explains How To Get To The Bottom Of "Who Hacked The Democrats"

    With the scandals plaguing the Democratic National Convention – set to start in just over an hour – get stronger, so does the narrative that it was all Russia’s fault the Democratic party was hacked.

    As a result, as reported earlier today, the objective FBI said it is now investigating how thousands of DNC emails were hacked, a breach that Hillary Clinton’s campaign maintains was committed by Russia to benefit Donald Trump.  Indeed, as noted yesterday, Clinton’s campaign, citing “experts”, pointed to a massive hacking of DNC computers in June that cybersecurity firms linked to the Russian government.

    Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta added fuel to the debate Monday, saying there was “a kind of bromance going on” between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Trump. The Clinton campaign says Russia favors Trump’s views, especially on NATO.

    Trump on Monday dismissed as a “joke” claims by Hillary Clinton’s campaign that Russia is trying to help Trump by leaking thousands of emails from the Democratic National Committee.

    “The new joke in town is that Russia leaked the disastrous DNC emails, which should have never been written (stupid), because Putin likes me,” Trump wrote as part of a series of Tweets. “Hillary was involved in the email scandal because she is the only one with judgement (sic) so bad that such a thing could have happened.”

    The scandal continue into the afternoon when a Motherboard article noted that “”metadata show that the Russian operators apparently edited some documents, and in some cases created new documents””

    Perhaps it did, but not the ones that Wasserman Schultz already resigned over. Because while the Democratic party is pointing fingers the underlying reality is simple: no matter who hacked the Wikileak’ed emails, the DNC was engaging in media collusion and actively suppressing the campaign of Bernie Sanders.  To be sure, as some already noted, “one way the DNC could have prevented embarrassing info about its collusion and lies from entering the public domain: not colluded and lied.“

    In any case, the fallout from the email leak has been escalating all day, with Sanders supporters booing the former DNC Chairman offstage, forcing her to skip the convention entirely. And so has the fingerpointing at the Kremlin as the culprit behind a scandal that threatens to overshadow even last week’s scandal-ridden Republican convention.

    But how to get to the bottom of who did what?

    One way would be to listen to the person who should know all about this stuff: Edward Snowden. This is what he said earlier today on Twitter:

     

    So there you have it: if you want to know if the Russians “did it”, just get a credible, accurate answer from the NSA.

    The only problem is getting a “credible and accurate” answer from what is fundamentally a biased, political organization.

    But perhaps the biggest irony is that while half the US is accusing Russia of hacking the DNC, it was the US government that was exposed specifically authorizing the hacking of political parties.

    Define irony?

  • DNC Day 1: Debbie Doesn't Do Philly But Bernie Meets Michelle – Live Feed

    After the turmoil of last week's RNC, this week' Democratic Nation Convention is off to an even more chaotic start (no matter what the surrogates desperately try to say). Wasserman Schultz resignation and decision not to 'gavel in' the convention is over-shadowed by the increasingly loud voices of Bernie (who will speak tonight) supporters booing any mention of Clinton-Kaine, but according to the mainstream media, Michelle Obama's headline speech tonight will bring the party together.

     

     

    Live Feed (due to start at 4pmET)

    *  *  *

    Hillary better hope for a Convention bounce because she is starting to lag Trump notably…

    *  *  *

    Or do voters know something else? Did Jane Sanders just drop a huge hint at what comes next?

    While almost inaudible, some have suggested she says: "They don't know your name is being put in nomination…"

    Source: MichaelPRamirez.com

    *  *  *

    Full order of business (via NJ.com):

    The list of speakers released by the Democratic National Committee is incomplete. Clinton's running mate, Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, has yet to be added to the schedule, as well as many of the federal and state elected officials,who were announced as speakers on Thursday.

    Here is the current schedule:

    Monday, July 25

    Session begins at 4 p.m.

    • Pam Livengood of Keene, N.H., whose daughter struggles with drug addiction
    • Karla and Francisca Ortiz of Las Vegas. Karla is an American citizen but Francisca, her mother, is undocumented
    • Anastasia Somoza of New York, an advocate for Americans with disabilities
    • Astrid Silva, an undocumented immigrant who came to the U.S. as a child
    • Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota
    • National Education Association President Lily Eskelsen Garcia
    • Rep. Raul Grijalva of Arizona
    • Iowa Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal and candidates of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee
    • SEIU President Mary Kay Henry
    • Rep. Joe Kennedy of Massachusetts
    • Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy, chair of the Democratic Governors Association
    • Building Trades President Sean McGarvey
    • U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon
    • Rep. Linda Sanchez of California and members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus
    • AFSCME President Lee Saunders
    • AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka
    • American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten
    • U.S. Sen. Cory Booker
    • U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont
    • First Lady Michelle Obama

    Tuesday, July 26

    The session begins at 4 p.m.

    • Thaddeus Desmond, a Philadelphia advocate for children
    • Dynah Haubert, a Philadelphia lawyer for a disability rights organization
    • Kate Burdick, a lawyer at the Juvenile Law Center in Philadelphia
    • Anton Moore of Philadelphia, who founded a nonprofit community group to talk to youth about gun violence
    • Dustin Parsons of Little Rock, Ark., a fifth grade teacher
    • Students from Eagle Academy in New York City and Newark for at-risk youth
    • Joe Sweeney, a New York City police detective who responded to 9/11
    • Lauren Manning, a former executive and partner at Cantor Fitzgerald who was wounded in the World Trade Center attack on 9/11
    • Ryan Moore, originally from South Sioux City, Neb., who has a health condition that hie father's employer refused to cover
    • Donna Brazile, Democratic National Committee vice chair of voter registration and participation
    • Former Georgia state Sen. Jason Carter
    • House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi of California and the Democratic women of the House, including Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman of New Jersey's 12th District.
    • Planned Parenthood Action Fund President Cecile Richards
    • President Bill Clinton, husband of Hillary Clinton
    • Mothers of the Movement, mothers who lost their children to gun violence or to enounters with law enforcement.

    Wednesday, July 27

    The session will begin at 4:30 p.m.

    • Erica Smegielski, whose mother Dawn was the principal of Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut and was one of 26 people killed in the 2012 mass shooting there
    • Felicia Sanders and Polly Sheppard, two of the three survivors of the 2015 shooting at a black church in Charleston, S.C., which killed nine
    • Jamie Dorff, whose husband, an Army helicopter pilot from Minnesota, died while on a search and rescue mission in northern Iraq
    • Rep. G.K. Butterfield of North Carolina and members of the Congressional Black Caucus
    • Rep. Judy Chu of California and members of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus
    • NARAL President Ilyse Hogue
    • Retired Navy Rear Adm. John Hutson 
    • Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson
    • Rep. Ben Ray Lujan of New Mexco and candidates of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee
    • Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta
    • Former Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey
    • EMILY's List President Stephanie Schriock
    • Center for American Progress Action Fund President Neera Tanden
    • Vice President Joe Biden
    • President Barack Obama

    Thursday, July 28

    The session begins at 4:30 p.m.

    • Henrietta Ivey, a Michigan home care worker who advocates for a $15 an hour minimum wage.
    • Beth Mathias of Ohio, who works two jobs
    • Jensen Walcott and Jake Reed. Walcott was fired from her job in Bonner Springs, Kan., for asking why her co-worker, and friend,  Reed, made more than she did for the same job
    • Khizr Khan, whose son, , Humayun S. M. Khan, is one of 14 American Muslims killed after 9/11 serving in the U.S. Armed Forces
    • Retired Marine Corps Gen. John Allen, who commanded U.S. forces in Afghanistan
    • Candidates of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee
    • Human Rights Campaign President Chad Griffin
    • League of Conservation Voters President Gene Karpinski
    • Rep. Sea Patrick Maloney of New York, co-chair of the Congressional LGBT Equality Caucus, and LGBT rights activist Sarah McBride
    • U.S. Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland and Democratic women of the Senate
    • Chelsea Clinton, Clinton's daughter
    • Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, presumptive Democratic nominee

    Finally, there is one 'unified' group that Hillary can rely upon…

    h/t @Mark412NH

  • Marissa Mayer Blames “Gender-Charged” Reporting Of Yahoo

    “We all see the things that only plague women leaders, like articles that focus on their appearance, like Hillary Clinton sporting a new pantsuit. I think all women are aware of that, but I had hoped in 2015 and 2016 that I would see fewer articles like that. It’s a shame” Marissa Mayer decried to the Financial Times.

    While the honorable thing would be to admit the countless mistakes Yahoo! made along the way, including refusing to purchase Google for $1 million in 1998, purchasing Tumblr for $1.1 billion, and refusing to sell itself to Microsoft for $40 billion, evidently it is easier to blame the boogeyman of sexism.

    “I’ve tried to be gender blind and believe tech is a gender neutral zone but do think there has been gender-charged reporting,” she argues.

    We wonder if she will complain about gender-charged reporting once she is set to receive a compensation package of up to $55 million in cash and stock.

    Finally, for those who may still believe appearances and pantsuits led to Yahoo’s demise, as the FT presents below, sales at Yahoo’s core business, market share and market capitalization have been plummeting since Mayer first took over in 2012. Perhaps another Vogue photo session  is in the making of this Silicon Valley star.

  • Bernie Fans Claim Their Signs Are Being Seized At Convention

    Submitted by Blake Neff via DailyCaller.com,

    Bernie Sanders supporters at the Democratic National Convention claim people are seizing pro-Sanders signs in an effort to suppress the heavy support he is receiving on the convention floor.

    The allegations began flying Monday night on Twitter just as the Democratic convention kicked off. Many Sanders supporters in the arena booed every mention of presumed Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, creating a divisive atmosphere at what is supposed to be the party’s big celebration.

    “They are ripping signs out of people’s hands and threatening no credentials tomorrow if we hold up signs,” one Sanders delegate allegedly said in a text message exchange posted online by a friend.

    Another video first posted to Twitter and later uploaded to YouTube, shows a man in a suit allegedly taking a Sanders campaign sign from an attendee.

    Despite the claim that the man is confiscating Sanders signs, it’s not entirely clear what is actually happening in the video. When the video starts, the man in the suit already has a large Sanders sign, and a person appears to hand over a smaller Sanders sticker quite willingly.

    Other tweets claim that party operatives began handing out “Love Trumps Hate” signs to the audience in an effort to drown out the many Sanders signs. Some of the Vermont senators’ supporters quickly began modifying the paraphernalia to be pro-Sanders, though…

  • Furious Sanders Supporters, Angry Media, Blistering Chaos Marks First Day Of Democratic Convention

    Democrats were delighted to watch as last week’s scandal-plagued Republican National Convention lurched from one fiasco to another until…. the Democratic National Convention was on the verge of crashing and burning (and that is not a pun on the searing Philadelphia heat) during its own disoragnized launch among angry supporters, blistering temperatures, sheer chaos, and a fractured organization that has left Republicans stunned in amazement at a Democratic party seemingly torn in two.

    As documented earlier, Bernie Sanders supporters disrupted the first day of the Democratic convention, repeatedly chanting and booing mentions of Hillary Clinton’s name as the party’s hopes for a show of unity dissolved into frequent chaos. Speakers in the convention’s first hour struggled to carry out business as angry Sanders supporters roared their disapproval, drawing a deafening response from Clinton delegates, Reuters adds.

    “We’re all Democrats and we need to act like it,” U.S. Representative Marcia Fudge of Ohio, the convention’s chairwoman, shouted over the uproar.

    Earlier in the day, Sanders drew jeers from his supporters when he urged his delegates to back the White House bid of his formal rival, Clinton, and focus on defeating Republican Donald Trump in the Nov. 8 presidential election. Sanders’ followers shouted: “We want Bernie” in a show of anger at both Clinton’s victory in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination and emails leaked on Friday suggesting the party leadership had tried to sabotage Sanders’ insurgent campaign.

    In an attempt to project unity, former rivals Hillary and Bernie urgently joined forces Monday to tamp down dissent among his supporters, as Democrats tried to keep infighting from overtaking an opening night featuring some of the party’s biggest stars, including first lady Michelle Obama.

    It was unclear whether the efforts would succeed, AP adds. Chants of “Bernie” echoed through the arena, and boos could be heard nearly every time Clinton’s name was raised. Outside the arena, several hundred Sanders backers marched down Philadelphia’s sweltering streets changing, “Nominate Sanders or lose in November.”

    For Hillary, it was a turbulent start to a historic four-day gathering that will culminate in the nomination of the first woman to lead a major U.S. political party. 

    Sanders had a better start to the convention, scoring a major victory with the forced resignation of party chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz following the release of emails showing her staff favored Clinton during the primary despite vows of neutrality. But Sanders’ aides reached out to the Clinton campaign Monday afternoon to express concerns that the chairwoman’s ouster wouldn’t be enough to keep supporters from disrupting the convention, according to a Democratic official.

    Sanders previewed his remarks during an appearance earlier Monday before supportive delegates. He implored them to vote for Clinton, generating a chorus of boos. “Brothers and sisters, this is the real world that we live in,” Sanders said as he tried to quiet the crowd. “Trump is a bully and a demagogue.”

    The discussions between the two camps prompted Sanders to send emails and text messages to supporters asking them not to protest.

    “Our credibility as a movement will be damaged by booing, turning of backs, walking out or other similar displays,” Sanders wrote.

    As Reuters adds, the scenes of booing in Philadelphia were a setback to Democratic officials’ attempts to present the gathering as a smoothly run show of party unity in contrast to the volatile campaign of Republican nominee Trump. 

    Desperately hoping to appease boisterous Sanders’ supporters, moments after the convention opened in Philadelphia, the DNC also apologized to Sanders and his backers “for the inexcusable remarks made over email.” The statement was signed by DNC leaders, though Wasserman Schultz’s name was notably absent.

    The Florida congresswoman’s resignation is effective later this week, though she also stepped down from her official convention duties. The mere sight of her on stage had been expected to prompt strong opposition from Sanders’ backers. 

    Meanwhile, Trump gloated at the Democrats’ opening day disorder. “Wow, the Republican Convention went so smoothly compared to the Dems total mess,” he wrote on Twitter.

    Trump also seemed to enjoy the Clinton campaign’s attempt to blame the DNC hack, which is now being investigated by the FBI, on Russian military intelligence agencies. The campaign also accused Moscow of trying to meddle in the U.S. election and help Trump, who has said he might not necessarily defend NATO allies if they are attacked by Russia. Trump dismissed the suggestion in a tweet: “The joke in town is that Russia leaked the disastrous DNC emails, which should never have been written (stupid), because Putin likes me.”

    But, ironically, the bulk of the democrats’ anger was focused not so much on Trump, at least not yet, as on Wasserman Schultz (and in many cases, Hillary herself). Wasserman Schultz, a Florida congresswoman who resigned as the DNC head on Sunday, was the focus of anger from liberal Democrats over some 19,000 DNC emails that were leaked by the WikiLeaks website that showed the party establishment working to undermine Sanders. 

    She told Florida’s Sun Sentinel newspaper she would not speak as planned at the opening of the event. On Monday morning, Wasserman Schultz struggled to be heard above boos as she spoke to the delegation from her home state. Some protesters held up signs that read “Bernie” and “E-MAILS” and shouted: “Shame” as she spoke.

    The cache of leaked emails disclosed that DNC officials explored ways to undercut Sanders’ insurgent presidential campaign, including raising questions about whether Sanders, who is Jewish, was an atheist. Sanders supporters were already dismayed last week when Clinton passed over liberal favorites like U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts to select the more moderate Kaine as her running mate.

    * * *

    But it wasn’t just the lack of unity and common voice that marked the start of the DNC. According to The Hill, the apparent lack of organization as well as a hostile weather conditions, all conspired – pun intended – to make the initial impression of the Democratic Convention even worse than that of the Republican one. 

    Attendees reported walking long distances — in some cases, nearly a mile — in 98-degree temperatures to get to the arena from the car drop-off area. Complaints of overheating and poor coordination by the DNC are escalating just as the party looks to contain the fallout from the resignation of its chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
     
    Wasserman Schultz, who was expected to open the convention’s first night, is no longer expected to speak at all. 

    Just hours before the opening gavel, only two eateries inside the convention center were serving food and drinks around lunchtime. Water bottles were priced at $4.50. Thousands will arrive by Monday evening for keynote speeches by Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and first lady Michelle Obama. Outside, temperatures reached 98 degrees Fahrenheit by 3 p.m., with a heat index of 109 degrees. 

    The National Weather Service had previously warned of “multiple days of excessive heat” during the Democratic National Convention. Officials said the heat would “greatly affect those who are attending outdoor activities,” such as the thousands of people joining protests downtown.

    Morgan Finkelstein, a spokeswoman for the DNC’s media team, said in a text Monday afternoon that its event contractor was “working on making it colder in the tents.”   Just outside the convention center by the media tents, a handful of food trucks sizzled on the pavement, with no other food spots nearby. Inside the tents, water has only been made available by media outlets for their own staff.  

    The media was furious: peeved reporters and editors have taken to Twitter to complain about the event’s disorganization, with some pining for their experience at last week’s Republican National Convention in Cleveland.

    Megan Liberman, editor-in-chief of Yahoo News, described the day as “chaos”  (and an employee for Yahoo should know). “To be totally objective and nonpartisan: the logistics at DNC are appalling. Squalid hotels, sweltering workspace, no directions. Chaos,” Liberman tweeted.

    “Walking thru hot media tents, or walking the mile from Uber drop off to hot media tents, one hears longing for CLE,” Washington Post reporter Philip Rucker tweeted.

    Finkelstein said the DNC was providing air conditioning in the media tents “the best that we can.” In the arena, she said they tried to “beef up AC as much as we could” — including adding two 300-pound chillers stationed near the delegates. 

    Finkelstein said reporters were allowed to buy or bring their own water into the convention hall or the media tents. When asked if the DNC planned to make any available in the hotter-than-expected tents, she said: “I don’t actually know if we’re allowed to provide that.”

    The DNC’s media facilities had already drawn complaints before temperatures began to soar Monday. With an approaching thunderstorm late Sunday, convention officials warned reporters to be prepared to evacuate the media tents in case of lightning. “Tents in the vicinity of the area are not designed to fully protect inhabitants in the event of a direct lightning strike,” according to an email by the DNC’s Department of Media Logistics.

    * * * 

    Perhaps it is poetic justice that after all the mocking of the Republican Convention, the Democratic one has launched on such chaotic, turbulent waves. That said, we are hopeful that things will normalize, and eagerly look forward to Bernie’s speech later tonight when the Vermont socialist will do all in his power to bring the two warring group of democrats together. If what has transpired so far is any indication, he may have an uphill battle.

  • FishLivesMatter: California To Decide If Saving 'Delta Smelt' Is Worth $65 Billion Of Taxpayer Money

    Starting tomorrow, California's State Water Resources Control Board will begin hosting months of public hearings on whether or not to proceed with Jerry Brown's controversial "California WaterFix" project, or the "Delta Tunnels" as it is more commonly known.  The project has been heavily criticized as yet another Brown-sponsored public works boondoggle with total price tag estimates ranging to over $65BN.
    California Delta

    We have to admit that we're a little perplexed by this project as it seems to address only one of the symptoms of California's water crisis while completely ignoring the overall illness which is the complete inflexibility of the Endangered Species Act.  While the twin tunnels may limit the number of smelt getting ensnared in the Delta pumping stations it does nothing to address the salinity issues raised by environmentalists when too much fresh water is removed from the system.  Maybe we're a little dense, but it's unclear to us how moving upstream to divert fresh water flows from the Sacramento River, a river which otherwise empties into the Delta and accounts for roughly 85% of the total fresh water flows into the system, rather than pulling it directly from the existing pumping stations would have any impact on overall salinity levels in the Delta.  As we discussed here just a few days ago, without addressing the inflexibility of the Endangered Species Act this is simply another opportunity to squander taxpayer money on more water infrastructure that will never actually be used because of leadership's inability and/or lack of desire to stand up to California's environmentalists in favor of practical solutions.

    For those of you less familiar the intricacies of the proposal, the Delta Tunnels project calls for diverting a portion of the Sacramento River’s fresh water flow via new gravity-fed intakes more than 30 miles upstream, between Clarksburg and Courtland. The water would then flow south via two 40-foot-wide pipes buried 150 feet underground and ultimately feed into the existing state and federal canal systems.

    While there are multiple viewpoints on the pros/cons of the Delta Tunnels (often based on where a person lives, farms, etc.), in general, proponents argue that the tunnel plan is better for the Delta Smelt population as it reduces reliance on large pumping stations at the south end of the Delta that often entrap the small fish.  Opponents, on the other hand, view the tunnels simply as a form of corporate welfare for large corporate ag interests and/or are concerned that the tunnels will do nothing to actually increase water flows to the southern part California without relaxing rules under the Endangered Species Act.

    Proposed Delta Tunnel Plan

    Separately, California voters in November will be presented with a ballot initiative that could effectively torpedo the tunnels plan. Proposition 53, would require a statewide vote on any public works project financed with at least $2 billion in revenue bonds.

  • With G20 Over, FX Market Chaos Resumes: Yen Surge, Yuan Purge

    Once again the 'fake' FX stability of pre-geopolitical-events has ben shattered now that the G-20 meetings ended with their usual un-fanfare of nothingness (and rising discord). After exuberant status-quo-supporting weakness in the Yen and stability in the Yuan (against the dollar), that's all coming unglued rapidly in the last 36 hours as USDJPY tests back to a 104 handle and Yuan resumes its weakening trend…

    As Bloomberg notes, history shows that the Chinese currency usually strengthens ahead of major political or economic events, such as President Xi Jinping’s state visits to the U.S. and the Boao Forum.

     

    And sure enough, as soon as G-20 is overm Yuan starts to weaken again…

     

    And USDJPY has tumbled back to a 104 handle… (down 3 handles from pre-G-20 highs), back below Brexit levels…

     

    As a reminder, geopolitical risks are surging…(and not priced in)

Digest powered by RSS Digest

Jul 25

Today’s News 25th July 2016

  • "Politically Correct" German MP Demands Probe Over Police Shooting Of Axe-Wielding Jihadist

    Submitted by Soeren Kern via The Gatestone Institute,

    • "I am a soldier of the Caliphate and am launching a martyrdom operation in Germany. … I have lived among you, lived in your homes. I planned this in your own land. And I will slaughter you in your own homes and in the streets. … I will slaughter you with this knife and sever your necks with an axe, if Allah permits. " – Germany's axe-attacker, in an Islamic State video.

    • "Künast should not be watching so many bad movies. Who would believe that if someone attacks the police with an axe and a knife, the police are supposed to shoot the axe out of the attacker's hands? That is really clueless and stupid. If police officers are attacked in this manner, they will not engage in Kung Fu. Unfortunately, it sometimes ends in the death of the perpetrator. This will not change." – Rainer Wendt, Chairman of the German Police Union.

    • The Bavarian Criminal Police Office has now launched an internal investigation to determine if police were justified in shooting a jihadist.

    A 17-year-old Afghan asylum seeker brandishing an axe and shouting "Allahu Akbar" ("Allah is the greatest") seriously injured five people on a train in Würzburg, Bavaria. The assailant was shot dead by police after he charged at them with the axe.

    The teenager, who had claimed asylum after arriving in Germany in June 2015 as an unaccompanied minor, had been placed with a foster family just two weeks before the attack as a reward for being "well integrated."

    Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann said police had found a hand-painted Islamic State flag in his room at his foster home in the nearby town of Ochsenfurt. They also found a farewell letter to his father which read: "Now pray for me so that I can take revenge on these infidels. Pray for me that I can get to paradise."

    Shortly after the attack, the Islamic State released a video purporting to show an Afghan asylum seeker holding a knife and making threats against Germany:

    "In the name of Allah, I am a soldier of the Caliphate and am launching a martyrdom operation in Germany.

     

    "Here I am. I have lived among you, lived in your homes. I planned this in your own land. And I will slaughter you in your own homes and in the streets.

     

    "I will make you forget about the spectacular attacks in France, if Allah permits.

     

    "I will fight to the death, if Allah permits. I will slaughter you with this knife and sever your necks with an axe, if Allah permits."

    In the video, the Islamic State identified the attacker as Muhammad Riyad, who can be heard speaking Pashto, a language spoken in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran. But German media identified the attacker as Riaz Khan Ahmadzai. The discrepancy raised questions about the teenager's true identity.

    Police found a Pakistani document in the teenager's room, leading some to believe he may have lied about being from Afghanistan in order to improve his chances of securing asylum. German authorities generally classify migrants from Pakistan as economic migrants and those from Afghanistan as refugees. But Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière said there is no reason to doubt that the attacker was indeed from Afghanistan.

    There are also unresolved questions about the teenager's ties to the Islamic State. Herrmann, the Bavarian interior minister, said the video is authentic: "The man in the video is the Würzburg attacker." The federal prosecutor's office in Karlsruhe said it believed "the attacker committed the offense as a member of the Islamic State."

    Left: The 17-year-old Afghan asylum seeker who seriously injured five people on a train in Germany, while shouting "Allahu Akbar," is shown in an Islamic State video saying, "In the name of Allah, I am a soldier of the Caliphate and am launching a martyrdom operation in Germany… I will slaughter you in your own homes and in the streets." Right: The attacker's body is removed from the place where police shot him, after he charged at them with the axe.

    By contrast, De Maizière said the attacker was a self-radicalized "lone wolf" who had been incited by Islamic State propaganda. The public prosecutor in Bamberg, Erik Ohlenschlager, said "We have no evidence that he was in direct contact with the Islamic State."

    After the blood-filled train — an eyewitness said it "looked like a slaughterhouse" — came to a stop at a station in Heidingsfeld near Würzburg, the teenager jumped off and tried to escape. Surrounded by police, he lunged at them with an axe. Police shot the attacker dead because "there was no other option."

    Green Party MP Renate Künast criticized the police for using lethal force. In a tweet, she wrote: "Why could the attacker not have been incapacitated without killing him???? Questions!"

    Künast's comments provoked a furious backlash, with many accusing her of showing more sympathy for the perpetrator than for the victims. The outpouring of anger against Künast indicates that Germans have had enough of their politically correct politicians.

    The chairman of the German police union, Rainer Wendt, said:

    "The final rescue shot is clearly regulated by law. The policemen were attacked and used their firearm to defend against an immediate danger to life and limb. That is their statutory duty. The Green MP Renate Künast has absolutely no idea about reality of dangerous police actions."

    Speaking on N24 television, Wendt added:

    "Künast should not be watching so many bad movies. Who would believe that if someone attacks the police with an axe and a knife, the police are supposed to shoot the axe out of the attacker's hands? That is really clueless and stupid.

     

    "If police officers are attacked in this manner, they will not engage in Kung Fu. Unfortunately, it sometimes ends in the death of the perpetrator. This will not change."

    The head of the police union in Bavaria, Peter Schall, said: "If a police officer is not allowed to shoot in such situations, he might as well stop carrying a weapon."

    Mike Mohring, a politician with the ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU), called for stiffer penalties for those who attack police officers. He said attacks against police are on the rise across Germany and "the only effective deterrent is that the law provides an appropriate penalty." He also said German police should be outfitted with body cameras to protect both the police and the public.

    Bavarian Justice Minister Winfried Bausback called on Künast to resign: "Anyone who publicly suspects police in such a situation without any knowledge of the matter — as Künast has done in her tweet — is unacceptable as chairman of the parliamentary legal committee."

    Green leader Cem Özdemir distanced himself from Künast:

    "I did not understand what she wrote there. It is always a good idea to think about what you are writing before you send a tweet. What are police officers supposed to do if they are attacked? They protected others and they protected themselves. Her view is not the position of my party."

    Andreas Scheuer, the general secretary of the Christian Social Union, the Bavarian sister party to Chancellor Angela Merkel's CDU, said Künast's comments were "perverse." He added: "The CSU's policy is: protection of victims takes priority over protection of perpetrators."

    German commentator Klaus Kelle wrote:

    "Our police in Germany do an excellent job and are hardly ever thanked for it. They are poorly paid … and repeatedly are whipping boys for errors of policy. Endless overtime, violent attacks, even in harmless situations such as illegal parking, is part of everyday life for our sons and daughters, who serve all of us.

    "Where are the politicians who support our policemen, rather than those who mindlessly criticize them, as now? Ms. Künast, does the presumption of innocence apply to police officers in this country?"

    The Bavarian Criminal Police Office has now launched an internal investigation to determine if police were justified in shooting a jihadist.

  • Paul Craig Roberts Warns "Armageddon Approaches" After German Leak

    Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

    The Western public doesn’t know it, but Washington and its European vassals are convincing Russia that they are preparing to attack. Eric Zuesse reports on a German newspaper leak of a Bundeswehr decision to declare Russia to be an enemy nation of Germany.

    According to a report issued on June 6th in German Economic News (Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten, or DWN), the German government is preparing to go to war against Russia, and has in draft-form a Bundeswehr report declaring Russia to be an enemy nation. DWN says: “The Russian secret services have apparently thoroughly studied the paper.

     

    In advance of the paper’s publication, a harsh note of protest has been sent to Berlin: The head of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Russian State Duma, Alexei Puschkow, has posted the Twitter message: ‘The decision of the German government declaring Russia to be an enemy shows Merkel’s subservience to the Obama administration.’”

    This is the interpretation that some Russian politicians themselves have put on the NATO military bases that Washington is establishing on Russia’s borders.

    Washington might intend the military buildup as pressure on President Putin to reduce Russian opposition to Washington’s unilateralism. However, it reminds some outspoken Russians such as Vladimir Zhirinovsky of Hitler’s troops on Russia’s border in 1941.

    Zhirinovsky is the founder and leader of Russia’s Liberal Democratic Party and a vice chairman of the Russian parliament. In a confrontation with the editor of a German newspaper, Zhirinovsky tells him that German troops again on Russia’s border will provoke a preventive strike after which nothing will remain of German and NATO troops. “The more NATO soldiers in your territory, the faster you are going to die. To the last man. Remove NATO from your territory!” 

    Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has expressed his frustration with Washington’s reliance on force and coercion instead of diplomacy. It is reckless for Washington to convince Russia that diplomacy is a dead end without promise. When the Russians reach that conclusion, force will confront force.

    Indeed Zhirinovsky has already reached that point and perhaps Vladimir Putin also. As I reported, Putin recently dressed down Western presstitutes for their role in fomenting nuclear war.

    Putin has made it clear that Russia will not accept US missile bases in Poland and Romania. He has informed Washington and the imbecilic Polish and Romanian governments. However, as Putin observed, “they don’t hear.”

    The inability to hear means that Washington’s arrogance has made Washington too stupid to take seriously Putin’s warning. If Washington persists, it will provoke the preventive strike that Zhirinovsky told the German editor the Merkel regime was inviting.

    Americans need to wake up to the dangerous situation that Washington has created, but I doubt they will. Most wars happen without the public’s knowledge until they happen. The main function of the American left-wing is to serve as a bogyman with which to scare conservatives about the country’s loss of morals, and the main function of conservatives is to create fear and hysteria about immigrants, Muslims, and Russians. There is no sign that Congress is aware of approaching Armageddon, and the media consists of propaganda.

    I and a few others try to alert people to the real threats that they face, but our voices are not loud enough. Not even Vladimir Putin’s voice is loud enough. It looks like the West won’t hear until “there remains nothing at all of the German and NATO troops,” and of Poland and Romania and the rest of us.

  • Here's Why The New DNC Chair Is About To Make Bernie Supporters Just As Angry

    Meet Donna Brazile – interim party chair after Debbie Wasserman Schultz (DWS) resignation over Wikileaks-email-leaked proof confirming months of accusations that she had put her thumb on the scales in favor of presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton…

     

    The only problem is… a quick search of Wikileaks leaked DNC email database shows… Brazile is exactly the same as DWS – clearly demonstrating bias against the Sanders’ camp…

     

    And rejecting Sanders’ efforts to battle the rigged super-delegate system as “another lunacy”…

     

    So now, following Bernie’s statement with regard DWS’ resignation…

    We suspect, Sanders’ supporters will be screaming for more blood (and rightfully so) and the deeply-rigged nature of today’s body politik spews to the surface once again.

  • China Bans Websites From Original Reporting

    It was about six months ago when global stock markets were crashing, that China tightened its control on local media, and ordered the local press and news outlets to stick to “positive reporting” or else “risk the stability of the country.”  As we reported back in February “China is now openly declaring war on anyone who dares to even suggest that not all may be well in China.  A separate commentary by Xinhua yesterday said that controlling public opinion was essential for a a ruling party: “With one hand we grab the guns; with the other we grab the pens,” it said. “Mobilising public opinion is the great tradition of our party.”In other words, China is worried that popular anger and negative sentiment is starting to stir especially after the recent economic troubles, and that those who dare to promote an objective version of reality will likely be promptly quieted.”

    Since then while superficially the economy may have improved on the back of nearly $2 trillion in freshly-created new loans, it appears that reports of bad news have not stopped. As such, China has decided to come up with an even more draconian measure: ban original reporting altogether.

    According to The Paper, major internet portals in China including Sina, Sohu, Netease and Ifeng.com have shut down some of their original reporting operations after receiving “harsh criticism” from country’s top industry regulator. 

    As Bloomberg adds, the Beijing branch of Cyberspace Administration of China has set deadlines for portals for rectification. It also reports that an unidentified head of Beijing branch cited portals for violating China’s internet regulations by carrying plenty of news content obtained through original reporting.

    What happens to those who dare to do what news organizations are expected to by definition, i.e., original reporting? Nothing good: portals also to face other penalties including fines and warnings.

    Full source from China’s The Paper, google translated:

    Recently, the Beijing Information Office of the territorial network Sina, Sohu, Netease, Phoenix and other sites provide a large number of illegal behavior in the presence of Internet News Information Service raised harsh criticism, ordered the site to be a deadline for correction.

     

    Currently, Sina has been shutting down “Geek News” section, are cleaning “Sina studio” section of the offending content; Sohu has been shutting down “News party”, “rad”, “click Today” and other columns;

     

    Netease been shut down. ” echo “,” roadmap “and other columns, is cleaning” School of Journalism “section of the offending content; Phoenix has been shut down” serious report “section. All shut down, cleaning section including website pages, mobile clients, micro-channel public account other publishing platform.

     

    Beijing letter network do the responsible person, said the channel was ordered to rectification column, a serious violation of the national “Provisions on the Administration of Internet News Information Services” provisions of Article XVI, were published a large number of self-editing of news and information, and serious violations , a very bad influence. Beijing Information Office in addition to ordering the territorial network related sites suspected of illegal channels to be rectification column, the law will give a warning and impose a fine of administrative penalties.

     

    The next stage, the Beijing Municipal Information Office will continue to increase network administration and law enforcement, standardize territorial website news and information service activities, maintain good order in the Internet industry. Welcome to the majority of users of the Internet illegal and unhealthy information supervision and reporting, and jointly create a good ecological network.

    What happens next? Sooner rather than later, China prohibits all forms of “original reporting”, at
    which point the only allowed form of “news” will be whatever the
    politburo greenlights… very much in the same way that the DNC would preapprove articles by Washington Post or segments by MSNBC or CNN.

  • With Kuroda Under Pressure To Increase Stimulus Again, Dissenters Appear

    With the yen strengthening ~12% against the US dollar and the Nikkei down ~10% YTD, it seems Haruhiko “Peter Pan” Kuroda is having a difficult time working his magic in favor of Abenomics. As the WSJ reports, Kuroda is under increasing pressure from the Prime Minister’s advisers to coordinate efforts to jumpstart the economy. Earlier this month, we first reported of the secretive meeting between Kuroda and Bernanke, where the former Fed Chairman urged Japan to unleash helicopter money.

    With what little credibility it still has, the Bank of Japan is set to meet this week and likely agree on the size of yet another stimulus package for the economy. Prime Minister Abe’s main economic advisor Etsuro Honda recently detailed in an interview that the BOJ should increase its Qualitative and Quantitative Monetary Easing (QQE) program from ¥80 trillion to ¥90 trillion.

    In addition, there has been growing speculation regarding coordinated fiscal and monetary stimulus. The fiscal stimulus efforts are not expected to be unveiled until August, according to the WSJ. Expectations point to a “multiyear program valued at ¥20 trillion ($188 billion), including direct spending, government loans and public-private financing.”

    Perhaps more interesting, this time, Kuroda may have a difficult time convincing the 8 remaining members of the monetary board. As the Journal notes, “other BOJ officials are signaling a reluctance to act, underscoring questions about whether the central bank has reached the limits of its powers to revive Japan’s economy. They note that monetary policy is already extremely accommodative, with bond yields and interest rates at or near record lows, and express doubts that additional easing would make fiscal stimulus much more effective, according to people familiar with the central bank’s thinking.”

    As core metrics and corporate expectations of inflation plummet, Kuroda’s promise to do “whatever it takes” to reach 2% inflation seems to be under significant threat. Doing nothing now would “amount to an admission that the BOJ’s monetary policy has reached its limits—it wants to move, but it can’t,” said Yuichi Kodama, chief economist at Meiji Yasuda Life Insurance.

    Not unlike the Fed, it is clear that the BOJ is trapped in its own end game. As Kyle Bass recently told CNBC, “The textbooks aren’t working for the academics … I fear they’re going to have to go into some sort of jubilee where the central bank just forgives the debt that they own…I don’t know what happens to the yield curve then. The unconventional policies aren’t working, so they’re going to have to go to unconventional, unconventional policies next. I don’t know where that takes them.”

    The answer appears to be a one-way ticket to Neverland, where we can all believe in our hero, Peter Pan.

  • 27-Year-Old Syrian Suicide Bomber Behind German Music Festival Attack That Injured 12

    Update 2: The suspect behind an explosion that injured 12 people in Bavaria was a 27-year-old asylum seeker from Syria, Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann says early Monday. The suspect, who arrived in Germany two years ago, died in the blast. He had been refused asylum, Bavarian authorities told a press conference. His application was rejected a year ago but the man was allowed to stay in Germany temporarily, due to ongoing hostilities in Syria.

    Police say they do not yet known if the attacker had any radical Islamist background. The investigations is currently focused on attacker’s communications.

    *  *  *

    Update 1: "A man, according to our current knowledge the perpetrator, died" in the blast they said in the short statement. Further details weren't immediately available and they did not pick up their telephone lines.

    *  *  *

    As we detailed earlier, capping an awful week for Germany (and France), an explosion in the city of Ansbach, originally reported as a gas leak, has been confirmed as being caused by "an explosive device."

    As The Telegraph reports, one person is dead (believed to be the bomber) and at least 11 more injured as the explosion occured shortly after 10pm outside a wine bar near the entrance to an open-air music festival, where there were some 2,500 people in attendance. The festival was shut down as a precaution.

    With Germany already on high alert following the events in Reutlingen and Munich.

    On Sunday, 21-year-old asylum-seeker from Syria killed a woman, reported to be pregnant, with a meat cleaver in the southern German town of Reutlingen.

     

    Only two days earlier an 18-year-old man killed nine people in a shooting near a shopping centre in Munich, before turning the gun on himself.

    One person has been killed and another 11 injured in an explosion at a cafe in the Bavarian city of Ansbach. (via The Telegraph)

    A spokesman for the Bavarian Interior Ministry said the explosion was not an accident and appears to have been intentional.

     

     

    Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann was en route to the site, the spokesman said.

     

    The blast killed one person and injured 11 others in the Bavarian city, police confirmed late on Sunday. It said the cause of the blast was unknown.

     

     

    The blast a at Eugene's Wine Bar triggered a large-scale police operation involving police, rescue workers and one helicopter, Sky News said.

     

    The blast was initially reported to have been caused by a gas leak.

     

    News agency Dpa reports that an open-air concert nearby with some 2,500 in attendance was shut down as a precaution after the explosion.

     

    Additionally,  AP reports that

    Police in the southern German city of Ansbach say the man was killed when an explosive device he was believed to be carrying went off near an open-air music festival,

    The only question left now is how long before an otherwise patient German population react after three apparent mass attacks in one week?

  • Deep Underground Military Bases? California Hit By Mysterious Clockwork "Booms" Daily For Years

    Submitted by Piper McGowan via The Daily Sheeple,

    For years now, residents of Sonora, California have been hearing a window-shaking loud and so far officially unexplained BOOM! that always happens between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. daily.

    Inquisitr reports that the explanation floating around Sonora from a local geologist/teacher is that an Army Depot in Hawthorne, Nevada, all the way across the state and behind a mountain range which disposes of old munitions like bombs, might be what residents have been hearing.

    But do they have so many old bombs to dispose of that they do it daily every single day even on weekends and holidays without fail for years? Why would Sonora, California of all locations near Hawthorne be the seemingly most affected city of all?

    Besides, even people who work at the depot aren’t hearing the booms regularly (via ABC News):

    Ken Thomas, a contracting officer for the Hawthorne Army Depot, told ABC News today that they do detonate munitions regularly at the depot when the munitions are past their shelf-life, but he is not convinced that it can be heard in Sonora.

     

    “It doesn’t feel right that what we’re doing here would be heard 200 miles away when there’s a mountain range in between us,” Thomas said. “My office is 27 miles from where they detonate the old munitions, I only hear it here maybe one time a month, and just barely and it’s like ‘Was that a boom?'”

    On top of that, not only are they clockwork, but these have been described as deep, low booms which can almost be felt by the people who live there. In fact, a friend who lives near Sonora said that sometimes they can actually see their windows warp during the booms.

    So what is it? Lots of conspiracies are, of course, floating around including aliens (as per the usual).

    But one in particular sounds a lot more plausible than an old weapons depot that’s a three-hour drive from Sonora: DUMBs.

    Deep underground military bases.

    We all know there’s an extensive network of them which has been significantly expanded since 9/11 and the creation of Homeland Security…

    …and we’re all just supposed to put our fingers in our ears and go “la la la” and pretend like they don’t exist.

    The tunneling project is a joint venture involving the National Security Agency, CIA, FBI, MiB, Homeland Security & a few other groups that are buried in the Congressional Intelligence Committees with some weird acronyms no one really understands. Much of the info on this comes from private citizens in the county, public officials, as well as Coast to Coast with George Noory & Art Bell. These shows have given incredibly good information on the topic for the last several months, beginning in late 2003…

     

    According to the information available, there are several reasons for the project:

     

    1) Homeland Security needs an system of rapid deployment in the South, free of traffic;

    2) certain gov't agencies want an easy connection route with other gov't installations in the South;

    3) there is a move on in the intelligence community to begin more efficient use of the underground rail system already in place at Lockheed in Marietta;

    4) Paulding is a central location for the complete project that will eventually connect installations in Anniston, AL; Macon, GA; Lockheed in Marietta; Lookout Mtn, TN; Greenville-Spartanburg, SC; & Raleigh-Durham, NC;

    5) the Yorkville area of Paulding has been designated as the prime location for these hubs to come together because of geological preference;

    6) the addition of new Walmart facilities in NW GA give spur hubs & depots easy access to large areas that can be partitioned off for moving of very large equipment & large numbers of people in case of national emergency.

    (source)

    Kinda like the CIA kept pretending Area 51 didn’t exist for decades until it was finally, quietly admitted it in 2013.

  • "Game Over" – Nintendo Crashes Most Since 1990 After Admitting "Limited Earnings Impact" From Pokemon Go

    Update: Things have proceeded south… Nintendo is now down over 17% – the biggest drop since October 1990… following Super Mario World’s release on the NES & Gameboy and the crash in the Tokyo Stock Market…

     

    After the close Friday, Nintendo admitted that the earnings impact from the newly-released ‘Pokemon Go’ game would be limited (and that it has no plans to adjust its forecasts). This has sent Nintendo shares down over 16% today, following last Wednesday’s 12% collapse. 

     

    Nintendo has given up half its panic-buying gains of last week…

     

    Today’s drop is the largest since March 2000…


  • Did Verizon Just Signal The Top?

    The last time AOL (bought by Verizon in May 2015) was involved in a mega merger was January 2000, when AOL acquired Time Warner for $182 billion in what was the mega deal of the last tech bubble, creating a $350 billion behemoth… which nearly dragged down both companies a few years later. The timing could not have been more perfect as it marked the tech bubble top…

    Will it happen again?

    As Bloomberg reports, Verizon Communications will announce plans to buy Yahoo!’s core assets for about $4.8 billion on Monday, a move that would finally seal the fate of the iconic web pioneer after months of speculation and pressure from investors.

    News of the takeover is expected to come before the market opens, said a person with direct knowledge of the situation who asked not to be identified because the information isn’t public. The deal includes Yahoo real estate assets, while some intellectual property is to be sold separately, the person said. Yahoo will be left with its stakes in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan, with a combined market value of about $40 billion.

     

    With its core wireless business maturing, Verizon is expected to keep Yahoo mostly intact to compete with Alphabet’s Google and Facebook in digital ads by tapping into users on sites like Yahoo Finance. The takeover will double the size of Verizon’s digital advertising, placing it as a distant third behind Google and Facebook in the $187 billion market.

     

    “The deal speaks to a clear strategy shift at Verizon,” Craig Moffett, an analyst with MoffettNathanson, said Sunday. “They are trying to monetize wireless in an entirely new way. Instead of charging customers for traffic, they are turning to charging advertisers for eyeballs.”

    Desperately overpaying for already over-valued assets with market-wide valuations at record levels. What could go wrong?

Digest powered by RSS Digest

Jul 24

Today’s News 24th July 2016

  • Koch Brothers Now Supporting "Often Confused" Hillary Clinton

    Authored by Eric Zuesse,

    On July 20th, a Republican U.S. Senator lost his main financial backers for having urged Republicans to vote for Donald Trump instead of for Hillary Clinton.

    The Koch brothers speak with their words, which can’t be trusted, but they also speak with their money, their investments, which are always honest expressions of their actual beliefs and desires. This time, the Kochs spoke with their money, just a day after that Senator spoke with his words.

    They spoke with their investments on July 19th, when they yanked their money from a U.S. Senator whom they had always financially backed, until now; and they did it immediately after that Senator not only went to the Republican National Convention where Donald Trump was to be nominated, but he gave there a powerful argument for Republicans to vote for Trump.

    U.S. Senator Ron Johnson, from Wisconsin, told the assembled Convention (and the far larger number of people outside the Convention), on July 19th (and this is what the Kochs abandoned him over):

    Let me repeat that — RADICAL ISLAMIC TERRORISTS — slaughtering and brutalizing their innocent victims.

     

    So the question is, when will America actually confront this terrible reality?

     

    We certainly won’t if Democrats win in November. …

     

    Hillary Clinton is asking America to give her Obama’s third term.

     

    The world is simply too dangerous to elect either of them [either Democrat Russ Feingold who is running to win the Republican Johnson’s Senate seat, or Hillary Clinton].

     

    Instead, America needs strong leadership. Leaders who will jumpstart our economy, secure our borders, strengthen our military, and accomplish the goal President Obama set over twenty-two months ago [but failed to fulfill]: We must defeat ISIS, and then remain fully committed to destroying Islamic terrorists wherever they hide. …

     

    It is a fight we absolutely must win.

     

    Donald Trump and Mike Pence understand that these must be America’s top priorities. They will be strong leaders, working with Republicans in the House and Senate to achieve a goal that can unite us all: A safe, prosperous, and secure America.

     

    Our future hangs in the balance. We must unify, work tirelessly, and together, save this great nation.

    Unlike John Kasich, who had refused even to attend the Convention at all, or Ted Cruz, who did attend but refused to say anything at all in favor of Trump, Johnson was now actually campaigning for Trump against Hillary.

    The next day, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel bannered "Koch brothers pull ad buy backing Ron Johnson”, and reported that, "A day after U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin spoke at the Republican National Convention, a group affiliated with the conservative Koch brothers pulled more than $2 million in ad time in the Badger State.”

    In other words: immediately after one of their owned Senators campaigned for Trump, they cut off his main monetary lifeline.

    This is a warning to any other Republican who might still be considering to campaign for Trump; it says, loud and clear: If you do that, you lose us.

    The Koch-led contingent of Republican billionaires and centi-millionaires is one of two Republican financial-backer contingents. The other is led by Karl Rove.

    The Koch-led network of billionaires (who rely upon hiring academia and media for manipulating voters), and the Rove-led network of billionaires (who rely far more heavily upon garnering Wall Street money and Evangelical clergy for manipulating voters), have long been the two financial mainstays of the Republican Party. The Kochs have now made unmistakably clear that they want Hillary Clinton to become the next President (and, thus, academics and the media will overwhelmingly support Hillary). Previously, there was question as to whether the Kochs would go so far as to help a Democrat; but, now, there is no serious doubt about it: they already do (though as quietly as possible, and not in their own — often lying — mere words).

    The Rove-led billionaires’ faction are also strongly inclined to prefer Hillary, but can’t afford to alienate the Republican electorate, and so they will continue to support other Republicans but not Trump. (Consequently, Ron Johnson, for example, still can get their money.) They aren’t as emphatic about their backing of Hillary as the Koch-led faction is. They won’t withdraw their financial support from Republicans (such as Johnson) who campaign for Trump. They aren’t really pro-Hillary; but the Koch-contingent now are.

    And then, of course, there’s Rupert Murdoch. On 17 May 2016, Gabriel Sherman headlined in New York magazine, “Why Rupert Murdoch Decided to Back Trump”, and he wrote: “According to one Fox News producer, the channel's ratings dip whenever an anti-Trump segment airs. A Fox anchor told me that the message from Roger Ailes's executives is they need to go easy on Trump. ‘It’s, ‘Make sure we don't go after Trump,’ the anchor said. ‘We’ve thrown in the towel.’” However, Sherman also noted that Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal was supporting Hillary. Murdoch has long been fond of her; and, in the pages of the WSJ, he still enjoys the freedom to shape the ‘news’ to favor her (something that would lose him audience if he were to do it at Fox). (He also supports both Obama and the Bushes. In one photo at a lobbyists’ dinner, he’s surrounded at his left by Obama’s longtime aide Valerie Jarret, and at his right by Jeb Bush, all three smiling like friends; but, in any case, all three are supporters of that same far-right Republican lobbying organization. At the top in American society, there is real bipartisanship. Another photo displaying such bipartisanship is of Donald and Melania Trump, and Bill and Hillary Clinton, warmly socializing together. These people aren’t at all enemies of one-another; they just play that on TV, in print, and etc. Those are the roles they play, not really who they are.)

    Even as early as October 2015, it was clear that the Republican Party’s mega-donors were already contributing more money to Hillary Clinton’s campaign than to Donald Trump’s. They also were contributing more than they were to Clinton’s campaign, to each the Republican Presidential campaigns of: John Kasich, Scott Walker, Ben Carson, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and (the most of all, to) Jeb Bush. So, in the ultimate 17-candidate Republican field, Hillary was already getting more of the 2012 Romney donors’ money than was each campaign of Lindsey Graham, Rand Paul, Carly Fiorina, Chris Christie, Rick Perry, Mike Huckabee, Donald Trump, Bobby Jindal, Rick Santorum, George Pataki, and (the least of all, they donated to) Jim Gilmore. So, if she were added to that 17-candidate Republican-candidate list, she’d have been #7 out of the 18 recipients of Republican money. (And that’s not even counting the money from Democratic-Party megadonors — virtually all of whom donated and donate only to Clinton.)

    Perhaps Trump is hoping to get lots more contributions from Democratic donors than previous Republican Presidential nominees have. But he certainly won’t be able to come even close to matching Hillary’s campaign warchest, which is widely expected to break all previous records — and for good reason. (In fact, Hillary as the State Department chief, was, behind-the-scenes, ferociously assisting the Koch brothers, regarding the Keystone XL Pipeline project and other government-policy matters. She’s a proven dynamo for the super-rich.)

    The question regarding Trump as President would be: would he sell the government (perhaps at low prices to his friends and at high prices to his enemies) for various prices (as Clinton already has done — sold it to both her friends and her ‘enemies’ — but which sales she now only needs to deliver on); or would he, instead, refuse to sell it, and actually try to run the U.S. government for and on behalf of the American public? He has no actual record in public office; so, there’s no way of answering that question, unless and until he becomes President. But if Hillary Clinton becomes President, then the outcome would be much more certain, because she already has a lengthy record in ‘public’ service. It’s one that the Kochs probably appreciate very much. (And especially Hillary’s record as the U.S. Secretary of State is informative about the type of President she would make. Her real priorities are clear by her actions, though not at all by her words. By contrast, Trump’s priorities are, and might long remain, a mystery.)

    *  *  *

    Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

    And so it seems, after all the talk, The Koch Brothers would prefer not to place their hardly-earned money with an unknown entity like Trump, preferring instead to bet on the known entity supporting their status qup… even though even her own staff admit "she's often confused"…

    Source: Judicial Watch vs State emails

    Presumably that's an even better bet for The Kochs as it enables the puppet-mastery.

  • All You Need To Know About Germany's "Most Stringent" Gun Ownership Laws

    An 18-year-old German-Iranian believed to have acted alone killed nine people in a shooting spree with a pistol at a busy shopping center in Munich on Friday evening. This is just the latest in a spree of 'mass shootings' which have prompted increasingly zealous calls for 'gun control' from President Obama and his supporters. With 2 dead and 16 wounded in Chicago (which is among America's most-gun-controlled cities), we thought some facts about acquiring and owning a gun in Germany (which has the "most stringent" rules around gun control in Europe) might be useful in the forthcoming debate about how this 'mass shooting' epidemic will be solved if we all just hand our guns over.

    1. Germany has some of the "most stringent" rules around gun control in Europe, according to the U.S. Library of Congress. (https://www.loc.gov/law/help/firearms-control/germany.php#t1)

     

    2. To own a gun in Germany, it is necessary to obtain a weapon licence for which applicants must generally be at least 18 years old and show they have they have a reason for needing a weapon.

     

    3. German authorities can prohibit anyone who is dependent on drugs or alcohol or is mentally ill from obtaining a gun license. People under 25 have to undergo a psychiatric test. (https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/waffg_2002/BJNR397010002.html)

     

    4. After a teenager shot 15 people dead at a school in the southwestern town of Winnenden in 2009, Germany tightened the rules around firearms. Among other things, authorities were given greater authority to check whether guns were stored securely when not in use, and can make spot checks. (http://www.bmi.bund.de/DE/Themen/Sicherheit/Waffenrecht/Aenderungen-Waff…)

     

    5. Almost 5.5 million firearms are owned privately in Germany by around 1.4 million people, according to data from the German Firearms Register in early 2013. Germany's population is about 82 million. (http://www.bva.bund.de/SharedDocs/Kurzmeldungen/DE/BVA/Sicherheit/NWR/20…)

     

    6. There are up to 20 million illegal firearms in Germany, the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung cited experts in Germany as saying in January. (http://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/inland/in-deutschland-gibt-es-bis-zu-…)

     

    By comparison, website GunPolicy.org says between 270 million to 310 million legal and illegal firearms are owned by civilians in the United States, where the population is about 324 million. (http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region/united-states)

     

    7. The Federal Criminal Police Office said in its 2015 annual report that the use of firearms had been on a downward trend for years. In 2015 there were 4,289 cases of people being threatened with firearms – the lowest level since 1993. There were 4,711 cases of people or things being shot at in 2015, it said. (file:///C:/Users/U0148792/Downloads/pks2015Jahrbuch.pdf)

     

    8. There were 57 gun homicides in Germany in 2015, up from 42 the previous year – compared with 804 in 1995, according to website GunPolicy.org (http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region/germany)

    And yet… mass shootings still happen? Inconceivable! Nevertheless, we are sure 'gun control' in America makes much more sense because a defenseless populous will be somehow safer?

    Source: Reuters

  • A Post Western World? A Disturbing Interview With Prof. Harry Redner

    Submitted by Erico Matias Tavares of Sinclair & Co

    A Post Western World? An Interview with Prof. Harry Redner – Part I

    Prof. Harry Redner was Reader at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, as well as visiting professor at Yale University, University of California-Berkeley and Harvard University. He postulates that the world is now transitioning to “beyond civilization” – a new and unprecedented condition in Human History known as globalization. This in turn has major implications for societies across the world, and in particular developed nations.

    He is the author of several articles and fourteen books, including a tetralogy on civilization: “Beyond Civilization: Society, Culture, and the Individual in the Age of Globalization”, “Totalitarianism, Globalization, Colonialism: The Destruction of Civilization since 1914”, “The Tragedy of European Civilization: Towards an Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century” and “The Triumph and Tragedy of the Intellectuals: Evil, Enlightenment, and Death”.

    PART I: GENERAL TRENDS AND THE END OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION

    The political and economic issues broadly discussed in the media usually revolve around political cycles, terrorism, foreign policy, rising debt levels, sluggish economic performance, academic underachievement, environmental problems, ageing demographics and so forth.

    In our view, this all ties into a major cycle of history that has been with us for some time, and which has been gaining traction since the 1990s: the end of Western Civilization and the transition towards a globalized society. There is some confusion between the two terms, where the latter is often perceived as the continuation of the former, but in reality the two have been in conflict for almost 100 years.

    We are delighted to get Prof. Harry Redner’s views on this topic, which he has studied and written about extensively. The political, social and economic ramifications are likely to be life changing in the years to come. Politicians, investors and citizens all over the world should take note.

    E. Tavares: Prof. Redner, thank you for being with us today. Let’s start with a basic yet difficult to define concept: what is civilization?

    H. Redner: How and why it originated and how it developed further are extremely contentious issues, about which the views of specialists from at least half a dozen disciplines are frequently at odds. It has been debated for centuries and will continue so for the foreseeable future. My own views on these matters carry no special weight and everything I have to say can be disputed and, indeed, will be so, as there are no final conclusive answers to these ultimate questions. But for what they are worth, I will present a few of my provisional thoughts.

    Civilization is a necessary and inevitable stage in human development. When human societies increase in number and productive capacity, when they become more integrated through communication, trade and authority systems and, above all, when higher cultures and mentalities above those of primitive shamanistic cults, spirit worship and fetishist symbolism arise, civilization takes off as the next stage of human development.

    This happened at different times and places all over the globe, first along the river valleys of Mesopotamia and the Nile, later along those of the Indus and Yellow Rivers; later still, and completely autonomously, under different conditions in Mesoamerica and in the Andes. There is a syndrome of features, most of which these early civilizations display, more or less completely in each case, such as the rise of cities, the formation of states, class differentiations, the invention of methods of writing and organized religion, together with a mythological creed or pantheon.

    However, my interest is not in these early civilizations but only in the later, more developed ones, those that survived until the start of the twentieth century. These are the so-called post-Axial Age civilizations. The idea of an Axial Age, which occurred approximately between 700 and 300 BC, was developed by the German philosopher Karl Jaspers to refer to this period when the first philosophies and universal religions arose that have persisted till now. It is a curious and still unexplained historical coincidence that many of the great thinkers and sages, such as Zoroaster, Pythagoras, deutero-Isaiah, the Buddha, Confucius and Lao-Tse all lived around 500BC in widely dispersed places. The post-Axial civilizations are based on their teachings.

    In each case what was crucial for the rise and development of these civilizations was the construction of a higher form of literacy embodied in a set of canonical texts and, stemming from these, a higher form of ethical conduct. The figures of the philosopher, prophet, sage, saint, ascetic monk, scholar, rabbi and mandarin, as bearers of the highest values of literacy and ethics, arose respectively in each of the resulting civilizations. Invariably, but with some crucial exceptions, empires were founded by conquerors and rulers based on these values, which were given an organized form in schools of philosophy or law, monastic orders or churches or other types of scholarly or religious institutions. These have mostly lasted till our time. But since the start of the twentieth century at the very latest they were undermined and came under attack from many quarters in a general disruption of established traditions all over the world.

    ET: Can you briefly summarize what makes Western Civilization different? Was the Greek classical tradition what made it take root across Europe, or was there something else at play?

    HR: The term “Western Civilization” is used ambiguously in two somewhat different senses: it can refer to the whole development of civilization in the West from its Greek origin to its European culmination, or alternatively, it can refer only to the latter, namely to the civilization of Europe that began to flourish around 1000AD. This is a distinct form of civilization different from the Classical or Greco-Roman civilization based on the Mediterranean that lasted approximately till 500AD, as well as from the Byzantine civilization, located largely in what is now Turkey and the Balkans that followed. Clearly, there were strong historical, cultural and religious continuities between these three civilizational stages, which is the reason that they can be collectively called Western Civilization in the broad sense.

    Western Civilization in the narrow sense, namely European civilization, had one of its roots in the Classical Greco-Roman tradition, but its other crucial root lay in Judaism, as developed and enlarged by Christianity. The key text of this civilization is and remains the Judaeo-Christian Bible, which is why it is often referred to as a Judaeo-Christian Civilization.

    What made European civilization different was its capacity to absorb all earlier Western civilizational forms, which manifested itself in numerous Renaissances and Reformations. During the Renaissances, the first of which took place in the 12th century, it went back to its roots in classical civilization; during its Reformations and counter-Reformations it went back to its biblical roots, back to the prophets, the Gospels and the Church Fathers. Each time it gained renewed cultural vigor.

    Politically, what made European Civilization so unusual was that it never unified into a single empire, as all the others had done at one time or another. But Europe always remained divided and resisted all attempts at imperial unification and domination. Instead of a single empire, it evolved politically into a system of kingdoms, principalities and semi-autonomous cities, together with a Church, also vying for power, which itself broke up during the Reformation. This meant that no single authority could ever maintain complete control over all of Europe and no single orthodoxy in respect of anything could prevail everywhere.

    This is the secret source of European freedom and individualism. It gave rise to the conditions that fostered competition and contention that proved immensely conducive to creativity and innovation. Its dark obverse side was continual strife and wars which proved most damaging when they irrupted as religious wars and persecutions, and which eventually in the twentieth century turned into ideological wars that almost destroyed European Civilization.

    ET: It can be said that Western Civilization reached its pinnacle just before the First World War. Clearly the subsequent loss of entire generations of would-be scientists, teachers, civil servants, doctors, priests, engineers, patriots, mothers, fathers and children in devastating conflicts was something the West never really recovered from. The peace and prosperity that Europeans have achieved since then masks this fact, certainly in relative terms. What are your thoughts here? 

    HR: Certainly the First World War was the proximal inciting cause for a process of civilizational destruction in Europe and the rest of the world that is still going on.

    It was not so much the killing in itself, though that was bad enough – a large part of a generation of young men was sacrificed – as the demoralization and loss of faith in the enlightenment values of liberalism and democracy by which Europe had been guided in the nineteenth century and towards which most countries were moving.

    This was particularly virulent in the countries on the losing side, beginning with Russia, where it led to the Bolshevik Revolution, which briefly spread to much of central Europe; and in Italy, which was on the winning side but in danger of a Bolshevik takeover, and where a Fascist reaction ensued. Soviet totalitarianism in Russia devastated its culture and society, in a process started by Lenin and Trotsky and concluded by Stalin. This upheaval might have been contained and stopped from spreading to the rest of Europe were it not for the Great Depression, which destroyed any hope for democracy and led almost inevitably to the Second World War with all its devastating consequences.

    After that war, Europe lay prostrate and divided by the Cold War into two mutually closed off spheres. With American aid, Western Europe rebuilt itself materially remarkably quickly; in Eastern Europe under Soviet domination this happened much more slowly. However, there was no moral or cultural recovery. European Civilization did not rise like a phoenix from the ashes. It languished for a while and now seems to be petering out.

    ET: As you argue persuasively in your books, totalitarianism ended up being a major force behind the destruction of European Civilization. However, the likes of Mussolini and Hitler rose to power by promising their nations that they would regain the commanding role in its progression – at the expense of others through the use of extreme violence. Are there inherent conflicts within Western Civilization or was totalitarianism an accident of history?

    HR: Totalitarianism was an accident of history only to the extent that the First World War was an accident of history – a very tragic accident with calamitous consequences. There was nothing in European Civilization as such, or as it was developing during the nineteenth century, necessitating the First World War. On the contrary, everything seemed to point to the impossibility of such a war.

    However, the war was no accident in so far as the disposition of the great power alliances was concerned. This was bound to lead to some kind of war, though not necessarily to the First World War, a war of great duration and unprecedented ferocity. The two sides were too evenly matched for either to quickly defeat the other. Had Germany won the war during the first or even second year there would have been no revolution in Russia and no totalitarianism there or in Italy. Europe would have been saved the worst, at least for a long while, though it would have fallen under German domination, but that would have been by far the lesser evil.

    Hitler’s rise to power and Nazi totalitarianism was the direct consequence of the outcome of the First World War together with the Great Depression. In a sense, the latter, too, was the outcome of an accident of economic history, just like the Global Financial Crisis we have recently experienced. Nevertheless, there were robust historical causes behind both events. The idea of an “accident of history” is a relative one, for what is accidental in relation to one set of developments, generally of a broad type, is causally necessitated in relation to another set. There is no such thing as a “historical accident” in any absolute sense.

    In the case of totalitarianism we cannot discount the role of individuals of exceptional ability, especially when this is conducive to evil, such as Lenin, Stalin, Hitler and Mao and others such as Mussolini and Franco to a lesser extent. Are they accidents of history or rather men that rise to great heights when history provides them with the opportunities for doing so? Do they make history or does history make them? These are the kinds of issues that need to be considered when accounting for so-called “accidents of history”.

    ET: You also talk about the role that some prominent European philosophers played in the formation of these destructive ideologies, something which is seldom discussed. Which ones do you believe made the biggest contribution to the development of European and Soviet totalitarianism?

    HR: Totalitarianism could not have arisen without political ideologies; and such ideologies could not have emerged without philosophers and other types of intellectuals, some of them men of great genius. Behind Bolshevism there stands the great social theorist Marx and behind Nazism the almost as great thinker, Nietzsche. However, neither Marx nor Nietzsche is directly responsible for Bolshevism or Nazism; a long chain of mediating accessory figures had to be active in transitioning from the philosophical thought to the political ideology. These intermediaries were themselves intellectuals of a lesser kind, and there were literally hundreds of them.

    Prior to the First World War, Marxism was being successfully adapted to the needs of democratic workers’ movements of socialist parties throughout Europe. Only in Czarist Russia, where the Marxist party was illegal, did a splinter movement of those calling themselves Bolsheviks arise under the leadership of Lenin, in opposition to the majority of moderate Marxists who called themselves Mensheviks. Lenin’s Bolshevik ideology was a far cry from classical Western Marxism being in large part inspired by Russian insurrectionist traditions.

    Hitler’s Nazi ideology, based on virulent anti-Semitism and nationalistic imperialism, was also far removed from the classical German philosophies of Fichte, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, on which it based itself. But there were many German intellectuals who applied these philosophical ideas in ways which, at their most extreme and crudest, led to the Nazi ideology as Hitler enunciated it, and as the German people subsequently accepted it.

    Again it needs to be stressed that this could not have happened were it not for the demoralizing effects of the First World War and the Great Depression that followed. The role of the intellectuals in these complex processes of creation, distortion and political application of theoretical ideas, I have studied in my latest publication entitled The Triumph and Tragedy of the Intellectuals.

    ET: We are all familiar with the destructive results of revolutionary communism, particularly as it matured under full totalitarianism under Stalin and Mao. However, there were other political thinkers which advocated a much more subversive approach for the implementation of communism in the West, such as Gramsci for instance.

    Shocked that during World War I workers ended up fighting other workers instead of the “maleficent” bourgeois, these thinkers reasoned that this was because Europeans were too conditioned by their own nationalism, families and religion – all of which broadly formed the basis of their civilization. So to achieve communism these institutions had to be eradicated from society, not necessarily by force like in Russia or China, but by progressive infiltration and ideological replacement of the media, education, politics, unions and even the religious institutions themselves.

    However, European political elites post-Second World War also supported the replacement of these institutions in society by the state, or more specifically, the superstate which is now known as the European Union. So there was a curious confluence of interests in this process, all under the guise of eliminating the “evils” that supposedly led to the disasters of twentieth century Europe and creating a more egalitarian society. What are your thoughts here?

    HR: Marxism is a very broad church which can accommodate a huge variety of thinkers, social movements and political parties. Some of these were close to the political ideology of Russian Bolshevism, whereas others were far removed from it and closer to the enlightenment ideas of Marx himself, at least in his early humanistic works. Where a thinker like Gramsci stands in this Marxist line-up is difficult to determine, because he wrote his works in the relative “freedom” of Mussolini’s jail, where he was not subject to the immediate Comintern pressure; but at the same time he had to write in code and could not express himself openly on all issues. Had he escaped to Moscow, as his colleague, the later Italian leader Togliatti did, he would have been compelled to become a Stalinist and could not have developed his ideas. Much later, Gramsci’s ideas became the basis of the Italian Communist Party, and thereby of Euro-Communism.

    As Euro-Communism demonstrates, there is nothing in Marxism as such that precludes it from being tolerant and accepting towards religion, family and other such personal traditional values, even though in fact, most Marxists were atheists. However, some Christians were Marxists, including those within the Catholic Church itself who preached liberation ideology or took part in worker-priest movements. The relation between Marxism and Christianity is an extremely complex historical issue that went through many phases from outright hostility to mutual accommodation.

    The role of the state in relation to traditional values, social institutions and culture in general is an overwhelming topic that can only be treated in a book-length work. By the state, we mean, of course, the nation-state, the prevalent European form. Prior to the First World War, the nation-state had by and large a positive social and cultural effect. It enabled new nations to flourish, particularly Germany and Italy, and led to national revivals throughout Europe, especially in the East. But at the same time, the nation state was a militaristic institution that led to the disasters of the First World War and what followed with the totalitarian states, the very worst manifestation of the nation-state.

    Since the Second World War, the state in Western Europe has become increasingly a welfare state. It has had some remarkable successes but also incurred some failures. Its greatest achievement has been to bring about a considerable degree of economic social justice, especially in class-ridden societies like Britain. The kind of grinding poverty prevalent before the First World War is now no longer in evidence.

    On the other hand, state education seems to have been largely a failure and has led to considerable miseducation in many respects: in the case of schools for the poor being barely able to instill the rudiments of the three Rs (“Reading”, “Writing” and “Arithmetic”). In Britain, private schools and the ancient universities are still the bulwarks of the class system. Of course, there are some European countries, generally the smaller ones, where state education has achieved a much better outcome.

    The inception of the European Union has so far neither improved nor worsened this general condition to any great extent. Imposing a single model for all of Europe in some respects, such as in university education, is very likely a backward step. On the other hand, enabling regions with ethnic or cultural minorities to partially escape the iron grip of the nation-state is a positive step. Much more could be said about this of course.

    ET: In addition to developing its own brand of destructive political philosophies, the West unleashed upon the world the Forces of Modernity, as you call them. These are generally perceived as an extension of Western Civilization, but you contend that they are now destroying it. Can you describe these forces and why they are problematic for civilization?

    HR: By the term “Forces of Modernity” I mean the crucial economic, political, cognitive and technical respects, according to which nearly all societies in the world are now organized and managed, namely modern capitalism, the modern state, science and technology.

    These arose unequivocally only in the European West from approximately 1500 onwards. There were other variants of these both in the Greco-Roman world and in other non-Western civilizations, particularly in China, but they do not approach what Europe achieved in these respects. The causes that made Europe alone to embark on this course, which during the nineteenth century was called “Progress”, are many and varied and are generally disputed among the major theorists on these matters, such as Marx, Weber and many subsequent thinkers. We no longer regard it as progress in any ameliorative sense, for we recognize its many drawbacks and consequences that are inimical to civilization.

    During the nineteenth century up to the First World War, the Forces of Modernity were still largely in keeping with the main trends in Western Civilization, especially in America. But in non-Western societies they were having a disastrous effect on all the still surviving civilizations. Their introduction undermined traditional authorities, religions, cultures and values. They gradually prevailed all over the world, either being imposed by colonialism or through the desire to ward off colonialism by emulating the Western powers. America forced Japan to open its doors and accept the Forces of Modernity, and when the Japanese realized they had no choice about it they did so very successfully. It was a much more fraught and conflict-ridden matter in China and the Ottoman Empire.

    In the West itself, the situation began to change drastically following the First World War. The nature of this war and all subsequent ones was the direct outcome of the development of the Forces of Modernity in all European societies during the nineteenth century. The huge expansion of the state power since the French Revolution, the introduction of universal conscription and a state sanctioned education system provided millions of trained and ideologically enthused soldiers ready to sacrifice themselves at the behest of their nation state. The vast expansion of mass production that capitalism brought about enabled such mass armies to be armed, equipped and supplied for many years. Science and technology invented new weapons for mass slaughter and new machines of war, some already developed before the war, but many arising out of war-time research itself. The world has made enormous progress in these respects since and it is possible that the latest discoveries and inventions will bring civilization to an end and perhaps wipe out humanity itself. It almost happened a number of times, and it was only sheer luck that saved us in the nick of time.

    This is where the Forces of Modernity have brought us. But at the same time, humanity cannot do without them, for only the combination of capitalism, the state, science and technology can provide for, order, control and organize the mass of humanity, swollen to huge numbers, now inhabiting the world, without completely despoiling the natural environment and bringing disaster in another way. This is at least our hope and what we must endeavor to achieve.

    ET: And the outcome of these forces is “globalization”? If they prevail, how does a post civilization world looks like?

    HR: What we now call globalization is a condition where the Forces of Modernity are prevailing in all societies all over the world; they are becoming increasingly more integrated precisely through the prevalence of these forces. We are increasingly being faced with a uniform and homogenous world, in which all particularities and identities are gradually being eroded. This bodes ill for social relations, for cultures, for spiritual aspirations, for individuality, indeed for everything that civilizations offered in the past to make human life meaningful. There is still a long way to go before any such negative conditions might eventuate, for there is still much left of the old civilizations, especially Western Civilization and its cultural heritage. There is no inevitability about any outcome and much we can do to forestall the worst.

    Nevertheless, we must now recognize that humanity is now entering a new and dangerous historical condition unlike any of those it ever encountered in the past. It is no longer a matter of one civilization falling, to be replaced by another, such as happened when Europe arose after the collapse of the Roman Empire. Now all civilizations are endangered and none can survive as autonomous, independent entities as in the past. It is in this sense that we are now moving to a historical stage that is beyond civilization.

    This does not mean that we must abandon any further thought of civilization. On the contrary, we must do all we can to save what is left of civilization and prevent it from vanishing completely, as is now happening. This will require a coordinated human effort on the part of all major societies in the world. Whether this will ultimately succeed or fail or what the future holds for a globalized humanity is, of course, for us unpredictable.

    Hence, I have no idea what a post-civilizational world will look like, except to surmise that unless some way is found to counter the worst of the present trends towards soulless uniformity, it will not be a world which I would like our children and grandchildren to inherit.

    ET: But by suppressing European identities, national democracies and centralizing political power, isn’t the European Union an offshoot of those Forces of Modernity? As such, do the British people have a point in saying that getting out in the recent referendum is a necessity to regain their country and even their culture back?

    HR: I do not altogether agree that the European Union is “suppressing European identities, national democracies, and centralizing political power.” I hold that it is a far more limited undertaking made necessary by the collapse of Europe after the Second World War, the Cold War and since then, by the ever increasing economic competition from the new giants of Asia, first Japan, then China and now India emerging as a global power.

    In response to such multiple pressures, and with the encouragement of America, Europe did move towards economic and, to a limited extent, political integration, starting with France and Germany and bringing in more and more countries, eventually after the fall of Communism also those of Eastern Europe. But how far it will proceed is not yet decided. Everything in Europe’s past speaks against a “United States of Europe”. But that need not forestall a very open European common market with considerable labor mobility. There are centripetal forces for unity and centrifugal forces for dispersion: how these opposed tendencies will work themselves out in the future is also impossible to predict.

    Thus far, I believe, the benefits have been considerable and the adverse consequences as yet not disastrous. This could reverse itself if the Mediterranean countries in the Eurozone prove unable to escape the poverty trap of a strong currency that prevents them devaluing and trading their way out of trouble. Their present levels of unemployment, especially among the young, are unsustainable. On the other hand, incorporating and integrating the former communist countries of Eastern Europe has been an enormous achievement, but one that has also had some unintended bad consequences for other countries in Europe.

    The free movement of labor that brought millions of Eastern Europeans, especially Poles, into Britain was undoubtedly one of the main causes for the working-class revolt and vote for Brexit. The open-borders policy that brought a million refugees from the civil wars in Syria and Afghanistan, as well as economic migrants from all parts of Africa and Asia in an uncoordinated and uncontrolled flow was obviously mismanaged. This gave many Europeans, including those who were less affected, a fright. It was such a concatenation of incidental factors that had unexpectedly arisen in the last few years that brought Brexit about, rather than any thought-through dissatisfaction with the European Union. Cameron should never have allowed the matter to be decided by one referendum. It was a political misjudgment on his part.

    I predict – always a foolhardy matter – that the effects of Brexit will be far smaller than those who advocate it wish. Theresa May and Angela Merkel, two very astute politicians, will reach a deal whereby Britain will remain close to Europe and any disruptions minimized on both sides. This could easily go awry if there is a huge exodus of multinational firms from Britain sinking the British economy; if Scotland and Northern Ireland vote for independence; or if the Conservative Party and the Labor Party break up and some other more Right wing, or, less likely, more Left wing political party comes to power. All these are possible, but, I believe, unlikely from our present point of view.

    ET: As mentioned above, the state has gradually replaced the role of traditional Western institutions, a tendency which has accelerated in recent decades. As a result, there is now a complete dependency on the state to care and provide for large segments of the population, which in turn requires enormous, ever growing resources to sustain.

    A byproduct of all this is a huge incentive for the misallocation of resources and even corruption, since politicians now command huge portions of the economy and society. In a democracy votes can be bought by promising all sorts of free goodies to the electorate, who in turn will never vote for anyone that will change the system they depend on, even if it is demonstrably on an unsustainable trajectory.

    Has the growth of the state along these lines further corroded European values and morals? As a result, can any European government be truly reformed at this point via the ballot box?

    HR: It is true that dependence on the state is increasing in European countries and that states are consuming a considerable proportion of their society’s resources. But the reasons for this vary and are not the same everywhere. The two most contrasting countries are Sweden and Greece.

    Sweden is the great success story of the Welfare State and its effects on society. A century ago, it was a poor country, but in the course of the twentieth century it has gone from strength to strength, economically, socially and politically. High taxation rates have not affected its productive capacity; its firms flourish as never before. Its political system is a byword for democracy and popular consultation. Corruption is minimal.

    Greece is just the opposite in all these respects. Apart from exploiting its sunshine, beaches, and building hotels, it has failed to develop economically. Tax evasion is rife. The state has been completely mismanaged, as political parties vied with each other by bribing the electorate with borrowed funds. Corruption is rife. Now the country is bankrupt and will most probably never fully recover.

    Most European countries are somewhere between these two extremes; generally the further north they lie the closer they are to the Swedish model; the further south, closer to the Greek one. For those in the south, how to achieve reforms so as to make the economy more productive, increase work participation and bring expenditure to affordable limits is the big problem. Resistance to reforms, as evidenced most recently in the strikes and riots in France, is fierce from those that wish to hold on to what they have and fear losing it.

    These are the fundamental concerns that will determine whether the European Union survives or goes under. They are the kinds of issues that are prominent in every major capitalist society. America has to face analogous problems due to departure of industries, outsourcing and the influx of illegal migrant labor.

    The backlash from the working class and sections of the middle class is what partly accounts for the popularity of Trump. Trumpery is the direct outcome of the degeneration of American Civilization and the decline of its political culture which is now all pervasive. Another recession would bring the overheated political situation to the boil with very dangerous consequences.

    ET: The most advanced – or civilized – countries in the world have the lowest birthrates. In recent years Germany (along with other beacons of civilization like Japan and Singapore) has had birthrates even lower than China with its draconian one-child policy. Is civilization bad for babies, or is something else at play here?

    HR: The truth of the matter is that high standards of living and female emancipation are responsible for low birth-rates. The more educated women become and the more economically independent, the fewer babies they tend to have. Hence, countries with high birth-rates, such as India, those of the Muslim world and Africa south of the Sahara urgently need to educate and emancipate their women, for otherwise the pressures of population growth will be too much for them to cope with in the long term.

    It is only in highly developed countries, such as Europe, Japan, America, and now also China that low birth-rate is a problem. It is a measure of their productivity and success in managing the Forces of Modernity. It has nothing to do with civilization as such.

    Various solutions will have to be tried in addressing this problem. Immigration from poorer, overpopulated areas was, until recently, the favored option, as this provided cheap labor power. But that is increasingly becoming less of an option, as recent events have demonstrated. Japan has refused to accept mass immigration all along and is taking the technological route to maintaining productivity. Raising the retirement age is another partial solution.

    Lower birthrates might be bad for these countries in the present, but it is good for the world as a whole. Ultimately, the human population cannot just increase without limit; it must sooner or later reach its maximum possible level, and gradually begin to decline.

    ET: As you point out, several European governments have opened their borders and welfare systems to mass immigration, particularly from the Third World. The hope is that they will help pay those burgeoning state bills over time. After a few decades these inflows now account for a sizeable percentage of their populations, and particularly so in the larger cities.

    Some immigrant communities have brought very different cultures with them, and as their numbers grew this created many social tensions within European societies. Responses to this have differed by country, but a general tendency towards “multiculturalism” is now observable throughout much of the Old Continent. Sweden even made it part of its constitution.

    But by definition multiculturalism means the dilution of a nation’s own culture. In fact, liberal Europeans can’t seem to get rid of it fast enough these days. Irrespective of any benefits associated with immigration, is this seemingly unstoppable migration wave and the resulting transformation of Europe’s cultures a symptom or cause of the present demise of Western Civilization?

    HR: To answer the last part of this complex question first, the mass immigration of people, generally from the Muslim world, is neither a symptom nor a cause of the present plight of European civilization. It proceeds in the first place from factors internal to the Muslim world itself; from the failure of the Muslim world to modernize, that is, to introduce and institute the Forces of Modernity in a way that is acceptable to and consonant with their culture. Neither capitalism, nor the rational-legal state, nor science, nor technology functions at all well in Muslim countries, with very few partial exceptions. The inability of these countries to modernize, indeed, the opposition to modernization, has produced all the manifestations of lack of development, instability, corruption and civil war. This, coupled with a high birth rate, generates tens of millions, possibly as many as a hundred million, mainly young people who are eager to migrate to the developed world, and Europe is their nearest and easiest destination.

    Until now, Europe has been willing to accept them for many reasons. The primary reason has been economic; a young workforce of immigrants was desirable when Europe was growing at a rapid rate. The other reasons had more to do with Europe’s post-Second World War adhesion to enlightened values of liberalism, anti-racism, providing refuge for victims of intolerance and ultimately a belief in multiculturalism, namely, in all the respects in which Europe had failed prior to the war.

    The absorption of those who had already arrived over the past half century or so has not proved easy, especially in a climate of economic decline when jobs have become scarce. Apart from these factors, there has been a tendency among many of these new arrivals to settle in ghettoes, where they maintain their own cultural patterns, some of which are at odds with the prevailing host cultures, especially in such matters as the treatment of women. This has led to mutual misunderstanding and resentment. Given satisfactory economic conditions, the readiness of accommodation and compromise on both sides, such problems might in time be overcome. However of late the situation has become critical due to the rise of militant Islam and the resultant civil wars in most Muslim countries. This has generated hordes of refugees and even larger numbers of economic migrants who look to life in Europe as the only chance they will ever have, because they completely despair of their own societies. If Europe continues to practice uncontrolled entry, it will be overrun in no time, with all the adverse consequences of social unrest and illiberal regimes arising.

    The only solution to this staggering global problem is two-fold. On the one hand, Europe will have to bite the bullet and adjust its liberal principles, so as to reduce immigration to numbers it can absorb, as my own country, Australia, has done. On the other hand, Europe will have to tackle the problem at its source – in the Muslim world itself. Pacification, development, a brake on corruption and general enlightenment are the fundamental measures Europe will have to promote and be willing to spend the resources necessary. In the long term, this will prove cheaper than letting the current situation fester.

    ET: America has always been regarded as the great hope for Western Civilization – indeed, even its prime driving force post Second War War. But you argue that “Americanism” is destroying American civilization. What do you mean by this?

    HR: America escaped the civilization-destroying onslaught of totalitarianism that ravaged Europe, Russia, China and other parts of the world. In fact, America profited from the self-inflicted destruction of Europe to emerge as the leading world power in all respects. However, America has not escaped the civilization-reducing propensity of the Forces of Modernity, which it had itself developed and brought to a pitch of perfection.

    Thus, American capitalism has been a tremendous success in terms of production, the generation of wealth and the rise of the standard of living of its own people, as well as all those, such as Europeans, where the American-promoted global market operated. There is no known economic system that leads to greater and more rapid GDP growth than American capitalism. China has had to learn this painful lesson after Mao.

    However, there has been a high cost to pay in cultural and social terms for this tremendous economic success. American capitalism is the goose that lays the golden egg, but in the process it generates plenty of crap that somehow has to be cleaned up. This has been so in America itself, as well as in the rest of the world where American capitalism has operated, eventually almost everywhere after the Second World War.

    Most of the social and cultural problems that America has had to face, especially after the Second World War, can be traced directly or indirectly to its economic success. For example, the social integrity and cultural cohesion of its cities was destroyed by the huge influx of rural migrants when its industries were booming, especially during and after the Second World War. This, in turn, led after the war to the exodus of the middle class from the cities to the burgeoning suburbs, which completely hollowed out city centers. When industries declined, this produced inner-city impoverishment and, even worse, the creation of racial ghettoes. The social problems that these ups and downs of capitalism caused are now all but insuperable.

    Culturally, much damage was done by the huge advertising industry that was a necessary adjunct to mass production. It promoted a hedonistic life-style of envy, exhibitionism, status flaunting and other kinds of behaviors, which were formerly considered vices, or at least bad manners. Thus, the moral fiber of American people was weakened and in extreme cases, such as in respect of the Protestant work ethic, it was corrupted.

    The Culture Industry dispensing mass entertainment and the media in the hands of big moguls, whose only interest was profit and nothing else, also played a role in the stupefaction of the American public. How this was achieved through free-to-air television is something that a number of major studies have demonstrated. Little wonder that the TV set was referred to in common parlance as the idiot box. One could continue this catalogue of adverse consequences of capitalism almost indefinitely.

    This is how “Americanism”, of which capitalism is a most prominent part, is destroying American civilization. One could similarly study other aspects of “Americanism”.

    ET: Like their European counterparts, Americans are also becoming increasingly dependent on the state. US government spending is projected to reach stratospheric levels in the not too distant future driven by primarily by healthcare and social expenditures. Federal debt has doubled in each of the last two administrations, and is now over 100% of GDP. Is this also a symptom of civilizational decay?

    HR: The rise of the federal debt to over 100% of GDP is due to many causes, most of which are a combination of economics and politics, which has little to do with civilizational decay. However, even if these problems were overcome and expenditure reduced to more tolerable levels this may not necessarily matter to civilization, which is largely a cultural issue.

    The main factor driving the federal debt is the diminution of the tax base due to the rapid erosion of American industry, which in the past generated well-paid full-time employment. Now the poor, even when they have work, pay little or no tax. The very rich have also found ways, legal, semi-legal and illegal, of avoiding tax. Hence, the tax burden is being born increasingly by a shrinking middle class. Wholesale tax reform is mandatory, but that cannot be carried through for political reasons. Vested interests of all kinds have a stranglehold on Congress and the major parties are usually in deadlock on this matter.

    It is also the case that social expenditure is growing, because casual jobs and low minimum wages can no longer afford a living for poor people without aid from the state. Healthcare expenditure is also growing, because people live longer and because modern medicine is becoming increasingly more costly.

    I do not believe that all these major difficulties are insoluble, given decisive political leadership. This is, however, lacking at present for reasons that I cannot go into in this context. Hence, though the burden need not be left to future generations to bear, given things are as they are at present, it most probably will be.

    ET: What role do declining education standards play in all this? The US strikingly lags the developed world in academic achievement below the graduate level. And it’s their young who will end up footing the bill for all that government largesse.

    HR: The declining education standards in America are, indeed, both a symptom and a cause of the decline of American Civilization. Before the Second World War, American schools and universities were among the best in the world. They continued to function extremely well for a period after the Second World War. Then the schools began to fail and some decades later, so, too, did the universities.

    The rot in the schools began with the so-called “life adjustment movement” based very loosely on the educational philosophy of Dewey. From then on, for a majority of American youth, schooling became at best a social and not a learning experience. As the social critic, Richard Hofstadter in his book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, published in 1963, pointed out: what this approach aims to do (and here I quote from memory) is not for students “to become a disciplined part of the world of production and competition, ambition and vocation, creativity and analytic thought, but to teach them the ways of the world of consumption and hobbies, of enjoyment and social compliance – to adapt to the passive and hedonist style summed up by the significant term adjustment”. At the same time, what was taking place in the blackboard jungles of the inner city schools was much worse than that. All this was aggravated by the poor salaries of teachers relative to other professions and the lack of respect for the work they were doing. This made teaching a last resort as a career choice, into which mainly women were pushed.

    In the universities, things did not begin to go bad until the late 1970s. Having poorly prepared students to work with, much of university courses had to be devoted to remedial teaching. The student insurrections of the previous period made university teaching something of a hazardous profession, and teachers naturally preferred to placate students rather than challenge them intellectually. High grades became the norm. The effect of this was felt much more severely in the humanities and social sciences than the natural sciences and the professional faculties. Increasingly fewer students chose to study humanities and social science subjects. Many of these were undermined by the “radical” theoretical fashions and the rise of various kinds of “critical” studies that catered to narrow self-selected groups, made up of those whose mind was closed and no longer open to real critical debate.

    All these deleterious intellectual developments are apart from the sheer economic fact that universities charge increasingly high fees, especially the elite schools, which only the very rich can afford. But the bulk of that extra income is being spent not on teaching and research, but on administrative costs, as students are being provided with all kinds of life-style services, and as the general bureaucratization of the university grows in leaps and bounds. Officials now outnumber professors.

    Nevertheless, the good American universities are still the best in the world. They are attracting the wealthiest, though not necessarily the best students from all over the world. But for how long this situation will continue remains to be seen.

    ET: Technology appears to play a role here as well. For instance social media, instant messaging and all the rest create an environment where we feel we are much less effective and productive. We can only imagine how young students struggle to concentrate on learning anything these days.

    This reminds of how the use of lead in plumbing and all types daily artifacts poisoned many Roman leaders, to the point of where perhaps they completely made the wrong decisions on where their society should be heading. Could technology be the twenty first century equivalent? This might explain some of the seemingly irrational decisions of Western societies of late…

    HR: The parallel you draw between lead plumbing in the Roman world and modern technology is a good one, except that lead poisoning was probably not as prevalent as some of the poisonous effects of some modern technologies. One of the most beneficial technologies in our societies has, indeed been plumbing, largely introduced in the nineteenth century. It is likely that plumbers and sanitation workers have done more for human health and well-being than doctors. This is evident in Third World countries, where the building of drains and toilets should be given higher priority than the building of hospitals.

    In short, some technologies, often very simple ones, have been extraordinarily beneficial. But this is not true of all technologies. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to distinguish between good and bad technologies before they have been introduced. Every technology that is taken up on a large scale serves as a social experiment; it transforms the whole of society in ways that are unpredictable in advance, for it always has unintended consequences either good or bad that cannot be foreseen.

    We have learnt this lesson in nearly every case and even more so with advanced technologies. The introduction of the private motorcar on a mass scale gave people unparalleled freedom of mobility, but it also had all kinds of far from desirable consequences. It polluted the air. It destroyed public transportation. It enabled people to desert the cities, which became hollowed out shells, and so on for countless other effects, among which, moral puritans will argue, was the loss of sexual restraint among the young. How one balances the good and bad consequences is an extremely difficult issue of judgment. But it is now too late to do much about it, as the car is here to stay.

    It is similar, though perhaps even more complex, with the new information technologies. This, too, is a massive social experiment, the results of which might not be known for a few generations. The benefits of computers, the Internet, social media, etc. are obvious and are being touted by all those with a vested interest in the matter: by the computer and software manufacturers, by their advertisers, the media and by state agencies, including by many education authorities who should not have been as eager to embrace these new technologies. This has been going on for nearly a generation. And already some adverse unintended consequences are becoming apparent, especially among children.

    Perhaps the most dangerous of these are changes in brain function starting to appear among children who are heavy computer users. These children and youth are still too young to make any “of the irrational decisions of Western society”, but one day they will be in a position to do so. What future generations of children brought up on computers will do as adults cannot be now predicted. But we should be careful how we handle the social changes which will ensue.

    It is evident even now that computers have not fulfilled their promise in education, for there are strong indications that they have been detrimental to some kinds of learning. If this can be conclusively demonstrated, then the removal of computers from schools, or their restriction to special technical centers might be one drastic move to be contemplated. This is obviously a huge issue, which will continue to be debated for the remainder of this century as more of the long-term effects become apparent.

    ET: Looking at the bigger picture now, so what if Western Civilization is going the way of the dodo? We have had peace and progress over the last five decades. The nefarious Soviet Union was vanquished in the interim. And globalization and technology have brought new opportunities and interactions. Investors seem to believe in that, given that the US stock market is at record highs while global bond yields near record lows. It seems all is good…

    HR: It is true, human life continues regardless of the state of human civilization. It might even be said that life is becoming better and better for greater numbers than ever before. Standards of living are rising and will continue to improve for people in their billions all over the world. The Chinese have lifted themselves out of poverty. Now it is the turn of the Indians, after that there will be others as well. The world is at peace as never before. I am not unduly troubled by the few incidents of terrorism that are so exaggerated by the media, or even by the few sputtering civil wars. So who needs civilization? Isn’t life better off without it?

    Unfortunately, things are not as rosy when we look at the global situation as a whole. Many of the major problems of humanity are no nearer to being solved. The issue of nuclear annihilation still hangs in the balance; we could still destroy ourselves through some political miscalculation or some technical error. A clash of interests between the major powers could still bring on a global war. Our present peace is still precarious.

    Global warming and all the other environmental problems are far from being solved. It is possible they will not be overcome, unless a majority of human beings change their way of life and cease to strive for ever greater levels of affluence and the possession of material goods. A new ethical orientation might be called for, drawing on the values of past civilizations, as adapted to contemporary conditions.

    In brief, human life based on material considerations alone might not be sustainable in the long run. Man does not live by bread alone – not even by bread and circuses in their latest electronic form. Masses of people crammed into huge metropolises that cities are now becoming all over the world is hardly a pleasant prospect to contemplate for the future of humanity. Without civilization we are faced with the kind of brave new world scenario, outlined long ago by Huxley.

    This is the reason we must strive to maintain as much of our various civilizations and their cultures as are still viable. Cultural conservation is as crucial as conservation of Nature. Indeed it is hard to envisage how the one can work without the other, as I have explained in my books.

    ET: If Western Civilization is so important, what are investors missing given how far up asset prices have gone in recent years? Are they just too myopic?

    HR: As far as investors go, it is not Western Civilization as a whole that is important, what is crucial for them is that the minimal norms of international affairs governing economic activity should obtain, above all, the rule of law and the security of contracts, because without that none of their investments are safe. As for human rights, that is important in so far as they do not wish to profit from slave labor or any other grossly exploitative conditions. If they are more ethically minded than that, as they should be, they should also insist that individual rights are implemented before they undertake business dealings in any country. Whether they should also insist on other freedoms is a moot point, unless they wish to be ethical investors and are prepared to forego some profit opportunities.

    ET: What about the unique contributions of Western Civilization to human rights, rule of law, democracy, healthcare and general progress. Can these not be sustained and indeed enhanced with globalization?

    HR: Western Civilization is the one that brought about the present conditions of humanity. It is, therefore the one most responsible for its problems and drawbacks, and the one charged with the task of remedying them. Indeed, it is the only one at present that has the capacity for doing so. The Forces of Modernity – capitalism, the state, science and technology – arose out of Western civilization, and the difficulties for humanity that they have brought about can be best understood and addressed within the context of that civilization.

    An example of this fact is that it is the West that is forging the universal standards, which the whole of humanity can accept, and on the basis of which all civilizations can coexist, regardless of how they differ in other respects. The United Nations and its various agencies, the World Bank and many other such organizations, indeed the whole system of cooperating, as well as peacefully competing states, was the creation of Western Civilization, based primarily on its principles and values.

    These organizations mandate a minimum of norms of international behavior that all states, regardless of their origins, must now accept, if relations between them and even meaningful communication are to be maintained. What this minimum of necessary norms is to be is the subject of interminable disputes. Americans tend to see it in the maximalist terms of their own traditions, as well as their national interests, and press for full democratization, as well as free market liberalism; other nations with other traditions and interests have naturally resisted this. Some basic human rights and the rule of law, no matter how interpreted, seem to be such basic minimal provisions for belonging to the international order. Democracy, healthcare and general progress is perhaps asking too much of many societies, which are unwilling or incapable of entertaining such things. Whether further globalization will alter this is dubious. We see this in the case of China, which has globalized at a rapid rate, but is no nearer to democracy or liberalism in most respects.

    ET: In Part II of our discussion we will look at what is happening in the Chinese, Islamic, Indian and Russian spheres, and how they fit within the aforementioned trends. Anything else you would like to add before we conclude this part of our discussion?

    HR: I would like to stress that my general theoretical analysis of the state of civilization and humanity be distinguished and separated from my detailed diagnosis of specific conditions and problems or my proposals for dealing with them. I stick to my theories, which I believe are correct. I am far less sure of my practical analyses. Someone agreeing with my general point of view might easily offer quite different accounts of things or solutions to problems than the ones that I suggest. I am quite prepared for such disagreements, for theory and practice do not necessarily entail each other.

    Indeed, I welcome debate on the theoretical, practical and evaluative aspects of everything I have said here, or written in my books. I am sure I have made many errors and contravened many other worthy thinkers, present or past and expect that these sins will, in time, be exposed. But this can only happen if my views are subjected to the acid test of stringent criticism. Hence, I hope that it will be said of me, as was once said of another notorious writer: “his sins were scarlet, but his books were read.”

    ET: Thank you very much.

     

  • France Escalates – Sends Aircraft Carrier To Fight ISIS

    Seemingly not satisfied with the domestic blowback from their interventionist-driven Washingtonian foreign policy, Francois Hollande – lagging badly in the polls – has decided to double-down following the recent terror attack in Nice. As Sputnik News reports, France will send artillery to Iraq and its Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier to assist the US-led coalition’s efforts in Syria and Iraq in the coming months.

    The French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle will be sent to the region in September, the President added.

    "The Charles de Gaulle airacrft carrier will arrive in the region by the end of September. It and our Rafale aircraft will allow to intensify our strikes against Islamic State positions in Syria and Iraq," Hollande said in a televised statement.

    France will also send artillery to Iraq in August to help the Iraqi army fight Daesh terrorists, the President added.

    "The Defense Council and I made a decision this morning to provide Iraqi forces with artillery as a part of anti-Daesh efforts. The artillery will be delivered in August," Hollande said.

    However, France "will not deploy ground troops," Hollande said.

    "We support the operations in Syria and Iraq, but will not send our troops. We have advice to give, training to provide, but we will not deploy men on the ground," Hollande stressed.

    The US-led coalition of more than 60 nations, including France, has been carrying out airstrikes in Syria and Iraq since the summer of 2014, with the US alone having recently reached the questionable milestone of dropping 50,000 bombs on ISIS. 

    Do you feel more of less safe?

  • A Collision-Course With Crisis: Making The Wrong Choices For The Wrong Reasons

    Submitted by Adam Taggart via PeakProsperity.com,

    Life is full of examples where folks make bad choices for noble reasons. Not every decision is a winner: sometimes you make the right call, sometimes you don't.

    • In 1962, Decca Records passed on signing a young new band because it thought that guitar-based groups were falling out of favor. That band was The Beatles.
    • Napolean Bonaparte calculated he could conquer Russia by assembling one of the largest invading forces the world has ever seen. He marched towards Moscow in the summer of 1812 with over 650,000 troops. Less than six months later, he retreated in failure, his forces decimated down to a mere 27,000 effective soldiers.
    • 1985 217 separate investors turned down an entrepreneur trying to raise the relatively modest sum of $1.6 million to fund his vision of transforming a daily routine shared by millions around the world. That company? Starbucks.  

    In these cases, those making the decision made what they felt was the best choice given the information available to them at the time. That's completely understandable and defensible. Fate is fickle, and no one is 100% right 100% of the time.

    But what's much harder to condone — and this is the focus of this article — is when people embrace the wrong decision even when they have ample evidence and comprehension that doing so runs counter to their welfare.

    Really? you might be skeptically thinking. Do people really ever do this?

    Yes, sadly. Absolutely they do.

    Because decision-making isn't just based on data. It's also influenced by beliefs. And when our beliefs don't align with the data, we humans can be woefully stubborn against changing our behavior, even in spite of mounting evidence that our beliefs are incorrect and possibly even detrimental to us.

    The fascinating field of behavioral economics is dedicated to studying why people are capable of making bad decisions despite have access to good data (if you've got the time, listen to our past interviews with behavioral economist Dan Ariely here. They're riveting.)

    So, yes, we humans are easily capable of being our own worst enemies.

    For a prime example, let's turn to one of the greatest basketball players of all time.

    The Curious Case Of Wilt Chamberlain's Free Throws

    On a long drive I took recently, I listened to a podcast produced by Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point as well as a number of other intellectually enjoyable human interest books.

    Gladwell's podcast tackled this same topic of Why do smart people make dumb decisions?, and it featured Wilt Chamberlain's free throw career to make its point.

    Wilt Chamberlain is widely cited as the best forward to ever play the game of basketball. At 7' 1" and 275 pounds, with a ferocious attitude and athletic grace, he was a dominating force on the court during the 1960-70s. He won seven scoring titles, including the game he is best known for in which he single-handedly scored 100 points — a record that still stands today.

    That record 100-point game is even more interesting than most people realize, Gladwell points out. It's significant not just for the total number of points that Chamberlain scored, but also for the number of free throws that he made during the game: 28. 

    Chamberlain was on fire with his free throws that night. He made 88% of them (28 of 32). That's a very high percentage versus the league average, and amazingly high given Chamberlain's career average of roughly 50%.

    In fact, Chamberlain was widely regarded as a horrible free throw shooter. His overall stats certainly say he was, but this short video clip below does an even better job of hitting home how poorly he typically shot from the line:

    So how did Chamberlain's free throw conversion get so much better?

    To answer that, we need to look at another basketball great…

    Rick Barry & The 'Granny Shot'

    A contemporary of Wilt Chamberlain was Rick Barry, who played much of his career for the Golden State Warriors. Barry was a phenomenal free-throw shooter — at the time he played he was the best in history.

    His career percentage? 90%

    That's over a 15-year pro career. Amazing. (His best year was in 1979 when he completed a freakishly high 94.7% of his shots from the line).

    Why was Barry so successful at free throws? Why was he so much better than Wilt?

    He shot his free throws underhanded.

    Yep, that's right. This 12-time NBA all-star made 'granny shots'.

    Barry approached the free throw as a physics problem, and had a willingness to "do whatever it takes" to improve his accuracy and precision:

    "Physicists have done all kinds of testing and said it's the most efficient way to shoot because there are fewer moving parts. It's so much more natural to shoot this way," he says. "Who walks around with their hands over their head?"

     

    As Barry has often explained, the primary benefits of Granny style are that it increases the likelihood of a straight toss, and it produces a much softer landing on the rim. [Shooting underhand] is also able to generate more backspin, which gives him more breaks on errant throws. 

    Here's a clip of Barry in action:

    He didn't always shoot this way. Barry started as an overhand shooter like everybody else. But when he realized that his completion percentage improved by adopting the underhand toss, he switched over and the rest is NBA history.

    Which brings us back to Chamberlain.

    As a notoriously bad foul-line shooter, Chamberlain was advised to adopt the granny shot. He did, and his free throw percentage soon rose to a career high 61% in 1961-62, the same season as his famous 100-point game. So, the change worked. His stats improved, his team won more games, and his amazing consistency helped him set a single-game scoring record that remains untouchable to this day.

    But then something unexpected happened: Chamberlain stopped shooting underhanded.

    Making The Wrong Choices For The Wrong Reasons

    When Wilt gave up the granny shot, his free throw percentage proceeded to decline, plummeting to a career low of just 38% by the 1967-68 season.

    So, the big question here is: Why? Why would Chamberlain willingly abandon a superior form of shooting, especially when he had already experienced direct personal gain from its benefits?

    The answer goes back to beliefs: he felt "like a sissy" shooting that way.

    Sure, in the early days of the NBA, underhanded foul shots were common. But by the time of Chamberlain's career, pretty much only female basketball players shot that way anymore.

    Given the machismo of professional sports, it's understandable that a star like Wilt cared what the other guys thought of him. But was it important enough to abandon a solution that improved his quality of play so much? After all, isn't the most respected teammate the one who can be counted on to put the most points on the board?

    Gladwell notes that it has been estimated that Chamberlain could have scored over 1,000 additional points in his career had he shot underhand from the foul line throughout.

    In addition to that, he likely would have scored even more points by playing more minutes. Because he was such a poor free thrower, Wilt was often benched in the final minutes of play during close games — as a poor foul shooter is a big liability under those conditions. The opposing team can foul him with confidence that he'll miss his shots and they'll then get possession of the ball.

    Gladwell marvels that somebody so driven to win would deliberately abandon such an easy and advantageous solution as Chamberlain did the granny shot. Even after he had personally experienced its superiority. But he did, thus proving how belief can trump reason.

    Later, in his autobiography Wilt: Larger Than Life, Chamberlain admits that switching back to an overhanded free throw was a clear mistake:

    "I felt silly, like a sissy, shooting underhanded. I know I was wrong. I know some of the best foul shooters in history shot that way. Even now, the best one in the NBA, Rick Barry, shoots underhanded. I just couldn't do it."

    What's amazing is that even though both Rick Barry and Wilt Chamberlain very visibly demonstrated the advantages of the underhanded free throw, half a century later almost nobody — not in the NBA and not in college ball — has adopted it. Think of all the additional points that could have been scored over that time, all the additional minutes played, all the additional team wins. It's not like players haven't had a powerful incentive to consider changing their behavior — these are the very stats their contracts are based on. In great likelihood, many $millions ($billions?) of additional player compensation have been forfeited over the past 50 years simply because the athletes didn't want to look a tiny bit 'girly' at the line.

    Later on in his podcast, Gladwell concludes that Chamberlain — like virtually everbody else in professional basketball — had a high threshold for overcoming conventional opinion. He wasn't comfortable being a maverick when it came to bucking social mores. Rick Barry, on the other hand, clearly had a lower threshold — famously not caring what others thought of him (Barry was widely disliked across the league for his disregard of other's feelings).

    He ends the podcast with this observation:

    I know we've really only been talking about basketball, which is just a game in the end. But the lesson here is much bigger than that. It takes courage to be good, social courage, to be honest with yourself, to do things the right way.

    A Lack Of Courage To Be Good & Honest

    Which brings us back to the point of this article. Chamberlain's willful blindness to the ramifications of his clearly inferior choice is not unique. In fact, when we look at many of the decisions being made by world leaders in recent years, we see a depressing abundance of intentional bad choices.

    Most emblematic of this, in my opinion, are the ZIRP/NIRP interest rate policies the world's central banks are implementing. As discussed many times here at PeakProsperity.com, the endgame of these policies is easy to predict. History is replete with examples of similar attempts of governments attempting to print their way to prosperity. It's simply not possible. As Chris says, if it were, the Romans would have figured it out and today we'd all be speaking Latin.

    The head central bankers are not morons (although a number of them may indeed be ivory tower academics too out-of-touch with the real world). Many of them realize that they have painted themselves into a corner by easing too much for too long, by flooding the world with too much cheap debt-based money. Many understand, perhaps today more than ever, Ludwig von Mises' rule that: 

    "There is no means of avoiding a final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as a result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved."

    But, like Chamberlain, they do not have the courage to re-evaluate their beliefs and chart an alternative course.

    To 'voluntarily abandon further credit expansion' means letting natural market forces bring down stock, bond and real estate prices from their current bubble highs — thereby vaporizing a lot of paper wealth. It means widespread layoffs as inefficient companies that have been kept alive by nearly free access to nearly unlimited credit have to start actually generating profits if they can. It means living below our means today, so that we can sustainably live within them tomorrow.

    Instead, they simply double down on the policies that got us into this mess in the first place, claiming that their efforts to date just haven't been big enough yet to succeed. And they do this with the full support of our politicians, who want to avoid any unpopular austerity measures because they care much more about getting re-elected than the hard work of actually addressing our nation's structural problems. So interest rates go even lower, asset bubbles grow even higher, the wealth gap extends even wider, and the risks of a "total catastrophe of the currency system" become even more extreme.

    The coming economic/financial/monetary reckoning can't be avoided at this point; only managed. But we can't position ourselves to manage it gracefully if we don't have to courage to even recognize its existence. And our current leaders do not have that courage.

    Which is why we need to ready ourselves, as individuals. Charles Hugh Smith recently penned an excellent report Investing For Crisis which is an essential read for any investor who shares the concern that we will continue to see more wrong choices being made for the wrong reasons — until the entire systems fails. If you haven't read it yet, you really should.

    Click here to read Charles' Investing For Crisis report (free executive summary, enrollment required for full access)

  • "If You Can't Touch It, You Don't Own It"

    Submitted by Jeff Thomas, Writer for Doug Casey’s International Man and Strategic Wealth Preservation, via SprottMoney.com,

    The pending Brexit has, not surprisingly, caused a shakeup in the investment world, particularly in the UK. Of particular note is that, recently, asset management firms in Britain began refusing their clients the right to cash out of their mutual funds. Of the £35 billion invested in such funds, just under £20 billion has been affected.

    For those readers who live in the UK, or are invested in UK mutual funds, this is reason to tremble at the knees.

    So, why have these investors been refused the right to exit the funds? Well, it’s pretty simple. The trouble is that quite a few of them made the request at about the same time. Of course the management firms don’t keep enough money on hand to pay them all off, so, rather than spend all their money paying off as many clients as possible, then going out of business due to a lack of liquidity, they simply announce a freeze on redemptions.

    Those who are outraged may read the fine print of their contracts and find that the fund managers have every right to halt redemptions, should “extraordinary circumstances” occur. Who defines “extraordinary circumstances?” The fund managers.

    Across the pond in the US, investors are reassured by the existence of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which has the power to refuse this power to investment firms…or not, should they feel that a possible run on redemptions might be destructive to the economy.

    Countries differ as to the level of freedom they will allow mutual fund and hedge fund management firms to have on their own, but all of them are likely to err on the side of the protection of the firms rather than the rights of the investor, as the firms will undoubtedly make a good case that a run on funds is unhealthy to the economy.

    The Brexit news has created a downward spike in investor confidence in the UK – one that it will recover from, but, nevertheless, one that has caused investors to have their investment locked up. They can’t get out, no matter how badly they may need the money for other purposes. This fact bears pondering.

    Presently, the UK, EU, US, et al, have created a level of debt that exceeds anything the world has ever seen. Historically, extreme debt always ends in an economic collapse. The odiferous effluvium hasn’t yet hit the fan, but we’re not far off from that eventuality. Therefore, wherever you live and invest, a spike such as the one presently occurring in the UK could result in you being refused redemption. Should there then be a concurrent drop in the market that serves to gut the fund’s investments, you can expect to sit by and watch as the fund heads south, but be unable to exit the fund.

    As stated above, excessive debt results in an economic collapse, which results in a market crash. It’s a time-tested scenario and the last really big one began in 1929, but the present level of debt is far higher than in 1929, so we can anticipate a far bigger crash this time around.

    But the wise investor will, of course diversify, assuring him that, if one investment fails, another will save him. Let’s look at some of the most prominent ones and consider how they might fare, at a time when the economy is teetering in the edge.

    Stocks and Bonds

    Presently, the stock market is in an unprecedented bubble. The market has been artificially propped up by banks and governments and grows shakier by the day. Bonds are in a worse state – the greatest bubble they have ever been in. This bubble is just awaiting a pin. We can’t know when it will arrive, but we can be confident that it’s coming. Rosy today, crisis tomorrow.

     

    Cash on Deposit

    Cyprus taught us in 2013 that a country can allow its banks to simply confiscate (steal) depositors’ funds, should they decide that there is an “emergency situation” – i.e., the bank is in trouble. Unfortunately, the US (in 2010), Canada (in 2013) and the EU (in 2014) have all passed laws allowing banks to decide if they’re “in trouble”. If they so decide, they have a free rein in confiscating your deposit.

     

    Safe Deposit Boxes

    Banks in North America and Europe have begun advising their clients that they cannot store money or jewelry in safe deposit boxes. Some governments have passed legislation requiring those who rent safe deposit boxes to register the location of the box, its number and its contents with the government.

     

    Each year, the storage of valuables in a safe deposit box is becoming more dubious.

     

    Pensions

    Pension plans tend to be heavily invested in stocks and bonds, making them increasingly at risk in a downturn. To make matters worse, some governments have begun to attack pensions. Others, such as the US, have announced plans to force pensions to invest in US Government Treasuries – which, in a major economic downturn could go to zero.

     

    These are amongst the most preferred stores of wealth and are all very much at risk. In addition, there are two choices that, if invested correctly, promise greater safety.

     

    Real Estate

    The Mutual funds in the UK that are presently in trouble are heavily invested in real estate. But real estate that you invest in directly does not face the same risk. However, any real estate that’s located in a country that’s presently preparing for an economic crisis, such as those mentioned above, will be at risk. Real estate in offshore jurisdictions that are not inclined to be at risk is a far better bet. (An additional advantage is that real estate in offshore locations is not even reportable for tax purposes in most countries, because it cannot be expatriated to another country.

     

    Precious Metals

    Precious metals are a highly liquid form of investment. They can be bought and sold quickly and can be shipped anywhere in the world, or traded for metals in another location. Of course, storage facilities in at-risk countries may find themselves at the mercy of their governments. However, private storage facilities exist in Hong Kong, Singapore, the Cayman Islands, Switzerland and other locations that do not come under the control of the EU or US. Precious metals ownership provides greater protection against rapacious governments, but storage must be outside such countries.

    The lesson to take away here is that, if you can’t touch it, you don’t own it. Banks and fund management firms can freeze your wealth, so that you can’t access it. Governments and banks can confiscate your wealth. If you don’t have the power to put your hands on your wealth on demand, you don’t own it.

    This evening, take account of all your deposits and investments and determine what percentage of them you do truly own. If you decide that that percentage is too low for you to accept, you may wish to implement some changes… before others do it for you.

  • "As Long As All The Offensive Shit Is Verbatim, I'm Fine With It"

    Deep inside the treasure trove of smears, collusion, and questionable fund-raising exposed by Wikileaks dump of DNC leaked emails was this little gem of 'innocent propaganda' by the Clinton campaign against the Trump campaign.

    The email – found here- shows DNC staffers’ creating a fake craigslist job posting made for women who wish to apply to jobs at one of Trump’s organizations.

    The fake position, titled a Honey Bunny, requires the prospective applicant to, among other tasks, refrain from gaining weight, be open to public humiliation and be alright with groping or kissing by her boss…

    Multiple Positions (NYC area)

     

    Seeking staff members for multiple positions in a large, New York-based corporation known for its real estate investments, fake universities, steaks, and wine. The boss has very strict standards for female employees, ranging from the women who take lunch orders (must be hot) to the women who oversee multi-million dollar construction projects (must maintain hotness demonstrated at time of hiring). 

     

    Title: Honey Bunch (that’s what the boss will call you)

     

    Job requirements:

     

    * No gaining weight on the job (we’ll take some “before” pictures when you start to use later as evidence)

    * Must be open to public humiliation and open-press workouts if you do gain weight on the job

    * A willingness to evaluate other women’s hotness for the boss’ satisfaction is a plus

    * Should be proficient in lying about age if the boss thinks you’re too old Working mothers not preferred (the boss finds pumping breast milk disgusting, and worries they’re too focused on their children).

     

    About us:

     

    We’re proud to maintain a “fun” and “friendly work environment, where the boss is always available to meet with his employees. Like it or not, he may greet you with a kiss on the lips or grope you under the meeting table.

     

    Interested applicants should send resume, cover letter, and headshot to jobs@trump.com<mailto:jobs@trump.com>

    And when passed up the chain for comms approval, the response was positive…

    "As long as all the offensive shit is verbatim I’m fine with it."

    And just in case readers thought this was from The Onion, here is the original leaked email chain…

     

    We are sure donors to Hillary's "victim card" funds will be more than happy to see such stunts being pulled… or is this just another example of how the body politik works nowadays – propaganda tops policy any day.

  • The Market For Lemons, The Market For Bullshit, And The Great Cascading Credence Crash Of 2016

    Submitted by Daniel Cloud

    The Market for Lemons, the Market for Bullshit, and the Great Cascading Credence Crash of 2016

    “The cost of dishonesty, therefore, is not only the amount by which the purchaser is cheated; the cost must also include the loss incurred from driving legitimate business out of existence.”

           George Akerlof, The Market for Lemons

     

    People have begun to worry that we’re experiencing a crisis of confidence in our traditionally most prestigious institutions – in our political parties, and central banks, and great newspapers, and universities, and even in accredited experts.

    Views that would have been regarded as extreme in the past also seem much more common now. The entire political spectrum, all around the world, seems to be in the middle of collapsing into a collection of smaller, more radical groups. Some of them advocate violence.

    The problem doesn’t seem to be unique to this particular historical moment. There are other times in recent history – the 1930’s, perhaps, or the 1960’s – when the public seemed equally unhappy with existing institutional points of view. Like the present, they were periods of relatively rapid change in organizational and communications technology.

    The underlying problem is, I think, a very strange one. But it’s a risk faced by any society that both undergoes rapid technological change, and contains organized interest groups. (Formal or informal.) Something really bad is happening to all our bullshit. In fact, I’ve begun to worry that there’s actually a sort of crash or cascading failure going on in the bullshit market. If there is, I think it’s driven, as previous bullshit crashes were, by changing technology.

    This may seem like an odd thing to worry about. But it’s actually a very natural worry, if you have any interest at all in recent American philosophy and/or the economics of informational externalities.

    Bullshit Defined

    Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit i has, for a long time, been the single best-selling title in Princeton University’s Press’s philosophy list. The book sells well partly because people think the title is somehow cute, or funny, but Frankfurt himself doesn’t really seem to think that bullshit is a laughing matter at all. (Take a look at his 2007 YouTube video2, if you want to see if he’s serious about the subject.)

    He argues that lying and bullshit are distinct forms of dishonesty. The liar is trying to present something false as true. But the bullshitter doesn’t actually care whether what he’s saying is true or false, relevant or irrelevant. He represents himself as concerned with the truth, but in fact his only concern is presenting a certain appearance or creating some particular impression in his audience. Frankfurt thinks that this is a much more subtle and powerful strategy, and therefore a much more dangerous one.

    The bullshitter is competing with those around him to seem a certain way, or he’s competing with them to avoid seeming a certain way. Or perhaps he wants to make someone else seem some way, or make some proposal seem some way, seem noble or contemptible, dangerous or safe. Or he wants to fit in, or stand out, or be admired, or pitied, or feared, or promoted. The truths he speaks in the course of his effort to achieve these things may be completely irrelevant to the point he’s supposedly trying to make. But unlike the liar, the bullshit artist doesn’t actually have to say anything false to mislead. He might, but he also might not, he might just talk about a lot of irrelevant true stuff. (Machiavelli tells us that a Prince should almost never lie…)

    This is a way of deceiving that’s much safer for the deceiver than outright lying. A lie can be destroyed by a single incongruous truth. It’s much harder for a single fact to pierce the veil of bullshit, because it’s more difficult for a single fact to dispositively establish that some set of considerations is irrelevant, or that their importance is being exaggerated. Humans are instinctively angry at the liar, but the bullshit artist slides right past our evolved defenses. Frankfurt thinks this is a much more powerful and subtle strategy than lying, and therefore a more dangerous one.

    In fact, it seems to me that one of the ways we can tell that someone is basically a bullshit artist is that it never really happens to the person that they argued for something, and then, to their surprise and dismay, found out that they were wrong about the facts and had to permanently change their views. That just isn’t a thing, in their world. The bullshitter’s very rare and grudging public mea culpa is always only tactical. When your argument isn’t actually based on the trueness of certain facts in the first place, no pattern of facts can possibly dislodge you from it in any lasting way. As Frankfurt says, the bullshit artist has a kind of freedom and a kind of safety that the liar can only dream of.

    Is Bullshit Necessary, or Inevitable?

    Presumably the idea of a crash in the bullshit market wouldn’t actually worry Frankfurt himself very much. In his most recent statements on the topic (in his recent Vimeo video iii) he seems convinced that bullshit is unnecessary, that a world without bullshit would be a better one. But he hasn’t always seemed so sure; in the earlier YouTube video, he was still wondering whether bullshit might perhaps be of some use to society.

    (The contrast between the two videos I’ve mentioned is interesting, in itself, as a sign of where we’re all headed, of how things are developing at the moment. The 2007 YouTube video has clunky production values and a crystal-clear message. But the much more recent one on Vimeo… Well, let’s just say that the producers seem to have been worried that in 2016, a man sitting in a chair telling the truth simply isn’t enough.)

    Is bullshit, defined as Frankfurt’s defined it, something that we can ever really expect to be completely free of? Personally I doubt it. For one thing, some of it strikes me as genuinely useful. The policeman directing traffic in his spiffy uniform is doing his very best to present a somewhat false appearance of gleaming perfection, because a ragged naked man presenting the same truths about where it would be convenient for cars to go would be ignored. He may even wear a hat designed to make him look taller and more imposing than he actually is. He isn’t trying to look tall because he’s vain. Yes, the whole thing is an act, but in this case it’s a necessary act. Because of the nature of the social role that’s been delegated to him, because we all want him to send a certain clear, authoritative and unambiguous signal iv, we excuse and approve of these conventional, socially necessary, legitimate forms of bullshit.

    No doubt the line between these things and the more egregious or harmful forms of bullshit is a very complex and deceptive one, with one form often disguised as the other. (Perhaps this particular policeman actually is a little vain. Maybe his hat is custom-made, and is a little taller than a regular policeman’s hat. Or maybe he takes bribes to let some cars through the intersection more quickly.)

    Anyway, empirically, there don’t seem to be any large complex human societies without any bullshit. To completely get rid of it, you’d have to read everyone’s mind at all times, which seems undesirable. So I can’t quite agree with Frankfurt’s more recent opinion that we’d all be better off without any bullshit at all. It seems to me that human society would collapse into a collection of small warring tribes. (Just as traffic at the intersection might grind to a halt without the spiffy policeman.) As far as I can tell, that’s how we lived before we invented bullshit. No chimpanzee is a bullshit artist – or any other kind of artist.

    Like it or not, we have it now, and I find it impossible to imagine a practical plan for completely eliminating it. If we really can’t get rid of it, then I can’t agree that the relevant question is what life would be like without it. That seems utopian. Bullshit exists; it’s doing something in our society. It has effects on us. The real question, I think, is whether there can be better or worse effects. Is some bullshit more damaging than the rest? Are fairly standard forms of timeworn bullshit perhaps a bit like the suite of benign microbes that live in our guts? Is existing, harmless bullshit protecting us from novel, possibly dangerous bullshit? (As the analogies of the 1930’s and the Reformation might suggest…) Can anything really go wrong with the market for bullshit? Are there any public dangers associated with this large-scale, apparently rather consequential social phenomenon, do we need to manage it somehow?

    Bullshit and Informational Externalities

    As for the economics of informational externalities… Frankfurt’s philosophical clarification of the meaning of the ordinary English word “bullshit” strikes me as capable of driving an economic model because he suggests that we’re most likely to come up with bullshit when it’s difficult for us to speak the truth. For example, when we’re expected to have a strong opinion about a matter on which we have no expertise. From an economic point of view, this is a theory about how people cope with the potential costs of information gathering.

    We all constantly encounter subjects we know very little about. Most conversations about politics are like this. Discussions between people who know rather little about the particular problems they’re discussing, problems they personally won’t be expected to directly do anything about. It could hardly be otherwise in a democracy, since everyone’s asked to vote on whole political programs containing prescriptions for dealing with various different societal problems.

    The reward for carefully ascertaining and then impartially telling the unadorned and directly relevant truth in many of these ordinary, inconsequential conversations is small. There might be public benefits. But public knowledge of the truth is a public good. We, personally, will only receive one seven billionth of those benefits, while the entire cost of carefully gathering the information and presenting to people who may not be all that interested in it will fall on us. The temptations to slack off and pursue other social goals which these situations present may be resisted by a few, but those are rare and sometimes unpopular individuals.

    Perhaps we all have a threshold. When we know less than x about some subject, we all struggle against a temptation to employ bullshit in discussing it, to just agree with the people around us to be agreeable, or use the incident as an excuse to point out how stupid the hated out-group is, or try to come up with a funny or enraging fairy-tale about what the truth must be, or to complain plaintively about how nobody really cares, or something like that. Making up bullshit is easier than finding the truth about every abstruse subject, so wherever ease or mere courtesy are the most practically relevant considerations, we can expect almost everyone to face a temptation to repeat or invent bullshit. In a sort of conversational version of Gresham’s law, bullshit should drive out honesty wherever there are no consequences for the individual.

    But the true bullshit artist produces bullshit egregiously, even in contexts where it’s not conventional or acceptable. He represents himself as sincerely concerned with the truth in situations where he really should be, but he’s not. He isn’t just occasionally tempted to make careless and insincere pronouncements on unimportant-seeming subjects he knows nothing about. He’s turned doing that into his thing, into a complex art form. He persistently insists that his bullshit is reality, and that the actual truth is just a bunch of bullshit.

    He may even get angry when this assertion is questioned. Often the anger is sincere; he thinks it’s unfair for you to question his facts, because his argument was never based on facts, the facts were just added to support an existing point of view. They’re basically decorations, so by attacking them you’re not really invalidating his conversation goal, as far as he’s concerned. You’re just getting in the way. Like an idiot, like some fool who thinks the conversational contest is about what the facts are. Not, as he believes it to be, about whose bullshit will prevail in the eyes of the audience. Presumably he has no idea that the questioner is doing anything that’s different from what he himself is doing…

    It seems to me that in some sense this person is a polar opposite or mirror image of Hayek’s “man on the spot” v or Kenneth Arrow’s benevolent specialist vi, In both these cases, the expert creates positive informational externalities for society by knowing all about some obscure thing, and sharing the information in various ways. Either through the price system, for Hayek, or by broadcasting the information, by publishing it in a journal, for Arrow. I also like to tell a story vii  that involves a kind of person, the entrepreneur, who generates positive informational externalities for society by personally taking the risk of performing an experiment that may fail, of starting a firm and possibly going bankrupt.

    But the bullshit artist doesn’t perform any experiments, and he doesn’t know all about some obscure thing. Or if he does, he doesn’t actually just stick to telling the plain unadorned truth about that thing, or about how those experiments came out.  He’s surrendered completely to the natural human urge to have a strong opinion on every subject, even ones he’s not in a very good position to discover the truth about. He hasn’t bothered to take the risks he’d need to take, or go to the trouble he’d need to go to, do the hard work he’d need to do, to engage in the self-criticism and he’d have to engage in, to find out the truth about them. Because he doesn’t really care that much about what’s true.

    Since bullshit is free from the constraints of honesty, it can be perfectly designed to attract attention and elicit belief. (Whereas the actual full truth is usually abstruse and implausible.) From the point of view of cultural evolution, it’s a parasitic mimic, like a cuckoo. Like a cuckoo chick, it has to be more dazzling than the real thing in order to displace it.

    Nevertheless, the bullshit artist may generate either positive or negative informational externalities, because even he will speak the truth if it suits his ulterior purpose.

    The Market for Lemons

    But before I say anything more about all that, I need to quickly describe George Akerlof’s model of the used car market viii That will put me in a much better position to explain why I’m now starting to worry about cascading failure in the “bullshit market”.

    Akerlof was interested in the potential of informational asymmetries, in general, to produce market failure. (So it’s easy to see why his model might be relevant to the market for bullshit, which by its very nature exists entirely within the precarious and shifting world of asymmetries in information.) The basic idea behind his model is quite simple. Suppose that, when buying a new car, people have an imperfect ability to determine whether the car is a lemon. (For the sake of the example, either quality control is very bad, or else little information on safety, reliability, etc. is available in advance of purchases, or the people simply have imperfect judgment. The model is from a time when it was more plausible that not much information about car quality might be available.) But once they’ve owned a car for a little while, they begin to have a pretty clear idea of its quality.

    People who have a car that they now know is worth more than the prevailing market price for a used car will keep their car off the market. But people who have a car that they now know is worth less than the prevailing market price for a used car would be happy to sell theirs for the prevailing market price. So the used car buyer will have to choose his car from a pool of used cars the very best of which are worth a shade less than the prevailing market price, and the worst of which are worth much less than the prevailing market price.

    In the case of completely asymmetric information – if the seller always knows just exactly how bad the lemon is, but the buyer can’t ever tell the difference between it and any other car – the average buyer will end up with a car drawn from the middle of this distribution. But that means the average person will get a car that’s worth a lot less than he paid for it. Once this becomes generally known, it’s hard to see why the buyers wouldn’t refuse to buy used cars for any price higher than this average value.

    If the price is adjusted down to this new level, however, everyone with a car that’s worth more than the new price will withdraw their car from the market. So the average quality of the cars available at that price will be even lower. Once this becomes generally known, it’s hard to see why the buyers wouldn’t refuse to buy cars for any price higher than the new, lower, average value.

    Once the price has been adjusted down to the new new level, however, everyone with a car that’s worth more than the new new price will withdraw their car from the market…

    By a cascading series of steps like that, the used car market can fail, as a result of the informational asymmetry between buyer and seller. Although at each step there were some sellers willing to sell cars for only a little more than they were worth, and some buyers genuinely willing to pay slightly over fair value to avoid the expense of buying a new car, in the end the equilibrium is zero transactions. 

    If some institution or institutions existed to help the buyer determine the actual value of the used car more precisely, or if the people themselves developed a method of detecting lemons, they could meet and transact. So getting rid of the informational asymmetry would remove the market failure. But Akerlof worried that the rating agency would be unreliable, that whoever provided the public information about car quality would be tempted to issue bullshit instead, to use the resulting power to muddy the water in some self-serving way…

    The Market For Bullshit

    Okay, so now we’re back to bullshit, though now we’re coming at it from a slightly different angle. But what exactly is the analogy I’m pushing here actually supposed to be? What actually makes the market for bullshit a “market” in the first place? Is that supposed to be some kind of metaphor?

    I don’t think it is just a metaphor. At the same time, the phrase is slightly misleading, in precisely the same way as the phrase “the market for lemons”. Of course, the market for bullshit is parasitic on the market for sincere attempts to tell the truth. Why? Because bullshit derives most of its value from the fact that not everyone can always tell the difference between these two things. Strictly speaking, the market for bullshit is no more separable from the market for putative public truths in general than Akerlof’s “market for lemons”, for used cars not really worth the price they’re being offered for, is from the market for used cars in general. It’s one segment of the market for putative truths, in the same way the market for lemons is one segment of the market for used cars. The segment, in both cases, includes all and only those items that are worth less than they’re presented as being worth. (Or at least, in the case of bullshit, where the seller hasn’t exercised nearly enough diligence to really know that they’re worth as much as he’s presenting them as being worth.)

    Every issuance of egregious bullshit that’s at all consequential is, in fact, an exchange, involving at least two parties. There are people who produce egregious bullshit, often for a living, and there are people who buy it, and hold onto it until and unless they see through it. The producers are paid by the consumers, not with a permanent transfer of the scarce commodity, credence, but with a conditional loan that can be recalled at will. The unique and distinctive transaction in this market is the temporary exchange of egregious bullshit for credence.  Sooner or later, this credence may be repossessed by the credulous person, when the bullshit becomes discredited in his eyes. (When and if the bullshit artist’s ulterior motives become too readily apparent, or crucial facts turn out to be too obviously false, or the emotional impact simply fades.)

    So really it’s a commodity market, because while some truths remain true forever, bullshit gets used up over time, like gasoline, or sugar, meaning new bullshit must constantly be produced.

    The objective of each established vendor of bullshit is to get the customer to constantly roll over his credence to a new story from the same source, instead of repossessing it and looking for another vendor. But if the perceived credibility of the pool of existing vendors, in aggregate, declines, for some reason, new vendors with equally low quality bullshit who were shut out of the market before will become able to enter and compete.

    Every time a prestigious institution or a prestigious public official lowers a standard somehow to compete in the market for putative pieces of public information, whether in an internal or an external struggle, every time we see egregious bullshit from an unexpected source, some players outside the Establishment lose their tinfoil hats. Every time a prestigious news source uses an invidious headline or elides a crucial fact, other, less trusted sources of information suddenly seem more credible. Disenchanted television viewers move from the news networks to the Daily Show, opining that there’s no difference except the entertainment value. But once they have, they’re just as likely to wander on over to the Onion, even though they might never have thought of that as an alternative to CNN or the Washington Post before the move.

    That means this market has an odd and dangerous feature, one that makes it similar to the market for lemons. As exchange value – price, in the case of used cars, and credence, in the case of bullshit – goes down, average quality should also get worse.

    (Not that the Onion itself isn’t good. It’s just that in a world where the Onion is as reliable as hard news sources, consensus reality does not exist.)

    The admission of new, marginal sources to the pool of semi-credible public information is one obvious reason for this decline in quality. But there’s another problem, one that can, I think, drive human societies into surprisingly dark places. To be really interesting, the new bullshit must be fresh, which means it must somehow differ from existing, less exotic bullshit. But the low-hanging fruit has already been taken. The most salient and crucial truths will already be employed, in some existing item or tradition of bullshit, and can’t be repeated in any interesting and engaging way. Each additional marginal piece of bullshit must be either less directly relevant, or more contaminated with falsehood, or both, to succeed in being unique. To compete for the attention and credence of a fixed number of humans, it should also be gaudier than its predecessors. It should be more extreme, more bizarre or more shocking or more pleasing or moving or nobler or more wrathful or terrifying or self-mutilating or funnier, in order to still be noticeable in the more crowded field. Existing sources of public information, however credible, may also have to participate in this race to the bottom, if they’re going to retain viewers or readers. So the average quality of their output is likely to decline along with everyone else’s. That makes the information asymmetry a lot worse, because now even trusted sources may be forced to peddle egregious and exotic bullshit. Akerlof’s model of the market for lemons suggests that it should be possible, in theory, for this intensification of the informational asymmetry to cause cascading failure all by itself.

    Unfortunately, this market also has another strange feature, one that makes it even more fragile. Removing tinfoil hats affects volume as well as quality. In the face of increased competition, existing issuers also have to try even harder to catch the public’s increasingly fragmented attention, and are likely to increase the volume of putative information they put out. So as “price” (average number of people convinced and mean duration of the conviction produced by the typical piece of bullshit) goes down, the aggregate quantity of bullshit being produced should actually increase in response. The price elasticity of the bullshit supply curve is negative.

    But that means that the quantity increases if the quality declines. And we already knew that the quality declines if the quantity increases. So if the quality declines, the quantity increases. And if the quantity increases, then the quality declines. But if the quality declines, the quantity should increase again. And if the quantity increases again, the quality should decline again… Which is cascading failure, in the same kind of jerky series of successive steps down that Akerlof described for the used car market.

    If the public can’t tell the difference between good and bad sources of information, if they suddenly or gradually lose that ability somehow, the market for public information becomes vulnerable to this sort of failure. Because the average source may then in fact become much worse, much less honest, than they’re used to supposing. Is forced to do that, in order to compete, by the public’s very confusion. And things can continue to cascade down from there. So the equilibrium outcome can be zero transactions. Zero credence being lent. Nobody really believing anything anyone says in public.

    Even though there are some sources of information that are still almost as valuable as they claim to be, and some consumers of information who would still benefit from lending credence to them, the informational asymmetry would, in a world like that, make it impossible for these people to find each other, so nobody would end up lending much credence to anything said in public. In that world, the public would take rumors, and lies, and conspiracy theories just as seriously as official pronouncements from formerly credible sources.

    The First Consequence of the Technological Shock: Too Much Information

    Now that we have this supposed analogy on the table, what’s the exogenous technological shock supposed to be? Why might the combined market for bullshit and sincere attempts to tell the truth in public be crashing, again, right at this moment? What is it about all our tweeting, and Facebooking, and Googling, and emailing, and chatting, and constantly talking on the phone, and instant messaging, and posting of ominous videos on Vimeo, and tinderizing, and dressing up as plush toys, and organizing two-day conferences about Derrida’s influence on the Ninja Turtles action figures, and writing things for Zero Hedge, that could possibly cause a similar problem?

    Obviously, an enormous amount of new, very low-quality information has become publicly available to everyone. (Along with a very large but still smaller amount of new, very high-quality information, the problem being that we haven’t yet really collectively learned how to tell the difference in the new environment.) It seems to me that the consequence is that the persuasive value of the average piece of bullshit is collapsing. This is happening because the supply is increasing greatly, while fewer people attach less lasting credence to each piece. This affects our faith in existing institutions partly because they’re what’s available for people to lose faith in, because you can only lose the illusions you already had.

    As the increasing public supply of bullshit becomes more and more discredited, it drags the credibility of all sources of public information down – especially since some of the new bullshit is coming from the same institutions the more credible information already comes from.

    Information can be endlessly, costlessly replicated, so simply making some information more salient and more available counts as an increase in the supply of that particular information. As every part of every legacy institution becomes better and better at making itself transparent, the overall picture of the institution as a whole that we can get from outside becomes much more detailed. But this explosion of available details confuses the brand, because we no longer only see the greatest achievements and most serious messages. We still see those, but now we see everything else as well, and the average thing we see is less impressive.

    Each member of the Fed’s board always had their own opinions, but now technology has put them in a position to constantly tell us all about them, and us in a position to dig down into all the inevitable disagreements and uncertainties. Seeing the complexities that were always there more clearly makes the message much harder to interpret, and decreases its authority. In something like the same way seeing what’s actually been under the uniform of the traffic cop all along might diminish his authority in our eyes.

    The Fed, in particular, is and really has to be in the business of fooling everyone, at least if they’re going to go on being Keynesians rather than straight neo-classical rational choice theorists, because Keynesian monetary stimulus relies on the creation of illusions for its effectiveness. Every producer is supposed to be under the illusion that it’s only the price of their own product that’s going up, in response to the stimulus, while the prices of their inputs are going to remain unchanged. That’s what makes them increase production – the illusion that doing so has become more profitable. If nobody was fooled, if everyone realized that all prices would eventually go up in response to the monetary stimulus, they would simply adjust their own prices, immediately, without increasing production at all. 

    So the Keynesian central banker is supposed to be a kind of magician, who manipulates the public into doing what he sees as the right thing by creating illusions, using a printing press. But a magician can’t really show you everything he’s doing to fool you, as he’s doing the trick, and still expect you to be fooled by it. That would be a good way of teaching you to do the trick yourself. But as a way of doing a magic trick that’s supposed to actually deceive the audience and make them take some ill-considered action, it makes exactly no sense at all.

    The odd thing is that the prestigious institution often still seems to suppose that the front of the house still represents it to the public, that we basically all get our information about it from the occasional very formal and uninformative news conference for the old media by the head chef. But now all the diners can also see everything going on in the kitchen, which naturally gives them a completely different perspective on what sort of place the restaurant is. The chef’s formal description has turned into an empty ritual, a place food critics go to show off their own particular brands of bullshit in front of an audience.

    The contrast with the new, more complex and transparent background makes any traditional form of bullshit that might be conventional in communicating with the old media at press conferences seem more antiquated and unreasonable. So traditional ways of preserving public credibility can now actually have the effect of diminishing it, under the new technological circumstances. Refusing to comment in public on matters you’ve already shared your opinion about in less formal settings, that sort of thing. The problem is that the contrast between official pronouncements and actual beliefs is now just too obvious, too visible, too sharp. Even though the actors were never actually trying all that hard to conceal the contrast in the past. They just relied, unconsciously, on the whole picture being a little more murky, to outsiders, than it presently is. Clarified, it seems to convey a certain amount of contempt for the audience’s ability to reason, to connect the dots in the dot plots… (It’s as if we cleaned up the Mona Lisa a little, and it turned out she’d been giving us the finger all along.)

    From the outside, we now see a confusing multiverse of different Harvards, with no consistent story coming from anywhere about which ones matter most, or which one is the real Harvard. The university itself may not have changed very much, it was always a big complicated place, but the partial panopticon it lives in has become much more elaborate. We outsiders all can see much more about more different parts of it, if we choose to. That makes it potentially much more confusing to the outside world, which now can’t tell whether they should think of it as primarily consisting of the parts they like, or the ones they find unappealing.

    Complex human complex societies are always built around limiting the information people have to know about each other to a manageable level. In a group of more than a few thousand people, what there actually is to be known exceeds our individual capacity for assimilating and dealing with the knowledge. We aren’t gods, or angels. We’re just people. Now that necessary blurring has been interfered with, by the new technology, and we can’t help staring at what was always underneath the blur. At what an angel would see, at what, in some cases, only an angel could fully accept.

    So just the new technologies, all by themselves, are capable of making the credibility, plausibility, and comprehensibility of the average piece of public information from existing institutions decline, as far as the observer is concerned, even if those institutions don’t change at all. Even organizations which aren’t even occasionally in the business of producing any kind of bullshit (if there are any) can’t avoid having their credibility affected by this technologically driven tendency towards a confusing kind of transparency.

    A Second Consequence of the Technological Shock: Coming Up With New, More Extreme Forms of Bullshit

    But it’s also true that most large institutions contain many groups of people doing various different things. Inevitably, for a variety of reasons, some of those groups are more focused on publicly stating the exact truth as they understand it than others. Some people have searched diligently for genuinely important truths for a long time, with great skill. Occasionally they succeed in finding one. The advent of new organizational technology – computers and the things they’ve led to – helps these people. But there are only so many who can and will do the lonely, difficult, sometimes boring work, and actually finding significant new truths is very hard.

    Coming up with new forms of bullshit, and organizing new communities of bullshit artists around them, seems to be much easier. Entrepreneurial people associated with existing political parties, newspapers, interest groups, universities, or other prestigious institutions have considerable organizational advantages in the struggle to keep up with the depreciating value of bullshit, and may be responsible for a large fraction of the increased supply. New organized interest groups must grow up around existing institutions like vines, whenever organization and communication get easier and cheaper. Naturally each has its own preferred line of bullshit.

    In fact, the existence of organized interest groups, sources of economic and political rents, and other subsidies for particular signals means that the tendency for the credibility of public speech to decline under some technological circumstances can be accelerated in surprising ways by the social results of competition for access to the subsidies. Their existence can lead to a competition for unfakeable displays of commitment to the cause ix. Over time, this can result in behavior that seems quite strange to outsiders, as each would-be beneficiary tries to outdo the most recent effort of some rival. The result of this ratchet is a world where people often seem to decide what to think and do by asking themselves what would be most implausible belief and the most counterproductive behavior. As both organization and communication have become easier and cheaper with the new technologies, our ability to mount impressive and highly visible displays of this kind has improved as well.

    Perhaps the most extreme example of all this, at the moment, is the group of zealots in Raqqa. They’ve been very successful in attracting both followers and contributions in this very way, by undertaking insanely counterproductive, disgusting, and shocking displays of takfiri commitment. But the phenomenon is a far more widespread one, because this is, in fact, a basic human impulse, something our ancestors have been doing for a very long time in a huge variety of different ways, some splendid and some horrifying. The specific content of the subsidized signal – whether it’s flower arrangement, some particular form of social justice, or suicide bombing – matters enormously, but the competition to display some very refined and demanding or very arbitrary or very twisted conception of virtue or capability is always the same.

    This tendency to produce exaggerated forms of bullshit, as an evolved part of human nature, is, I suspect, at least partly a tool for achieving what Max Weberx called “closure”, a way for an in-group to acquire permanent ownership of a source of economic rents. People already immersed in the local brand of bullshit already know exactly what to say to please their audience. Often that includes some extremely odd things, some things the community has allowed itself to become concerned with, over time, by some progressive process of cultural evolution that seemed perfectly reasonable to them at each little step. By these gradual processes, the group can arrive at a set of preferences that would strike any outsider as strange and exotic in somewhat the same way some very unusual breeds of dog or cat or goldfish do. These exotic and arbitrary preferences act as a semi-permeable barrier to entry. You only get in to the subsidized group if you drink the cool-aid, if you become really good at exhibiting the exotic preferences in acceptable ways. Which limits access to the source of rent to friends and willing henchmen.

    This sort of competition for access to a subsidy can force competing bullshit artists to come up with more and more extreme, impressive, and (to the uninitiated) unpalatable versions of the particular forms of bullshit that are customary in their moral community. As the competition for prestige becomes more intense, what counts as an impressive signal of commitment to the subsidized set of beliefs can become much more extreme, leading in the end to forms of priest-craft that may seem very strange to any uninitiated person. Technological change, new ways of organizing and communicating, can greatly enhance the effectiveness of this sort of competitive display, as it has for the zealots in Raqqa. So as the exogenous technological shock hits, the exotic in-group behavior may become even more extreme.

    At the same time, a general increase in transparency has the effect of making all these weird little social worlds much more visible from the outside, contributing to the public sense that the other people whose social behavior they’re observing clearly for the first time have all gone completely nuts. In a world that’s apparently gone crazy, even crazy analyses may seem credible.

    All of these same processes can take place inside of existing institutions as well, as new organized interest groups with their own new forms of bullshit spring up under the newly favorable technological circumstances like mushrooms after a rain. Sometimes this can apparently be quite paralyzing. Various political parties in different places around the world have already visibly begun to experience interesting new forms of internal fragmentation and competition. Certainly there are fascinating things happening inside both large American political parties.

    A Third Consequence of the Technological Shock: More Rapid Turnover of Egregious Bullshit

    For both of these reasons, the passive one and the active one, the initial effect of the new technology should be a decline in the average perceived credibility of existing institutions’ output of putative pieces of public information, along with an increase in its perceived quantity. A Democrat is now more likely to publicly say or write that the DNC, and a Republican that the RNC, is terrible. And we’re also more likely to hear about it. Having heard these things, we’re now less likely to accept anything either party says. If even they say they’re terrible…

    (Presumably the initial impact of any large technological change is always partly just disorganization, because at the beginning the society is bound to be set up all wrong, given the possibilities inherent in the new technology. The pattern is as old as Ugarit. Invent the first alphabetic writing system and the use of gold as money… and watch your whole civilization collapse, as it tries to cope with the social results. Once you notice it, this pattern appears in history again and again. Improvement may only come much later, if at all, as a result of some sort of eventual Darwinian winnowing process.)

    At the same time, as Daniel Dennett has pointed out recently with respect to public falsehood in general x, xi, we’ve recently become collectively much better both at detecting all kinds of dishonesty, and at informing each other that we all know everyone else has also detected it.

    In the Politics, Aristotle points out that in the end, the public tends to have sound judgment about what’s really a great work of art, even though individually many of its members may lack perfect taste. Each person still may be able to spot some particular flaw, so all together they constitute a reliable filter. The sound evaluations reinforce each other, while each idiosyncratic error of judgment is likely to be different. So over very long periods of time, the public standard of taste is more reliable and refined than that of any one individual.

    The same thing applies to public bullshit. Over time, at least outside of subsidized in-groups, all but the very finest examples of bullshit are eventually detected and persuasively rejected by someone in the crowd. Sooner or later, someone successfully points out that the Emperor isn’t wearing any clothes. The motive or gimmick becomes obvious to everyone, and the dishonesty becomes transparent.

    The Internet has dramatically amplified this oracular collective capability, because more eyeballs are now seeing each potential piece of bullshit with greater clarity, sooner. The people behind the eyeballs now find it much easier to communicate their skepticism to each other. So we reject dishonesty much more quickly and with better accuracy. Common “knowledge” of both truths and untruths, making it known to all that everyone knows that everyone supposedly knows something, has, as Dennett points out, become both much easier to produce, and much easier to destroy.

    Bullshit Inflation and Market Failure

    With a vastly increased supply, lower average quality, and much less public willingness to hold on to each piece, the value of the average putative item of public information seems to be crashing now in more or less the same way the value of a unit of currency crashes during a hyperinflation. In that case, the problem is also that the supply of something – money – explodes just as public willingness to hold onto it for very long is collapsing. The credibility of each individual piece of bullshit, the number of people it will persuade for how many hours in total, is, I suspect, now in steep decline. What’s pretty easy to see is that bullshit just simply doesn’t stick for very long any more, that a semi-bullshit explanation that’s believed by the public may now only settle them down or rile them up for a few days or a few weeks, not for months or years as it once might have.

    What’s a little harder to observe, unless you habitually wander into a lot of places people in your own little social world don’t go much, is the fact that that this more rapid churning is happening in parallel in more and more different and divergent arenas. So during the much shorter half-life of each piece of bullshit it probably convinces many fewer people at any one time. As its value collapses and its quality declines, more and more must be issued to accomplish the same persuasive tasks.

    In the end, no amount of bullshit may be enough. It may become impossible for anyone to persuade very much of the public of anything, even the truth. Akerlof’s model of the used car market suggests that in an extreme scenario, the market for public information, for putative attempts to tell the truth in public, as a whole might eventually fail under the new pressure.

    The problem with this kind of crash in the bullshit market would be that it would have the unfortunate effect of making genuinely reliable sources of public information no more credible than any entrepreneur with a completely novel and untested form of bullshit. A simple, clear, and emotionally appealing plan, concocted without reference to its actual possibility or efficacy. When nobody is the least little bit credible, anybody at all is just as credible as anyone else. That can be a surprisingly bad outcome for the whole society – if “anybody at all” happens to include Adolf Hitler.

    Keeping civilization going is hard, not easy. This is the fundamental fact we seem most inclined to forget. Human history shows that there are more potential recipes for societal disaster, more ways of not having the things we have now, than paths to societal success. Agonizing failure is genuinely possible. History is full of failed experiments. So a frantic bullshit free-for-all of the kind Germany had in 1920’s and the 1930’s seems like a rather frightening outcome. But a possible one. Or look what happened when the printing press was invented. Suddenly everyone was an authority on scripture. It was fun… at first. But the path from Erasmus to the Battle of White Mountain is surprisingly straight.

    At the same time, there was a lot of bullshit around in the 1920’s, and the 1950’s – all the horrible bullshit associated with segregation and numerous other unjust deprivations of basic human rights – that we’re all much better off without. In the very long term, getting rid of bullshit is usually a very good thing. There are probably some similar pieces of horrible bullshit in our world, things our descendants will wish we could have rejected sooner. The problem is basically just that the transition from there to here involved all kinds of untoward and surprising events. Good news in the long term can sometimes be surprisingly bad news in the short or medium term.

    We assume that seeing far more of each other’s lives than we’ve ever seen before will leave our social and political system pretty much undisturbed. Because on some level we think we’re still living in the television age. But actually the particular design of the partial panopticon we all live in, which only allows certain acts of certain people to be seen by certain other people some of the time, is central to society’s functioning on a day-to-day basis. We aren’t used to having this much extreme bullshit directed towards us this persistently. We aren’t used to actually seeing a man’s head sawed off with a serrated knife. As part of a sort of gruesome political advertisement for an expensive form of madness, directed at least partly at those few scattered people who might be driven over the edge by it, and commit similar acts.

    We aren’t used to knowing this much about what the people who run the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are actually talking about, with each other, behind the scenes. We aren’t used to having the magician describe every trick in detail for us, as he’s actually doing it.

    Eventually we’ll learn ways to shut most of the information out again, to stop watching Charlie Rose and Jihadi recruitment videos, but in the meantime the sheer quantity and volume and the increasingly uncertain quality are extremely disorganizing. Sooner or later, public revulsion may set in, and the market may fail completely.

    The specific sort of fragility I’m imagining in the market for public information is a vulnerability to cascading failure, which makes the full magnitude of a possible event very difficult to predict in advance. Presumably bullshit crises are like earthquakes. There must be many, many tiny little cascading failures in local bullshit markets all the time, a few medium sized ones every once in a while, and very very rarely, some really huge ones that affect everyone.

    Hopefully this one will be one of the smaller ones, or will be relatively benign, even if it is big. But the Reformation, or the eventual effects of the introduction of radio, movies, telephones, and the mass party early in the twentieth century, can give us some idea of how bad the short-term effects of a really serious bullshit crash can potentially be.

    Some appreciation of the potential risks associated with this kind of rapid change in communications and organizational technology, on the part of our political leaders, might perhaps make them less eager to continue to try to put out fires with gasoline, as they’re presently doing.

    What Is To Be Done?

    Is there anything we can do about all this? In the end, I’m afraid, as in past cases, it’s really mostly going to be up to us. As citizens, we have to learn how to recognize lemons. We have to learn to tell the difference between sincere though possibly mistaken public speech, or the policeman’s hat, customary and acceptable forms of public pretense, and genuinely egregious bullshit. As these things appear in new forms in the new technological environment. And to learn how to tune a lot of the bullshit out. If we can. Eventually the public learns how to navigate under the new technological circumstances. Spinoza writes the Theological-Political Treatise, and order is restored in the market for public information.

    (Unless they don ‘t, and it isn’t. Germany society in the 1920’s and ‘30’s doesn’t really seem to have ever endogenously solved its bullshit problem. And they were incredibly sophisticated people. So it’s possible to fail, even if you’re very smart. Nevertheless, we can hope.)

    Just as Akerlof’s used car market can really only function well if buyers eventually learn to detect lemons, to function in the new world, we all have to become less willing to have our attention grabbed and our emotions inflamed by some bullshit artist with a novel song and dance. Human societies are structured as they are precisely because we don’t and can’t have perfect information about everything and everyone. Moral exhortations to live as if we did are utopian, in a way that should be easier to see now that the people in Raqqa have also become all riled up about what they perceive as the manifold injustices of our global society. Thinking globally implies a will to impose your conception of the good on the whole of humanity. But we don’t need seven billion distinct and incompatible utopian conceptions of the global good being unilaterally imposed on the whole world all at the same time. What we actually want is seven billion people all doing their best to see through that kind of reckless bullshit, on the basis of what they know about their own smaller worlds. Doing their best to not be beguiled or distracted by bullshit artists with simple, morally satisfying solutions for all the world’s most photogenic problems.

    I’m afraid the bad new is that we the people are more or less on our own, in this particular struggle. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal can’t really help us, or advise us, now, because it’s precisely whether to go on trusting them that we have to decide. There are things they could do to retain or regain our trust, but we shouldn’t hold our breath, because they apparently have yet to perceive any need for reform.

    No, it’s sort of going to have to be up to us to learn to filter out this latest wave of bullshit, and figure out which sources to trust in the new technological environment, just as we’ve eventually done in all the previous crises. The stakes are high. This may be your single most important job, as a citizen. Figuring out which publicly available bullshit is egregious, and of that what part is potentially harmful, and what harmless, or even socially necessary. What makes the whole thing much more complicated is the fact that there’s probably a lot of the existing egregious bullshit that we need to try to keep, for the sake of continuity if nothing else.  And because it takes up space that we don’t want filled with something worse… Even though it may all seem worthless, in the middle of a crash.

    [i]  Frankfurt, H. On Bullshit. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2005.
    [ii] “On bullshit, part I.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1RO93OS0Sk
    [iii] “Bullshit!” https://vimeo.com/167796382
    [iv] McAdams, R. The Expressive Power of Law: Theories and Limits. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA (2015)
    [v] Hayek, F. “The use of knowledge in society.” American Economic Review, XXXV, no. 4 (Sep. 1945) pp. 516-30.
    [vi] Arrow, K. “Methodological individualism and social knowledge.” American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings 84 (1994) 1-8.
    [vii] Cloud, D. The Lily. Lassiez Faire Press, Baltimore, MD (2011)
    [viii] Akerlof, G. “The market for ‘lemons’: quality uncertainty and the market mechanism.” Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 84, no. 3 (Aug. 1970) pp. 488 – 500.
    [ix] Berman, E. “Sect, subsidy, and sacrifice: an economist’s view of ultra-orthodox Jews.” NBER Working Paper No. 6715 (Aug. 1998). Currently available at http://www.nber.org/papers/w6715.pdf
    [x] Weber, M. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. The Free Press, New York (1947)
    [xi] Dennett, D., and Roy, D. “How digital transparency became a force of nature.” Scientific American, March 2015.
    [xii] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/transparency-how-transparency-…

  • The War In Afghanistan Is A Good Thing (If You're A Drug-Dealer)

    Submitted by Mnar Muhawesh via MintPressNews.com,

    The “War on Drugs” and the “War on Terror” are more intertwined than that media and our elected officials would like us to think.

    And this became full front and center when the U.S.-led global crusades overlapped in Afghanistan, leaving in their wake a legacy of death, addiction and government corruption tainting Afghan and American soil.

    In the U.S., the War in Afghanistan is among the major contributing factors to the country’s devastating heroin epidemic.

    Over 10,000 people in America died of heroin-related overdoses in 2014 alone– an epidemic fuelled partly by the low cost and availability of one of the world’s most addictive, and most deadly, drugs.

    Despite our promises to eradicate the black market, the U.S. actually enables the illegal drug trade. As journalist Abby Martin writes, the U.S. government has had a long history of facilitating the global drug trade: In the 1950s, it allowed opium to be moved, processed and trafficked throughout the Golden Triangle in Southeast Asia while it trained Taiwanese troops to fight Communist China. In the 80s, the CIA provided logistical and financial support to anti-Communist Contras in Nicaragua who were also known international drug traffickers.

    Since the DEA got the boot from the Bolivian government in 2008, cocaine production in that country has steadily fallen year after year.

    And in 2012, a Mexican government official claimed that rather than fighting drug traffickers, the CIA and other international security forces are actually trying to “manage the drug trade.”

    “It’s like pest control companies, they only control,” Guillermo Terrazas Villanueva, the Chihuahua spokesman, told Al Jazeera. “If you finish off the pests, you are out of a job. If they finish the drug business, they finish their jobs.”

    While there is no conclusive proof that the CIA is physically running opium out of Afghanistan,  Martin notes:

    “[I]t’s hard to believe that a region under full US military occupation – with guard posts and surveillance drones monitoring the mountains of Tora Bora – aren’t able to track supply routes of opium exported from the country’s various poppy farms (you know, the ones the US military are guarding).”

    Ironically, it was the U.S. mission to obliterate the Taliban in the “War on Terror” that turned Afghanistan into a “narco state.”

    Prior to the War in Afghanistan, the Taliban actually offered subsidies to farmers to grow food crops not drugs.

    In the summer of 2000, Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar announced a total ban on the cultivation of opium poppy, the plant from which heroin is made. Those caught planting poppies in Taliban-controlled parts of the country were beaten and marched through villages with motor oil on their faces.

    The only opium harvest the following spring was in the northeast, in an area controlled by the Taliban’s rivals, the Northern Alliance. That year, as Matthieu Aikins reported for Rolling Stone in 2012, “Opium production fell from an estimated 3,276 tons in 2000 to 185 tons in 2001.”

    But then 9/11 hit and the Bush administration pushed into Afghanistan once again, carrying the banner of the “War on Terror.”

    “When the Taliban fled or went into hiding, the farmers lost their financial support to grow food, and returned to growing heroin, a crop that thrives in regions of Afghanistan,” as Dr. Steven Kassels noted in a 2015 piece for Social Justice Solutions.

    Seeking a “light footprint” in Afghanistan, the U.S. and our allies teamed up with what Aikins describes as “anti-Taliban warlords.” Aikins reported: “Within six months of the U.S. invasion, the warlords we backed were running the opium trade, and the spring of 2002 saw a bumper harvest of 3,400 tons.”

    That’s right: The War in Afghanistan saw the country’s practically dead opium industry expanded dramatically. By 2014, Afghanistan was producing twice as much opium as it did in 2000. By 2015, Afghanistan was the source of 90 percent of the world’s opium poppy.

    Since 2001, the U.S. has poured billions into counternarcotics programs in Afghanistan. How could this industry flourish right under the nose of the U.S. and our allies? Well, quite simply, because we let it: Aikins alleges that the DEA, FBI, the Justice Department and the Treasury ALL knew about their corrupt allies in the country, but did nothing to pursue them because it would have derailed the troop surge.

    “The drug is entwined with the highest levels of the Afghan government and the economy in a way that makes the cocaine business in Escobar-era Colombia look like a sideshow,” Aikins writes, later noting: “On the ground, American commanders’ short-term imperatives of combat operations and logistics trumped other advisers’ long-term concerns over corruption, narcotics and human rights abuses, every time.”

    But where did it all go? Well, as Aikins reported, Afghanistan’s “borders leak opium like sieves into five neighboring countries.”

    The increased supply flooded European, Asian and Middle Eastern markets. And with Europe no longer reaching out to opium producers in South America and Mexico, that excess flooded the American market. Prices fell everywhere, making heroin dangerously cheap and dangerously accessible.

    And this is where we find ourselves today: Heroin, one of the most addictive and deadly substances on Earth, can be found for as little a $4 a bag in some American cities.

    Between 2002 and 2013, heroin-related overdose deaths quadrupled. In 2014, more than 10,000 people died of heroin overdoses in America. Should we add these casualties to the 3,504 U.S. and coalition soldiers who died in the war, or the 26,000 dead Afghan civilians?

    And heroin use is up across the entire population. Age, sex, race, income, location — it doesn’t matter. And, as the CDC notes, “Some of the greatest increases occurred in demographic groups with historically low rates of heroin use: women, the privately insured, and people with higher incomes.”

    Unfortunately, it’s not just the U.S. suffering under the weight of a heroin addiction that’s hit epidemic proportions: Afghanistan, which has a long cultural tradition of smoking opium, is dealing not just with its status as a “narco state,” as Aikins described it, but also with the health and social ills stemming from increased heroin use.

    In the process of waging a “War on Terror,” we lost the “War on Drugs.” Both wars deal in corruption and violence, and they put real human lives on the line — not just on the battlefield, but in the fields where farmers cultivate crops and in the neighborhoods where people live.

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Jul 23

Today’s News 23rd July 2016

  • THE SUBPRIME U.S. ECONOMY: Disintegrating Due To Subprime Auto, Housing, Bond & Energy Debt

    srsrocco

    By the SRSrocco Report,

    The U.S. financial system continues to disintegrate even though most Americans hardly notice.  The system is being gutted from the inside out… much the same way a chronic disease weakens a patient even before any symptoms are felt.  However, we are already experiencing painful symptoms as U.S. economic indicators continue to weaken.

    Here are just a few of the recent headlines:

    Energy Giant Schlumberger Fires Another 8,000 As “Market Conditions Worsen” in Q2

    The Financial System Is Breaking Down At An Unimaginable Pace

    Potential Crisis Triggers Continue To Pile Up In 2016

    Just In Time—–Big Wall Street Housing Investors Cashing-Out On Housing Bubble 2.0

    Corporate Bond Defaults Hit Highest Rate Since Financial Crisis

    These are just some of the recent headlines pointing to BIG TROUBLE AHEAD.  However, the U.S. financial system is in dire shape due to the SUBPRIMING of the entire economy.  Today, anyone can purchase a car for little or nothing down and finance it for 84 months.  The U.S. housing market is also in the same predicament.

    According to the article, Are We Heading for Another Housing Crisis?, published on May 12th this year:

    While the economy and home prices have both rebounded, some people have expressed concern we are headed for a repeat housing bubble. As of January 2016, home prices were rising at a rate twice that of inflation, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller U.S. National Home Price Index.

     

    What’s more, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have unveiled programs to allow first-time homebuyers to make a purchase with only 3 percent down. Plus, some lenders are using alternate credit scores, which may make loans available to those who can’t get one under conventional credit scoring methods.

    So, here we are heading down the same path as we did prior to the 2008 U.S. Investment Banking and Housing collapse.  However, this time around its both a Subprime Auto & Housing problem.  But, that is just part of the Subprime mess.

    As most of you already know, many of the world’s sovereign bonds have negative yields.  According to the article, The Financial System Is Breaking Down At An Unimaginable Pace:

    In February 2015, the total amount of negative-yielding debt in the world was ‘only’ $3.6 trillion.

    A year later in February 2016 it had nearly doubled to $7 trillion.

     

    Now, just five months later, it has nearly doubled again to $13 trillion, up from $11.7 trillion just over two weeks ago.

    Think about that: the total sum of negative-yielding debt in the world has increased in the last sixteen days alone by an amount that’s larger than the entire GDP of Russia.

     

    Just like subprime mortgage bonds from ten years ago, these bonds are also toxic securities, since many of are issued by bankrupt governments (like Japan).

     

    Instead of paying subprime home buyers to borrow money, investors are now paying subprime governments.

    And just like the build-up to the 2008 subprime crisis, investors are snapping up today’s subprime bonds with frightening enthusiasm.

    To see total world negative-yielding debt doubling to $13 trillion in just the past six months is a BLINKING RED LIGHT.

    So, not only do we have Subprime Auto & Housing… we also have to include Subprime Govt Bonds.  While U.S. Treasuries and bonds are not yet negative-yielding, I believe it is just a matter of time.

    As we can see, the U.S. is now becoming a massive SUBPRIME ECONOMY.  Unfortunately, it gets much worse.  The factor that most analysts have not yet factored into the subprime disaster is energy.

    I would like to remind my readers and new followers that it takes energy to run the Auto, Housing & Bond markets.  Yes, it takes the burning of energy to allow the global bond markets to function.  Basically, Treasuries and Bonds are nothing more than claims on future economic activity.  My sympathy goes out to anyone holding onto 20-30 year bonds until maturity.  I highly doubt these bonds will ever make it to maturity.

    That being said, let’s look at the catastrophe taking place in the U.S. Subprime Energy Industry.

    U.S. Shale Oil Companies Saddled With Debt Up To Their Eyeballs

    I discussed the big trouble with the U.S. Shale Energy Industry in my recent interview with Dan at Future Money Trends.  If you haven’t yet checked it out, I highly recommend it:

    https://youtu.be/Zpxb2G_6oes

    During the interview I spoke about the following chart below.  These are some of the top U.S. Shale oil companies.  I included Chevron, not because it is a large shale oil producer, but because it is one of the three major oil companies in the United States:

    US Shale Oil Companies Long Term Debt

    In 2006, these seven U.S. oil companies held $17.2 billion in combined long-term debt.  However, by 2015… this ballooned to $72.1 billion.  Basically, their debt increased four times in a decade.  Now, the interesting thing to understand about this chart is that their long-term debt really started to increase in 2011.  Why is this significant?

    Because, the price of U.S. oil (West Texas Crude) was nearly $100 for 2011, 2012 and 2013.  Which means, the high oil price did nothing to help these companies pay down their debt.  Rather, their long-term debt more than doubled in just the past four years.

    I hope anyone reading this will realize, SHALE OIL IS SUBPRIME ENERGY that really wasn’t economic unless we had zero interest rates and monetary printing.  Even though the U.S. Shale Oil Industry brought on a lot of oil in the past decade, they really didn’t make any money… they just saddled their balance sheets with debt.

    Let’s take a look at the most recent data from the top four shale oil fields in the United States.  According to the U.S. EIA Drilling Productivity Report released on July 18, the Bakken and Eagle Ford shale oil fields are estimated to suffer large declines in August:

    Bakken Oil production

    Eagle Ford Oil production

    The EIA forecasts that the Bakken and Eagle Ford will lose 80,000 barrels per day in just August.  These are BIG NUMBERS.  If we look at the actual production figures for the top four shale oil fields, here is the result:

    Top 4 Shale Oil Production

    Oil production from the top four shale oil fields has declined 914,000 barrels per day (bd) since the peak in March 2015.  This translates to a 17% decline in oil production from these four fields in just 16 months.  However, the impact on the U.S. economy is even worse when we look at the figures on a monthly and annual basis.

    This next chart shows the combined loss of oil production from these top four shale oil fields based upon the minimum production from Nov 2014 to Nov 2015.  Let me explain.  In Nov 2014, these shale fields produced 5,027,000 bd, peaked in March 2015 at 5,304,000 bd and then fell back to 5,106,000 bd in Nov 2015.  So between Nov 2014 & Nov 2015, these fields produced a minimum of 5,067,000 barrels per day.

    In August, the Bakken, Eagle Ford, Niobrara & Permian oil fields will be producing approximately 4,390,000 barrels per day.  This is a 676,000 barrel per day decline from the minimum production these four fields produced for a year during that Nov 2014-2015 time period.

    The reason why I decided to do it this way is to show that these four fields produced at least 5,067,000 barrels per day for an entire year.  To show the decline from the high peak is disingenuous because it was only for a brief one month period.  This means, these top four fields will lose 20.3 million barrels of oil in a month and a stunning 247 million barrels in a year:

    Top 4 Shale Oil Fields Production Loss

    However, it will be much worse than this going forward as U.S. Shale oil production continues to decline.  How bad will it be?  Well, if these companies received $50 a barrel for oil, it turns out to be a loss of $13.7 billion in a year.  But, as I stated, it will be worse as oil production continues to decline.

    I published this chart in a previous article, but it’s important to see again:

    U.S. Energy Sector Interest on Debt

    The U.S. Energy Sector is saddled with $370 billion in debt.  In 2015, the U.S. Energy Sector paid 48% of their operating profits just to pay the interest on their debt.  This ballooned to 86% in Q1 2016 when the oil price fell to $33.  If the oil price remains between $40-$50, the U.S. Energy Sector will likely have to fork out 60-70% of its operating income just to service its debt in 2016.

    And of course… IT’S EVEN WORSE THAN THAT… LOL.  We must remember, for most of 2015, the top shale oil fields were producing 676,000 barrels per day more than they will be this year.  Thus, they will have less revenues due to falling oil production.

    So, the billion dollar question is this… how will the U.S. Energy Sector survive with low oil prices and falling production???

    Welcome to SUBPRIME USA.

    Unfortunately, the coming collapse of the U.S. economic and financial system will be orders of magnitude greater than what took place in 2008.  Why?  Because we just had a subprime housing market in 2008, whereas the entire U.S. economy today is SUBPRIME….  Subprime Auto, Housing, Bonds & Energy.

    Lastly, while some precious metals investors have become a bit frustrated by the low gold and silver prices or the ongoing manipulation of the markets by the Fed and Central Banks, the current system is not sustainable.  The doubling of world debt with negative yielding debt in the past six months is a bad sign indeed.

    Owning physical gold and silver will provide a lot more options during the next economic and financial collapse than most of the paper assets 99% of the world is invested.

    IMPORTANT NOTICE:  Here is the link to register for the SRSrocco Report Precious Metals Webinar taking place on Tuesday, August 2nd at 6 pm EST – Eastern Standard Time:

    SIGNUP For SRSrocco Precious Metals Webinar

    Lastly, if you haven’t checked out our new PRECIOUS METALS INVESTING section or our new LOWEST COST PRECIOUS METALS STORAGE page, I highly recommend you do.

    Check back for new articles and updates at the SRSrocco Report.

  • America Needs A Good, Old-Fashioned Economic Depression

    Submitted by Jay Kawatsky via The National Interest,

    Artificial measures to stave off a downturn will only make it much worse.

    Describing what he called the “crack-up boom”, Ludwig von Mises, the great Austrian economist, said:

    The boom cannot continue indefinitely. There are two alternatives. Either the banks continue the credit expansion without restriction and thus cause constantly mounting price increases and an ever-growing orgy of speculation – which, as in all other cases of unlimited inflation, ends in a “crack-up boom” and in a collapse of the money and credit system.

     

    Or the banks stop before this point is reached, voluntarily renounce further credit expansion, and thus bring about the crisis. The depression follows in both instances. (emphasis added)

    Although it would be the wiser policy, there is no evidence that the world’s central bankers have the wisdom, either individually or collectively, to select the second alternative. More specifically, they lack “the courage to act” (as Ben Bernanke’s recent, self-congratulatory memoir was so ironically titled); they and their political, big finance and big business cronies are afraid to swallow the “d-pill”, the economic medicine named “depression”.

    A good, old-fashioned, pre-1929 depression (like the short-lived, eleven-month depression in 1920-1921, before the days of “modern” central banking and “enlightened” Keynesian intervention “cures”) is the only tonic that can clear out the malinvestment built up since the beginning of the fiat money era. That era began in August of 1971. That is when Richard Nixon, informed that U.S. gold reserves were precipitously declining as a result of President Johnson’s March 1968 action to reduce the gold reserve ratio from 25 percent to zero, “temporarily” suspended the convertibility of the U.S. Dollar into gold. That “temporary” measure has been in effect for forty-five years.

    Finally freed from the constraints of what they could not print (i.e., gold), central bankers and their cronies in government, finance and big business were given a license to debase all formerly hard currencies. (Such currencies were “hard”, as they were linked, via the Bretton Woods arrangement, to the dollar, which was backed by gold.) And debase they did: they replaced real investment capital (i.e. actual savings) with cheap, invented credit; they replaced market-derived price (of money) discovery, i.e., market-derived interest rates, with central-bank-proclaimed interest rates.

    The actions of central bankers to suppress real price discovery (i.e., market-derived interest rates) now has led to nearly $12 trillion of sovereign debt having been issued with interest rates below zero (“NIRP”, or “negative interest rate policy”). That means that more than one third of all sovereign debt worldwide now carries negative interest rates.

    That nearly $12 trillion total includes $3.2 trillion of short-term sovereign debt and $8.5 trillion of long-term sovereign debt. The total NIRP debt is up $1.3 trillion from the end of May. Even more astounding is that the total amount of negative-yielding debt with maturities of seven years or longer has ballooned to $2.6 trillion. That is nearly double just since April of this year. In fact, all of the debt issued by the Swiss government – every borrowed franc, even Swiss fifty-year bonds – now carries a negative yield. All of the debt issued by the Japanese government (JGBs) with maturities up to twenty years now carries a negative yield.

    Imagine lending money to anyone, even the Swiss government, for fifty years, ultimately getting back less than you loaned … and paying for the privilege! What such an investor has to believe, in order to make such a loan, is that inflation over the next fifty years will be substantially negative (i.e., a great, and long-lasting deflation), with the result that the purchasing power of the Swissie will increase substantially over the next fifty years. But every major currency on the planet, including the US dollar, the British pound, the Japanese yen and the Euro/DM, has lost purchasing power over the last forty-five years (since the end of Bretton Woods).

    Without some form of scarce commodity backing (e.g., precious metals) for currencies, why would anyone, particularly sovereign bond investors, believe that currency units, which can be conjured at will from thin air (not a scarce commodity) by desperate governments, will be worth more, not less, over the next fifty years? But believe it they do, proving that, at least with respect to high finance (better named low-IQ finance?), you can fool all of the people (the investment public) all of the time.

    NIRP simply never could exist in a real-money world, where credit, like all commodities, is scarce and must be rationed by the market. But European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi, with the implicit and explicit assent of all the world’s central bankers and the urging of their cronies in government, finance and big business who get “first crack” at the conjured money, has reiterated over and over that there would be “no limits” to what he and the ECB might do with respect to printing money and further reducing interest rates. (No wonder the workaday citizens of Great Britain voted overwhelmingly for Leave.)

    ZIRP and NIRP certainly have well served the central banks and their crony political, finance and big business elite masters (the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent). Money printed by central banks ex nihilo (out of nothing) has poured into the world’s stock markets, fueling stock buybacks that enrich big-business management via soaring stock-options values. Money printed by central banks has fueled an auto-loan bubble, with total auto debt now more than $1 trillion. Money printed by central banks has fueled the rapid increase in student debt that either will enslave American youth, preventing most from participating in the “American Dream” of home ownership and a reasonable retirement, or turn them into rabid supporters of socialist politicians (e.g., Bernie Sanders) who promise to absolve them of their unpayable debts.

    But the central bankers’ ability to defy economic gravity may, at long last, be coming to an end. Even the radical Keynesian, Richard Koo has recognized the outrage of NIRP, which he recently described as “an act of desperation born out of despair over the inability of quantitative easing and inflation targeting to produce the desired results… the failure of monetary easing symbolizes crisis in macroeconomics."

    The failure of ZIRP, QE and now NIRP is easy to see from recent corporate earnings reports and associated PE multiples: As of close of trading on Friday, July 1, 2016, the S&P 500 was trading at 24.3 times earnings over the last twelve months, close to an historical record high PE multiple. Generally (meaning before fiat money), elevated PE multiples were notched during times of increasing earnings. But for the first fiscal quarter of 2016 (FQE 3/31), S&P 500 earnings per share were only $87. That is 18 percent less than the $106-per-share earnings peak reported for the third quarter (FQE 9/30) of 2014. If money printing and central-bank-dictated interest rates were the saviors of the real economy, and if the United States were actually experiencing a real economic recovery, corporate earnings would be increasing, not declining precipitously.

    Interestingly, the first quarter 2016’s $87 per share earnings were eerily equivalent to the $85 earnings per share for the last twelve months just preceding the 2008 crash. And the S&P 500 multiple was only 18.4 at that time. So stocks have a long way to fall from their elevated current levels, levels only reached as a result of share buybacks (artificially increasing earnings per outstanding share and increasing per share prices), which buybacks were (and continue to be) fueled by relentless near-ZIRP maintained by the U.S. Federal Reserve, as well as so-called “carry-trade” borrowings in currencies with NIRP (such as the Japanese yen).

    The failure of ZIRP, QE and now NIRP also is easy to see from recent corporate sales reports: According to the most recently updated Inventories to Sales Ratio compiled by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, the inventory to sales ratio is hovering at 1.35, just below the highest recorded (1.41 in January of 2009) in over twenty years. That ratio exploded higher (meaning unsold goods are piling up) every quarter since the end of the second quarter of 2014. If money printing and central bank-dictated interest rates were the saviors of the real economy, and if the United States were actually experiencing a real economic recovery, inventories would not be languishing unsold on the shelves of suppliers and merchants. Workers with higher pay checks would be consuming them.

    Which brings us to perhaps the easiest way to understand the failure of ZIRP, QE and now NIRP: the labor market. Contrary to the claims of the Obama administration’s Bureau of Labor Statistics’ headline unemployment numbers (which counts job slots, so that a part-time gig is the equivalent of a forty-hour-per-week career job paying over $50,000 per year), there is not more work being done in America. There actually is less, as former full time jobs (with benefits) have been, and continue to be, replaced with more part-time, lower paying jobs (without benefits). Indeed, as former OMB chief David Stockman has instructed, the number of what can be called “breadwinner jobs”, which are jobs that can support a family of four, is now almost one million below the number of such jobs in the year 2000. If money printing and central bank-dictated interest rates were the saviors of the real economy, and if the United States were actually experiencing a real economic recovery, there would be more “breadwinner jobs” now than in 2000, when the population was considerably lower.

    The crack-up boom, fueled by fiat money, QE, ZIRP and now NIRP, is coming. It will hit on a global scale, and “rock the casbah” (and all points north, south, east and west thereof). It will make the Great Depression look like a picnic party in the park. Why will it be worse? Consider just two simple facts: first, supply chains are much longer and considerably more intricate than eighty-five years ago. As they fail (due to bankruptcies and business failures of those in the chain), basic necessities will not get to those in need of them. Second, compared to eighty-five years ago, the world has billions more mouths to feed, and many fewer people, including millions fewer farmers, who actually know how to produce the basic necessities.

    Yes, central bankers can print currency units, but not food, energy or other commodities necessary for sustaining life. As basic commodities become more scarce or are priced out of the reach of average folks, wars, riots, rebellions, diseases and repressive governments will result. All of this human suffering will be the progeny of ZIRP, QE and NIRP, which in turn are the progeny of the replacement of the gold standard by the Ph.D standard.

  • Hillary Clinton Picks Tim Kaine For Vice President

    Moments ago the worst kept secret in Washington was confirmed when Hillary Clinton announced on Twitter she has picked Virginia senator Tim Kaine as her running mate in an attempt to bolster her support among blue-collar workers and maximize votes from US Latinos dismayed by Donald Trump.

    Kaine, 58, a Catholic former governor of Virginia, has described himself in the past as “boring”, and is seen as a safe, moderate if unexciting option, but his everyman roots, executive experience and fluent Spanish are assets that could strengthen the Democratic ticket. By choosing  Kaine, 58, a moderate Democrat from a battleground state, Clinton has passed up the chance to pick a left-winger such as senator Elizabeth Warren.

    “I am boring,” he said on NBC in June, but then joked, “Boring is the fastest-growing demographic in this country.”

    Others on her list presented risks. For instance, some thought an all-women ticket with Sen. Warren could turn off potential backers.  Clinton also looked at a political novice, retired Adm. James Stavridis, who is an expert in foreign policy but hasn’t faced the rigors of a political campaign.

    According to the FT, Clinton has matched Trump by picking a seasoned elected official who has served as both a governor and a member of Congress. But while the main role of Mike Pence, the Indiana governor chosen by Trump, is to shore up support from conservatives within the Republican party, Kaine will aim to broaden support for Clinton beyond the Democratic base.

    “He’s from a working-class background, so he understands the difficulties of blue-collar people and others who don’t have a lot of economic resources,” said Carl Tobias, a University of Richmond law professor who has known Mr Kaine since he taught at the college in the late 1980s.

    “He’d be very good with the kind of voters Trump is attracting, but he can also reach out to lawyers and elites.”

    Clinton announced the move Friday via Twitter, moments after the tragic shooting in Munich got the “all clear”, and  following the Republican National Convention that adjourned with Donald Trump as the GOP nominee. Democrats hoped the announcement would blunt any momentum Trump gained from his convention. Clinton is expected to campaign with Kaine on Saturday in Miami.

    “I’m thrilled to announce my running mate, @TimKaine, a man who’s devoted his life to fighting for others,” she tweeted.

    A campaign official said Clinton made up her mind Friday to tap Kaine. She called him at 7:32 p.m. from Tampa, where she had appeared at a rally, the official said.

    Virginia, a battleground state where Kaine also served as mayor of Richmond, is one of a handful of swing states that will determine the outcome of the race for the White House. Although his state is not part of the rust belt, where Trump’s anti-globalisation stance is most resonant, Kaine has seen first-hand the decline of textile and furniture factories in southern Virginia.

    His own father was a welder who ran a metalworking shop in Kansas City, where Mr Kaine’s family moved after his birth in Minnesota. After she spoke to Kaine, Clinton called President Barack Obama to notify him of her choice, the official said.

    According to the WSJ, Kaine could help Clinton with minority voters. He took a year off law school to help run a technical school founded by Jesuit missionaries in Honduras. In 2013, he delivered a speech in Spanish on the Senate floor in support of an immigration overhaul. A Catholic, Mr. Kaine joined an African-American church in Richmond and was elected mayor of that majority black city.  Many Democrats have long assumed Clinton would choose Mr. Kaine because of his credentials, her comfort with him and because choosing him comes with few risks.

    Kaine’s his selection could come as a disappointment to the liberal wing of the party, some of which had hoped Clinton would turn to a more populist leader, such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, in an effort to unite the party following a divisive primary. Kaine’s positions in favor of trade and other matters leave many progressives cold. He is unpopular with some in the Democratic Party’s liberal wing due to his positions on trade and other issues. Last year, he voted to give the president “fast-track” authority to smooth passage of a controversial 12-nation trade pact called the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a deal opposed by the Democratic base. Mr. Kaine has said free-trade deals can help the economy if negotiated in ways that protect workers’ rights.

    “He does nothing for [Bernie] Sanders supporters. He does nothing for the young or people of color. He won’t help win the white workers devastated by our perverse trade policies,” said Robert Borosage, co-director of the liberal group Campaign For America’s Future. “He is the choice of a candidate confident of victory who wants a safe VP.”

    Mr. Kaine is unpopular with some in the Democratic Party’s liberal wing due to his positions on trade and other issues. Last year, he voted to give the president “fast-track” authority to smooth passage of a controversial 12-nation trade pact called the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a deal opposed by the Democratic base. Mr. Kaine has said free-trade deals can help the economy if negotiated in ways that protect workers’ rights. “He does nothing for [Bernie] Sanders supporters. He does nothing for the young or people of color. He won’t help win the white workers devastated by our perverse trade policies,” said Robert Borosage, co-director of the liberal group Campaign For America’s Future. “He is the choice of a candidate confident of victory who wants a safe VP.”

    With Donald Trump running as the law-and-order candidate, Republicans hope to tar Kaine for his opposition to the death penalty and cite his pro bono work to try to free two murderers convicted in the 1980s. The effort will echo Kaine’s 2005 campaign for governor of Virginia, when then state Attorney General Jerry Kilgore used the issue against him. What’s new is GOP researchers uncovered the argument used by Mr. Kaine as a lawyer, that the death penalty wasn’t warranted in one case because the suspect didn’t actually rape the 17-year-old victim, but instead sodomized her.

    “We plan to use this to show his extreme position on criminal-justice issues,” an RNC official said. As governor, however, Kaine didn’t let his personal views stop death-penalty cases and didn’t intervene in 11 executions, including that of Washington sniper John A. Muhammad.

    The senator has been one of Clinton’s most dedicated supporters on the Hill, endorsing her for president in early 2014 before she even announced her candidacy.

    Kaine has represented Virginia in the Senate since 2012. From 2006 to 2010 he served as governor of the state, which includes wealthy suburbs of Washington DC, big military bases and pockets of rural poverty. His wife Anne Holton is Virginia’s secretary of education.

    The state has voted for the winning candidate in seven of the last nine presidential elections.

  • Awkward?

    “Peddling fiction“ versus “inconvenient truths“…

    Presented with little comment – Grabbed from the front page of CNN – ivory tower ignorance or willful blindness, you decide…

    h/t @momomiester

    But have no fear, America – While Obama says there’s no “doom and gloom”, Hillary is “monitoring” the situation…

  • Hillary Says Trump Is Most Dangerous Presidential Candidate Ever – But Is She?

    Via The Daily Bell,

    Hillary Clinton said Monday that Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, was the most dangerous presidential candidate in the history of the United States. -CNN

    Clinton, in an interview with CBS News’ Charlie Rose, believes Donald Trump has “no self-discipline, no self-control, no sense of history, no understanding of the limits of the kind of power that any president should impose upon himself.”

    All of this could be applied to Clinton. She is by far the more dangerous of the two candidates.

    If Clinton gets into office, she will start or expand wars and through large economic programs will ensure the US’s quasi-depression deepens and that the economy never truly recovers at all (even though it may seem to.)

    If things aren’t getting worse, Hillary’s power is not advancing. She is good at making things worse.

    As her opponent, Donald Trump’s main recommendation is that he has not been a politician before.

    Donald Trump has chiefly been a builder and businessman.

    But Hillary has basically been a politician.

    Economically speaking, politics is price fixing. Laws are price-fixes, forbidding people from taking certain actions in favor of other ones.

    We may agree or disagree with these price-fixes, but they exist and are a function of lawmaking.

    Price-fixes always distort and degrade economies. The more laws you have, the more price-fixing and the more degradation.

    We’ve often argued for private justice for instance in which individuals work out their own civil and criminal differences.

    The less price-fixing (state control), the better.

    The modern state – with its massive economic, political and judicial interference – is already well on its way to toppling.

    Hillary Clinton has done well in the current system. She and her husband have built a gigantic non-profit and reportedly use it to trade favors with powerful people around the world.

    She and Bill are connected at the highest levels and can influence US political and military decisions.

    People will pay lots of money to anyone with this sort of clout. But the money does not apparently go directly to the Clintons. Instead it reportedly goes to their non-profit, so it does not seem as if the Clintons are accepting payments for their “help.”

    How well is this non-profit run? Here, from an April 2015 New York Post in an article entitled, “Clinton Foundation a ‘Slush Fund.’

    The Clinton Foundation’s finances are so messy that the nation’s most influential charity watchdog put it on its “watch list” of problematic nonprofits last month.  The Clinton family’s mega-charity took in more than $140 million in grants and pledges in 2013 but spent just $9 million on direct aid.

     

    The group spent the bulk of its windfall on administration, travel, and salaries and bonuses, with the fattest payouts going to family friends …

     

    “It seems like the Clinton Foundation operates as a slush fund for the Clintons,” said Bill Allison, a senior fellow at the Sunlight Foundation, a government watchdog.

    Supporters of the Clintons would no doubt disagree with this assessment, as would Hillary herself.

    In her interview, Hillary said of Trump, “What he has laid out is the most dangerous, reckless approach to being president than I think we’ve ever seen.”

    More from the article:

    “There is a lot of fear in our country. And when Americans are worried they’re looking for answers. He’s providing simplistic, easy answers,” Clinton said.

    The article quotes poll numbers that indicate Americans are more confident about Hillary’s experience and ability to be president, even though they don’t trust her.

    This is unfortunate. As political price-fixes must by definition make economies worse (unless they are removing laws), the more “experienced” a politician is,  the more destructive he or she has the capacity to be.

    In fact, Hillary and Bill are multimillionaires many times over. Their overarching priority is self-enrichment and the accumulation of power.

    Bottom line: Hillary is being groomed for president because she will help usher in the next wave of democracy, which is a form of global technocracy.

    This form of government  with emphasize the power of multinational corporations and those run them.

    These corporations, more than ever, will work closely with powerful politicians to generate and expand serial wars necessary to advance globalist control.

    When the Gutenberg press undermined the Catholic Church and the divinity of kings, the powers-that-be began to promote “democracy.” The French Revolution was created to further the concept.

    Now that the Internet has exposed the phoniness of most “democracy,” a new form of governance is being promoted. This will emphasize the global marketplace as run by multinational corporations and their technocratic “experts.”

    New international trade courts are being created that will allow corporations to have equal footing with nation-states.

    None of this is coincidence.

    Trade deals TPP and TPIP are both foundational building blocks of this new era. Hillary, from what we can tell, is intended to be the point person to advance this paradigm.

    Tomorrow’s globalism, as Hillary’s backers conceive of it, will be racked by war and ruled via corporate authoritarianism. As we pointed out previously, HERE, Hillary is no “democrat” and no “liberal.”

    Conclusion: Win or lose, Hillary will continue to be a dangerous backer and builder of corporate, globalist technocracy. If she wins, she’ll pursue her goals on the national stage. If she  loses, she will continue to work behind the scenes. Either way she’s dangerous.

  • "That's A Scary Graph" Former Fed Economist Warns

    The problem, warns 33-year St.Louis Fed veteran Daniel Thornton, is that "the financial cycle is way ahead of the economic cycle." As Bloomberg notes, that's a worry given that the past two downturns were driven by asset-price deflation.

    Americans are about as wealthy as they've ever been – and that's a worry?

     

    Yup, say veteran economists Daniel Thornton and Joe Carson. They're concerned that the swelling of wealth could prove unsustainable because it's far outstripped the growth of the economy since the recession's end in 2009.

     

    Thornton, who spent 33 years at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis before retiring in 2014, says in effect that we've seen this picture before. Household net worth ballooned in the late 1990's and the early 2000's; in the first instance pumped up by rising stock prices, in the second by expanding home values.

    Both cases ended badly, with the economy falling into recession after the bubbles burst.

    Chart: Bloomberg

    Just as occurred in the previous two episodes, the latest expansion of wealth  has been driven more by rising prices of assets -in this case both shares and homes – than by improved economic fundamentals…

    Since 2009, households have seen their holdings of stock and mutual funds nearly double, to $20.6 trillion.

     

    Only 6 percent of that gain can be ascribed to new flows of money into the funds or share purchases, according to calculations by Carson, director of global economic research at AllianceBernstein LP in New York. The rest is due to price appreciation.

    As the veteran economist sum up:

    The problem, he said, is that "the financial cycle is way ahead of the economic cycle.'' That's a worry given that the past two downturns were driven by asset-price deflation.

     

    "Nobody knows what's going to happen," Thornton said. "But there's plenty of reason to think that’s a scary graph."

    Still, why worry, with stock valuations at 12 year highs (amid decling earnings) and median home prices well above the prior peak, what could go wrong?

  • Stocks 'Safer' Than Bonds? The Last Time This Happened Did Not End Well

    It’s quiet out there, too quiet. With VIX once again testing cycle lows, equity risk is trading below bond risk for the first time since right before markets crashed in August 2015.

    S&P 500 implied volatility (VIX) has now been lower than Treasury ETF TLT’s implied volatility for the month of July (since Brexit)…

     

    As FundStrat’s Tom Lee points out in a recent reports, gaps as wide as the current one were followed 68% of the time by S&P 500 Index declines in the next 20 trading days, according to his data… and is clear from above, the last time stocks got this ‘relatively’ complacent, things went south very fast.

  • The 9-Point Guide To Deciphering Political Propaganda

    Submitted by David Galland via GarrentGalland.com,

    Given we are eyeballs-deep in the US presidential election cycle, now seems a particularly appropriate time to share some observations on the topic of political propaganda.

    As a naturally curious fellow, some years ago – during the Clinton vs. Bush Senior contest – I became interested in the language and techniques used in political campaigning. So much so that I dedicated my daily study period to the topic for the better part of a week.

    Since it will be impossible to escape the rhetorical onslaught for the next few months, I thought I might be able to shed some light on what goes on in the battle for your subconscious.

    As these insights come from the well-worn pages of playbooks of every politician around the world, I think they are pretty much timeless and cross all borders.

    At the core of what I learned in my studies is that the stock and trade of the propagandist revolves around trying to simplify issues, no matter how complex, into easily understood concepts that tap into the existing attitudes and emotions of the target audience.

    As an aside, since this topic touches on politics, I may inadvertently gore your ox. For the record, I view most politicians and political parties with disdain, though my disdain is particularly elevated for politicians espousing policies that interfere with my life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.

    With that brief introduction, here are just some of the techniques you can watch for as the election season gains steam.

    1. Use stereotypes.

    This technique has probably been in active use since humans lived in caves. Successfully drape the opponent in the cloak of a stereotype that triggers a negative image, and you’ve done a good day’s work as a propagandist.

    Depending on which side of the political spectrum you swing to, you might trot out old favorites such as “rich fat cat,” or “friend of Wall Street,” or “big-government socialist,” or any one of many handy sterotypes. These stereotypes allow you to instantly tap into powerful underlying prejudices and emotions.

    And, for the record, it is a well-documented fact that when we humans are emotionally worked up, we become much more suspectible to follow-on political messaging.

    2. Name substitution.

    The propagandist will try to label the opponent with an unflattering, and memorable, term. If that is successful, the label will involuntarily come to mind at the sight of the opponent. Donald Trump is the reigning champion of this technique, using name substitution like a two-by-four against his opponents.

    Every time Elizabeth Warren’s name comes up, my mind automatically substitutes her name with Pocahontas and I have to smile. On the other side of the contest, the Hillary camp has been trying to stick Trump with the “bully” label. I expect to see a lot more of that.

    3. Selection.

    Out of a mass of complex facts, the propagandist selects only those that are suitable for his or her purpose. You wouldn’t expect Trump to mention his past bankruptcies, or Hillary her long list of crimes.

    There is, actually, an instance where Trump might want to mention his bankruptcies. Folks in the influence business—including trial lawyers—use a technique called “inoculation” where, knowing your opponent is going to come after you on a point, you bring it up first and therefore diffuse it.

    “My opponent, Crooked Hillary, is probably going to mention the fact that I have had some businesses go bankrupt many years ago. She’s right.

    “When you’re involved in the rough and tumble world of business, sometimes things just aren’t going to work out, and so you have to do what you have to do to protect your employees and buy some time to pay your debts.

    But here’s the important thing to remember. I’ve run businesses—big businesses—ever since I was 19 years old. And Crooked Hillary? She’s a lawyer and never ran a single business. Not once. And that’s the problem with American politics… too many lawyers and not enough business folks!”

    4. Downright lying.

    The “big lie” has always been an important part of propaganda.

    Remember the woman who came forward to tell Congress about Iraqi soldiers raping and hacking their way through a maternity ward in Kuwait as part of the campaign to get the US to invade? The politicians got emotionally involved in the story and so, per my earlier comments, were made more susceptible to the idea of invading Iraq.

    Turned out the woman was the daughter of a high-ranking Kuwaiti official who had been enlisted by a PR firm, and her story was completely fabricated.

    Not so long ago, Bloomberg ginned up a story claiming Trump had invited thug and convicted rapist Mike Tyson to address the Republican convention.

    Baseless nonsense dreamed up by soulless PR cretins, and nothing more.

    5. Repetition.

    If you repeat a statement often enough, it will become ingrained in the minds of your target audience.

    For example, the myth propagated by the Democrats that the rich need to pay their “fair share” despite the fact that the top 10% of income earners pay 70% of all federal income taxes.

    On the flip side, the Republications constantly repeat the mantra that Democrats are all in favor of “big government” despite the reality that the size of the government has continued to grow in size under Republican and Democrat administrations alike.

    6. Assertion.

    The clever propagandist rarely engages in a substantive debate over the issues, but instead favors bold assertions to support his thesis. This is logical because the essence of propaganda is to present only one side of the picture and deliberately obfuscate or bury facts to the contrary.

    We are told Donald Trump is a bigot, but for the life of me, I can’t find any examples. Unless you think his call for enforcing immigration laws bigoted.

    We are told that police target black men for summary execution, a meme that has contributed mightily to the recent outbreak of violence against the police. In time, that will also result in the police keeping their hands in their pockets and avoiding neighborhoods where they aren’t wanted. At which point the real mayhem will begin.

    It doesn’t matter that the assertion is not factually true, what does matter is that it fits the narrative that the majority of the white population, especially fat cats like Donald Trump, are racists.

    As to the truth, here is a very worthwhile article that looks past the meme and to the statistical facts.

    7. Identify an enemy that taps into deeply held prejudices.

    It is particularly helpful to the politicians not to just be “for” something, but to be against some real or imagined enemy who is supposedly frustrating the will of his audience. This serves to deflect any opposing views while strengthening “in group” feelings. Some of the campaigners for Brexit used the influx of illegal immigrants very effectively in this regard. As has Donald Trump.

    8. Appeal to authority.

    The authority may be religious or some respected political figure. In the case of the Democrats, you’ll increasingly see references to Bill Clinton, who is apparently remembered fondly by some. By trotting out Bill, Hillary hopes the voters will overlook her many faults.

    Knowing this is coming, the Republicans have done a pretty spiffy job of tarnishing Bill Clinton’s reputation—which wasn’t real hard—with exposés on the Clinton Foundation and his proclivity for women other than his wife. (For the record, I almost made a snarky comment, but refrained.)

    9. Peer pressure.

    One of the most powerful influence techniques is summed up in the phrase, “Everyone else is doing it.” Being a herd animal, it is very hard for us as individuals to go against the crowd. In the Brexit campaign, the media tried to paint the “Leave” folks as malcontents on the fringe.  

    In the US, to self-identify as a Trump supporter is—if you believe the Democrats and the media they control (which is, like, all the media)—you are some sort of gun-hoarding racist nutjob.

    In what might be viewed as either good news or bad, the most fundamental limitation of propaganda is that almost everyone develops a more or less rigid set of beliefs and attitudes early in life and, except in trivial matters, clings to those beliefs.

    Thus, the real task of the propagandist is to tap into those attitudes and attempt, often with deliberate lies, to demonstrate that the propaganda accurately reflects the established views of the audience.

    Here is an example. On first hearing that Trump proposed to build a wall across the border with Mexico, my reaction was incredulous and very negative. What a dumbass idea.

    However, when I heard Trump describe his wall, stressing that the wall would have a “big door, a very, very big door” for people that fulfilled the legal requirements for immigration to pass through, my opposition was muted.

    I still don’t think it’s a practical idea, or even a good idea, but by his clever rhetoric—mentally painting the picture of a big door where people who followed the rules could enter—Trump was able to get me to view the idea of the wall in a different light. To wit, he’s not anti-immigration. Just anti-illegal immigration.

    Some Concluding Observations

    I doubt Trump will win the election. Not only does he have the entire liberal establishment lined up against him, but the propagandists have had great success in turning the larger ethnic communities against him.

    And in what may be a first, even the leadership of his own political party continues to go to great lengths to discredit him.

    This is not to say that Hillary and the Democrats will be able to credibly marshall an effective propaganda attack on Trump that will sway his constituents.

    For starters, that constituency views “Hillary” not just as a political opponent, but an icon for everything that is wrong with the political class. They are not budging even one iota come election day.

    Which makes this a battle for the so-called independents. And that’s where the propagandists will be aiming the big guns.

    The Democrats tried to turn women against Trump by painting him as a misogynist. However, a master of the game, Trump countered by pushing forward the women the media had pointed to as “proof” of his misogyny who, in no uncertain terms, stated that the reporter had made up the whole story.

    So, what scab can the propagandists (successfully) pick to ensure Trump doesn’t attract the independents who are uneasy about the direction America has taken? Well, for sure, Hillary can’t claim he’s corrupt or a crook, you know, because of the whole rocks-and-glass-houses thing.

    So, I expect she’ll play the usual “fat cat” card and double down with the bully thing. That way when he berates her on the national stage, especially in the upcoming debates, she’ll do the equivalent of an “I told you so! Look at how he treats poor me.”

    I think Trump is probably smart enough to figure all this out and be prepared.

    Regardless, at the end of the day it’s going to boil down to demographics. Who has the bulk of the voting public in their camp?

    If Trump is on the right side of the demographics, the side that fondly remembers the idea of America and wants to preserve it, versus those who embrace the brave new world of political correctness, multiculturalism, and populist economics, he’s got a chance.

    If not, he will be toast and those of you who make America your home will have to accept that the country is going to continue slipping down the slippery slope. And not just under Madam President, but under whichever politically correct construct gets elected after her eight-year term ends.

    Who knows, maybe by then the president will be introduced to audiences as “Ze President”?

    So, any hints from the demographic data on who might win?

    A useful gauge of what to expect from the 2016 race is to look back at the 2012 presidential election.

    In 2012, Barack Obama defeated Mitt Romney by the comfortable margin of 332 to 206 electoral votes (to win the presidency, a candidate needs 270 electoral votes). In the popular vote, Obama beat Romney by a difference of about five million votes.

    Historically, women make up 53% of presidential voters and men make up 47%. In the 2016 election, it is likely that the gender makeup will stay constant, which will favor Hillary Clinton. According to the Gallup Poll, 70% of women have an unfavorable opinion of Trump. That kind of gender gap could deliver the White House to Clinton.

    On the other end of the scale, Donald Trump has the support of white men who distrust Clinton.

    Trump may like to think he can up his chances in the presidential stakes by appealing to discontented white voters who will constitute an estimated 71% of the voting population in the 2016 elections. But the last presidential election results show otherwise. Even though the Republicans won white votes by huge margins in 2012, Mitt Romney still lost.

    What carried Barack Obama into the White House were minority votes. He won 93% of African-American voters, 71% of Latino voters, and 73% of Asian voters.

    The minority electorate carries even greater weight in 2016—with 38% of Americans constituting minorities, as opposed to 28% in 2012.

    Furthermore, almost two million more Latino voters are expected to turn up for the 2016 elections than in 2012.

    Therefore, Trump will need minority votes if he is to have a chance of winning the White House. An impossibility if one accepts the premise put forward by some political analysts that 84% of nonwhite voters won’t vote for him.

    Based on the demographics, I’m prepared to bet that it’s unlikely that Donald Trump can win the popular vote for the United States presidency in 2016.

    Then again, everyone thought Brexit would fail, so there’s that.

    I will close by saying that there are a couple of scenarios that could change the tide.

    • One is that Trump absolutely dominates in the upcoming presidential debates.
    • The other is that Hillary gets indicted.

    Regardless, I’ll be watching the election results as they come in from a comfortable seat in the Bad Brothers Wine Experience. Which, given the prospects for a Clinton presidency, seems a fine place to be.

  • Beyond 28 Pages: The US – Saudi Relationship Starts To Fray

    Submitted by Kevin Schwartz via Counterpunch.org,

    We taste the spices of Arabia, yet never feel the scorching sun which brings them forth.

     

    -Inscribed around the rotunda of the Jefferson Reading Room in the US Library Congress, above the figure of Commerce

    The long-overdue release of the classified 28 pages of a 2002 congressional inquiry into the 9/11 attacks represents the fullest public accounting of evidence that certain Saudi nationals potentially assisted some of the hijackers. Any evidence, however, that the Saudi government may have knowingly provided assistance at this point remains circumstantial and unproven, a perspective shared by a 2005 FBI-CIA memo, which was released the same day as the 28 pages. Former Senator Bob Graham, who was a member of the congressional inquiry, along with Terry Strada, the national chairwoman for 9/11 Families United for Justice Against Terrorism, have riposted that the matter of Saudi involvement is long from concluded and that more classified information needs to be issued.

    While the 28 pages may provide little closure on how the largest terrorist attack on US soil transpired, its publication is yet another indication that the primacy of Saudi Arabia as irreproachable Middle East ally is in question. The declassification of the 28 pages comes on the heels of other developments that have undermined the carefully manicured image of Saudi Arabia as stalwart and stable ally, such as: the signing of a nuclear accord with Iran in 2015- raising the prospect of increased cooperation with the kingdom’s chief rival; the distribution of a cache of Saudi foreign cables discussing internal matters, which includes monitoring its citizens and attempts to combat critical voices in the media abroad; the unverified court testimony of Zacharias Moussaoui (the “20th hijacker”) detailing potential Saudi governmental involvement in 9/11; a war in Yemen that has caused thousands of civilian deaths and led to a humanitarian crisis, and international concern over the execution of 47 individuals on terrorism charges.

    One consequence of these developments is the introduction of bipartisan legislation by members of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee to curtail American arms support to Saudi Arabia for use in its Yemen campaign. In another case, the U.S. House of Representatives only narrowly passed a bill allowing the transfer of cluster bombs to Saudi Arabia, evidence that lawmakers are beginning to approach this issue with greater care. Further, the U.S. Senate recently passed a bill that would allow the Saudi Arabian government to be held legally liable for any potential role in the 9/11 attacks, though a last-minute loophole in the bill will likely diminish its impact. Ongoing concerns continue to be expressed over the country’s funding of extremist groups and mosques worldwide. Following the massacre at an Orlando nightclub last month, for example, Hillary Clinton declared that Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries are apathetic toward their citizens’ financial support of violent extremism- not the first time the presumptive Democratic nominee singled out Saudi Arabia on the campaign trail in such a manner.

    Elsewhere relations with Saudi Arabia are undergoing a similar reappraisal. Last year Sweden decided not to renew a Saudi arms agreement maintained since 2005, largely from concern over the country’s human rights record. The United Kingdom withdrew a £5.9m bid for a prisons contract, after criticism of human rights abuses by both Tory and Labour officials. Belgium and the Netherlands have taken steps to end or limit arms sales to Saudi Arabia, while the EU passed a non-binding resolution for member countries to halt arm sales. The Canadian government proceeded with a controversial $15-billion arms deal (signed by the current government’s predecessor) only amidst a public outcry to annul it and a lawsuit arguing that the deal contravenes federal laws over prohibiting such sales to countries suspected of use against civilians or having a record of repeated human rights violations. Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion, even while taking responsibility for pushing through the arms deal, recognized the public concern by noting that the matter of selling arms to Saudi Arabia may be a question best left to the electorate.

    Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister Adel al Jubeir may be correct in noting that “the surprise in the 28 pages is that there is no surprise,” but he would be hard-pressed to exhibit a similar lack of concern about the increased public scrutiny and shifting perceptions of Saudi Arabia’s role in the world. The Saudis instead have responded to the above developments with direct actions, threatened reprisals, and a spirited public relations campaign. The Saudi ambassador to Sweden was briefly recalled. The U.S. has been threatened with the selling of $750 billion worth of Saudi investments in this country, over the Senate’s 9/11 legal liability bill. In response to the Canadian arms deal imbroglio, Saudi Arabia defended its judicial system as one that “calls for preserving and protecting human rights,” even though Freedom House ranks it worst in all categories of its freedom index. Current Saudi state officials and ambassadors and former advisors have increasingly sought forcefully to defend their country’s actions and image to the public, referencing Saudi Arabia’s key role in combating international terrorism in alliance with the United States and United Nations. They seek to justify Saudi Arabia’s “Operation Decisive Storm” in Yemen as an effort to restore “legitimate order” and “combat a militia influenced by Iran.” This public relations campaign has been abetted by other attempts to promote a counter-narrative to voices critical of Saudi Arabia, including the use of PR firms to charm American policy-makers and journalists and the attempted censoring of voices critical of the country’s human rights record. In March 2016, the Saudi American Public Relations Affairs Committee (SAPRAC) was established, the first US-based lobbying group with the expressed task of working toward strengthening US-Saudi ties and highlighting opportunities for investment. “Vision 2030,” the plan promoted as an effort to diversify and modernize the Saudi economy that includes the partial privatization of the state-owned oil company Aramco, may reasonably be seen as part of this charm offensive, as bankers worldwide eye a piece of the prize.

    Answers about Saudi Arabia’s involvement in 9/11 may prove elusive and forever unknown. But more than ever, questions are being raised and subsequent actions are being taken in relation to Saudi Arabia, extending far beyond what’s contained in the 28 pages of fourteen years ago and portending a new realignment of the US and other western countries’ long-standing relationship with this Middle East power.

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Jul 22

Today’s News 22nd July 2016

  • The New Middle East: Exit America Enter Russia

    Submitted by Ghassan Kadi via The Saker,

    Is the genie finally out of the bottle?

    A myriad of seemingly unrelated events and loose ends are converging in a manner that points in the direction of a huge win for Russian diplomacy in the Middle East, and we only need to connect the dots to see this scenario unfolding.

    What dots, one might ask?

    Henry Kissinger made it law for America to protect Israel. In his shuttle diplomacy trips in the lead up to the Camp David agreement, Kissinger has basically removed the USSR from the position of a superpower and a key partner on the negotiating table between Arabs and the Israelis and reduced its role to zilch. The ensuing dismantling of the USSR and the emergence of the so-called “New World Order” meant that Israel was to maintain its military superiority.

    However, with the rise of Axis of Resistance in general and Hezbollah in particular, Israel’s technical military edge proved unable to provide Israel with any real security. As a matter of fact, it seems to have done just the opposite. Israel has never ever been under the kind of existential threat that it faces now, with an estimated hundred thousand Hezbollah missiles, if not more, poised to hit Israeli targets as far as Eilat.

    And because America had been such a biased supporter of Israel for so long, it has lost its stature as a non-partisan arbitrator and mediator. In reality therefore, whilst America tried as hard as possible to enable Israel to impose its own peace, under its own terms, in practice, it has not been able to provide Israel with any peace under anyone’s terms.

    Off to Syria.

    Syria has been deadlocked in a war for more than five years. The Russian intervention that commenced in late September 2015 took the conflict, for the first time, into a direction in which the Syrian Government and its allies gained the clear upper hand.

    Then, and in the height of the military operation, and seemingly just a tad before achieving and declaring victory, Russia suddenly declared a major pullout and eventually a ceasefire. Many questions were raised, and even the staunch and extremely savvy ally of Russia, Hezbollah chief Nasrallah himself has questioned publicly in a recent speech the rationale behind the Russian stand and asked: ”Who has benefited from the ceasefire?” Nasrallah was obviously referring to the fact that Al-Nusra Front and other groups have taken advantage of the ceasefire to bolster their positions and even to gain some territory in some regions.

    In as much as the Russian intervention in its speed, accuracy and effectiveness has stunned the world, especially NATO, so did the pullback and ceasefire. Why did President Putin suddenly decide to scale down the military offensive, was a question that many analysts asked and tried to make speculations about.

    Short-sighted analysts, especially those who love to hate Russia, found in this a golden opportunity to lash at Russia and accuse President Putin of backing off and letting Syria down. But would Putin truly back down after he had put his global political reputation on the line? Was he really expecting the Americans to come clean and work with him on identifying who is who on the ground? Would he back off after Russian lives were lost both in Syria and in the tragic jetliner crash in Sinai, and which was done in retaliation to Russia’s military action in Syria? Would Putin risk being seen in a negative way by his own people after he had risen to the level of a rescuer and hero? Last but not least, would Putin leave Turkey, and Erdogan specifically, “unpunished” after Turkey deliberately downed a Russian plane and killed its pilot?

    The collective and individual answer to all of the above questions is a categorical NO. So why did Putin do it then? There seemed to be no clear answer; at least not for a while.

    And of course, we cannot mention Turkey without allowing the train of events to stop at the Turkish station for a very thorough analysis.

    In my analysis of the failure of “War On Syria”, which effectively began to take shape over the last two years or so, and especially after the emergence of Daesh, I had been reiterating that different elements of the “Anti-Syrian Cocktail” who were bundled together, united only by their hatred for Syria and her President, have realized that they were unable to have their collective dream materialized. They thus resorted to pursuing their own individual dreams and/or to implement some contingency plans. In that context, among other things, Daesh declared mutiny on its former allies and captured oil fields in order to be able to self-finance.

    When Erdogan looked at Daesh, he could see a double-edged sword. And irrespective of politics, Erdogan’s fundamentalist ideology is not very different from that of Daesh, and according to this doctrine, putting everything else aside, Daesh members are regarded as brethren. Furthermore, the fact that Daesh and the Kurds were in conflict was something that Erdogan could not ignore. Erdogan’s fear of the Kurdish factor is very high, and the fact that America was helping some Kurdish factions has angered Erdogan to an extreme. America cannot be a friend of Turkey and the Kurds at the same time, Erdogan has said on many occasions, both directly and indirectly.

    At the same time, America was growing very frustrated with Erdogan, and in turn, played its own cat and mouse game within the Daesh-Kurdish-Turkish triangle; favouring any side at a time that was convenient and suitable for its agenda.

    But for Erdogan, the issue was becoming very critical. Turkey is now under attack with a string of explosions going off here and there; some purportedly perpetrated by Kurds and others by Daesh. Not only has Erdogan’s gamble in Syria failed, but he has brought the conflict home; at least partially, and the economic boom and the “zero problems” policy that crowned his early years of power were all getting eroded by the quagmire that Erdogan found himself in.

    To make it worse for Erdogan, after he downed Russia’s Su-24 in November 2015, he was expecting NATO’s support, but NATO’s response was clear and brief. He was told that he needed to sort out his own problems with Russia.

    He tried to use the refugees as a trump card, but this could not go far enough. Apart from the few billion dollars he was given by the EU, which is in relative terms a petty bribe, Erdogan was unable to even clinch Turkey’s longtime aspiration of becoming an EU member.

    Erdogan found himself cornered, abandoned, under attack, facing severe Russian sanctions and an economic slump. He needed an exit strategy; an exit from trouble and into a totally new era.

    In the meantime, Israeli PM Netanyahu made an unprecedented number of trips to Moscow. Why? Many asked.

    The dust has not even began to settle yet, but there are markers that indicate that we are about to see a huge shift in Middle Eastern politics, conflicts and alliances.

    We are now hearing formal Turkish statements accusing the USA of plotting the recent failed coup attempt. Turkey has even imposed a lockdown on Incirlik airbase, a NATO airbase, in which America stock piles nuclear weapons, and has even cut off power supplies to the base. This is tantamount to declaring mutiny on NATO. When Erdogan said that the coup was a “gift from God” to cleanse the army, he might as well have also said that it was a gift from God for him to show his resentment to the USA.

    We also hear of counter-rumours that Erdogan has staged the failed coup in order to cleanse the military from elements that are not loyal to him. Whilst this scenario cannot either be confirmed or discounted, Erdogan is not mincing either his words or his actions with his NATO boss the USA.

    It is important to note here that in the last few weeks, Erdogan and Netanyahu made up, and furthermore, the Turkish-Russian relationship was normalized. Erdogan has been seen to be making a turn, and perhaps a U-turn in regard to his policies in Syria, but for what ends?

    For anyone to make a decisive win in Syria, the city of Aleppo holds the key. Whoever takes full control of Aleppo will win the war. The Syrian-Russian coalition has the upper hand to win the battle of Aleppo, but at what civilian cost? The other way to win it is to bring Erdogan down to his knees; and this seems to be what has happened. If Erdogan seals Turkey’s borders, the terrorists will be doomed.

    If we were to connect the above main dots, ignoring many other minor dots which do not need to be discussed individually, we can only see a Middle Eastern Russian-brokered masterplan coming to fruition.

    What puts Russia in the position to be able to muster such a plan is the fact that Russia is highly respected and is on fairly good terms with all major players. After mending relationships with Turkey, Russia is now on very good terms not only with Turkey, but also with Syria, Israel and Iran. The foolhardy foreign American policies in the Middle East have turned America into a force that cannot be trusted even by its own allies.

    Putin is adamant on fighting terrorism. Whether he is able to do this or not is another story, but strategically speaking, he knows well that the military fight against terrorism cannot be won, let alone properly conducted, if other players in the region are in a state of conflict.

    According to this analysis, we are on the verge of seeing a Russian plan unfolding, a plan that will not only form a foundation for ending the “War On Syria”, but also one that will seek an Arab/Israeli settlement.

    The plan will have to be based on a win-win situation for all parties involved. The Saudis (and Qataris) will be the only losers. They will probably be left out in the cold and hung to dry. No one really wants to or needs to appease them any longer. Their clout is shrinking, and so are their resources. If anything, the war on terror, if it takes form under a Russian umbrella, may need to confront Al-Saud’s sponsorship to the spread of religious radicalism.

    The avalanche of events has started, and as the USA is being shown the exit door by its closest allies, Russia is coming in as the only power that has the ability of resolving long standing niggling issues and cleaning up America’s mess.

  • Are Leftists Planning A Coup On 'President' Trump? "Voters Must Stop Him Before Military Has To"

    Submitted by Mac Slavo via SHTFPlan.com,

    How far will they go to destroy this country? Liberals and globalists are already plotting several moves ahead.

    If Donald Trump beats Hillary, they are already contemplating a Plan B.

    In a  op-ed, L.A. Times. writer James Kirchick dangles the ambiguous but ominous threat, “If Trump wins, a coup isn’t impossible here in the U.S.”

    It basically hints that a military overthrow of a Trump Presidency might be coming in the future, and would then be justified by horrific dictatorial acts that hordes of screaming leftists have been warning about all this time:

    From the L.A. Times:

    Americans viewing the recent failed coup attempt in Turkey as some exotic foreign news story — the latest, violent yet hardly unusual political development to occur in a region constantly beset by turmoil — should pause to consider that the prospect of similar instability would not be unfathomable in this country if Donald Trump were to win the presidency.

    Naturally, in this scenario, Trump would be quick to commit war crimes (as Kirchick and many others see it).

    What if his presidency is so dangerously unconstitutional and misguided that a military intervention will be necessary to take the country back?

    In their quest to stop Trump at all costs, many of his opponents are already prepared to take things that far. That is telling, and very chilling indeed.

    Throughout the campaign, Trump has repeatedly bragged about ordering soldiers to commit war crimes, and has dismissed the possibility that he would face any resistance. “They won’t refuse,” he told Fox News’ Bret Baierearlier this year. “They’re not gonna refuse me. Believe me.”  When Baier insisted that such orders are “illegal,” Trump replied, “I’m a leader. I’ve always been a leader. I’ve never had any problem leading people. If I say do it, they’re going to do it.”

     

    Try to imagine, then, a situation in which Trump commanded our military to do something stupid, illegal or irrational.

     

    […]

     

    If this scenario sounds implausible, consider that Trump has normalized so many once-outrageous things — from open racism to blatant lying. Needless to say, such dystopian situations are unimaginable under a President Hillary Clinton, who, whatever her faults, would never contemplate ordering a bombing run or — heaven forbid — a nuclear strike on a country just because its leader slighted her small hands at a summit. Rubio might detest her, but he cannot honestly say that Clinton, a former secretary of State, should not be trusted with the nation’s nuclear codes.

     

    Trump is not only patently unfit to be president, but a danger to America and the world. Voters must stop him before the military has to.   

    The veiled threat can’t be dismissed just because it is misguided or vague.

    Should Donald Trump take it as a threat? Is his life in danger?

    What happens if voters don’t make the choice these people think is the right one?

    Glenn Beck was suspended from air for a week for allow a guest to make similar comments that hinted at ‘taking Trump out.’

    Discussing a potential Donald Trump presidency, Thor lamented that impeachment would likely be off the table.

     

    “If Congress won’t remove him from office, what patriot will step up and do that if, if, he oversteps his mandate as president, his constitutional-granted authority, I should say, as president,” Thor said. “If he oversteps that, how do we get him out of office? And I don’t think there is a legal means available. I think it will be a terrible, terrible position the American people will be in to get Trump out of office because you won’t be able to do it through Congress.”

    There is a very real and very potent anger fomenting across our country. Though there are good reasons for it, most of it is misdirected, and 2016 has proven to be open season for attacks of all kind against Trump and his supporters.

    Violence has trailed his campaign as passionate leftists stop at nothing to defy his controversial policies on immigration and the rest of it.

    The rule of law is slipping away, and certain sectors of the establishment love the chaos is will bring.

  • Obama's America?

    Presented with no comment…

     

    Source: MichaelPRamirez.com

  • Full Text Of Donald Trump's Convention Speech

    Here is the full text of Donald Trump's prepared remarks as delivered at the Republican National Convention.

    * * *

    Friends, delegates and fellow Americans: I humbly and gratefully accept your nomination for the presidency of the United States.

    Together, we will lead our party back to the White House, and we will lead our country back to safety, prosperity, and peace. We will be a country of generosity and warmth. But we will also be a country of law and order.

    Our Convention occurs at a moment of crisis for our nation. The attacks on our police, and the terrorism in our cities, threaten our very way of life. Any politician who does not grasp this danger is not fit to lead our country.

    Americans watching this address tonight have seen the recent images of violence in our streets and the chaos in our communities. Many have witnessed this violence personally, some have even been its victims.

    I have a message for all of you: the crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon come to an end. Beginning on January 20th 2017, safety will be restored.

    The most basic duty of government is to defend the lives of its own citizens. Any government that fails to do so is a government unworthy to lead.

    It is finally time for a straightforward assessment of the state of our nation.

    I will present the facts plainly and honestly. We cannot afford to be so politically correct anymore.

    So if you want to hear the corporate spin, the carefully-crafted lies, and the media myths the Democrats are holding their convention next week.

    But here, at our convention, there will be no lies. We will honor the American people with the truth, and nothing else.

    Decades of progress made in bringing down crime are now being reversed by this Administration’s rollback of criminal enforcement.

    Homicides last year increased by 17% in America’s fifty largest cities. That’s the largest increase in 25 years. In our nation’s capital, killings have risen by 50 percent. They are up nearly 60% in nearby Baltimore.

    In the President’s hometown of Chicago, more than 2,000 have been the victims of shootings this year alone. And more than 3,600 have been killed in the Chicago area since he took office.

    The number of police officers killed in the line of duty has risen by almost 50% compared to this point last year. Nearly 180,000 illegal immigrants with criminal records, ordered deported from our country, are tonight roaming free to threaten peaceful citizens.

    The number of new illegal immigrant families who have crossed the border so far this year already exceeds the entire total from 2015. They are being released by the tens of thousands into our communities with no regard for the impact on public safety or resources.

    One such border-crosser was released and made his way to Nebraska. There, he ended the life of an innocent young girl named Sarah Root. She was 21 years-old, and was killed the day after graduating from college with a 4.0 Grade Point Average. Her killer was then released a second time, and he is now a fugitive from the law.

    I’ve met Sarah’s beautiful family. But to this Administration, their amazing daughter was just one more American life that wasn’t worth protecting. One more child to sacrifice on the altar of open borders. What about our economy?

    Again, I will tell you the plain facts that have been edited out of your nightly news and your morning newspaper: Nearly Four in 10 African-American children are living in poverty, while 58% of African American youth are not employed. 2 million more Latinos are in poverty today than when the President took his oath of office less than eight years ago. Another 14 million people have left the workforce entirely.

    Household incomes are down more than $4,000 since the year 2000. Our manufacturing trade deficit has reached an all-time high – nearly $800 billion in a single year. The budget is no better.

    President Obama has doubled our national debt to more than $19 trillion, and growing. Yet, what do we have to show for it? Our roads and bridges are falling apart, our airports are in Third World condition, and forty-three million Americans are on food stamps.

    Now let us consider the state of affairs abroad.

    Not only have our citizens endured domestic disaster, but they have lived through one international humiliation after another. We all remember the images of our sailors being forced to their knees by their Iranian captors at gunpoint.

    This was just prior to the signing of the Iran deal, which gave back to Iran $150 billion and gave us nothing – it will go down in history as one of the worst deals ever made. Another humiliation came when president Obama drew a red line in Syria – and the whole world knew it meant nothing.

    In Libya, our consulate – the symbol of American prestige around the globe – was brought down in flames. America is far less safe – and the world is far less stable – than when Obama made the decision to put Hillary Clinton in charge of America’s foreign policy.

    I am certain it is a decision he truly regrets. Her bad instincts and her bad judgment – something pointed out by Bernie Sanders – are what caused the disasters unfolding today. Let’s review the record. In 2009, pre-Hillary, ISIS was not even on the map.

    Libya was cooperating. Egypt was peaceful. Iraq was seeing a reduction in violence. Iran was being choked by sanctions. Syria was under control. After four years of Hillary Clinton, what do we have? ISIS has spread across the region, and the world. Libya is in ruins, and our Ambassador and his staff were left helpless to die at the hands of savage killers. Egypt was turned over to the radical Muslim brotherhood, forcing the military to retake control. Iraq is in chaos.

    Iran is on the path to nuclear weapons. Syria is engulfed in a civil war and a refugee crisis that now threatens the West. After fifteen years of wars in the Middle East, after trillions of dollars spent and thousands of lives lost, the situation is worse than it has ever been before.

    This is the legacy of Hillary Clinton: death, destruction and weakness.

    But Hillary Clinton’s legacy does not have to be America’s legacy. The problems we face now – poverty and violence at home, war and destruction abroad – will last only as long as we continue relying on the same politicians who created them. A change in leadership is required to change these outcomes. Tonight, I will share with you my plan of action for America.

    The most important difference between our plan and that of our opponents, is that our plan will put America First. Americanism, not globalism, will be our credo. As long as we are led by politicians who will not put America First, then we can be assured that other nations will not treat America with respect. This will all change in 2017.

    The American People will come first once again. My plan will begin with safety at home – which means safe neighborhoods, secure borders, and protection from terrorism. There can be no prosperity without law and order. On the economy, I will outline reforms to add millions of new jobs and trillions in new wealth that can be used to rebuild America.

    A number of these reforms that I will outline tonight will be opposed by some of our nation’s most powerful special interests. That is because these interests have rigged our political and economic system for their exclusive benefit.

    Big business, elite media and major donors are lining up behind the campaign of my opponent because they know she will keep our rigged system in place. They are throwing money at her because they have total control over everything she does. She is their puppet, and they pull the strings.

    That is why Hillary Clinton’s message is that things will never change. My message is that things have to change – and they have to change right now. Every day I wake up determined to deliver for the people I have met all across this nation that have been neglected, ignored, and abandoned.

    I have visited the laid-off factory workers, and the communities crushed by our horrible and unfair trade deals. These are the forgotten men and women of our country. People who work hard but no longer have a voice.

    I AM YOUR VOICE.

    I have embraced crying mothers who have lost their children because our politicians put their personal agendas before the national good. I have no patience for injustice, no tolerance for government incompetence, no sympathy for leaders who fail their citizens.

    When innocent people suffer, because our political system lacks the will, or the courage, or the basic decency to enforce our laws – or worse still, has sold out to some corporate lobbyist for cash – I am not able to look the other way.

    And when a Secretary of State illegally stores her emails on a private server, deletes 33,000 of them so the authorities can’t see her crime, puts our country at risk, lies about it in every different form and faces no consequence – I know that corruption has reached a level like never before.

    When the FBI Director says that the Secretary of State was “extremely careless” and “negligent,” in handling our classified secrets, I also know that these terms are minor compared to what she actually did. They were just used to save her from facing justice for her terrible crimes.

    In fact, her single greatest accomplishment may be committing such an egregious crime and getting away with it – especially when others have paid so dearly. When that same Secretary of State rakes in millions of dollars trading access and favors to special interests and foreign powers I know the time for action has come.

    I have joined the political arena so that the powerful can no longer beat up on people that cannot defend themselves. Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it. I have seen firsthand how the system is rigged against our citizens, just like it was rigged against Bernie Sanders – he never had a chance.

    But his supporters will join our movement, because we will fix his biggest issue: trade. Millions of Democrats will join our movement because we are going to fix the system so it works for all Americans. In this cause, I am proud to have at my side the next Vice President of the United States: Governor Mike Pence of Indiana.

    We will bring the same economic success to America that Mike brought to Indiana. He is a man of character and accomplishment. He is the right man for the job. The first task for our new Administration will be to liberate our citizens from the crime and terrorism and lawlessness that threatens their communities.

    America was shocked to its core when our police officers in Dallas were brutally executed. In the days after Dallas, we have seen continued threats and violence against our law enforcement officials. Law officers have been shot or killed in recent days in Georgia, Missouri, Wisconsin, Kansas, Michigan and Tennessee.

    On Sunday, more police were gunned down in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Three were killed, and four were badly injured. An attack on law enforcement is an attack on all Americans. I have a message to every last person threatening the peace on our streets and the safety of our police: when I take the oath of office next year, I will restore law and order our country.

    I will work with, and appoint, the best prosecutors and law enforcement officials in the country to get the job done. In this race for the White House, I am the Law And Order candidate. The irresponsible rhetoric of our President, who has used the pulpit of the presidency to divide us by race and color, has made America a more dangerous environment for everyone.

    This Administration has failed America’s inner cities. It’s failed them on education. It’s failed them on jobs. It’s failed them on crime. It’s failed them at every level.

    When I am President, I will work to ensure that all of our kids are treated equally, and protected equally.

    Every action I take, I will ask myself: does this make life better for young Americans in Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, Ferguson who have as much of a right to live out their dreams as any other child America?

    To make life safe in America, we must also address the growing threats we face from outside America: we are going to defeat the barbarians of ISIS. Once again, France is the victim of brutal Islamic terrorism.

    Men, women and children viciously mowed down. Lives ruined. Families ripped apart. A nation in mourning.

    The damage and devastation that can be inflicted by Islamic radicals has been over and over – at the World Trade Center, at an office party in San Bernardino, at the Boston Marathon, and a military recruiting center in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

    Only weeks ago, in Orlando, Florida, 49 wonderful Americans were savagely murdered by an Islamic terrorist. This time, the terrorist targeted our LGBT community. As your President, I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBT citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology. To protect us from terrorism, we need to focus on three things.

    We must have the best intelligence gathering operation in the world. We must abandon the failed policy of nation building and regime change that Hillary Clinton pushed in Iraq, Libya, Egypt and Syria. Instead, we must work with all of our allies who share our goal of destroying ISIS and stamping out Islamic terror.

    This includes working with our greatest ally in the region, the State of Israel. Lastly, we must immediately suspend immigration from any nation that has been compromised by terrorism until such time as proven vetting mechanisms have been put in place.

    My opponent has called for a radical 550% increase in Syrian refugees on top of existing massive refugee flows coming into our country under President Obama. She proposes this despite the fact that there’s no way to screen these refugees in order to find out who they are or where they come from. I only want to admit individuals into our country who will support our values and love our people.

    Anyone who endorses violence, hatred or oppression is not welcome in our country and never will be.

    Decades of record immigration have produced lower wages and higher unemployment for our citizens, especially for African-American and Latino workers. We are going to have an immigration system that works, but one that works for the American people.

    On Monday, we heard from three parents whose children were killed by illegal immigrants Mary Ann Mendoza, Sabine Durden, and Jamiel Shaw. They are just three brave representatives of many thousands. Of all my travels in this country, nothing has affected me more deeply than the time I have spent with the mothers and fathers who have lost their children to violence spilling across our border.

    These families have no special interests to represent them. There are no demonstrators to protest on their behalf. My opponent will never meet with them, or share in their pain. Instead, my opponent wants Sanctuary Cities. But where was sanctuary for Kate Steinle? Where was Sanctuary for the children of Mary Ann, Sabine and Jamiel? Where was sanctuary for all the other Americans who have been so brutally murdered, and who have suffered so horribly?

    These wounded American families have been alone. But they are alone no longer. Tonight, this candidate and this whole nation stand in their corner to support them, to send them our love, and to pledge in their honor that we will save countless more families from suffering the same awful fate.

    We are going to build a great border wall to stop illegal immigration, to stop the gangs and the violence, and to stop the drugs from pouring into our communities. I have been honored to receive the endorsement of America’s Border Patrol Agents, and will work directly with them to protect the integrity of our lawful immigration system.

    By ending catch-and-release on the border, we will stop the cycle of human smuggling and violence. Illegal border crossings will go down. Peace will be restored. By enforcing the rules for the millions who overstay their visas, our laws will finally receive the respect they deserve.

    Tonight, I want every American whose demands for immigration security have been denied – and every politician who has denied them – to listen very closely to the words I am about to say.

    On January 21st of 2017, the day after I take the oath of office, Americans will finally wake up in a country where the laws of the United States are enforced. We are going to be considerate and compassionate to everyone.

    But my greatest compassion will be for our own struggling citizens. My plan is the exact opposite of the radical and dangerous immigration policy of Hillary Clinton. Americans want relief from uncontrolled immigration. Communities want relief.

    Yet Hillary Clinton is proposing mass amnesty, mass immigration, and mass lawlessness. Her plan will overwhelm your schools and hospitals, further reduce your jobs and wages, and make it harder for recent immigrants to escape from poverty.

    I have a different vision for our workers. It begins with a new, fair trade policy that protects our jobs and stands up to countries that cheat. It’s been a signature message of my campaign from day one, and it will be a signature feature of my presidency from the moment I take the oath of office.

    I have made billions of dollars in business making deals – now I’m going to make our country rich again. I am going to turn our bad trade agreements into great ones. America has lost nearly-one third of its manufacturing jobs since 1997, following the enactment of disastrous trade deals supported by Bill and Hillary Clinton.

    Remember, it was Bill Clinton who signed NAFTA, one of the worst economic deals ever made by our country.

    Never again.

    I am going to bring our jobs back to Ohio and to America – and I am not going to let companies move to other countries, firing their employees along the way, without consequences.

    My opponent, on the other hand, has supported virtually every trade agreement that has been destroying our middle class. She supported NAFTA, and she supported China’s entrance into the World Trade Organization – another one of her husband’s colossal mistakes.

    She supported the job killing trade deal with South Korea. She has supported the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The TPP will not only destroy our manufacturing, but it will make America subject to the rulings of foreign governments. I pledge to never sign any trade agreement that hurts our workers, or that diminishes our freedom and independence. Instead, I will make individual deals with individual countries.

    No longer will we enter into these massive deals, with many countries, that are thousands of pages long – and which no one from our country even reads or understands. We are going to enforce all trade violations, including through the use of taxes and tariffs, against any country that cheats.

    This includes stopping China’s outrageous theft of intellectual property, along with their illegal product dumping, and their devastating currency manipulation. Our horrible trade agreements with China and many others, will be totally renegotiated. That includes renegotiating NAFTA to get a much better deal for America – and we’ll walk away if we don’t get the deal that we want. We are going to start building and making things again.

    Next comes the reform of our tax laws, regulations and energy rules. While Hillary Clinton plans a massive tax increase, I have proposed the largest tax reduction of any candidate who has declared for the presidential race this year – Democrat or Republican. Middle-income Americans will experience profound relief, and taxes will be simplified for everyone.

    America is one of the highest-taxed nations in the world. Reducing taxes will cause new companies and new jobs to come roaring back into our country. Then we are going to deal with the issue of regulation, one of the greatest job-killers of them all. Excessive regulation is costing our country as much as $2 trillion a year, and we will end it. We are going to lift the restrictions on the production of American energy. This will produce more than $20 trillion in job creating economic activity over the next four decades.

    My opponent, on the other hand, wants to put the great miners and steel workers of our country out of work – that will never happen when I am President. With these new economic policies, trillions of dollars will start flowing into our country.

    This new wealth will improve the quality of life for all Americans – We will build the roads, highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, and the railways of tomorrow. This, in turn, will create millions more jobs. We will rescue kids from failing schools by helping their parents send them to a safe school of their choice.

    My opponent would rather protect education bureaucrats than serve American children. We will repeal and replace disastrous Obamacare. You will be able to choose your own doctor again. And we will fix TSA at the airports! We will completely rebuild our depleted military, and the countries that we protect, at a massive loss, will be asked to pay their fair share.

    We will take care of our great Veterans like they have never been taken care of before. My opponent dismissed the VA scandal as being not widespread – one more sign of how out of touch she really is. We are going to ask every Department Head in government to provide a list of wasteful spending projects that we can eliminate in my first 100 days. The politicians have talked about it, I’m going to do it. We are also going to appoint justices to the United States Supreme Court who will uphold our laws and our Constitution.

    The replacement for Justice Scalia will be a person of similar views and principles. This will be one of the most important issues decided by this election. My opponent wants to essentially abolish the 2nd amendment. I, on the other hand, received the early and strong endorsement of the National Rifle Association and will protect the right of all Americans to keep their families safe.

    At this moment, I would like to thank the evangelical community who have been so good to me and so supportive. You have so much to contribute to our politics, yet our laws prevent you from speaking your minds from your own pulpits.

    An amendment, pushed by Lyndon Johnson, many years ago, threatens religious institutions with a loss of their tax-exempt status if they openly advocate their political views.

    I am going to work very hard to repeal that language and protect free speech for all Americans. We can accomplish these great things, and so much else – all we need to do is start believing in ourselves and in our country again. It is time to show the whole world that America Is Back – bigger, and better and stronger than ever before.

    In this journey, I'm so lucky to have at my side my wife Melania and my wonderful children, Don, Ivanka, Eric, Tiffany, and Barron: you will always be my greatest source of pride and joy. My Dad, Fred Trump, was the smartest and hardest working man I ever knew. I wonder sometimes what he’d say if he were here to see this tonight.

    It’s because of him that I learned, from my youngest age, to respect the dignity of work and the dignity of working people. He was a guy most comfortable in the company of bricklayers, carpenters, and electricians and I have a lot of that in me also. Then there’s my mother, Mary. She was strong, but also warm and fair-minded. She was a truly great mother. She was also one of the most honest and charitable people I have ever known, and a great judge of character.

    To my sisters Mary Anne and Elizabeth, my brother Robert and my late brother Fred, I will always give you my love you are most special to me. I have loved my life in business.

    But now, my sole and exclusive mission is to go to work for our country – to go to work for all of you. It’s time to deliver a victory for the American people. But to do that, we must break free from the petty politics of the past.

    America is a nation of believers, dreamers, and strivers that is being led by a group of censors, critics, and cynics.

    Remember: all of the people telling you that you can’t have the country you want, are the same people telling you that I wouldn’t be standing here tonight. No longer can we rely on those elites in media, and politics, who will say anything to keep a rigged system in place.

    Instead, we must choose to Believe In America. History is watching us now.

    It’s waiting to see if we will rise to the occasion, and if we will show the whole world that America is still free and independent and strong.

    My opponent asks her supporters to recite a three-word loyalty pledge. It reads: “I’m With Her”. I choose to recite a different pledge.

    My pledge reads: “I’M WITH YOU – THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.”

    I am your voice.

    So to every parent who dreams for their child, and every child who dreams for their future, I say these words to you tonight: I’m With You, and I will fight for you, and I will win for you.

    To all Americans tonight, in all our cities and towns, I make this promise: We Will Make America Strong Again.

    We Will Make America Proud Again.

    We Will Make America Safe Again.

    And We Will Make America Great Again.

    THANK YOU.

     

  • WSJ Reporter's "Shocking" Discovery: DHS Can Confiscate Any Device Along The Border Without Suspicion

    A WSJ reporter who covers the Middle East had a very “troubling” close-encounter with the US police superstate.

    Maria Abi-Habib was detained by federal agents at Los Angeles International Airport, who demanded to confiscate her two cell phones, and was shocked to learn that border agents have the authority to do that. The reporter has both U.S. and Lebanese citizenship and was traveling on an American passport. She was flying into Los Angeles from Beirut last Thursday when she taken out of line at immigration.

    “They grilled me for an hour,” she wrote. “I answered jovially, because I’ve had enough high-level security experiences to know that being annoyed or hostile will work against you.” Abi-Habib said that the agents then asked for her cellphones in order to “collect information.”

    “That is where I drew the line,” Abi-Habib wrote. “I told her I had First Amendment rights as a journalist she couldn’t violate and I was protected under.”

    According to Abi-Habib, the agent then presented a DHS document which explained that the government has the right to confiscate phones within 100 miles from U.S. borders: the document “basically says the US government has the right to seize my phones and my rights as a US citizen (or citizen of the world) go out the window.” 

    She posted a photo of this tearsheet on the Facebook post.  The same document is also available on the website of the US Customs and Border Patrol and can be found at the following link. The key section is the following:

    You’re receiving this sheet because your electronic device(s) has been detained for further examination, which may include copying. You will receive a written receipt (Form 6051-D) that details what item(s) are being detained, who at CBP will be your point of contact, and the contact information (including telephone number) you provide to facilitate the return of your property within a reasonable time upon completion of the examination.

     

    The CBP officer who approved the detention will speak with you and explain the process, and provide his or her name and contact telephone number if you have any concerns. Some airport locations have dedicated Passenger Service Managers who are available in addition to the onsite supervisor to address any concerns.

    More importantly, one can not refuse to hand over any demanded electronic device to the customs agent, as “collection of this information is mandatory at the time that CBP or ICE seeks to copy information from the electronic device. Failure to provide information to assist CBP or ICE in the copying of information from the electronic device may result in its detention and/or seizure.”

     

    Here, Abi-Habib did something the DHS did not expect: “I called their bluff” she says, as she refused to hand over her two cell phones.   

    “You’ll have to call The Wall Street Journal’s lawyers, as those phones are the property of WSJ,” she said.

    This led to the agent accusing her of “hindering the investigation.” The agent left to speak with her supervisor, returning 30 minutes later to tell Abi-Habib that she was free to go. “I have no idea why they wanted my phones,” she wrote. “It could have been a way for them to download my contacts. Or maybe they expect me of terrorism or sympathizing with terrorists.”

    “Why I was eventually spared, we do not know and we are writing a letter contesting DHS’ treatment of me,” Abi-Habib wrote. “I assume they avoided seizing my phones forcefully because they knew we would make a stink about it and have a big name behind us — WSJ.”

    According to CNN, DHS later acknowledged the incident occurred, confirming the story, and explaining Abi-Habib’s shock at the realization of being singled-out by the police state.

    Except…

    None of this is actually new. 

    The policy was set in 2013 when DHS reviewed its own powers and concluded that its agents were clear to search at will.  “Imposing a requirement that officers have reasonable suspicion in order to conduct a border search of an electronic device would be operationally harmful without concomitant civil rights/civil liberties benefits,” it wrote.

    In fact we wrote about precisely this over three years ago, in February 2013, in “Goodbye Fourth Amendment: Homeland Security Affirms “Suspicionless” Confiscation Of Devices Along Border.” As a reminder, this is what we said:

    Slowly but surely the administration is making sure that both the US constitution, and its various amendments, become a thing of the past. In the name of national security, of course. And while until now it was the First and Second amendments that were the target of the administration’s ongoing efforts to eavesdrop on anyone, all the time, in order to decide who may be a domestic terrorist and thus fit for ‘droning’, coupled with an aggressive push to disarm and curtail the propagation of weapons in what some perceive is nothing more than an attempt to take away a population’s one recourse to defend itself against a tyrannical government, the time may be coming to say goodbye to the Fourth amendment – the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures – next. But only in close proximity to the border at first. As it turns out the Department of Homeland Security’s civil rights watchdog has concluded that travelers along the nation’s borders may have their electronics seized and the contents of those devices examined for any reason whatsoever — all in the name of national security.

    Who was at fault for this?  As it turns out, first Bush and then Obama.

    The President George W. Bush administration first announced the suspicionless, electronics search rules in 2008. The President Barack Obama administration followed up with virtually the same rules a year later. Between 2008 and 2010, 6,500 persons had their electronic devices searched along the U.S. border, according to DHS data.

     

    What does this decision mean in principle: According to legal precedent, the Fourth Amendment — the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures — does not apply along the border. By the way, the government contends the Fourth-Amendment-Free Zone stretches 100 miles inland from the nation’s actual border.

    Finally, why 100 miles?

    Because as the attached map shows, the “borders” in question include maritime zones as well, and with the bulk of the US population concentrated along the coasts, the “constitution free” zone of the US includes virtually everyone living on the two seaboards: some 66% of the US population.

     

    We even laid out a case study of what happened to a perfectly innocent man:

    A lawsuit the ACLU brought on the issue concerns a New York man whose laptop was seized along the Canadian border in 2010 and returned 11 days later after his attorney complained. At an Amtrak inspection point, Pascal Abidor showed his U.S. passport to a federal agent. He was ordered to move to the cafe car, where they removed his laptop from his luggage and “ordered Mr. Abidor to enter his password,” according to the lawsuit.

     

    Agents asked him about pictures they found on his laptop, which included Hamas and Hezbollah rallies. He explained that he was earning a doctoral degree at a Canadian university on the topic of the modern history of Shiites in Lebanon. He was handcuffed and then jailed for three hours while the authorities looked through his computer while numerous agents questioned him, according to the suit, which is pending in New York federal court.

    As we concluded then: “First they came for your iPad, and nobody said anything…”

    Over three year later, they came for a very stunned Maria Abi-Habib’s cell phones and she said something, because it is one thing to read about it one some website, it is something totally different to go through it in person.

    * * *

    Amusingly, the confusion stretched to the very top.

    The Wall Street Journal’s editor in chief, Gerard Baker, told CNN that the paper is “disturbed by the serious incident involving Abi-Habib.”

    “We have been working to learn more about these events, but the notion that Customs and Border Protection agents would stop and question one of our journalists in connection with her reporting and seek to search her cell phones is unacceptable,” Baker said in a statement to CNNMoney. 

    Actually, Gerard, it’s the law and has been for years. Even this little “fringe tinfoil blog” reported on it while you were focusing on far greater matters. Maybe now that you are familiar with just what the US police state is capable of doing, you will write an article decrying it?

    We doubt it.

    * * *

    But the absolute in irony came, when CNN quoted Gregory T. Nojeim, a lawyer at the Center for Democracy & Technology, who “is concerned” about these extraordinary powers.  “They should have to have reasonable suspicion when they do this,” he said.

    They should yes, but they don’t. And if you “lawyers” were actually doing your job and protecting civil liberties, this would not have happened. Of course, we realize that is asking far too much.

    * * *

    Her full Facebook post is reposted below in its entirety. Highlights ours.

    Dear friends,

    I wanted to share a troubling experience I had with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), in the hopes it may help you protect your private information. I was born a US citizen and was traveling on my American passport.

    I landed at LA airport last Thursday to attend a wedding. I was standing in line for immigration when a DHS officer said “oh, there you are.” I was puzzled. “I was trying to recognize you from your picture. I’m here to help you get through the line.”

    I asked a few questions, and she said that DHS had decided to pick me up when my name came in on the flight manifest (this is not uncommon, for countries to share passenger names). She didn’t say whether the flight manifest was sent from Beirut, where I started my trip, or Frankfurt, where I hopped onto my connecting flight to LAX. The DHS agent went on to say she was there to help me navigate immigration because I am a journalist with The Wall Street Journal and have traveled to many dangerous places that are on the US’ radar for terrorism. She independently knew who I worked for and my Twitter account, countries I’d reported from (like Iraq) and even recent articles I’d written — I told her nothing about myself.

    This didn’t seem out of the ordinary at first — I’ve had US Immigration officials tell me my name is on a special list that allows me to circumvent the questioning most would receive if they had a similar travel profile or internet print (talking to members of known terrorist groups). I travel to the US about twice a year and have always remarked on how smooth my experiences at Customs/Immigration are.

    But after pushing me to the front of a very long line at immigration, she then escorted me to the luggage belt, where I collected my suitcase, and then she took me to a special section of LAX airport. Another customs agent joined her at that point and they grilled me for an hour – asking me about the years I lived in the US, when I moved to Beirut and why, who lives at my in-laws’ house in LA and numbers for the groom and bride whose wedding I was attending. I answered jovially, because I’ve had enough high-level security experiences to know that being annoyed or hostile will work against you.

    But then she asked me for my two cellphones. I asked her what she wanted from them.

    “We want to collect information” she said, refusing to specify what kind.

    And that is where I drew the line — I told her I had First Amendment rights as a journalist she couldn’t violate and I was protected under. I explained I had to protect my sources of information.

    “Did you just admit you collect information for foreign governments?” she asked, her tone turning hostile.

    “No, that’s exactly not what I just said,” I replied, explaining again why I would not hand over my phones.

    She handed me a DHS document, a photo of which I’ve attached. It basically says the US government has the right to seize my phones and my rights as a US citizen (or citizen of the world) go out the window. This law applies at any point of entry into the US, whether naval, air or land and extends for 100 miles into the US from the border or formal points of entry. So, all of NY city for instance. If they forgot to ask you at JFK airport for your phones, but you’re having a drink in Manhattan the next day, you technically fall under this authority. And because they are acting under the pretense to protect the US from terrorism, you have to give it up.

    So I called their bluff.

    “You’ll have to call The Wall Street Journal’s lawyers, as those phones are the property of WSJ,” I told her, calmly.

    She accused me of hindering the investigation – a dangerous accusation as at that point, they can use force. I put my hands up and said I’d done nothing but be cooperative, but when it comes to my phones, she would have to call WSJ’s lawyers.

    She said she had to speak to her supervisor about my lack of cooperation and would return. I was left with the second DHS officer who’d been there since we left the baggage claim area.

    The female officer returned 30 minutes later and said I was free to go. I have no idea why they wanted my phones — it could have been a way for them to download my contacts. Or maybe they expect me of terrorism or sympathizing with terrorists — although my profile wouldn’t fit, considering I am named Maria Teresa, and for a variety of other reasons including my small child.

    I’ve since done some research and spoken to an encryption expert. This is the information I’ve gleaned which I hope may help those reading:

    1) My rights as a journalist or US citizen do not apply at the border, as explained above, since legislation was quietly passed in 2013 giving DHS very broad powers (I researched this since the incident). This legislation also circumvents the Fourth Amendment that protects Americans’ privacy and prevents searches and seizures without a proper warrant.

    2) Always use encryption, but even this cannot keep you 100% safe. If you are contacting someone about a sensitive matter, use an application like Signal. But if DHS seizes your phone, they can see you’ve been speaking to that person, although if you erase your chats, they won’t see what you spoke about.

    3) Never download anything or even open a link from a friend or source that looks suspicious. This may be malware, meaning that they have downloaded software on your phone that will be able to circumvent the powers of encryption. Don’t leave your phone unattended for the same reasons – they can just open it up and download malware.

    4) Travel “naked” as one encryption expert told me. If any government wants your information, they will get it no matter what. Remember the San Bernardino shooter? Apple refused to comply, so the US got the information by paying an Israeli company $1 million to unlock the shooter’s phone. So if you have something extra sensitive on your device – phone or laptop – do not travel with it and instead use your sim card in a clean phone. And for sensitive numbers, write them on a piece of paper you can somehow secure and then restore the factory settings on your phone – which seems to be the only way of wiping it clean 100%.

    Sorry for the long post. I hope this helps.

  • The Real Reason Pharma Companies Hate Medical Marijuana (Spoiler Alert: It Works)

    Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

    Former Federal Judge Nancy Gertner was appointed to the federal bench by Bill Clinton in 1994. She presided over trials for 17 years. And Sunday, she stood before a crowd at The Aspen Ideas Festival to denounce most punishments that she imposed.

     

    Among 500 sanctions that she handed down, “80 percent I believe were unfair and disproportionate,” she said. “I left the bench in 2011 to join the Harvard faculty to write about those stories––to write about how it came to pass that I was obliged to sentence people to terms that, frankly, made no sense under any philosophy.”

     

    She went on to savage the War on Drugs at greater length. “This is a war that I saw destroy lives,” she said. “It eliminated a generation of African American men, covered our racism in ostensibly neutral guidelines and mandatory minimums… and created an intergenerational problem––although I wasn’t on the bench long enough to see this, we know that the sons and daughters of the people we sentenced are in trouble, and are in trouble with the criminal justice system.”

     

    – From the post: Federal Judge of 17 Years Repents – Compares Damage Done by “War on Drugs” to Destruction of World War II

    Whenever an irrational and inhumane law remains on the books far longer than any thinking person would consider appropriate, there’s usually one reason behind it: money.

    Unsurprisingly, the continued federal prohibition on marijuana and its absurd classification as a Schedule 1 drug is no exception. Thankfully, a recent study published in the journal Health Affairs shows us exactly why pharmaceutical companies are one of the leading voices against medical marijuana. It has nothing to do with healthcare and everything to do with corporate greed.

    So is it a war on drugs, or a war on cheap medicine. Decide for yourself.

    The Washington Post reports:

    There’s a body of research showing that painkiller abuse and overdose are lower in states with medical marijuana laws. These studies have generally assumed that when medical marijuana is available, pain patients are increasingly choosing pot over powerful and deadly prescription narcotics. But that’s always been just an assumption.

     

    Now a new study, released in the journal Health Affairs, validates these findings by providing clear evidence of a missing link in the causal chain running from medical marijuana to falling overdoses. Ashley and W. David Bradford, a daughter-father pair of researchers at the University of Georgia, scoured the database of all prescription drugs paid for under Medicare Part D from 2010 to 2013.

     

    They found that, in the 17 states with a medical-marijuana law in place by 2013, prescriptions for painkillers and other classes of drugs fell sharply compared with states that did not have a medical-marijuana law. The drops were quite significant: In medical-marijuana states, the average doctor prescribed 265 fewer doses of antidepressants each year, 486 fewer doses of seizure medication, 541 fewer anti-nausea doses and 562 fewer doses of anti-anxiety medication.

    Screen Shot 2016-07-20 at 1.39.37 PM

    But most strikingly, the typical physician in a medical-marijuana state prescribed 1,826 fewer doses of painkillers in a given year.

     

    The tanking numbers for painkiller prescriptions in medical marijuana states are likely to cause some concern among pharmaceutical companies. These companies have long been at the forefront of opposition to marijuana reform, funding research by anti-pot academics and funneling dollars to groups, such as the Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America, that oppose marijuana legalization.

     

    Pharmaceutical companies have also lobbied federal agencies directly to prevent the liberalization of marijuana laws. In one case, recently uncovered by the office of Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), the Department of Health and Human Services recommended that naturally derived THC, the main psychoactive component of marijuana, be moved from Schedule 1 to Schedule 3 of the Controlled Substances Act — a less restrictive category that would acknowledge the drug’s medical use and make it easier to research and prescribe. Several months after HHS submitted its recommendation, at least one drug company that manufactures a synthetic version of THC — which would presumably have to compete with any natural derivatives — wrote to the Drug Enforcement Administration to express opposition to rescheduling natural THC, citing “the abuse potential in terms of the need to grow and cultivate substantial crops of marijuana in the United States.”

     

    The DEA ultimately rejected the HHS recommendation without explanation.

    Yes, this DEA…

    DEA Agents Caught Having Drug Cartel Funded Prostitute Sex Parties Received Slap on the Wrist; None Fired

    The DEA Strikes Again – Agents Seize Man’s Life Savings Under Civil Asset Forfeiture Without Charges

    DEA Agents Wrongly Jailed Student for 5 Days Without Food or Water Until He Had to Drink Own Urine; Nobody Fired

    In what may be the most concerning finding for the pharmaceutical industry, the Bradfords took their analysis a step further by estimating the cost savings to Medicare from the decreased prescribing. They found that about $165 million was saved in the 17 medical marijuana states in 2013. In a back-of-the-envelope calculation, the estimated annual Medicare prescription savings would be nearly half a billion dollars if all 50 states were to implement similar programs.

     

    One limitation of the study is that it only looks at Medicare Part D spending, which applies only to seniors. Previous studies have shown that seniors are among the most reluctant medical-marijuana users, so the net effect of medical marijuana for all prescription patients may be even greater.

    Naturally, any sane society would immediately declassify marijuana as a Schedule 1 drug. Unfortunately, we do not live in a sane society.

    Meanwhile, since we’re already on the topic of the disastrously idiotic “war on drugs,” let’s examine another egregious example of how it’s abused in order to unnecessarily ruin countless lives across America.

    What follows are excerpts from a recent New York Times article covering “$2 Roadside Drug Tests” (I strongly suggest reading the entire thing):

    Prepare to be outraged.

    The officer asked Wilson to step out of the car. Wilson complied. The officer leaned in over the driver’s seat, looked around, then called to his partner; in the report Officer Duc Nguyen later filed, he wrote that he saw a needle in the car’s ceiling lining. Albritton didn’t know what he was talking about. Before she could protest, Officer David Helms had come around to her window and was asking for consent to search the car. If Albritton refused, Helms said, he would call for a drug-sniffing dog. Albritton agreed to the full search and waited nervously outside the car.

     

    Helms spotted a white crumb on the floor. In the report, Nguyen wrote that the officers believed the crumb was crack cocaine. They handcuffed Wilson and Albritton and stood them in front of the patrol car, its lights still flashing. They were on display for rush-hour traffic, criminal suspects sweating through their clothes in the 93-degree heat.

     

    At the police academy four years earlier, Helms was taught that to make a drug arrest on the street, an officer needed to conduct an elementary chemical test, right then and there. It’s what cops routinely do across the country every day while making thousands upon thousands of drug arrests. Helms popped the trunk of his patrol car, pulled out a small plastic pouch that contained a vial of pink liquid and returned to Albritton. He opened the lid on the vial and dropped a tiny piece of the crumb into the liquid. If the liquid remained pink, that would rule out the presence of cocaine. If it turned blue, then Albritton, as the owner of the car, could become a felony defendant.

     

    Helms waved the vial in front of her face and said, “You’re busted.”

     

    Albritton was booked into the Harris County jail at 3:37 a.m., nine hours after she was arrested. Wilson had been detained for driving without a license but would soon be released. Albritton was charged with felony drug possession and faced a much longer ordeal. Already, she was terrified as she thought about her family. Albritton was raised in a speck of a town called Marion at the northern edge of Louisiana. Her father still drove lumber trucks there; her mother had worked as a pharmacy technician until she died of colon cancer. Albritton was 15 then. She went through two unexpected pregnancies, the first at age 16, and two ill-fated marriages. But she had also pieced together a steady livelihood managing apartment complexes, and when her younger son was born disabled, she worked relentlessly to care for him. Now their future was almost certainly shattered.

     

    She heard her name called and stepped forward to the reinforced window. A tall man with thinning hair and wire-rim glasses approached and introduced himself as Dan Richardson, her court-appointed defense attorney.

     

    Richardson told Albritton that she was going to be charged with possession of a controlled substance, crack cocaine, at an arraignment that morning. Albritton recalls him explaining that this was a felony, and the maximum penalty was two years in state prison. She doesn’t remember him asking her what actually happened, or if she believed she was innocent. Instead, she recalls, he said that the prosecutor had already offered a deal for much less than two years. If she pleaded guilty, she would receive a 45-day sentence in the county jail, and most likely serve only half that.

     

    Albritton told Richardson that the police were mistaken; she was innocent. But Richardson, she says, was unswayed. The police had found crack in her car. The test proved it. She could spend a few weeks in jail or two years in prison. In despair, Albritton agreed to the deal.

     

    Police officers arrest more than 1.2 million people a year in the United States on charges of illegal drug possession. Field tests like the one Officer Helms used in front of Amy Albritton help them move quickly from suspicion to conviction. But the kits — which cost about $2 each and have changed little since 1973 — are far from reliable.

     

    Think about the insanity of this. 1.2 million people...for possession. This is beyond unethical since there’s no actual victim in the case of drug possession. If there’s no victim, how can there be a crime? It’s preposterous.

    The field tests seem simple, but a lot can go wrong. Some tests, including the one the Houston police officers used to analyze the crumb on the floor of Albritton’s car, use a single tube of a chemical called cobalt thiocyanate, which turns blue when it is exposed to cocaine. But cobalt thiocyanate also turns blue when it is exposed to more than 80 other compounds, including methadone, certain acne medications and several common household cleaners.

     

    There are no established error rates for the field tests, in part because their accuracy varies so widely depending on who is using them and how. In Las Vegas, authorities re-examined a sampling of cocaine field tests conducted between 2010 and 2013 and found that 33 percent of them were false positives. Data from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement lab system show that 21 percent of evidence that the police listed as methamphetamine after identifying it was not methamphetamine, and half of those false positives were not any kind of illegal drug at all. In one notable Florida episode, Hillsborough County sheriff’s deputies produced 15 false positives for methamphetamine in the first seven months of 2014. When we examined the department’s records, they showed that officers, faced with somewhat ambiguous directions on the pouches, had simply misunderstood which colors indicated a positive result.

     

    By 1978, the Department of Justice had determined that field tests “should not be used for evidential purposes,” and the field tests in use today remain inadmissible at trial in nearly every jurisdiction; instead, prosecutors must present a secondary lab test using more reliable methods.

     

    But this has proved to be a meaningless prohibition. Most drug cases in the United States are decided well before they reach trial, by the far more informal process of plea bargaining. In 2011, RTI International, a nonprofit research group based in North Carolina, found that prosecutors in nine of 10 jurisdictions it surveyed nationwide accepted guilty pleas based solely on the results of field tests

     

    We found that more than 10 percent of all county and state felony convictions are for drug charges, and at least 90 percent of those convictions come by way of plea deals. In Tennessee, guilty pleas produce 94 percent of all convictions. In Kansas, they make up more than 97 percent. In Harris County, Tex., where the judiciary makes detailed criminal caseload information public, 99.5 percent of drug-possession convictions are the result of a guilty plea. A majority of those are felony convictions, which restrict employment, housing and — in many states — the right to vote.

     

    When Albritton pleaded guilty, she asked Franklin to explain the situation to her bosses at the rental-property firm, but Franklin decided it was safer to say nothing. She was going to be fired in any case, he reasoned, and alerting an employer about the drug felony would only hurt her future prospects. Albritton had managed the Frances Place Apartments, a well-maintained brick complex, for two years, and a free apartment was part of her compensation. But as far as the company knew, Albritton had abandoned her job and her home. She was fired, and her furniture and other belongings were put out on the side of the road. “So I lost all that,” she says.

     

    Albritton gave up trying to convince people otherwise. She focused instead on Landon. Using a wheelchair, he needed regular sessions of physical and occupational therapy, and Albritton’s career managing the rental complex had been an ideal fit, providing a free home that kept her close to her son while she was at work, and allowing her the flexibility to ferry him to his appointments. But now, because of her new felony criminal record, which showed up immediately in background checks, she couldn’t even land an interview at another apartment complex. With a felony conviction, she couldn’t be approved as a renter either. Doug Franklin allowed Albritton and Landon to move in with him temporarily, and Albritton took a minimum-wage job at a convenience store.

     

    In 1972, the Department of Justice published a training guide for forensic chemists in the nation’s crime labs, emphasizing that they were “the last line of defense against a false accusation,” but 40 years later, that line had largely vanished. A federal survey in 2013 found that about 62 percent of crime labs do not test drug evidence when the defendant pleads guilty. But the Houston crime lab, for all its problems, would not be among them.

    Absolute insanity.

    The forensic scientists in Miller’s lab keep untested samples in Manila envelopes locked in cabinets below their work benches. Some sat there for as long as four years, lab records show. Albritton’s evidence stayed locked up for six months. On Feb. 23, 2011 — five months after Albritton completed her sentence and returned home as a felon — one of Houston’s forensic scientists, Ahtavea Barker, pulled the envelope up to her bench. It contained the crumb, the powder and the still-unexplained syringe. First she weighed everything. The syringe had too little residue on it even to test. It was just a syringe. The remainder of the “white chunk substance” that Officer Helms had tested positive with his field kit as crack cocaine totaled 0.0134 grams, Barker wrote on the examination sheet, about the same as a tiny pinch of salt.

     

    Barker turned to gas chromatography-mass spectrometry analysis, or GC-MS, the gold standard in chemical identification, to figure out what was in Albritton’s car that evening. She began with the powder. First the gas chromatograph vaporized a speck of the powder inside a tube. Then the gas was heated, causing its core chemical compounds to separate. When the individual compounds reached the end of the tube, the mass spectrometer blasted them with electrons, causing them to fragment. The resulting display, called a fragmentation pattern, is essentially a chemical fingerprint. The powder was a combination of aspirin and caffeine — the ingredients in BC Powder, the over-the-counter painkiller, as Albritton had insisted.

     

    Then Barker ran the same tests on the supposed crack cocaine. The crumb’s fragmentation pattern did not match that of cocaine, or any other compound in the lab’s extensive database. It was not a drug. It did not contain anything mixed with drugs. It was a crumb — food debris, perhaps. Barker wrote “N.A.M.” on the spectrum printout, “no acceptable match,” and then added another set of letters: “N.C.S.” No controlled substance identified. Albritton was innocent.

    Her life was ruined, and for what?

    If Albritton’s case is one of hundreds in Houston, there is every reason to suspect that it is just one among thousands of wrongful drug convictions that were based on field tests across the United States. The Harris County district attorney’s office is responsible for half of all exonerations by conviction-integrity units nationwide in the past three years — not because law enforcement is different there but because the Houston lab committed to testing evidence after defendants had already pleaded guilty, a position that is increasingly unpopular in forensic science.

     

    Crime labs have been moving away from drug cases to focus on DNA and evidence from violent crimes. In some instances, the shift has been extreme. The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department’s forensic laboratory analyzes the evidence in, on average, just 73 drug cases a year, internal records show. Nearly all of its 8,000 annual possession arrests rest exclusively on field-test results.

     

    The United States Department of Justice was once among the leading voices of caution regarding field tests, and encouraged all drug evidence go to lab chemists. But in 2008, the Justice Department funded a program developed by the National Forensic Science Technology Center, a nonprofit that provides crime-lab training, to reduce drug-evidence backlogs. Titled Field Investigation Drug Officer, the program consisted of a series of seminars that taught local police officers how to administer color field tests on a large scale. In its curriculum, the technology center states that field tests help authorities by “removing the need for extensive laboratory analysis,” because “the field test may factor into obtaining an immediate plea agreement.” The Justice Department declined repeated interview requests.

    The Department of Justice, why am I not surprised. The DOJ seems interested in all sorts of things; unfortunately, justice isn’t one of them.

  • Peter Thiel's RNC Speech: "Wall Street Bankers Inflate Bubbles In Everything From Bonds To Hillary's Speaking Fees"

    What in our humble opinion has been the most original speech delivered so far at the RNC, was that of Peter Thiel, an openly gay libertarian, Facebook board member, former PayPal CEO and co-founder, and Nick Denton nemesis, who moments ago covered everything from Wall Street bubble blowing…

    “Wall Street bankers inflate bubbles in everything from government bonds to Hillary Clinton’s speaking fees”

    … to soaring costs in an age of alleged deflation as far as the eye can see…

    “Americans get paid less today than 10 years ago. But healthcare and college tuition cost more every year”

    … to floppy disks and figher planes…

    “Our nuclear bases still use floppy disks. Our newest fighter jets can’t even fly in the rain.”

    … to US foreign policy…

    “Instead of going to Mars, we have invaded the Middle East. We don’t need to see Hillary Clinton’s deleted emails: her incompetence is in plain sight. “

    … to transgender bathrooms…

    “Now we are told that the great debate is about who gets to use which bathroom.  This is a distraction from our real problems. Who cares?  Of course, every American has a unique identity.”

    … to America’s fake culture…

    “I don’t pretend to agree with every plank in our party’s platform. But fake culture wars only distract us from our economic decline.”

    And much, much more. His full speech transcript is below.

    * * *

    Good evening. I’m Peter Thiel.

    I build companies and I support people who are building new things, from social networks to rocket ships.

    I’m not a politician.

    But neither is Donald Trump.

    He is a builder, and it’s time to rebuild America.

    Where I work in Silicon Valley, it’s hard to see where America has gone wrong.

    My industry has made a lot of progress in computers and in software, and, of course, it’s made a lot of money.

    But Silicon Valley is a small place.

    Drive out to Sacramento, or even across the bridge to Oakland, and you won’t see the same prosperity. That’s just how small it is.

    Across the country, wages are flat.

    Americans get paid less today than 10 years ago. But healthcare and college tuition cost more every year. Meanwhile Wall Street bankers inflate bubbles in everything from government bonds to Hillary Clinton’s speaking fees.

    Our economy is broken. If you’re watching me right now, you understand this better than any politician in Washington. And you know this isn’t the dream we looked forward to. Back when my parents came to America looking for that dream, they found it—right here in Cleveland.

    They brought me here as a one-year-old, and this is where I became an American.

    Opportunity was everywhere.

    My Dad studied engineering at Case Western Reserve University, just down the road from where we are now. Because in 1968, the world’s high tech capital wasn’t just one city: all of America was high tech.

    It’s hard to remember this, but our government was once high tech, too. When I moved to Cleveland, defense research was laying the foundations for the Internet. The Apollo program was just about to put a man on the moon—and it was Neil Armstrong, from right here in Ohio.

    The future felt limitless.

    But today our government is broken. Our nuclear bases still use floppy disks. Our newest fighter jets can’t even fly in the rain. And it would be kind to say the government’s software works poorly, because much of the time it doesn’t even work at all.

    That is a staggering decline for the country that completed the Manhattan Project. We don’t accept such incompetence in Silicon Valley, and we must not accept it from our government.

    Instead of going to Mars, we have invaded the Middle East. We don’t need to see Hillary Clinton’s deleted emails: her incompetence is in plain sight. She pushed for a war in Libya, and today it’s a training ground for ISIS. On this most important issue, Donald Trump is right. It’s time to end the era of stupid wars and rebuild our country.

    When I was a kid, the great debate was about how to defeat the Soviet Union. And we won. Now we are told that the great debate is about who gets to use which bathroom.

    This is a distraction from our real problems. Who cares?

    Of course, every American has a unique identity.

    I am proud to be gay.

    I am proud to be a Republican.

    But most of all I am proud to be an American.

    I don’t pretend to agree with every plank in our party’s platform. But fake culture wars only distract us from our economic decline.

    And nobody in this race is being honest about it except Donald Trump.

    While it is fitting to talk about who we are, today it’s even more important to remember where we came from. For me that is Cleveland, and the bright future it promised.

    When Donald Trump asks us to Make America Great Again, he’s not suggesting a return to the past. He’s running to lead us back to that bright future.

    Tonight I urge all of my fellow Americans to stand up and vote for Donald Trump.

  • Donald Trump Addresses GOP Convention – Watch Live

    Trump speaks

    Full Speech Transcript

    * * *

    Friends, delegates and fellow Americans: I humbly and gratefully accept your nomination for the presidency of the United States.

    Together, we will lead our party back to the White House, and we will lead our country back to safety, prosperity, and peace. We will be a country of generosity and warmth. But we will also be a country of law and order.

    Our Convention occurs at a moment of crisis for our nation. The attacks on our police, and the terrorism in our cities, threaten our very way of life. Any politician who does not grasp this danger is not fit to lead our country.

    Americans watching this address tonight have seen the recent images of violence in our streets and the chaos in our communities. Many have witnessed this violence personally, some have even been its victims.

    I have a message for all of you: the crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon come to an end. Beginning on January 20th 2017, safety will be restored.

    The most basic duty of government is to defend the lives of its own citizens. Any government that fails to do so is a government unworthy to lead.

    It is finally time for a straightforward assessment of the state of our nation.

    I will present the facts plainly and honestly. We cannot afford to be so politically correct anymore.

    So if you want to hear the corporate spin, the carefully-crafted lies, and the media myths the Democrats are holding their convention next week.

    But here, at our convention, there will be no lies. We will honor the American people with the truth, and nothing else.

    Decades of progress made in bringing down crime are now being reversed by this Administration’s rollback of criminal enforcement.

    Homicides last year increased by 17% in America’s fifty largest cities. That’s the largest increase in 25 years. In our nation’s capital, killings have risen by 50 percent. They are up nearly 60% in nearby Baltimore.

    In the President’s hometown of Chicago, more than 2,000 have been the victims of shootings this year alone. And more than 3,600 have been killed in the Chicago area since he took office.

    The number of police officers killed in the line of duty has risen by almost 50% compared to this point last year. Nearly 180,000 illegal immigrants with criminal records, ordered deported from our country, are tonight roaming free to threaten peaceful citizens.

    The number of new illegal immigrant families who have crossed the border so far this year already exceeds the entire total from 2015. They are being released by the tens of thousands into our communities with no regard for the impact on public safety or resources.

    One such border-crosser was released and made his way to Nebraska. There, he ended the life of an innocent young girl named Sarah Root. She was 21 years-old, and was killed the day after graduating from college with a 4.0 Grade Point Average. Her killer was then released a second time, and he is now a fugitive from the law.

    I’ve met Sarah’s beautiful family. But to this Administration, their amazing daughter was just one more American life that wasn’t worth protecting. One more child to sacrifice on the altar of open borders. What about our economy?

    Again, I will tell you the plain facts that have been edited out of your nightly news and your morning newspaper: Nearly Four in 10 African-American children are living in poverty, while 58% of African American youth are not employed. 2 million more Latinos are in poverty today than when the President took his oath of office less than eight years ago. Another 14 million people have left the workforce entirely.

    Household incomes are down more than $4,000 since the year 2000. Our manufacturing trade deficit has reached an all-time high – nearly $800 billion in a single year. The budget is no better.

    President Obama has doubled our national debt to more than $19 trillion, and growing. Yet, what do we have to show for it? Our roads and bridges are falling apart, our airports are in Third World condition, and forty-three million Americans are on food stamps.

    Now let us consider the state of affairs abroad.

    Not only have our citizens endured domestic disaster, but they have lived through one international humiliation after another. We all remember the images of our sailors being forced to their knees by their Iranian captors at gunpoint.

    This was just prior to the signing of the Iran deal, which gave back to Iran $150 billion and gave us nothing – it will go down in history as one of the worst deals ever made. Another humiliation came when president Obama drew a red line in Syria – and the whole world knew it meant nothing.

    In Libya, our consulate – the symbol of American prestige around the globe – was brought down in flames. America is far less safe – and the world is far less stable – than when Obama made the decision to put Hillary Clinton in charge of America’s foreign policy.

    I am certain it is a decision he truly regrets. Her bad instincts and her bad judgment – something pointed out by Bernie Sanders – are what caused the disasters unfolding today. Let’s review the record. In 2009, pre-Hillary, ISIS was not even on the map.

    Libya was cooperating. Egypt was peaceful. Iraq was seeing a reduction in violence. Iran was being choked by sanctions. Syria was under control. After four years of Hillary Clinton, what do we have? ISIS has spread across the region, and the world. Libya is in ruins, and our Ambassador and his staff were left helpless to die at the hands of savage killers. Egypt was turned over to the radical Muslim brotherhood, forcing the military to retake control. Iraq is in chaos.

    Iran is on the path to nuclear weapons. Syria is engulfed in a civil war and a refugee crisis that now threatens the West. After fifteen years of wars in the Middle East, after trillions of dollars spent and thousands of lives lost, the situation is worse than it has ever been before.

    This is the legacy of Hillary Clinton: death, destruction and weakness.

    But Hillary Clinton’s legacy does not have to be America’s legacy. The problems we face now – poverty and violence at home, war and destruction abroad – will last only as long as we continue relying on the same politicians who created them. A change in leadership is required to change these outcomes. Tonight, I will share with you my plan of action for America.

    The most important difference between our plan and that of our opponents, is that our plan will put America First. Americanism, not globalism, will be our credo. As long as we are led by politicians who will not put America First, then we can be assured that other nations will not treat America with respect. This will all change in 2017.

    The American People will come first once again. My plan will begin with safety at home – which means safe neighborhoods, secure borders, and protection from terrorism. There can be no prosperity without law and order. On the economy, I will outline reforms to add millions of new jobs and trillions in new wealth that can be used to rebuild America.

    A number of these reforms that I will outline tonight will be opposed by some of our nation’s most powerful special interests. That is because these interests have rigged our political and economic system for their exclusive benefit.

    Big business, elite media and major donors are lining up behind the campaign of my opponent because they know she will keep our rigged system in place. They are throwing money at her because they have total control over everything she does. She is their puppet, and they pull the strings.

    That is why Hillary Clinton’s message is that things will never change. My message is that things have to change – and they have to change right now. Every day I wake up determined to deliver for the people I have met all across this nation that have been neglected, ignored, and abandoned.

    I have visited the laid-off factory workers, and the communities crushed by our horrible and unfair trade deals. These are the forgotten men and women of our country. People who work hard but no longer have a voice.

    I AM YOUR VOICE.

    I have embraced crying mothers who have lost their children because our politicians put their personal agendas before the national good. I have no patience for injustice, no tolerance for government incompetence, no sympathy for leaders who fail their citizens.

    When innocent people suffer, because our political system lacks the will, or the courage, or the basic decency to enforce our laws – or worse still, has sold out to some corporate lobbyist for cash – I am not able to look the other way.

    And when a Secretary of State illegally stores her emails on a private server, deletes 33,000 of them so the authorities can’t see her crime, puts our country at risk, lies about it in every different form and faces no consequence – I know that corruption has reached a level like never before.

    When the FBI Director says that the Secretary of State was “extremely careless” and “negligent,” in handling our classified secrets, I also know that these terms are minor compared to what she actually did. They were just used to save her from facing justice for her terrible crimes.

    In fact, her single greatest accomplishment may be committing such an egregious crime and getting away with it – especially when others have paid so dearly. When that same Secretary of State rakes in millions of dollars trading access and favors to special interests and foreign powers I know the time for action has come.

    I have joined the political arena so that the powerful can no longer beat up on people that cannot defend themselves. Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it. I have seen firsthand how the system is rigged against our citizens, just like it was rigged against Bernie Sanders – he never had a chance.

    But his supporters will join our movement, because we will fix his biggest issue: trade. Millions of Democrats will join our movement because we are going to fix the system so it works for all Americans. In this cause, I am proud to have at my side the next Vice President of the United States: Governor Mike Pence of Indiana.

    We will bring the same economic success to America that Mike brought to Indiana. He is a man of character and accomplishment. He is the right man for the job. The first task for our new Administration will be to liberate our citizens from the crime and terrorism and lawlessness that threatens their communities.

    America was shocked to its core when our police officers in Dallas were brutally executed. In the days after Dallas, we have seen continued threats and violence against our law enforcement officials. Law officers have been shot or killed in recent days in Georgia, Missouri, Wisconsin, Kansas, Michigan and Tennessee.

    On Sunday, more police were gunned down in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Three were killed, and four were badly injured. An attack on law enforcement is an attack on all Americans. I have a message to every last person threatening the peace on our streets and the safety of our police: when I take the oath of office next year, I will restore law and order our country.

    I will work with, and appoint, the best prosecutors and law enforcement officials in the country to get the job done. In this race for the White House, I am the Law And Order candidate. The irresponsible rhetoric of our President, who has used the pulpit of the presidency to divide us by race and color, has made America a more dangerous environment for everyone.

    This Administration has failed America’s inner cities. It’s failed them on education. It’s failed them on jobs. It’s failed them on crime. It’s failed them at every level.

    When I am President, I will work to ensure that all of our kids are treated equally, and protected equally.

    Every action I take, I will ask myself: does this make life better for young Americans in Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, Ferguson who have as much of a right to live out their dreams as any other child America?

    To make life safe in America, we must also address the growing threats we face from outside America: we are going to defeat the barbarians of ISIS. Once again, France is the victim of brutal Islamic terrorism.

    Men, women and children viciously mowed down. Lives ruined. Families ripped apart. A nation in mourning.

    The damage and devastation that can be inflicted by Islamic radicals has been over and over – at the World Trade Center, at an office party in San Bernardino, at the Boston Marathon, and a military recruiting center in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

    Only weeks ago, in Orlando, Florida, 49 wonderful Americans were savagely murdered by an Islamic terrorist. This time, the terrorist targeted our LGBT community. As your President, I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBT citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology. To protect us from terrorism, we need to focus on three things.

    We must have the best intelligence gathering operation in the world. We must abandon the failed policy of nation building and regime change that Hillary Clinton pushed in Iraq, Libya, Egypt and Syria. Instead, we must work with all of our allies who share our goal of destroying ISIS and stamping out Islamic terror.

    This includes working with our greatest ally in the region, the State of Israel. Lastly, we must immediately suspend immigration from any nation that has been compromised by terrorism until such time as proven vetting mechanisms have been put in place.

    My opponent has called for a radical 550% increase in Syrian refugees on top of existing massive refugee flows coming into our country under President Obama. She proposes this despite the fact that there’s no way to screen these refugees in order to find out who they are or where they come from. I only want to admit individuals into our country who will support our values and love our people.

    Anyone who endorses violence, hatred or oppression is not welcome in our country and never will be.

    Decades of record immigration have produced lower wages and higher unemployment for our citizens, especially for African-American and Latino workers. We are going to have an immigration system that works, but one that works for the American people.

    On Monday, we heard from three parents whose children were killed by illegal immigrants Mary Ann Mendoza, Sabine Durden, and Jamiel Shaw. They are just three brave representatives of many thousands. Of all my travels in this country, nothing has affected me more deeply than the time I have spent with the mothers and fathers who have lost their children to violence spilling across our border.

    These families have no special interests to represent them. There are no demonstrators to protest on their behalf. My opponent will never meet with them, or share in their pain. Instead, my opponent wants Sanctuary Cities. But where was sanctuary for Kate Steinle? Where was Sanctuary for the children of Mary Ann, Sabine and Jamiel? Where was sanctuary for all the other Americans who have been so brutally murdered, and who have suffered so horribly?

    These wounded American families have been alone. But they are alone no longer. Tonight, this candidate and this whole nation stand in their corner to support them, to send them our love, and to pledge in their honor that we will save countless more families from suffering the same awful fate.

    We are going to build a great border wall to stop illegal immigration, to stop the gangs and the violence, and to stop the drugs from pouring into our communities. I have been honored to receive the endorsement of America’s Border Patrol Agents, and will work directly with them to protect the integrity of our lawful immigration system.

    By ending catch-and-release on the border, we will stop the cycle of human smuggling and violence. Illegal border crossings will go down. Peace will be restored. By enforcing the rules for the millions who overstay their visas, our laws will finally receive the respect they deserve.

    Tonight, I want every American whose demands for immigration security have been denied – and every politician who has denied them – to listen very closely to the words I am about to say.

    On January 21st of 2017, the day after I take the oath of office, Americans will finally wake up in a country where the laws of the United States are enforced. We are going to be considerate and compassionate to everyone.

    But my greatest compassion will be for our own struggling citizens. My plan is the exact opposite of the radical and dangerous immigration policy of Hillary Clinton. Americans want relief from uncontrolled immigration. Communities want relief.

    Yet Hillary Clinton is proposing mass amnesty, mass immigration, and mass lawlessness. Her plan will overwhelm your schools and hospitals, further reduce your jobs and wages, and make it harder for recent immigrants to escape from poverty.

    I have a different vision for our workers. It begins with a new, fair trade policy that protects our jobs and stands up to countries that cheat. It’s been a signature message of my campaign from day one, and it will be a signature feature of my presidency from the moment I take the oath of office.

    I have made billions of dollars in business making deals – now I’m going to make our country rich again. I am going to turn our bad trade agreements into great ones. America has lost nearly-one third of its manufacturing jobs since 1997, following the enactment of disastrous trade deals supported by Bill and Hillary Clinton.

    Remember, it was Bill Clinton who signed NAFTA, one of the worst economic deals ever made by our country.

    Never again.

    I am going to bring our jobs back to Ohio and to America – and I am not going to let companies move to other countries, firing their employees along the way, without consequences.

    My opponent, on the other hand, has supported virtually every trade agreement that has been destroying our middle class. She supported NAFTA, and she supported China’s entrance into the World Trade Organization – another one of her husband’s colossal mistakes.

    She supported the job killing trade deal with South Korea. She has supported the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The TPP will not only destroy our manufacturing, but it will make America subject to the rulings of foreign governments. I pledge to never sign any trade agreement that hurts our workers, or that diminishes our freedom and independence. Instead, I will make individual deals with individual countries.

    No longer will we enter into these massive deals, with many countries, that are thousands of pages long – and which no one from our country even reads or understands. We are going to enforce all trade violations, including through the use of taxes and tariffs, against any country that cheats.

    This includes stopping China’s outrageous theft of intellectual property, along with their illegal product dumping, and their devastating currency manipulation. Our horrible trade agreements with China and many others, will be totally renegotiated. That includes renegotiating NAFTA to get a much better deal for America – and we’ll walk away if we don’t get the deal that we want. We are going to start building and making things again.

    Next comes the reform of our tax laws, regulations and energy rules. While Hillary Clinton plans a massive tax increase, I have proposed the largest tax reduction of any candidate who has declared for the presidential race this year – Democrat or Republican. Middle-income Americans will experience profound relief, and taxes will be simplified for everyone.

    America is one of the highest-taxed nations in the world. Reducing taxes will cause new companies and new jobs to come roaring back into our country. Then we are going to deal with the issue of regulation, one of the greatest job-killers of them all. Excessive regulation is costing our country as much as $2 trillion a year, and we will end it. We are going to lift the restrictions on the production of American energy. This will produce more than $20 trillion in job creating economic activity over the next four decades.

    My opponent, on the other hand, wants to put the great miners and steel workers of our country out of work – that will never happen when I am President. With these new economic policies, trillions of dollars will start flowing into our country.

    This new wealth will improve the quality of life for all Americans – We will build the roads, highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, and the railways of tomorrow. This, in turn, will create millions more jobs. We will rescue kids from failing schools by helping their parents send them to a safe school of their choice.

    My opponent would rather protect education bureaucrats than serve American children. We will repeal and replace disastrous Obamacare. You will be able to choose your own doctor again. And we will fix TSA at the airports! We will completely rebuild our depleted military, and the countries that we protect, at a massive loss, will be asked to pay their fair share.

    We will take care of our great Veterans like they have never been taken care of before. My opponent dismissed the VA scandal as being not widespread – one more sign of how out of touch she really is. We are going to ask every Department Head in government to provide a list of wasteful spending projects that we can eliminate in my first 100 days. The politicians have talked about it, I’m going to do it. We are also going to appoint justices to the United States Supreme Court who will uphold our laws and our Constitution.

    The replacement for Justice Scalia will be a person of similar views and principles. This will be one of the most important issues decided by this election. My opponent wants to essentially abolish the 2nd amendment. I, on the other hand, received the early and strong endorsement of the National Rifle Association and will protect the right of all Americans to keep their families safe.

    At this moment, I would like to thank the evangelical community who have been so good to me and so supportive. You have so much to contribute to our politics, yet our laws prevent you from speaking your minds from your own pulpits.

    An amendment, pushed by Lyndon Johnson, many years ago, threatens religious institutions with a loss of their tax-exempt status if they openly advocate their political views.

    I am going to work very hard to repeal that language and protect free speech for all Americans. We can accomplish these great things, and so much else – all we need to do is start believing in ourselves and in our country again. It is time to show the whole world that America Is Back – bigger, and better and stronger than ever before.

    In this journey, I'm so lucky to have at my side my wife Melania and my wonderful children, Don, Ivanka, Eric, Tiffany, and Barron: you will always be my greatest source of pride and joy. My Dad, Fred Trump, was the smartest and hardest working man I ever knew. I wonder sometimes what he’d say if he were here to see this tonight.

    It’s because of him that I learned, from my youngest age, to respect the dignity of work and the dignity of working people. He was a guy most comfortable in the company of bricklayers, carpenters, and electricians and I have a lot of that in me also. Then there’s my mother, Mary. She was strong, but also warm and fair-minded. She was a truly great mother. She was also one of the most honest and charitable people I have ever known, and a great judge of character.

    To my sisters Mary Anne and Elizabeth, my brother Robert and my late brother Fred, I will always give you my love you are most special to me. I have loved my life in business.

    But now, my sole and exclusive mission is to go to work for our country – to go to work for all of you. It’s time to deliver a victory for the American people. But to do that, we must break free from the petty politics of the past.

    America is a nation of believers, dreamers, and strivers that is being led by a group of censors, critics, and cynics.

    Remember: all of the people telling you that you can’t have the country you want, are the same people telling you that I wouldn’t be standing here tonight. No longer can we rely on those elites in media, and politics, who will say anything to keep a rigged system in place.

    Instead, we must choose to Believe In America. History is watching us now.

    It’s waiting to see if we will rise to the occasion, and if we will show the whole world that America is still free and independent and strong.

    My opponent asks her supporters to recite a three-word loyalty pledge. It reads: “I’m With Her”. I choose to recite a different pledge.

    My pledge reads: “I’M WITH YOU – THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.”

    I am your voice.

    So to every parent who dreams for their child, and every child who dreams for their future, I say these words to you tonight: I’m With You, and I will fight for you, and I will win for you.

    To all Americans tonight, in all our cities and towns, I make this promise: We Will Make America Strong Again.

    We Will Make America Proud Again.

    We Will Make America Safe Again.

    And We Will Make America Great Again.

    THANK YOU.

     

     

     

     

    * * *

    Earlier

    Following Cruz' "career-ending speech" last night, the moment everyone has been waiting for has arrived. A year after after announcing his run for president, billionaire Donald Trump takes the stage Thursday night to deliver what few pundits thought would ever happen: His acceptance speech for the presidential nomination of the Republican Party. While many will be interested in Peter Thiel and Tom Barrack, Ivanka Trump will introduce her dad whose theme – “Make America One Again” – centers on unity.

    Here’s what The Hill believes are the most important things to watch for during the final Republican National Convention session, which starts at 7 p.m. Eastern Time, as the real estate mogul takes hold of the party’s banner for the general election.

    Will the Donald deliver?

    All eyes will be on Trump’s keynote address, the climax of the weeklong event. Even for a man who has dominated media coverage for the greater part of a year, Trump’s Thursday speech will almost certainly be his most watched. He has sworn off his preferred free-wheeling style for a safer scripted address, a decision that will please the party’s wary establishment but could limit the opportunity for both viral moments and potentially damaging ones. Expect Trump to speak to both wings of the party—enthusiastic members of the Trump train as well as those who refuse to leave the station. He’ll need both if he wants to overtake Hillary Clinton’s lead in the polls and win the Oval Office.  

    Ivanka testifies for her father 

    Thursday also marks a major moment for Ivanka Trump, the eldest Trump daughter who is poised to emerge from this presidential cycle as a potent force. Ivanka has already served a key role in the campaign—she’s often deployed to soften her controversial father’s rough edges and has been called upon as his close adviser. Trump has already previewed the theme of his daughter’s speech—gender equality. As it stands in the polls, he could use a lifeline with female voters who have fled him in droves. It’s a tough mountain to climb, but Ivanka will be tasked with flipping the common perception of her father on its head and selling him as a compassionate father and, in her words earlier this month, a “feminist.” Even if she fails to stop a mass exodus of female support, a strong speech will reinforce her strong performance as a surrogate and potentially stoke the rumors of her potential political future.  

    Make America One Again

    The final spin on Trump’s theme, “Make America One Again” centers on unity. That’s no surprise considering the handful of notable Republicans reluctant to support Trump’s candidacy. While many of the party’s standard-bearers won’t be in attendance, Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus will take to the stage in the hopes of convincing delegates and Republicans across the country to fall in line, no matter their view on Trump. It’s a role Priebus has played for months—declaring Trump the party’s presumptive nominee back in May and working both in public and private to get Republicans on board. And it's a role that becomes even more important after Ted Cruz stunned the convention crowd on Wednesday by not endorsing Trump, a decision that dominated the night. Look for a healthy reliance on one thing bound to resonate with every delegate and attendee—an aggressive critique of Hillary Clinton. This week’s best-received speeches hammered home the case against Clinton—notably Chris Christie’s “indictment” of the presumptive Democratic nominee. So as he looks to motivate the party’s loyalists around the country, he’ll likely find no greater force than distaste for Clinton. 

    GOP looks to expand its appeal

    Trump’s precarious favorability numbers with women and minorities has prompted worries that he needs to expand his appeal or else he may lose the White House and take down-ticket Republicans with him. Thursday’s schedule of speakers is engineered to fight back and includes a handful speakers meant to shore up support among different constituencies. Along with Ivanka Trump, Rep. Marsha Blackburn (Tenn.) and Gov. Fallin (Okla.) will likely speak to discontented female voters and look to draw them back into the arms of the Grand Old Party. Jerry Falwell Jr. aims to rally Christian conservatives who may feel lukewarm about their nominee’s commitment to issues like abortion and gay rights. And Lisa Shin, a New Mexico small business owner and member of the National Diversity Coalition for Trump, will try to tell minority voters who have largely steered clear of Trump why he can “Make America Great Again” for them too.  

    Billionaires for Trump

    The speaking roster will also include two of Trump’s supporters from the business world—venture capitalist Peter Thiel and investor Tom Barrack. Thiel is best known as one of Facebook’s earliest outside investors and the head of security software firm Palantir Technologies. An openly gay man, he’s received some criticism from the liberal tech bubble for his support of Trump and the GOP despite the party’s stance against gay marriage. But Trump has been much more accepting of the LGBT community in his rhetoric, despite calling for the court to overturn the Supreme Court decision supporting gay marriage, so Thiel’s speech could shine an interesting light on how the party plans to reconcile the differences.

    Barrack’s relationship with Trump apparently dates back to before his political bid and to his real estate career. He also served as Deputy Undersecretary in President Ronald Reagan’s Department of Interior, giving him additional credibility at an event where Reagan is revered. He hosted Trump’s first major fundraiser in May, and recently released his own economic treatise… "Opaque global monetary policies combined with unfocused, poorly negotiated international trade agreements are undermining the entire project of globalization as proponents of these policies face a growing backlash among voters," he writes.

    Citizens everywhere are unhappy with their governments and angry with their leaders. They are no longer interested in a political rhetoric that they do not understand and that has no value in their lives. Monetary policy, trade policy technological disruption and the array of issues that make up globalization are simply a parade of unintelligible horribles to the average working class citizen.

     

    …

     

    Until recent times, central bank activities were mostly technical, marginal, and unreported. Today central bankers utilize exotic new tools such as Quantitative Easing (“QE”) and massive asset purchases to manipulate markets to conform to macroeconomic mandates and political leaders' preferences. The driving force behind US economic policy is no longer the Secretary of the Treasury or Chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisors; it is the new breed of central banker on steroids. Foreign exchange, QE, asset purchases and the printing of money unanchored to any external standard, and other technical monetary tools are today’s “super trade weapons.”

     

    In the early stages of the financial crisis, central banks acted quickly, decisively and effectively to provide liquidity and help avert another Great Depression. These actions reinvigorated the payments and settlements system, established a floor on value and forced banks to restructure. Yet instead of curtailing emergency policies as economies recovered, central banks have all but monopolized the economy policies of many nations. As a result, investment has stalled and savings rates are pressing historic lows. Middle- and lower-income workers see no benefits from these policies, while the holders of capital, just as with globalization, enjoy burgeoning investment portfolios and bank accounts. At this point, central bank actions seem mainly to impact asset prices while only marginally influencing the true drivers of the economy, such as real investment, productivity expansion and job growth. We have reached the point where central banks – which are a lot better at emergency responses than steering long-term policy – have become the problem, not the solution.

     

    …

     

    The dramatic swelling of Wall Street asset prices has not been accompanied by a revival of the real economy or rising middle class incomes. Unconventional monetary policy is not a reliable force for robust growth in a time of economic stagnation. Instead, it encourages riskier investment, compounding the rising wealth effects from expanding equity markets and real estate prices, which primarily benefit the affluent.

     

    Policies like QE also favor net borrowers over net savers, again benefitting debt-burdened governments and corporations that have the ability to borrow, while middle-class workers with limited borrowing capacity stagnate. This is the primary reason why corporate profit margins and equity markets are at historic highs, while real wage growth remains historically low. Employment data show a resentful workforce feeling despair and doomed to irrelevance in a technologically advanced global marketplace, even as investors enjoy the bull run of the century.

     

    In today’s globalized economy, elected leaders who decide fiscal policy, on which long-term economic growth is predicated, make little sustained effort to reform outdated personal or business tax policies or exercise spending restraints needed to reduce government debt. Monetary policy, for which elected leaders disclaim responsibility, leaving it to unelected central bankers, is king. Central banks are frantically seeking market share through currency devaluations, desperately hoping that lower nominal exchange rates will boost exports and reduce imports – part of a zero-sum rush-to-the-bottom.

     

    …

     

    As the central bankers continue down their road without a GPS, no one knows what the effects will be: financial bubbles, a debt bust, an equity bust, a disorderly exit from the sale of trillions of dollars sitting on central bank balance sheets, emerging market capital outflows or increased inequality and disenchantment. Financial engineering by itself cannot achieve the kind of sustainable, inclusive growth that will extend economic benefits to America’s hard-pressed middle class. Opaque global monetary policies combined with unfocused, poorly negotiated international trade agreements are undermining the entire project of globalization as proponents of these policies face a growing backlash among voters.

     

    …

     

    The world is moving at warp speed, as are all the things within it. In order to keep up, we too need to move and adapt or be lost in the black hole of entrenchment and entitlement. Many decades ago, Winston Churchill wrote a series of essays predicting the ever more dizzying pace of change in the modern world. It could not and must not be stopped, but he worried that mankind might have so much more, yet be unhappier than before. "Their hearts will ache, their lives will be barren, if they have not a vision above material things," he wrote. We need to be reminded about the "simple questions which man has asked since the earliest dawn of reason," about the meaning, purpose, and ends of mankind – in other words, the same kind of questions that led America's Founders to declare the self-evident truth that all human beings are created equal. As we question the status quo and chip away at the corrosion that attends old thoughts, ideas, and institutions, we must not fail to keep in mind the difference between material things that are always changing and the abiding truths that have made America great.

    Full Economic Treatise here…

  • 9/11: Bush's Guilt, And The 28 Pages

    Authored by Eric Zuesse via Strategic-Culture.org,

    On Friday July15th, as the national news media were either on vacation or preparing for the opening of the Trump National Convention on Monday the 18th, the long-awaited release of the ‘missing’ 28 pages from the US Senate’s 9/11 report occurred («DECEMBER 2002: JOINT INQUIRY INTO INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY ACTIVITIES BEFORE AND AFTER THE TERRORIST ATTACKS OF SEPTEMBER 11, 2001»). The official title of this document is «PART FOUR – FINDING, DISCUSSION AND NARRATIVE REGARDING CERTAIN SENSITIVE NATIONAL SECURITY MATTERS», and it constitutes pages 6-34 of a pdf. (Some writers mistakenly call it «29 pages».)

    It «was kept secret from the public on the orders of former President George W. Bush», and remained secret under Bush’s successor Barack Obama, until that Friday night late in Obama’s Second Administration, right before a week of Republican National Convention news would be dominating the news (along with any racial incidents, which would be sure to distract the public even more from any indication of Bush’s guilt). The pdf was of a picture-file so as to be non-searchable by journalists and thus slow to interpret, and thus would impede press-coverage of it. The file was also of a very degraded picture of the pages, so as to make the reading of it even more uninviting and difficult. Well, that was a skillful news-release-and-coverup operation! The Federal Government had plenty of time to do this right, but they evidently had plenty of incentive to do it wrong. They’re not incompetent; the reasonable explanation is something worse than that. (After all, this information has been hidden from the public for all of the 13+ years since that report was published without the 28 pages at the end of 2002.)

    What these 28 long-suppressed pages revealed was well summarized by one succinct reader who wrote:

    "The Inquiry discloses that there is a very direct chain of evidence about financing and logistics… [that] goes from the Saudi Royal family (Amb. Bandar's wife and Bandar's checking account) and Saudi consulate employees (al Thumiari) to the agent handlers (Basnan and al Bayoumi) to some of the 9/11 hijackers (Khalid al-Mihdhar, Nawaf al-Hazmi)."

    In other words, Prince Bandar bin-Sultan al-Saud, known in Washington as «Bandar Bush» (for his closeness to the Bush family), and who served at that time as Saudi Arabia’s Ambassador to the United States, paid tens of thousands of dollars to Saudi Arabia’s «handlers» who were directing two of the hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi. Also, one of Bandar’s subordinates at the Embassy, named al-Thumiari, was likewise paying the person who was paying and managing those two jihadists.

    The report said:

    "FBI files suggest that al-Bayoumi provided substantial assistance to hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi after they arrived in San Diego in February 2000… According to an October 14, 2002 FBI document, al-Bayoumi has ‘extensive ties to the Saudi Government’… According to the FBI, al-Bayoumi was in frequent contact with the Emir at the Ministry of Defense, responsible for air traffic control… Al-Bayoumi was receiving money from the Saudi Ministry of Defense… Al-Bayoumi was known to have access to large amounts of money from Saudi Arabia, despite the fact that he did not appear to hold a job… Al-Bayoumi’s pay increased during the time that al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar were in the United States."

    Also, an FBI agent testified on 9 October 2002 regarding al-Bayoumi, and said Bayoumi: 

    "acted like a Saudi intelligence officer, in my opinion. And if he was involved with the hijackers, which it looks like he was, if he signed leases, if he provided some sort of financing… then I would say that there’s a clear possibility that there might be a connection between Saudi intelligence and UBL [Usama bin Laden]."

    Moreover: «The FBI has now confirmed that only Osama Bassnan’s wife received money directly from Prince Bandar’s wife, but that al-Bayoumi’s wife attempted to deposit three of the checks from Prince Bandar’s wife, which were payable to Bassnan’s wife, into her own accounts… Bassnan was a very close associate of Omar al-Bayoumi’s and was in telephone contact with al-Bayoumi several times a day».

    Furthermore: «Bassnan’s wife received a monthly stipend from Princess Haifa».

    And: «On at least one occasion, Bassnan received a check directly from Prince Bandar’s account. According to the FBI, on May 14, 1998, Bassnan cashed a check from Bandar in the amount of $15,000. Bassnan’s wife also received at least one check directly from Bandar… for $10,000… FBI Executive Assistant Director D’Amuro commented on this financing: «I believe that we do have money going from Bandar’s wife, $2,000 a month up to about $64,000».

    Also:

    "On March 28, 2002, US and coalition forces retrieved the telephone book of Abu Zubayda, whom the US Government has identified as a senior al-Qa’ida operational coordinator. According to an FBI document, ‘a review of toll records has linked [to] ASPCOL Corporation in Aspen, Colorado… ASPCOL is the umbrella corporation that manages the affairs of the Colorado residence of Prince Bandar, the Saudi Ambassador… The US Government also located another Virginia number at an Usama bin Laden safehouse in Pakistan… [where a person was] interviewed by the FBI in June 2002. He could not explain why his number ended up at a safehouse in Pakistan, but stated that he regularly provides services to a couple who are personal assistants to Prince Bandar."

    This has to be seen in the context of George W Bush’s very close and longstanding personal friendship with Prince Bandar, and also in the context of Bandar’s career.

    Bandar has long been involved, both officially and unofficially, in the intelligence operations of the Saud family (which own Saudi Arabia). During October 2005 through January 2015, he served as secretary general of Saudi Arabia’s National Security Council, and he also was director general of the Saudi Intelligence Agency from 2012 to 2014. Furthermore, the just-released report asserts:

    «The FBI also received reports from individuals in the Muslim community alleging that Bassnan might be a Saudi intelligence agent. According to a CIA memo, Basnan reportedly received funding and possibly a fake passport from Saudi Government officials. He and his wife have received financial support from the Saudi Ambassador to the United States and his wife… A CIA report also indicates that Bassnan traveled to Houston in 2002 and… that during that trip a member of the Saudi royal family provided Bassnan with a significant amount of cash… FBI information indicates that Bassnan is an extremist and a supporter of Usama bin Laden».

    Regarding Shaykh al-Thumairy, he was «an accredited diplomat at the Saudi Consulate in Los Angeles and one of the ‘imams’ at the King Fahd Mosque… built in 1998 from funding provided by Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Abdulaziz. The mosque… is widely recognized for its anti-Western views».

    The 28 pages also include lots more, but those facts give at least some solid indications of the links that Prince Bandar had to 9/11.

    And other FBI offices than in San Diego were basically not even covered in the 28 pages; this was a rush-job by a Senate Committee, and with enormous resistance from the White House, which did everything they could to block the investigators.

    Furthermore: none of this information is as solid as the sworn court-testimony of the captured former bagman for al-Qaeda, their bookkeeper who personally collected each one of the million-dollar cash donations to the organization and named many donors, including Prince Bandar, as having been among the people from whom he picked up those suitcases full of cash. He said of their donations: «It was crucial. I mean, without the money of the – of the Saudi you will have nothing». The authors of the Senate investigation report, never got any wind of this, because that man was in a US prison and held incommunicado until that court-case in October 2014. But it was virtually the entire Saud family – not merely Bandar – who funded 9/11.

    So, we know that Bandar «Bush» was practically like a brother to George W Bush, but what other indications do we have of GWB’s guilt in the planning of the 9/11 attacks?

    First of all, if he wasn’t involved in the attack’s planning, then he was grossly incompetent and uncaring, to the point of criminal negligence for the numerous attempts that the CIA had made to warn GWB that such an attack was being planned and would occur soon – that he simply ignored those warnings. Criminal negligence, however, isn’t the same as being a traitor. That’s far more serious, and it would entail Bush’s conscious desire for such an attack to occur. Such evidence does exist. Here it is:

    Researcher Chris Whipple headlined at Politico, on 12 November 2015, «‘The Attacks Will Be Spectacular’», and he reported:

    «Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US» The CIA’s famous Presidential Daily Brief, presented to George W. Bush on August 6, 2001, has always been Exhibit A in the case that his administration shrugged off warnings of an Al Qaeda attack. But months earlier, starting in the spring of 2001, the CIA repeatedly and urgently began to warn the White House that an attack was coming.

    By May of 2001, says Cofer Black, then chief of the CIA’s counterterrorism center, ‘it was very evident that we were going to be struck, we were gonna be struck hard and lots of Americans were going to die.’ ‘There were real plots being manifested,’ Cofer’s former boss, George Tenet, told me in his first interview in eight years…

    The crisis came to a head on July 10. The critical meeting that took place that day was first reported by Bob Woodward in 2006. Tenet also wrote about it in general terms in his 2007 memoir At the Center of the Storm.

    But neither he nor Black has spoken about it publicly in such detail until now — or been so emphatic about how specific and pressing their warnings really were. Over the past eight months, in more than a hundred hours of interviews, my partners Jules and Gedeon Naudet and I talked with Tenet and the 11 other living former CIA directors for The Spymasters, a documentary set to air this month on Showtime.

    The drama of failed warnings began when Tenet and Black pitched a plan, in the spring of 2001, called «the Blue Sky paper» to Bush’s new national security team. It called for a covert CIA and military campaign to end the Al Qaeda threat — ‘getting into the Afghan sanctuary, launching a paramilitary operation, creating a bridge with Uzbekistan.’ ‘And the word back,’ says Tenet, ‘was «we’re not quite ready to consider this. We don’t want the clock to start ticking». (Translation: they did not want a paper trail to show that they’d been warned.)»

    Five days later, I wrote an article interpreting that, titled «Politico Reports Bush Knew 2001 Terror-Attack Was Imminent and Wanted It». Readers here are referred to that, for the continuation of the case here.

    For additional information on the bonding between the Saudi aristocracy and the US aristocracy, see this and this. It’s important to understand in order to be able to understand why Obama helped to set up the 21 August 2013 Syrian sarin attack to be blamed on Bashar al-Assad, who is allied with Russia. The US is allied with the Saud family, against Russia; and Syria is allied with Russia and refuses to allow pipelines for gas from Qatar and oil from Saudi Arabia through Syria to replace gas and oil that Russia has been selling to the EU. (Like RFK Jr. properly headlined on 25 February 2016, «Syria: Another Pipeline War». That’s why the Sauds want Assad dead.)

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Jul 21

Today’s News 21st July 2016

  • Sharia In Denmark

    Submitted by Judith Bergmann via The Gatestone Institute,

    • "All the bullying happens in Arabic… The hierarchy of the Arab boys creates a very violent environment. … I have filmed the particularly vile bullying of a Somali boy. You can see the tears in his eyes. They are destroying him; it is very violent. " — From a dissertation by Jalal El Derbas, Ph.D.

    • Danish teachers are the least respected and are spoken of in denigrating and humiliating terms.

    • "I am not saying that all the Arab children did ugly things, but we witnessed on a regular basis… using derogatory Arabic language towards Somalis and girls." — Lise Egholm, former head of the Rådmandsgade school in Copenhagen.

    • Whether Danish parliamentarians wish to acknowledge this problem or not, they are up against far wider issues than that of religious incitement in mosques by radical preachers.

    After the television documentary, "Sharia in Denmark", embarrassed Danish authorities by revealing how widespread the preaching of sharia is in mosques in Denmark; the Danish government, in May, concluded a political agreement about "initiatives directed against religious preachers who seek to undermine Danish laws and values and who support parallel legal systems."

    "We are doing everything we can without compromising the constitution and international agreements," Bertel Haarder, the Minister for Culture and Church, said about the political agreement.

    The agreement centers on a number of initiatives, which are supposed to compensate for the detrimental effects of all the years in which sharia was allowed to spread in Denmark while most authorities paid only scant attention to what was happening. Part of the new effort, therefore, will be the mapping of all existing mosques in Denmark.

    It will now be obligatory, according to the agreement, for all priests, imams and others who are not part of the Church of Denmark, and who wish to be able to perform weddings — as well as for foreign preachers who apply for residence permits — to learn about Danish family law, freedom and democracy. At the end of the course, all will have to sign a statement that they will accept Danish law, including freedom of speech and religion, gender equality, freedom of sexual orientation, non-discrimination and women's rights.

    The government will examine how to create more transparency in foreign donations to faith communities in Denmark, including controlling and, if necessary, preventing such donations. As part of this work, on May 4 the government presented a law making it a crime to receive funding from a terror organization to establish or run an institution in Denmark, including schools and mosques.

    Another element in the political agreement is the establishment of national lists with the names of traveling foreign (non-EU) religious preachers who will be excluded from entry into Denmark on the grounds that they are a threat to public order in Denmark. These named preachers will not be granted an entry visa and will be denied entry at the border. In addition, a non-public list, containing the names of such preachers who are EU citizens, will be established. The purpose of this list is to create awareness of the existence of these preachers, as, due to EU rules on free movement, they cannot be denied entry.

    The final component of the agreement is the criminalization of certain speech. According to the agreement, it will become illegal explicitly to support terrorism, murder, rape, violence, incest, pedophilia, the use of force and polygamy as part of religious training, and whether or not the speech was made in private or in public. Both the activities of religious preachers and the activities of others, who speak as part of religious training, are included in the criminalization.

    The political agreement is expected to become law when the Danish parliament reconvenes after the summer vacation.

    Danish parliamentarians are aware that it will be difficult to measure whether these initiatives have any effect — how do you measure whether religious preachers are indeed not explicitly supporting terrorism, murder, rape and pedophilia, unless you place them under constant surveillance? But lawmakers are nevertheless confident that the new initiatives will have an effect. "This will have an impact on what people put up with from their religious leaders." Culture and Church Minister Bertel Haarder says.

    Another parliamentarian, Naser Khader, who appears more realistic, says,

    "We are well aware that more initiatives are needed. But this stops hate preachers from coming to Denmark, preachers who only want to come here in order to sow discord between population groups and who encourage violence, incest and pedophilia."

    After the documentary "Sharia in Denmark" embarrassed Danish authorities, the government reached a new a political agreement, which Danish Member of Parliament Naser Khader supported, saying, "this stops hate preachers from coming to Denmark, preachers who only want to come here in order to sow discord between population groups and who encourage violence, incest and pedophilia."

    While Danish politicians have taken yet another step on an uncertain road that may or may not succeed in stemming the rise of sharia in Denmark, other problems abound, which compound the impression that this initiative will not amount to much more than a symbolic band-aid.

    A recent Ph.D. dissertation by Jalal El Derbas, as reported by the Danish newspaper, Berlingske Tidende, shows that in several Danish schools with Arab students, the latter, mainly boys, use Arabic as a means to sexually and racially harass and bully other students as well as their teachers, especially girls, Somalis and ethnically Danish teachers, who do not understand the insults hurled at them in Arabic.

    According to the article, El Derbas was shocked when he went through the video footage of 12- and 13-year-olds in two different Danish public schools with a majority of pupils with minority background. The purpose of his Ph.D. was to examine the possible causes of why bilingual boys — who speak both Danish and Arabic — continue to lag behind other Danish students. He wanted to see what those bilingual boys actually do in the classroom. The footage was taken over five months and it displayed a world characterized by hierarchy, sexual and religious harassment, bullying and racism, in which the first language of the students, Arabic, played a central and leading role. According to El Derbas:

    "I could see that the students used Arabic as a secret code and they only used it negatively to disturb the schoolwork. If they did not want to do the work, they simply shifted to Arabic. The schools were very flexible and allowed the students to use Arabic both inside and outside the classroom. But all that this freedom accomplished was that the students shifted from Danish to Arabic if they were getting into a fight and if there was a teacher nearby whom they did not want to understand what they were saying."

    The video footage also revealed a hierarchy consisting of sexual harassment and racism, because the Arab boys consider themselves higher-ranking than girls and Somali students.

    "All the bullying happens in Arabic. All the ugly and mean words are uttered in Arabic. The hierarchy of the Arab boys creates a very violent environment. I have video footage of severe sexual harassment against Arab girls and I have filmed the particularly vile bullying of a Somali boy. You can see the tears in his eyes. They are destroying him; it is very violent."

    According to El Derbas, Sunni and Shia Muslim strife is also imported into the grounds of these Danish schools. With the majority of the boys being Sunni Muslims, they look down on the Shia Muslim students and a teacher who is a Shia Muslim is called "Satan" or "witch", whereas a Sunni Muslim teacher is addressed courteously as "uncle" or "aunt". Danish teachers are the least respected, and are spoken of in denigrating and humiliating terms.

    El Derbas, stressed that the pupils come from ghetto areas, saying:

    "Many of the teachers have given up on engaging the parents in any way, but if this is to change it has to happen through the parents. Maybe it would help if the parents took turns of being present in the classroom to see how their children behave. Most of them [the parents] are not working or studying anyway. I think that could lead to an improvement. Because no parents will accept that their children behave in this manner".

    The results of the dissertation come as no surprise to Lise Egholm, now retired, but who for 18 years, until 2013, was the head of Copenhagen's Rådmandsgade school, which has many Arab students.

    "I am not saying that all the Arab children did ugly things," says Egholm, "but we witnessed on a regular basis exactly the phenomenon of using derogatory Arabic language towards Somalis and girls… Back then the biggest group of children in the school was Arabic speaking, and the words which in Arabic mean 'whore' and 'f— your mother' they all knew."

    In a written statement to Berlingske Tidende, Minister of Education, Ellen Trane Nørby, wrote,

    "It is never all right to bully, whether this happens in Danish, Arabic, or in a third language. That is why I have initiated a large initiative, which has as its purpose to prevent and combat bullying. The teachers have to signal very strongly that there has to be room for all children and that you have to treat other pupils with respect. If some pupils do not understand this and speak in 'code language' or use a language that excludes and bullies other pupils, the schools must intervene. Danish is the language used for teaching in Denmark, and pupils should not be excluded or bullied because of parallel languages in school".

    However, what the minister of education fails to mention is that the problems with this kind of behavior are not likely to remain inside the school, but will inevitably spill into the streets. Then what? No amount of lists of radical religious preachers and laws is going to change that fact.

    Whether Danish parliamentarians wish to acknowledge this problem or not, they are up against far wider issues than that of religious incitement in mosques by radical preachers. Notably, El Derbas's findings have not caused any debate remotely resembling that, which was caused by the "Sharia in Denmark" documentary. They should.

  • Ted Cruz Booed For Refusing To Endorse Trump; Heidi Cruz Escorted Out To Shouts Of "Goldman Sachs"

    Update 3: Chris Christie unloaded on Cruz… (as Politico reports)

    Chris Christie did not mince words for Ted Cruz after the Texas senator refused to endorse Donald Trump on the prime-time convention stage Wednesday night.

     

    “It was an awful, selfish speech by someone who tonight, through the words he said on that stage, showed everybody why he has richly earned the reputation that he has on Capitol Hill,” Christie said to reporters on the floor of the convention.

     

    The New Jersey governor put a formal voice to the many delegates who greeted Cruz’s failure to endorse Trump in his 23-minute speech with widespread boos.

     

    “If you love our country and love your children as much as I know that you do, stand and speak and vote your conscience,” Cruz said. “Vote for candidates up and down the ticket who you trust to defend our freedom and to be faithful to the Constitution.”

     

    Christie mocked that rhetorical flourish. “I don’t understand how someone can present themselves as a person of integrity and then come into this room tonight and give that cute speech,” he said. “And that was cute.”

    *  *  *

    Update 2: Cruz's actions appear to be backfiring…

    *  *  *

    Update 1: RNC sources are reporting that Ted Cruz' "speech was different than the version he gave RNC in advance." Furthermore, officials and Cruz had to be physically separated after his speech.

    *  *  *

    As we detailed earlier, those who had predicted that the third day of the RNC would unveil with yet another scandal, they were right.

    Moments ago, Donald Trump's former rival, Ted Cruz was roundly booed after failing to endorse Trump during an address to the Republican National Convention, an obvious jab from the Texas lawmaker at the real estate mogul, who tormented him as "Lyin' Ted" during the primary.

    Instead of urging the crowd to vote for Tump, Cruz instead told delegates and voters to "vote your conscience" in November and never specifically said that people should cast their ballots for the Republican nominee. During the course of his speech, Cruz only mentioned Trump once, to congratulate him on getting the nomination.

    "To those listening, please, don’t stay home in November. If you love our country, and love your children as much as I know you do, stand, and speak, and vote your conscience, vote for candidates up and down the ticket who you trust to defend our freedom and to be faithful to the Constitution," Cruz said. As he continued speaking, and the crowd began to realize that an endorsement seemed less likely, the cheers that marked the early part of the speech became boos.

    "I appreciate the enthusiasm of the New York delegation," Cruz said to the vocal Trump home-state supporters who were placed right in front of the stage. They were yelling "We want Trump! We want Trump!"

    One reason why Cruz' speech was among the most anticipated, is due to the level of vitriol that enveloped the closing days of the GOP primary campaign. Trump labeled Cruz “Lyin’ Ted,” falsely accused his father of being involved in the assassination of President Kennedy, and threatened to “spill the beans” on Cruz’s wife, Heidi. In turn, Cruz called Trump a “sniveling coward,” a “pathological liar” and a “narcissist at a level that I don’t think this country has ever seen.”

    Cruz's wife, Heidi, was seen leaving the arena when the booing started getting very loud. Former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli told ABC News that he escorted Heidi Cruz out of the convention hall because “it was volatile and the Trump folks were physically approaching and confrontationally yelling,” he said via text.

    According to CNN's Manu Raju, as Heidi was being escorted out, one angry Trump supporter was shouting "Goldman Sachs" at her.

     

    After leaving the floor, Heidi Cruz also reportedly got into a verbal altercation with the head of the Washington delegation, who had berated Ted Cruz following his speech.

    Or perhaps it was all intentional, and yet another dramatic sequence orchestrated to provide the next speaker, Trump's son Eric, with a crowd that needed an outlet for affirmation.

    According to Mashable, reports before Cruz spoke indicated that he did not plan to endorse Trump, although he did congratulate the nominee and admonished the crowd to vote for the candidate that will be "faithful to the constitution." That wasn't enough for the crowd, which loudly booed Cruz and chanted for Trump.

    As ABC writes, the fact that Cruz spoke at all came as a surprise to some considering how bitter the primary campaign became towards the end. At one point, Trump insinuated that Cruz's wife Heidi was less attractive than his own wife Melania, and later he made suggestions that Cruz's Cuban father was somehow connected to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

    He also questioned whether Cruz was eligible to run for the presidency because he was born in Canada.

    Shortly after Cruz exited the stage to a growing round of boos, Trump entered the arena on the opposite side to sit with his family and watch his son Eric address the crowd.

  • Wikileaks Is About To Expose The Turkish 'Coup', But Someone Is Trying To Silence Them

    Submitted by Carey Wedler via TheAntiMedia.org,

    Wikileaks claimed Monday it was under attack after it announced it would release hundreds of thousands of documents related to Turkey and the failed military coup attempted Friday, CNET reported.

    The organization, which has released information on everything from war crimes to Hillary Clinton’s email scandal, announced Sunday it would be releasing 100,000 documents related to Turkey’s “political power structure,” some of which detail the “leadup” to the coup.

     

    Wikileaks anticipated the release would be censored in Turkey, cautioning in a three-part tweet posted Monday:

    “Turks will likely be censored to prevent them reading our pending release of 100k+ docs on politics leading up to the coup. We ask that Turks are ready with censorship bypassing systems such as TorBrowser and uTorrent and that everyone else is ready to help them bypass censorship and push our links through the censorship to come.”

     

    The Turkish government, headed by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has increasingly ramped up censorship efforts against journalists, lending credibility to Wikileaks suspicions their release may not fully reach Turkish citizens—especially considering the latest leak concerns his ruling party, AKP.

    As CNET noted:

    “Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were reportedly blocked in Turkey during the attempted coup Friday, but many residents appear to have gotten around the blocks, posting messages and videos, likely using VPNs or other anonymizing services.”

    Throughout Monday, Wikileaks continued to promote the release.

    They then tweeted that instead of 100,000 documents, they would actually be releasing far more. “Our pending release of 100k docs on Turkish political power? Just kidding. The first batch is 300k emails, 500k docs,” they announced.

    But just hours later, they alerted followers their website was being attacked. “Our infrastructure is under sustained attack,” they tweeted, alongside the hashtag, #TurkeyPurge.

     

    “We are unsure of the true origin of the attack. The timing suggests a Turkish state power faction or its allies. We will prevail & publish,” Wikileaks tweeted shortly after.

     

    An hour later, the organization remained resolute in its determination to publish the hundreds of thousands of documents. “Coming Tuesday: The#ErdoganEmails: 300 thousand internal emails from Erdo?an’s AKP – through to July 7, 2016,” they tweeted.

    After tweeting further about the ongoing cyber attacks, Wikileaks eventually announced Tuesday they had released the first installment of emails, which can be viewed here. The emails are from the server of the AKP.

     

    The failed military coup in Turkey over the weekend heightened tensions within the country, where President Erdo?an has grown increasingly autocratic. The Turkish government has also been implicated in the rise of ISIS and has been accused of allowing fighters to cross through their borders and providing them with medical assistance.

    The coup, which continues to be mired in uncertainties, accusations, and conflicting reports, left Turkish citizens between a rock and a hard place—a military coup or an increasingly oppressive democratically-elected leader who has now overseen 50,000 suspensions or detainments of government employees regarding the military’s failed attempt to seize power.

    It seems Wikileak’s release of information on Turkish power structures could not come at a more vital time—that is, so long as it reaches the Turkish people.

  • US To Seize $1 Billion In Embezzled Malaysian Assets Which Goldman Sachs Helped Buy

    The last time we wrote about the long-running saga of the scandalous collapse and constant corruption at the Malaysian state wealth fund, 1MDB, which also happened to be an unconfirmed slush fund for president Najib, was a month ago when we learned that the NY bank regulator was looking into fundraising by the fund’s favorite bank, Goldman Sachs. Then overnight, the story which already seemed like it has every possible angle of crime and corruption covered for a series of Hollywood action-adventure blockbusters, got a new twist when the DOJ announced it would seek to seize some $1 billion in assets from individuals affiliated with the fun as part of one of the largest seizures in US history.

    The expected asset seizures would be the U.S. government’s first action tied to the 1MDB investigation. Among the properties the US is looking to confiscate, are Van Gogh paintings, Beverly Hills properties, a private jet, ultra high end real estate in NYC and LA, and the rights to profits from the hit movie The Wolf of Wall Street.

    The move by U.S. authorities to seize assets tied to an investment fund run by a foreign government would be a major escalation in Washington’s global efforts to fight corruption and block allegedly illegally obtained funds, facilitated by Goldman Sachs, from moving through the world’s financial system the WSJ adds.

    The case represents the most detailed and sweeping allegations to be brought in the multinational probe into a global scheme to siphon more than $3.5bn from the Malaysian government fund.  As the FT adds, it is also the first time Malay prime minister, Najib Razak, has been officially tied to the scandal, and while he has not been by name in court documents the description of “Malaysian Official 1” matches his biography and job responsibilities. In what may develop into a major diplomatic row, the DOJ states that that “official” received funds misappropriated from 1MDB, prosecutors say. Najib has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.

    The actions by U.S. authorities also threaten to upend the country’s relationship with Malaysia, a moderate Muslim nation that has long been an important U.S. ally in Southeast Asia, and may force Malaysia to enter China’s sphere of influence in exchange for protection from US retaliation. Malaysia has deep ties to the Middle East and has been seen as a bulwark against China, which has increasingly asserted its power across Asia. President Barack Obama cultivated a relationship with Mr. Najib, including playing golf together in Hawaii over the Christmas holidays in 2014, something we reported at the time.

     

    Amid the controversy, the Malaysian leader now was likely to focus on his domestic political survival rather than retaliate against the Obama administration, said James Keith, US ambassador to Malaysia from 2007 to 2010. Malaysia is a key regional partner for the US, backing a proposed trans-Pacific trade deal and hosting a digital centre to counter Islamic State propaganda. “I don’t think this is unexpected from Najib’s perspective,” said Mr Keith. “His approach is: batten down the hatches; we’re going to survive this, no matter what. He’ll do everything he can just to pretend this didn’t happen.”

    * * *

    Political fallout notwithstanding, the case reveals just how extensive money-laundering by the fund, the Malay prime minister, and a handful of affiliated individuals, often with US bank assistance, has been ever since 1MDB was created in 2009 as a government-owned vehicle to promote economic development through global partnerships and foreign investment.

    Ironically, it ended up anything but as funds intended to benefit the Malaysian people were instead diverted to buy real estate, works of art and jewellery, pay casino bills and hire musicians and celebrities for the conspirators’ “lavish lifestyles”,  the complaint says. More than $200m was spent on art alone, prosecutors allege.

    As part of the complaint, US authorities accuse Malaysian officials and business executives with receiving laundered 1MDB funds through banks in Singapore, Switzerland, Luxembourg and New York. The Malaysian officials “treated this public trust as a personal bank account”, said Loretta Lynch, US attorney-general. The misappropriation occurred over four years beginning shortly after Mr Najib set up the fund, according to the complaint. According to the suit, in March 2013, $681m in proceeds from a 1MDB bond offering were transferred into an account belonging to the official matching Mr Najib’s description. Five months later, $620m of that amount was shifted to a different account to which a 1MDB official was an authorised signatory.

    Officials at 1MDB and others began diverting money shortly after the fund was created in September 2009 under the guise of investing in a joint venture with a private Saudi oil extraction company, PetroSaudi International. More than $1bn was transferred to a Swiss bank account held by Good Star Ltd, which was owned by Mr Low, prosecutors allege. Andrew McCabe, deputy director of the FBI, told reporters in Washington: “The Malaysian people were defrauded on an enormous scale.”

    There is more in the full complaint, and it revolves around the three main players who, aside from the prime minister,  were instrumental in the perpetuation of this grand fraud, including, Riza Aziz, stepson of Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak; Jho Low, a Malaysian financier; and Khadem Al Qubaisi, a former Abu Dhabi managing director of a sovereign-wealth fund.

    Details about their involvement can be found in the WSJ.

    * * *

    Much of the above was already known, or implied, however this is the first official confirmation of just how vast the money-laundering scheme was and that it stretched to the very top. What is now also confirmed, is that at the heart of the fundraising operation was none other than Goldman Sachs.

    According to the complaint, in 2012, 1MDB officials and others fraudulently diverted $1.4bn in proceeds from two bond offerings arranged by Goldman Sachs, according to the complaint. Representing almost 40 per cent of the total raised, the funds were transferred to a Swiss account controlled by a British Virgin Islands entity called Aabar Investments PJS Limited. Aabar had been named to suggest a relationship with an Abu Dhabi company, Aabar Investments PJS, an investment arm of the Abu Dhabi government. But funds diverted to the Swiss account ultimately ended up in a Singapore bank account.

    In 2013, several officials including those from 1MDB diverted nearly $1.3bn from another $3bn Goldman bond offering. The money was supposed to be used to finance a joint venture known as the Abu Dhabi Malaysia Investment Co but was instead funnelled into a Singapore account controlled by Mr Low’s associate, the complaint says.

    Where it becomes clear that Goldman had a special arrangement with the complicit issuer and the prime minister, is that Goldman earned $192.5m or nearly 11 per cent of the principal amount on one of the 2012 bond deals, a $1.75bn offering, according to court documents, which also said that the offering circular “contained misleading statements and omitted materials facts”. Considering that a typical fee for an emerging market sovereign or quasi-sovereign bond offering between $1bn-$5bn would be between 0.1 per cent and 0.3 per cent, according to Dealogic, this is nothing short of kickback to Goldman, and raises questions about why Goldman wilfully accepted such an overblown fee for a deal which any of its competitor banks would have done for a fraction of the cost.

    This being Goldman, of course, the bank was not accused of any wrongdoing in today’s action. It may be in the future as per the DOJ’s parallel prove whether Goldman violated the Bank Secrecy Act in its handling of the proceeds of the securities offerings, but somehow the FBI was unable to link the bank to any crime conducted by the same people who were paying it exorbitant fees to keep the money flowing.

    * * *

    So once Goldman’s fundraising skills allowed corrupt Malaysian politicians and selected shady middlemen to have access to billion which they would then embezzle, what did they spend the money on? Perhaps a better question is what did they not spend on: among the purchases were Van Gogh paintings, a private jet, the rights to profits from the hit movie The Wolf of Wall Street, and real estate. Lots and lots of ultra high end real estate.

    Here are some of the details from WSJ:

    The properties allegedly bought with funds misappropriated from a Malaysian investment fund would make for a stunning house tour of high-end real estate in New York and Los Angeles. Besides flashy real estate, the U.S. government alleges that money from the fund, known as 1Malaysia Development Bhd. or 1MDB, was used to buy a $35 million private jet and a stake in EMI Music Publishing.

    The assets that the government is trying to seize were purchased by three men who had close ties to 1MDB: Jho Low, a Malaysian deal maker; Riza Aziz, the stepson of Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, and Khadem Al Qubaisi, a former Abu Dhabi managing director of a sovereign-wealth fund, and occasionally the men sold or gave assets to one another.

    The properties range from a Beverly Hills mansion with a 120-foot-long pool to a string of Manhattan condos, including a seven-bedroom, five-bathroom duplex overlooking Central Park that cost $35 million.

     The complaints paint a picture of lavish spending on casinos and private jets and a taste for high-end real estate—an asset that has been an increasingly popular place for the world’s wealthy to stash their cash outside the banking system and inside stable countries. Mr. Low declined to comment. A representative for Mr. Al Qubaisi didn’t reply to requests for comment. Red Granite Pictures, a company owned by Mr. Aziz, said it and Mr. Aziz “did nothing wrong.”

    Mr. Aziz’s New York duplex is by far the most expensive property in the Park Laurel building, a prominent luxury address near Lincoln Center and overlooking Central Park. Mr. Aziz has stayed in the apartment when he visits New York, according to a doorman there.

    A home bought by Mr. Low is located in the so-called Bird Streets in Los Angeles’s Hollywood Hills—a quiet enclave of narrow, twisting roads named after different types of birds. The property on Oriole Drive is a 6-bedroom, 5-bathroom home with a swimming pool, spa and wine cellar, which Mr. Low bought in 2012 for $39 million, according to records. A tall, white wall surrounds the house.

    The Los Angeles home owned by Mr. Aziz on North Hillcrest Road— a winding street just off Sunset Boulevard—was purchased in 2010 for $17.5 million. Security guards on the site Wednesday said that they had no idea who owned the property and that no federal agents had visited.

    The Viceroy L’Ermitage Beverly Hills, the hotel Mr. Low purchased in 2009 through his family’s trust, sits discreetly on a tree-lined, residential street and features a rooftop pool and 116 newly renovated suites. Hotel staff said they hadn’t noticed any unusual activity Wednesday morning.

    Mr. Low owns a majority stake in the Park Lane Hotel, a trophy property overlooking New York’s Central Park. He put up about $240 million of the $400 million of equity provided by the investors who bought the 46-story property in 2013 in a deal that valued it at about $850 million.

    The investor group, led by New York developer Steve Witkoff, planned at the time to continue running the Park Lane as a hotel while studying the possibility of redeveloping the hotel into condominiums or a mixed-use property. But when news broke that Mr. Low was under investigation, those plans were stymied. Such a plan would require approval from the New York state attorney general’s office, an unlikely event when the property’s majority owner was being investigated.

    * * *

    And that kind of magnificent organized crime, dear New Yorkers, is why real estate in Manhattan has never been more expensive.

  • Potential Crisis Triggers Continue To Pile Up In 2016

    Submitted by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,

    We are a little over half way through 2016 and, at the current rate, it will be a miracle if the year finishes without outright catastrophe in half the nations of the world. Some might call these events “Black Swans,” some might call them completely engineered threats, others might call it all a simple “coincidence” or a tragedy of errors. I stand strictly by the position that most of the dangers we see today have been deliberately escalated, if not strategically implemented.

    Here is the problem; international financiers and globalist nut-jobs are clearly operating on a timeline with the end goal of creating enough general chaos to convince the masses that complete centralized authority over every aspect of our lives is preferable to constant fear.

    For a more in-depth analysis on the schemes of the elites, see my articles Are Globalists Evil Or Just Misunderstood and Globalists Are Now Openly Demanding New World Order Centralization.

    In order to elicit this kind of thinking from the public, crisis events are required that will cause many human beings to act, for the most part, like rabid animals. How would this be accomplished? Well, what does history tell us about that which inspires people to sometimes sacrifice their moral code or to bow down to tyrants? Usually a loss of necessities is required — including a lack of employment, lack of production, lack of serviceable shelter, lack of ample food and clean water, lack of medical care, lack of overall security and a sense of safety, etc.

    The question often arises: “Why would the elites need to create crisis at all; don’t they already have control of the world?”

    The answer is no, not yet they don’t, and if you read my recent article The Reasons Why The Globalists Are Destined To Lose, you can see why they never will have total control. That said, just because the globalist plan for complete centralization is doomed to fail does not mean they will not do everything in their power to make the attempt.

    Changes in mass psychology that might take decades to achieve can be accomplished in only a few short years if the public is placed under the right amount of duress. I find that younger people (and isolated people who spend all their time on the web) in particular just don’t understand how this works. Look at it this way; you may not think crisis would be all that useful in pushing the globalist agenda forward until you find your family threatened, your children at risk or your parents in dire need. Fear of losing those we love can open the door to great collective evils, even more so than the fear of harm to ourselves.

    Those who have no concept of self defense or the will to prepare and fight are the easiest to manipulate in this way. Pacifists are an effortless meal for dedicated despots.  Hell, for some folks the simple threat of losing day-to-day comforts can cause them to make terrible choices and support destructive leaders and policies.

    Chaos is NOT the end game, it is only a tool by which the elites gain psychological leverage over the masses so that people willingly give up their rights to self determination and hand more power to the establishment.

    A perfect example would be the recent Brexit referendum, the effects of which have not even begun to rise to the economic surface yet. In light of this event, numerous political puppets and banking moguls have declared an outright need for financial centralization of all nations in order to avoid a calamity.

    Investors have been lured into a false sense of safety as equities do not yet reflect the fiscal downturn taking place in every other sector of the global economy, but time grows short nonetheless. The political can negatively affect the financial and vice versa.  Here are just a few of the latest trigger events that are piling up atop an already precarious year…

    Italian Banking Crisis

    Globalists continue to warn that the effects of the Brexit are coming soon, and that they will bring frightening instability. The latest warning comes again from the IMF, which argues that in the wake of the Brexit a banking crisis in Italy is now imminent and will initiate a “global contagion” in markets. The IMF is not wrong – probably because it had a hand in creating the crisis in the first place.

     

    Italy is the third largest economy in the EU. Current estimates project at least $400 billion in toxic debts tied to Italy’s insolvent banks (this obviously does not include the bulk of derivatives). The stock of Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena (MPS), the world’s oldest bank and Italy’s most vulnerable lender, has dropped by a staggering 43 percent. Most of the EU is inexorably chained to Italian finance through various debt obligations, bond holdings, long term investments, etc. A breakdown in Italy would indeed be a “Lehman moment” for Europe.

     

    In response, the Italian government and the Italian banking sector is seeking taxpayer bailouts from the EU under extraneous circumstances, but EU officials are questioning whether or not this is even legal under EU charter.

     

    They are also hoping that international banks like JP Morgan will successfully form a bailout response for distressed Italian assets and save Italian banks from a hard landing.

     

    It is doubtful that any bailout plan will be enough to stall the shock wave from an Italian bank crisis. I do not believe the elites even intend to defuse such a crisis. With Italy’s own constitutional referendum coming this fall, a political shakeup may result. If a banking disaster is mixed into this shift, the potential for Italy to exit the EU becomes more plausible. A refusal by the EU to save Italian banks would seal the deal.

     

    In my pre-Brexit articles outlining why I believed the Brexit vote would pass, I predicted that numerous instabilities in the global economy would be allowed to turn volatile and that the Brexit would be blamed for nearly all of them. Not surprisingly, the Italian finance minister is already placing the blame for Italy's impending bank implosion on the Brexit vote.

     

    This is the economic event that no one in the mainstream is paying much attention to. Again, as long as stocks remain in the green, the mainstream is oblivious to the underlying dangers. By the time equities begin to plummet, it will be too late for most people to do much to hedge their bets or prepare.

     

    "Failed" Coup In Turkey

    Maybe you thought 2016 was already getting weird, but this ugly party is just beginning. In what amounted to a half-day coup against Turkish president Recep Erdogen, Turkey went from corrupt cronyism to outright fascism overnight.

     

    I am not so sure that this short lived coup actually "failed"; in fact, I think it achieved exactly what it was supposed to achieve.  I am not surprised in the slightest that some believe that Erdogen fabricated the entire conflict in order to provide an excuse to root out his political opponents. The Turkish government has targeted at least 50,000 people so far, including judges, teachers, and political opposition, all in the name of combating "treason". Erdogen has been sliding into ruin for years with failed policies and an increasing penchant for human rights and free speech violations and now he has free reign to go full totalitarian.

     

    That said, I think the claims of an Erdogen false flag are missing the bigger picture.

     

    First, the coup was clearly staged. Anyone who knows anything about successful coups in history knows that you either imprison or kill the existing leadership of a government before you try to take it over militarily. Reports indicate that military insurgents had Erdogen’s plane in their sights and could have easily turned him into a cloud of flaming vapor, but for some reason did not fire.

     

    My instincts told me upon first hearing of the fleeting momentum of the coup that the whole event was not really about Erdogen. Rather, the event was about NATO, or a rationale for dividing NATO and weakening the West. Rather predictably, Erdogen’s government is now blaming the U.S. in particular for the coup attempt, as the Obama administration and the U.N. warn of civil rights violations by Erdogen.  John Kerry has openly suggested removing Turkey from NATO membership.

     

    At this time, Erdogen has allowed U.S. military operations at Incirlik Air Base to continue, but the prospect remains that this is a temporary condition.

     

    It is interesting that as the situation develops it is becoming obvious that whether the coup succeeded or failed the end result would be a rationalization for Turkey to break ranks with NATO and, in particular, America.  Turkey is a vital pivot point for NATO in dealing with the Middle East and Russia. To lose Turkish aid would mean a considerable weakening of NATO operations and open a path to more volatile confrontation between Eastern and Western powers.  Take note that no matter the ultimate outcome of the coup fiasco, the most probable result will be a Turkish break from the West.  If the latest coup is exposed as an Erdogen "false flag", this process will progress very quickly.

     

    I will be watching this situation carefully over the next few weeks, but I suspect that tensions between Erdogen and the U.S. are slated to expand and that Erdogen is about to go full-despot with human rights violations of the worst kind. I also suspect that Erdogen will begin drafting proposals for greater cooperation with Russia in the near term.

     

    The instability in Turkey is an advantage for the globalists. They can use it to undermine NATO operations if they wish. They can flood the EU with even MORE refugees and blame Turkey in the process. They can even help their Frankenstein monster, ISIS, by allowing Turkey to shut down U.S. operations out of Incirlik (as if the U.S. government had any intention of actually stopping ISIS anyway). This could be used as an impetus for a resurgence of ISIS activities.

     

    To summarize, a crisis in Turkey is not only good for Erdogen, it is also good for the globalists. Watch for this trigger event to continue mutating.

     

    Race War In The U.S.

    I have covered extensively the efforts by globalists, and George Soros specifically, to create open wounds in the American social structure and divide the public along racial lines. This has been done by promoting, and in some cases funding, operations of social justice groups (cultural Marxists) and black racist organizations. Black Lives Matter has so far been the vehicle Soros has used to lure useful idiots into championing a race war that has no basis in reality.

     

    While there is in fact a legitimate cause for concern over the militarization of state police, police abuses are in no way limited to any single race. I wrote about the best possible solution to constitutional violations by police organizations in my article The ‘Thin Blue Line’ Serves No Purpose. In it, I outlined why state police, funded by federal cash, should not exist all and that their duties should be by taken over by elected sheriff’s offices and neighborhood watches. This removes the gasoline from the fire and undermines attempts by cultural Marxists to incite race violence.

     

    Of course, this will never happen. Both Republicans and Democrats are calling for even MORE federalization of police in response to the continued shootings of random LEO’s by black activists. The Democrats want more federalization because they think it will reign in violent cops. The Republicans want more federalization because they think it will reign in violent BLM activists. Notice that no other solution is being offered other than more federal presence on American streets.

     

    Keep in mind that the shooting of random police officers is becoming an active trend and it is only going to get worse as we close in on the November elections. Watch for officers to be killed not only while on duty, but also while off duty, perhaps even in their homes.

     

    The goal here is to create an excuse for martial law without necessarily declaring martial law outright. That is to say, the government will enact the conditions of martial law incrementally. This will likely include anonymity of LEO identities — meaning ski masks, hidden badge numbers and zero public accountability, all in the name of “protecting police lives.” Groups like BLM and the social justice cultists that exploit them as a weapon are not a real threat to the public overall and could be crushed in an instant by an angry white majority and militarized police unrestrained by the constitution. But this is not the point.

     

    The militarization and federalization of the police will end in totalitarianism in the U.S. if it receives wide support by conservatives, or widespread civil war if it does not. Police need to refuse to act in an unconstitutional manner even in the face of violence directed against them, otherwise, they risk starting a fight with liberty groups as well. Black Lives Matter would be the least of their worries at that point.

     

    Quick Mention – 28 Page 9/11 Report Release: If you want my in-depth look at the growing rift between Saudi Arabia and the U.S., read my article 'One More Casualty Of The 9/11 Farce – The Petrodollar'.  I am giving this a quick mention because we have yet to hear the full Saudi response to the release of this report.  The original threat was that they would dump their U.S. treasury holdings and depeg their currency from the dollar.  This would officially end the petro-status of the dollar and eventually end the dollar's world reserve status as well.  I believe that if the Saudi's do take this action, they will do it quietly before bond markets and oil markets realize what is happening.  It is likely that a Saudi break from the U.S. will occur quickly in the event of a Trump presidency.

     

    Quick Mention – South China Sea Build Up: A prelude to WWIII?  Maybe, maybe not.  China and the U.S. have been sparring politically over the South China Sea for some time.   An international ruling has argued that China has no legitimate claims to the waters nor any territorial history.  This has led to greater tensions.  The latest build up of naval units in the region is concerning, but there has not yet been a true catalyst to instigate a war.  This is another scenario which may not materialize until next year, if it materializes at all.

    The overall purpose of these events, I believe, is first to conjure mass confusion. The globalists are turning up the heat on the citizenry much faster than ever before, and it is time to take stock of our position and response. The best defense, as I have always stated, is personal preparedness and self sufficiency, organization with friends and family, then organization of the like-minded within your neighborhood and if possible your town. Most people are self-isolated and thus weak in their defensive position. Anyone effectively organized will have far reaching advantages in the midst of social breakdown. Anyone who is organized with solid planning will become the point to which everyone else gravitates. You can either be a pillar of strength or a victim, it is your choice.

    Rest assured, there is more shock and awe to come in 2016. Now is the time to prepare if you have not done so already.

  • How Much Space Does $1,500 Rent You In America's Most Populous Cities?

    While location, location, location is something that is empasized a lot, the best places often come with compromises that are hard to come to terms with – chief among which, the financial matters. Across the 30 most populous US cities, the following chart from CafeRent.com shows how much bang you get for your buck…

    (click image for interactive version)

     

    For the record, the proportions in this infographic are correct – if San Diego seems twice as large as San Francisco, it’s because its average price per square foot is half that of the Golden Gate City. And in case you were wondering: yes, the hypothetical Manhattan studio that you’d get for $1,500/month, fits loosely inside the living room of a four-bed, three-bath Memphis home you could rent for the same amount of cash:

    In Boston’s 41 Saratoga community, one could rent a 386-square-foot studio unit for that price, and for an extra $100, that space could “grow” to 513 square feet. Although the apartments seem to lack bedroom furniture, they are brand new, featuring open floor plans with hardwood flooring, granite countertops and stainless steel appliances.

    In the right column, Southport Crossing in Indianapolis offers three-bed townhome layouts with 2.5 baths in a broad price range topping out at a little over $1,600. The amenities here include a resort-style swimming pool as part of the common space, and individual units come with up to 400 square feet of enclosed patio area.

    Read more here at RentCafe.com…

  • "My Own People Hate Me!" – Black Brooklyn Cop Slams "False Narrative Of Black Lives Matter"

    Authored by Brooklyn, NY police officer Jay Stalien (via Facebook),

    I have come to realize something that is still hard for me to understand to this day. The following may be a shock to some coming from an African American, but the mere fact that it may be shocking to some is prima facie evidence of the sad state of affairs that we are in as Humans.

    I used to be so torn inside growing up. Here I am, a young African-American born and raised in Brooklyn, NY wanting to be a cop. I watched and lived through the crime that took place in the hood. My own black people killing others over nothing. Crack heads and heroin addicts lined the lobby of my building as I shuffled around them to make my way to our 1 bedroom apartment with 6 of us living inside. I used to be woken up in the middle of the night by the sound of gun fire, only to look outside and see that it was 2 African Americans shooting at each other.

    It never sat right with me. I wanted to help my community and stop watching the blood of African Americans spilled on the street at the hands of a fellow black man. I became a cop because black lives in my community, along with ALL lives, mattered to me, and wanted to help stop the bloodshed.

    As time went by in my law enforcement career, I quickly began to realize something. I remember the countless times I stood 2 inches from a young black man, around my age, laying on his back, gasping for air as blood filled his lungs. I remember them bleeding profusely with the unforgettable smell of deoxygenated dark red blood in the air, as it leaked from the bullet holes in his body on to the hot sidewalk on a summer day. I remember the countless family members who attacked me, spit on me, cursed me out, as I put up crime scene tape to cordon off the crime scene, yelling and screaming out of pain and anger at the sight of their loved ones taking their last breath. I never took it personally, I knew they were hurting. I remember the countless times I had to order new uniforms, because the ones I had on, were bloody from the blood of another black victim…of black on black crime. I remember the countless times I got back in my patrol car, distraught after having watched another black male die in front me, having to start my preliminary report something like this:

    Suspect- Black/ Male, Victim-Black /Male.

    I remember the countless times I canvassed the area afterwards, and asked everyone “did you see who did it”, and the popular response from the very same family members was always, “Fuck the Police, I ain't no snitch, Im gonna take care of this myself". This happened every single time, every single homicide, black on black, and then my realization became clearer.

    I woke up every morning, put my freshly pressed uniform on, shined my badge, functioned checked my weapon, kissed my wife and kid, and waited for my wife to say the same thing she always does before I leave, “Make sure you come back home to us”. I always replied, “I will”, but the truth was I was never sure if I would. I almost lost my life on this job, and every call, every stop, every moment that I had this uniform on, was another possibility for me to almost lose my life again. I was a target in the very community I swore to protect, the very community I wanted to help. As a matter of fact, they hated my very presence. They called me “Uncle Tom”, and “wanna be white boy”, and I couldn’t understand why. My own fellow black men and women attacking me, wishing for my death, wishing for the death of my family. I was so confused, so torn, I couldn’t understand why my own black people would turn against me, when every time they called …I was there. Every time someone died….I was there. Every time they were going through one of the worst moments in their lives…I was there. So why was I the enemy? I dove deep into that question…Why was I the enemy? Then my realization became clearer.

    I spoke to members of the community and listened to some of the complaints as to why they hated cops. I then did research on the facts. I also presented facts to these members of the community, and listened to their complaints in response. This is what I learned:

    Complaint: Police always targeting us, they always messing with the black man.

     

    Fact: A city where the majority of citizens are black (Baltimore for example) …will ALWAYS have a higher rate of black people getting arrested, it will ALWAYS have a higher rate of blacks getting stopped, and will ALWAYS have a higher rate of blacks getting killed, and the reason why is because a city with those characteristics will ALWAYS have a higher rate of blacks committing crime. The statistics will follow the same trend for Asians if you go to China, for Hispanics if you go to Puerto Rico, for whites if you go to Russia, and the list goes on. It’s called Demographics

     

    Complaint: More black people get arrested than white boys.

     

    Fact: Black People commit a grossly disproportionate amount of crime. Data from the FBI shows that Nationwide, Blacks committed 5,173 homicides in 2014, whites committed 4,367. Chicago’s death toll is almost equal to that of both wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, combined. Chicago’s death toll from 2001–November, 26 2015 stands at 7,401. The combined total deaths during Operation Iraqi Freedom (2003-2015: 4,815) and Operation Enduring Freedom/Afghanistan (2001-2015: 3,506), total 8,321.

     

    Complaint: Blacks are the only ones getting killed by police, or they are killed more.

     

    Fact: As of July 2016, the breakdown of the number of US Citizens killed by Police this year is, 238 White people killed, 123 Black people killed, 79 Hispanics, 69 other/or unknown race.

     

    Complaint: Well we already doing a good job of killing ourselves, we don’t need the Police to do it. Besides they should know better.

     

    Fact: Black people kill more other blacks than Police do, and there are only protest and outrage when a cop kills a black man. University of Toledo criminologist Dr. Richard R. Johnson examined the latest crime data from the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Reports and Centers for Disease Control and found that an average of 4,472 black men were killed by other black men annually between Jan. 1, 2009, and Dec. 31, 2012. Professor Johnson’s research further concluded that 112 black men died from both justified and unjustified police-involved killings annually during this same period.

    The more I listened, the more I realized. The more I researched, the more I realized. I would ask questions, and would only get emotional responses & inferences based on no facts at all. The more killing I saw, the more tragedy, the more savagery, the more violence, the more loss of life of a black man at the hands of another black man….the more I realized.

    I haven’t slept well in the past few nights. Heartbreak weighs me down, rage flows through my veins, and tears fills my eyes. I watched my fellow officers assassinated on live television, and the images of them laying on the ground are seared into my brain forever. I couldn’t help but wonder if it had been me, a black man, a black cop, on TV, assassinated, laying on the ground dead… would my friends and family still think black lives mattered? Would my life have mattered? Would they make t-shirts in remembrance of me? Would they go on tv and protest violence? Would they even make a Facebook post, or share a post in reference to my death?

    All of my realizations came to this conclusion.

    Black Lives do not matter to most black people. Only the lives that make the national news matter to them. Only the lives that are taken at the hands of cops or white people, matter. The other thousands of lives lost, the other black souls that I along with every cop, have seen taken at the hands of other blacks, do not matter. Their deaths are unnoticed, accepted as the “norm”, and swept underneath the rug by the very people who claim and post “black lives matter”.

     

    I realized that this country is full of ignorance, where an educated individual will watch the ratings-driven news media, and watch a couple YouTube video clips, and then come to the conclusion that they have all the knowledge they need to have in order to know what it feels like to have a bullet proof vest as part of your office equipment, “Stay Alive” as part of your daily to do list, and having insurance for your health insurance because of the high rate of death in your profession. They watch a couple videos and then they magically know in 2 minutes 35 seconds, how you are supposed to handle a violent encounter, which took you 6 months of Academy training, 2 – 3 months of field training, and countless years of blood, sweat, tears and broken bones experiencing violent encounters and fine tuning your execution of the Use of Force Continuum.

     

    I realized that there are even cops, COPS, duly sworn law enforcement officers, who are supposed to be decent investigators, who will publicly go on the media and call other white cops racist and KKK, based on a video clip that they watched thousands of miles away, which was filmed after the fact, based on a case where the details aren’t even known yet and the investigation hasn’t even begun.

     

    I realized that most in the African American community refuse to look at solving the bigger problem that I see and deal with every day, which is black on black crime taking hundreds of innocent black lives each year, and instead focus on the 9 questionable deaths of black men, where some were in the act of committing crimes.

     

    I realized that they value the life of a Sex Offender and Convicted Felon, [who was in the act of committing multiple felonies: felon in possession of a firearm-FELONY, brandishing and threatening a homeless man with a gun-Aggravated Assault in Florida: FELONY, who resisted officers who first tried to taze him, and WAS NOT RESTRAINED, who can be clearly seen in one of the videos raising his right shoulder, then shooting it down towards the right side of his body exactly where the firearm was located and recovered] more than the lives of the innocent cops who were assassinated in Dallas protecting the very people that hated them the most.

     

    I realized that they refuse to believe that most cops acknowledge that there are Bad cops who should have never been given a badge & gun, who are chicken shit and will shoot a cockroach if it crawls at them too fast, who never worked in the hood and may be intimidated. That most cops dread the thought of having to shoot someone, and never see the turmoil and mental anguish that a cop goes through after having to kill someone to save his own life. Instead they believe that we are all blood thirsty killers, because the media says so, even though the numbers prove otherwise.

     

    I realize that they truly feel as if the death of cops will help people realize the false narrative that Black Lives Matter, when all it will do is take their movement two steps backwards and label them domestic terrorist.

     

    I realized that some of these people, who say Black Lives Matter, are full of hate and racism. Hate for cops, because of the false narrative that more black people are targeted and killed. Racism against white people, for a tragedy that began 100’s of years ago, when most of the white people today weren’t even born yet.

     

    I realized that some in the African American community’s idea of “Justice” is the prosecution of ANY and EVERY cop or white man that kills or is believed to have killed a black man, no matter what the circumstances are.

     

    I realized the African American community refuses to look within to solve its major issues, and instead makes excuses and looks outside for solutions. I realized that a lot of people in the African American community lead with hate, instead of love. Division instead of Unity. Turmoil and rioting, instead of Peace.

     

    I realized that they have become the very entity that they claim they are fighting against.

    And ultimately, I realized that the very reasons I became a cop, are the very reasons my own people hate me, and now in this toxic hateful racially charged political climate, I am now more likely to die… and it is still hard for me to understand… to this day.

  • Visualizing The Volatile History Of Crude Oil Markets

    Crude oil is the world’s most actively traded commodity (and today’s chaos evidenced that perfectly), and oil-related markets are a staple for traders, hedgers, investors around the globe. The below infographic, put together by Aspect, covers the history of crude oil trading, while also highlighting the major events that have shaped the landscape of the oil market as we know it today.

    As VisualCapitalist’s Jeff Desjardins points out, the infographic serves as the perfect primer for all the questions about oil that you had, yet were afraid to ask. It also illustrates the impact that unexpected geopolitical events can have on the oil price – and how this volatility can be contagious to other global markets.

    Courtesy of: Visual Capitalist

  • George Soros Doubles Down: Accept 300k Refugees Costing $30Bn, Or Risk EU Collapse

    Seemingly doubling down on his comments in April (following what he called Europe's "flawed asylum policy"), George Soros has expanded his demands from four to seven fundamental pillars on how to prevent the collapse of the European Union. In an article penned for Foreign Policy titled “This Is Europe’s Last Chance to Fix Its Refugee Policy," Soros details his plan (over-riding the current "piecemeal approach") for rescuing Europe before it is too late. Simply put, the billionaire says the EU must take in hundreds of thousands of refugees a year, spend at least 30 billion euros (a minor sum, since he believes it can all be financed by debt and taxes) or Europe faces an "existential threat."

    Soros begins ominously: The EU’s piecemeal solutions are coming apart. Only a surge of financial and political creativity can avoid a catastrophe.

    The refugee crisis was already leading to the slow disintegration of the European Union. Then, on June 23, it contributed to an even greater calamity — Brexit. Both of these crises have reinforced xenophobic, nationalist movements across the continent. They will try to win a series of key votes in the coming year — including national elections in France, the Netherlands, and Germany in 2017, a referendum in Hungary on EU refugee policy on Oct. 2, a rerun of the Austrian presidential election on the same day, and a constitutional referendum in Italy in October or November of this year.

     

    Rather than uniting to resist this threat, EU member states have become increasingly unwilling to cooperate with one another. They pursue self-serving, discordant migration policies, often to the detriment of their neighbors. In these circumstances, a comprehensive and coherent European asylum policy is not possible in the short term, despite the efforts of the EU’s governing body, the European Commission. The trust needed for cooperation is lacking. It will have to be rebuilt through a long and laborious process.

     

    This is unfortunate, because a comprehensive policy ought to remain the highest priority for European leaders; the union cannot survive without it. The refugee crisis is not a one-off event; it augurs a period of higher migration pressures for the foreseeable future, due to a variety of causes including demographic and economic imbalances between Europe and Africa, unending conflicts in the broader region, and climate change. Beggar-thy-neighbor migration policies, such as building border fences, will not only further fragment the union; they also seriously damage European economies and subvert global human rights standards.

     

    What would a comprehensive approach look like? It would establish a guaranteed target of at least 300,000 refugees each year who would be securely resettled directly to Europe from the Middle East — a total that hopefully would be matched by countries elsewhere in the world. That target should be large enough to persuade genuine asylum-seekers not to risk their lives by crossing the Mediterranean Sea, especially if reaching Europe by irregular means would disqualify them from being considered genuine asylum-seekers.

     

    This could serve as the basis for Europe to provide sufficient funds for major refugee-hosting countries outside Europe and establish processing centers in those countries; create a potent EU border and coast guard; set common standards for processing and integrating asylum-seekers (and for returning those who do not qualify); and renegotiate the Dublin III Regulation in order to more fairly share the asylum burden across the EU.

    And, as ValueWalk's Jacob Wolinksy notes, specifically Soros thinks the seven points below are key…

    First, the EU and the rest of the world must take in a substantial number of refugees directly from front-line countries in a secure and orderly manner, which would be far more acceptable to the public than the current disorder…

     

    Second, the EU must regain control of its borders. There is little that alienates and scares publics more than scenes of chaos…

     

    Third, the EU needs to develop financial tools that can provide sufficient funds for the long-term challenges it faces and not limp from episode to episode…

     

    Fourth, the crisis must be used to build common European mechanisms for protecting borders, determining asylum claims, and relocating refugees…

     

    Fifth, once refugees have been recognized, there needs to be a mechanism for relocating them within Europe in an agreed way…

     

    Sixth, the European Union, together with the international community, must support foreign refugee-hosting countries far more generously than it currently does…

     

    The seventh and final pillar is that, given its aging population, Europe must eventually create an environment in which economic migration is welcome.

    Soros concludes as follows:

    The benefits brought by migration far outweigh the costs of integrating immigrants. Skilled economic immigrants improve productivity, generate growth, and raise the absorptive capacity of the recipient country. Different populations bring different skills, but the contributions come as much from the innovations they introduce as from their specific skills — in both their countries of origin and their countries of destination. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence for this, starting with the Huguenots’ contribution to the first industrial revolution by bringing both weaving and banking to England. All the evidence supports the conclusion that migrants have a high potential to contribute to innovation and development if they are given a chance to do so.

     

    Pursuing these seven principles is essential in order to calm public fears, reduce chaotic flows of asylum-seekers, ensure that newcomers are fully integrated, establish mutually beneficial relations with countries in the Middle East and Africa, and meet Europe’s international humanitarian obligations.

     

    The refugee crisis is not the only crisis Europe has to face, but it is the most pressing. And if significant progress could be made on the refugee issue, it would make the other issues — from the continuing Greek debt crisis to the fallout from Brexit to the challenge posed by Russia — easier to tackle. All the pieces need to fit together, and the chances of success remain slim. But as long as there is a strategy that might succeed, all the people who want the European Union to survive should rally behind it.

    Interestingly, Soros goes back hundreds of years to give us the examples Huguenots and not fifty years to when France starting letting in migrants from Algeria and Morocco – so far the much recent plan has been a failure most would agree even before the recent terror attack in Nice. While hope continues to spring eternal (for many establishmentarians) that the EU stays together, we can't help but suspect that spending 30 billion euros a year (funded by taxing or indebting EU citizens more) and letting in 'even' 300,000 refugees a year when the social fabric of the looming super-state is near collapse, terrorist attacks are increasing, and unemployment in many European countries is in double digits – will likely be a non-starter.

    Soros' full treatise can be found here…

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Jul 20

Today’s News 20th July 2016

  • Austria Presidential Election Take II: Nice, Turkey Should Help Anti-Immigration Hofer On October 2

    Submitted by Michael Shedlock via MishTalk.com,

    Austria presidential election take II is coming up on October 2.

    It’s a rematch of the May 22 runoff that pitted anti-immigration candidate Norbert Hofer of the FPÖ party against Alexander Van der Bellen of the Greens.

    In Austria, the top two candidates go to round two of the elections if no one wins a clear majority in round one.

    Round two of the election was the first since World War II in which both the center-right and center-left candidates were knocked out in the first round.

    Hofer vs. Van der Bellen Replay

    Austria Election2

    Election evening, Hofer appeared to have won the election, but after mail-in votes were counted the next day, Van der Bellen was declared the winner.

    On 1 July, the results of the second round of voting were annulled after the Constitutional Court of Austria found that electoral rules (as stipulated in federal election law) had been disregarded in 14 out of 20 contested administrative districts (from a total of 117), resulting in over 77,900 absentee votes being improperly counted, however without any indication of votes having been fraudulently manipulated.

    Events Favor Hofer

    Events in Nice and Turkey should help anti-immigration candidate Norbert Hofer. If so, the election will be another hair-raising event for Brussels.

    The role of president is largely symbolic, with real power being held by the chancellor. However, the president can call for new national elections and it’s possible Hofer would do just that.

  • If Trump Tries To Remove ISIS, Will He Be Removed?

    Via The Daily Bell,

    Donald Trump accused his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton of enabling Islamic State’s emergence with “her stupid policies” in a joint interview with running mate Gov. Mike Pence, while pledging to “declare a war” on the terror group. “Hillary Clinton invented ISIS with her stupid policies. She is responsible for ISIS,” Trump said launching a scathing attack on Clinton’s legacy as US Secretary of State while speaking to CBS’s “60 Minutes” show host Lesley Stahl in an interview aired on Sunday.  -RT

    Saying that Hillary Clinton enabled ISIS, is an almost incomprehensible statement.

    Doesn’t Donald Trump realize that Hillary is not alone?

    She represents the most massive military and monetary forces available on this planet.

    Does he not realize they can crush him?

    Is he somehow doing their bidding?

    We know what to think of Hillary based on her associates and history. As we wrote here, she represents corporatism and militarism – the coming technocracy, in other words.

    We are less certain about Trump.

    He may have decided to run for president on his own and thus opened up possibilities for personal and political manipulation.

    But when Trump speaks bluntly about Hillary’s role in creating ISIS, he is basically making statements rarely heard in large – mainstream – venues before.

    Mitt Romney never said anything like this.

    GOP leaders, despite their supposed antagonism to Democrats, have never made such statements.

    Many GOP-ers are pro-war. Any war. Just like Hillary.

    Congressman Ron Paul was anti-war, and as a result he was eventually marginalized as a presidential candidate.

    Some of Trump’s statements have Ron Paul-like resonances.

    True, in this interview he said he would “declare a full-blown war on the group.” On the other hand, he clarified his statement.

    “I am going to have very few troops on the ground. We’re going to have unbelievable intelligence, which we need; which, right now, we don’t have,” he said.

    Trump also said negative things about NATO, as he has in the past, stating that the organization had an overly prominent role in the “war on terror” and that other nations should do more.

    If Trump really does try to wipe ISIS out – or drastically reduce the power of NATO – will he be risking his own health and well-being?

    The US is run by corporatist and military entities. Will they hesitate to intimidate or remove Trump if he tries to end ISIS?

    Western war-interests always need an enemy after all.

    When Russia began to bomb ISIS, its officials said that the Pentagon had been lying about its attacks on ISIS. Officials maintained that the US bombing was really aimed at Syrian infrastructure and thus at destroying the current regime rather than terrorist groups.

    Russian officials also said there were no moderate “terrorists” in Syria and that the Pentagon had just made it up to justify a lack of aggression in certain areas.

    This is certainly possible. After all, from what we can tell,  ISIS (and Al Qaeda before it) were essentially CIA inventions, created with the help of others: London’s City, Israel and Saudi Arabia, etc.

    At the center of the current horrible Islamic extremism is Wahhabism, jointly advanced by the US and Saudi Arabia.

    We’ve written about that here: The Internet Just Debunked the NY Post’s War on Terror.

    You can see another article here: Globalists Created Wahhabi Terrorism to Destroy Islam and Justify a Global State. We don’t endorse the article but find it interesting.

    Trump is currently attacking the West’s modern foundation. It is a combination of technocracy and authoritarianism and enormously profitable for those in control.

    Conclusion: In blaming Hillary, Trump did not fully explain how ISIS came to be. But by blaming her (when coupled with his other statements) he is opening up a “Pandora’s box” of issues relating to Western warfare. This is dangerous to those who stand behind “endless wars for endless peace.” It might be dangerous to Donald, too, if he pursues the issue to its logical conclusion.

  • 'Pokemon Go' Bubble Bursts: Nintendo Tumbles As Indonesia Issues "National Security Threat"

    Indonesian officials have warned that 'Pokemon Go' is a "national security threat," and military headquarters have banned personnel from playing the game while on duty, according to Jakarta Post. It appears the 'Pokemon Go' bubble is bursting, after surging 120% in 8 days, Nintendo is down over 12% today (as the bubble passes over to McDonalds Japan, which is up 12%, after reports of sponsoring 'Pokemon Go' in Japan).

    As Bloomberg reports,

    Indonesian Military headquarter has banned personnel from playing ‘Pokemon Go’ game while on duty, Jakarta Post reports, citing spokesman for Indonesian Armed Force, or TNI, Tatang Sulaiman.

     

    TNI says cautious as app could encourage gamers to go to restricted military facilities, record activities and post details online.

    And the bubble is bursting… tumbling 12% after doubling in 8 days…

    As UBS warns the rally is "hard to explain"…

    Nintendo’s market cap. expansion to more than 2t yen is “hard to explain” even when “substantial” billing rev. and reasonable vol. for Nintendo Plus is factored in, writes UBS analyst Sumito Takeda (sell) in note earlier.

     

    Estimates Pokémon Go Plus toy may generate direct earnings when released in future.

     

    Some expectations Nintendo may shift from hardware to software after seeing other cos. are using Nintendo IP to create popular games; believes co. should continue to invest in hardware.

     

    Maintains sell rating, 12-month price target 15,000 yen.

    But McDonalds Japan is surging…

    This follows reports from The Wall Street Journal that the company will be a sponsor of Pokemon Go in Japan, participating in the game’s release in the country and making its restaurants key locations for game players.
     

  • Terrorism Death Count Since 2015: The West 658 – 28,031 The Rest Of The World

    And the 'winner' is…

    Since the beginning of 2015, the Middle East, Africa and Asia have seen nearly 50 times more deaths from terrorism than Europe and the Americas.

    As The Washington Post reports, The Middle East and northern Africa account for over two-thirds of terrorism deaths since January 2015, with multiple attacks occurring daily, each claiming on average at least a dozen lives.

    Outside large attacks in France and Belgium, attacks in eastern Ukraine account for most terrorism casualties in Europe, according to Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Center. In the Americas, recent Islamic-State-inspired mass shootings make up the lion’s share of the terrorism-related deaths. Aside from that, a few scattered attacks from guerrilla groups in Colombia and Peru and some scattered violence in the Caribbean caused a handful of deaths.

    Simply put, the death tolls of attacks in Western countries pale in comparison to daily attacks in other parts of the world.

    Read more here…

  • Who Really Won The Oil Price War?

    Authored by Global Risk Insights via OilPrice.com,

    The rise in oil prices over the past six months has come as a blessing for the battered U.S. shale producers. Oil prices have risen more than 50 percent since January, giving a glimmer of hope to the U.S. oil industry that the worst of the oil crisis might finally be behind them. Moreover, it forced the shale producers to adapt by reducing production costs and increasing efficiency.

    According to data publicized by Reuters, the decline rates of oil wells in the most productive fields in the U.S. – the Permian and Bakken Basins – were almost halved over the past several years. In practice, this means that shale people will get more bang for their buck; due to slower decline of the wells, they will have to drill fewer new wells to sustain output and therefore lower their capital demands.

    After months of consecutive falls, the number of rigs has been increasing since May and companies expect additional growth if oil prices remain at $50 levels. In addition, Norwegian energy consultancy Rystad Energy’s newest estimates reveal that the U.S. holds more recoverable oil reserves than Russia or Saudi Arabia. More than 50 percent of reserves belong to unconventional shale oil.

    Low oil price has been both a blessing and a curse for the shale industry

    The key for the survival of the U.S. shale industry currently lies in its ability to raise money to finance its renewed activity. One of the shale’s weak spots was always its dependency on capital inflow and high level of debt. In the world of high oil prices and lax capital markets this did not matter so much. However, since the oil price crashed two years ago, financing has become the industry’s central problem. Bond sales of U.S. independent energy companies is currently at its lowest level in more than a decade, and the markets are still not convinced enough to devote fresh capital to new energy projects, despite the brighter outlook that came with higher prices of oil.

    A breath of fresh air could come from another side though. After the slump in prices, many oil giants such as Exxon and Chevron mothballed expensive offshore and Arctic projects and turned their attention towards cheaper and more feasible shale projects in the United States.

    No clear winner of the oil price war

    So who has won in this war of oil giants after all? It is probably a tie.

    Although the Saudis caused damage to the U.S. shale, they also hit to global oil industry hard, while they managed to preserve their market share, they paid a heavy price in terms of oil revenues. The real question however, is not whether the House of Saud is able to keep oil prices (and consequently U.S. shale production) subdued for a prolonged period of time, but how long they can do it without endangering fiscal and social stability of the Desert Kingdom and other OPEC members. Despite its ambitious Vision 2030 programme, Saudi Arabia will stay dependent on oil income to subsidize its social programmes for many years to come. Achieving restructuring at $50-60 price levels without swift and potentially painful reforms would prove a real challenge to the Saudi regime.

    On the other hand, Riyadh has done a huge favor to the U.S. shale industry by forcing it to adapt and change its business philosophy. OPEC will remain an important, and hopefully responsible, factor in oil markets, but it will have to accept the fact that the circumstances have changed over the past five years. Both the ascent of shale oil, and initiatives to reduce global carbon footprint will impose an enormous strain on the Cartel and its members, which are still a long way from having diversified economies.

  • Obama Administration Explains Its Own "Plagiarism" Was Merely "Inspiration"

    With the 'p' word being lobbed around by Republican and Democrat today as Melania and Michelle battled to the death over who is the plagiarizer-est, we are reminded that it wasn't too long ago that the media turned a blind eye when President Barack Obama was busted plagiarizing from Deval Patrick… and today The White House press secretary explained "Obama didn't plagiarize… he was 'inspired by'" the former Massachusetts Governor.

    As Fox News' Hannity reminds…

    In 2008, then-candidate Obama was found to have plagiarized the speeches of former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick on a number of occasions.

    "I am not asking anyone to take a chance on me, I'm asking you to take a chance on your own aspirations," Patrick said in a speech delivered in June of 2006. Obama repeated the line verbatim in a speech in South Carolina in November of 2007.

     

    In addition, Obama's famous refrain of "just words" in a 2008 speech was lifted directly from a speech Governor Patrick delivered in October of 2006.

    When the Clinton campaign cried foul, The New York Times reported:

    With the next round of voters set to weigh in on the Democratic presidential race, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign on Monday accused Senator Barack Obama of committing plagiarism in a weekend speech. Mr. Obama dismissed the charge as absurd and desperate.

    Mr. Obama told reporters he should have credited Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts, a friend, for a passage in a speech he delivered on Saturday in Milwaukee. But Mr. Obama said his rival was "carrying it too far."

    While the Obama campaign might have been dismissive of the charges, the video evidence made it absolutely clear that the then-Illinois Senator did indeed lift passages directly from Governor Patrick. Take a look for yourself:

    Perhaps the left should heed the advice that those in glass houses should refrain from throwing stones.

    But, it appears, given today's Melania-Michelle melee, the media is suddenly interested again…

    And White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest explained to the great unwashed and ignorant masses that "the president was in fact inspired by Governor Patrick's words."

    In other words, when we do it, it's "inspired thought," when you do it "it's blatant plagiarism."

  • We Need More Borders And More States

    Submitted by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

    In the context of trade and immigration, borders are often discussed as a means of excluding foreign workers and foreign goods. In one way of thinking, borders provide an opportunity for states to exclude private actors such as workers, merchants, and entrepreneurs. On the other hand, borders can also serve a far more endearing function, and this is found in the fact that borders represent the limits of a state's power. That is, while borders may exclude goods and people, a state's borders also often exclude other states. 

    For example, East Germany's border with West Germany represented the limits of the East German police state, beyond which the power of the Stasi to kidnap, torture, and imprison peaceful people was far more limited than it was within its native jurisdiction. The West German border acted to contain the East German state. 

    Similarly, the borders of Saudi Arabia delineate a limit to the Saudi regime's ability to behead people for sorcery or for making critical remarks about the blood-soaked dictators known as the House of Saud. 

    Even within a single nation-state, borders can illustrate the benefits of decentralization, as in the case of the Colorado-Nebraska border. On one side of the border (i.e., Nebraska) state police will arrest you and imprison you for possessing marijuana. They may kill you if you resist. On the other side of the border, the state's constitution prohibits police from prosecuting marijuana users. The Colorado border contains Nebraska's war on drugs. 

    Certainly, there are ways for regimes to extend their power even beyond their borders. This can be done by cozying up with the regimes of neighboring countries (or intimidating them), or through the organs of international quasi-state organizations. Or, as in the case of the US and EU, imposing broader policies upon a number of supposedly sovereign states. 

    Nevertheless, thanks to the competitive nature of states, many states will often find it difficult to project their power into neighboring states, and thus borders represent a very-real impediment to a state's power. This can then open the door to greater freedom, and even save lives as certain states impoverish or make war on their own citizens. 

    The Case of Venezuela 

    This principle was illustrated yet again this week as the Venezuelan regime opened its border with Colombia to allow Venezuelans the opportunity to purchase food and other supplies on the Colombian side of the border. The Colombian regime is by no means perfect, for all its problems, the Colombian regime has not reduced the country's population to desperate poverty amidst collapsing economic and social institutions. 

    Thus, it is rather easy to buy food and provisions in Colombia while store shelves sit empty in Venezuela. 

    Fortunately for Venezuelans, Venezuela is contained by the borders of the surrounding nation states, and the ability of the Venezuelan regime to arrest small-time entrepreneurs and and shopkeepers for being "class traitors" ends where Colombian territory begins. 

    Perhaps not surprisingly, the Venezuelan border with Colombia has been closed for some time. Apparently, the Venezuelan state felt there was too much freedom going on in the borderlands — where smugglers and black-market operators were able to use the frontier with Colombia to get around Venezuela's harsh anti-market policies. The closed border, of course, has only meant that law abiding citizens are excluded from free movement between the countries. Violent criminals, however, function freely in the area, making the Colombia-Venezuela border region especially hazardous. 

    In spite of all of this, the Colombian border has become a lifeline for Venezuelans now that it has become a source for basic supplies and food, and a partial escape from a life of deprivation forced on the population by the socialist policies of Nicolás Maduro and Hugo Chávez. 

    Fortunately for the people of South America (and the world), Venezuela is only a medium-sized state, with a total area one-third larger than Texas. One can only imagine how much greater misery could be inflicted on a larger population were Venezuela the size of Brazil or Russia or — worst of all — were it a world government. 

    The fact that Venezuela is physically limited in size and scope brings relief to those who are able to benefit form the proximity of the border, and those who might trade with foreigners and black-market merchants. 

    As the AP notes, though, one's "proximity" to the border can be defined according to the desperation that one endures, as illustrated by the fact that some people have traveled ten hours to the border in order to buy food. 

    The Benefits of Decentralization and Secession

    The physical realities of size and distance once again show us the benefits of political secession and decentralization: those who live a mere two hours from the border will have more opportunities to purchase food than those who live ten hours away. Those who live close to the border might also enjoy more opportunities to physically escape from Venezuelan territory were the need to arise. 

    This situation would be improved were even more decentralization realized and the western provinces of Venezuela were to secede from Venezuela, effectively moving the border eastward. 

    Imagine, for example, if the state of Zulia in western Venezuela were to expel the Venezuelan military and fully open the border with Colombia. Goods and services would immediately begin to flow into the newly liberated Zulia territory and goods would become far more plentiful. 

    But this wouldn't just benefit the people of Zulia. The new reality would also mean that the Venezuelan border would stop at Zulia's eastern border making the freedom of the border areas now more accessible to the neighboring states of Trujillo and Mérida, as well. Residents of Trujillo state, who might have been many hours from an external border before, may be now a mere hour from the border, thus allowing more people the ability to travel to the border or make more extensive use of black markets or even legal markets outside the reach of the Venezuela regime. 

    Ludwig von Mises understood the benefits of this type of piecemeal secession, noting with approval the possibility of allowing provinces and villages the opportunity to secede from one state and join another, or remain independent. The larger a state is, the more resources it controls, and the greater is its ability to impose higher costs on those who might seek to emigrate or escape the central state's rule.

    Writing on "self determination," Mises wrote that nations do not have a right to self-determination, but people do, and Mises supported "the right of the inhabitants of every territory to decide on the state to which they wish to belong." In practice, Mises reminds us, this often means breaking up states into smaller pieces: 

    Whenever the inhabitants of a particular territory, whether it be a single village, a whole district, or a series of adjacent districts, make it known, by a freely conducted plebiscite, that they no longer wish to remain united to the state to which they belong at the time, but wish either to form an independent state or to attach themselves to some other state, their wishes are to be respected and complied with. This is the only feasible and effective way of preventing revolutions and civil and international wars.

    Certainly, adopting Mises's plan in this respect would bring nearly immediate relief to many communities currently on the wrong side of the Venezuelan border. Unfortunately, the Venezuelan central government — like most national governments — has rarely shown much hesitation when it comes to brutally repressing "dissidents." Unless a significant ideological change takes place in Venezuela, it's unlikely any such local movement toward "self determination" is likely to be respected. 

    More States = More Choice 

    In practice, if we favor free choice, free movement, and the opportunity to escape from overbearing regimes, the answer lies in the creation of more borders and more states. While borders can often work to inhibit the movement of goods and human beings, they can also offer opportunities for greater freedom by limiting the power and reach of existing states.

    Moreover, since smaller states have greater trouble regulating markets and peoples beyond their borders, smaller states are more likely to have to rely on open commerce with other states in order to survive and thrive.

    Were Venezuela smaller and with more international neighbors, the people of Venezuela would have more opportunities for interacting with areas outside the control of the Venezuelan regime while facing greater opportunities in emigration and trade. In other words, the monopoly enjoyed by the Venezuelan state would be weaker, and the residents there would have more freedom of choice. 

    The answer really does lie in decentralization which leads to more choice, and thus more freedom: 

    [T]he practical answer to any current lack of choice (i.e., lack of "self-determination") lies not in the immediate abolition of all states (as no one has ever convincingly described how this might be done) but in the breaking down of existing states into smaller and smaller states…

     

    What Mises describes above refers to formal votes and declarations of independence, but the same effects, in practice, can be obtained through the methods of local nullification and separation as suggested by Hans-Hermann Hoppe here. And, of course, de facto secession, for practical reasons may often be preferable.

     

    The claim is often made by some doctrinaire and impractical anarchists that secession is a bad thing because it "creates a new state." This is a rather simplistic view, however, given the realities of geography on planet earth. Unless one is forming a new state completely in international waters or in Antarctica or outer space, the creation of any new state will have to come at the expense of some existing state. Thus, the creation of a new state, in say, Sardinia, would come at the expense of the existing state known as "Italy." Deprived by secession of tax revenues and the military advantages of territory, the state that loses territory would be necessarily weakened.

     

    In addition to weakening states, the advantage from the perspective of the individual, then, is that he or she now has two states to choose from where only one existed before. The individual now has more options from which to choose a place to live that best suits his or her personal lifestyle, ideology, religion, ethnic group, and more.

     

    With each additional successful act of secession, the choices from which each person has to choose grow larger and larger…

    If there's anything the people of Venezuela need right now, it's more choices.

  • Prominent Gold Skeptic Willem Buiter Says "Gold Looks Pretty Good"

    Back in November 2014, Willem Buiter, who has so far been wrong in his recent gloomier forecasts about the fallout from the Eurozone mess, or his predictions about a global economy, decided to become a commodity expert and announced that “Gold Is A 6,000 Year Old Bubble.” The irony is that while virtually every other asset class in the span of these 6,000 years has risen, risen more, in many cases indeed formed a bubble, burst, fallen, and ultimately turned to dust and forgotten, gold remains and furthermore has seen its value in recent years soar.

    What is interesting is that almost two years later, Buiter may have realized just that, and in an interview with the Epoch Times’ Valentin Schmid, the Citi strategist admits that he “would hold gold” due to the global tidal wave of negative interest rates:

    “I will never argue with a six thousand-year-old bubble. So gold, in times of uncertainty and especially in days of uncertainty laced with negative rates looks pretty good.”

    Looks like we have another post-conversion Alan Greenspan on our hands. Here is his full interview, courtesy of the Epoch Times.

    * * *

    Citigroup’s Willem Buiter Says ‘Would Hold Gold’

    Famous gold skeptic says gold wins against fiat currencies in negative rate environment

    In the books of most gold lovers, Citigroup’s chief economist Willem Buiter is noted down as the man who thinks gold is a “6,000 year bubble.”

    However, in a recent interview with Epoch Times [Skip to 38:00 in the video], he presented a much more nuanced position and said he would even own gold as part of a diversified portfolio of currencies. 

    “It competes with other fiat currencies, the dollar, the yen, the euro. And if these currencies now yield negative interest rates or are at risk of negative yields in the U.K. and the United States, then the currency that at least has a zero interest rate, looks better.”

    Gold, in times of uncertainty and especially in days of uncertainty laced with negative rates, looks pretty good.

    He still maintains that gold is a fiat commodity that has limited intrinsic value because it doesn’t have many industrial uses, and only has value because people say so. But he admits this is true of all paper currencies and bitcoin as well and gold may even have an advantage right now.

    “I will never argue with a six thousand-year-old bubble. So gold, in times of uncertainty and especially in days of uncertainty laced with negative rates looks pretty good,” he said.

    Bubbles are the essence of fiat money economies.

    His definition of a bubble is also interesting and he again includes all fiat currencies in this category.

    Citigroup Chief Economist Willem Buiter at an interview with Epoch Times in New York on July 6, 2016. (Epoch Times)

    Citigroup Chief Economist Willem Buiter at an interview with Epoch Times

    “The fundamental value of an intrinsically valueless good is zero. For every fiat currency if it’s value is positive,  it’s a bubble. There are good bubbles when they are stable. There are bad bubbles when they are exploding upwards and downwards.”

    And he says there is some positive value to having fiat money or gold for transactional purposes.

    “There is nothing wrong with a bubble. Fiat money as a positive value is a very beneficial bubble. It’s much more efficient of course to produce paper money without cost if it can be managed well, rather than the costly way to extract and store gold. But bubbles are the essence of fiat money economies.”

    Maybe what Buiter means is exactly what Scottish economist John Law explained in his work “Money and Trade Considered” in 1705.

    Instead of calling gold, paper money, or silver a “beneficial bubble” Law simply stated that precious metals (in this case silver) have value because they are the best at being money, not because they are used as a metal in industrial processes.  

    “The additional use [as] money silver was apply’d [sic] to would add to its value, because as money it remedied the disadvantages and inconveniences of barter, and consequently the demand for Silver encreasing [sic], it received an additional value equal to the greater demand its use as money occasioned,” writes Law.

    This is true of gold and paper money as well with the notable difference that paper money gains superior value as money by government decree (fiat) and because people are forced to use it.  Gold and silver have been in use as money because of their natural properties (scarcity, malleability, divisibility, and durability).

    Out of the 118 elements in the periodic table, gold and silver win as monetary instruments according to University College London chemistry professor Andrea Sella. The have just the right degree of scarcity and a low enough melting point to make them into coins he told the BBC.

    Another advantage: “Gold is unbelievably beautiful.”

    Willem Buiter agrees: “You can’t increase [the supply], maybe an advantage for those who like it … It is costly to store and all that but yes, you can put it in your nose and that makes it good.”

  • It's Official – Donald Trump Clinches Republican Nomination For President

    Millions of voices cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced…

    The Hill reports, The Republican Party officially nominated Donald Trump for president on Tuesday, capping his remarkable rise from political outsider to the standard-bearer of the GOP.

    Trump officially secured the 1,237 delegates needed to clinch the nomination after his home state of New York cast 89 delegates for the businessman.

    Trump’s adult children joined the New York delegation to cast the decisive vote that put Trump over the top. Donald Trump, Jr. was given the honor of making the announcement, and he promised his father would put the Empire State in play in November.

     

     

     

    Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions officially offered Trump’s name into consideration for president to huge rounds of applause.

    Sessions, who is Trump’s top ally on Capitol Hill, lauded the billionaire as a disrupter who has tapped into the unease felt by Americans across the country.

     

    “The American voters heard this message and they rewarded his courage and leadership with a huge victory in our primaries,” Sessions said. “He dispensed with one talented candidate after another, momentum started and a movement started. Democrats and Independents responded. He received far more primary votes than any Republican candidate in history.

     

    “Mr. Speaker, it is my distinct honor and great pleasure to nominate Donald J. Trump for the office of president of the United States,” he said.

     

    The Quicken Loans Arena exploded into cheers and chants of “Trump.”

    And finally…

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Jul 19

Today’s News 19th July 2016

  • Europe's Impossible Refugee Math: Brexit Was Mathematical Certainty Eventually

    Submitted by Michael Shedlock via MishTalk.com,

    In a recent GMO commentary on Immigration and Brexit, founder Jeremy Grantham laid out precise reasons why Brexit was a mathematical certainty eventually.

    Curiously, Grantham thinks Brexit was a bad idea.

    On the second sentence, I disagree strongly.

    The following snips, including bullet points are from Grantham. Subtitles are mine, not his.

    Europe’s Impossible Refugee Math

    • The truth about immigration to the EU, in my view, is bitter. As covered in earlier quarterlies, I believe Africa and parts of the Near East are beginning to fail as civilized states.
    • They are failing under the pressure of populations that have multiplied by 5 to 10 times since I was born; climate for growing food that is deteriorating at an accelerating rate; degraded soils; insufficient unpolluted water; bad governance; and lack of infrastructure. Country after country is tilting into rolling failure.
    • This is producing in these failing states increasing numbers of desperate people, mainly young men, willing to risk money and their lives to attempt an entry into the EU.
    • For the best example of the non-compute intractability of this problem, consider Nigeria. It had 21 million people when I was born and now has 187 million. In a recent poll, 40% of Nigerians (75 million) said they would like to emigrate, mostly to the UK (population 64 million). Difficult. But the official UN estimate for Nigeria’s population in 2100 is over 800 million! (They still have a fertility rate of six children per woman.) Without discussing the likelihood of ever reaching 800 million, I suspect you will understand the problem at hand. Impossible.
    • I wrote two years ago that this immigration pressure would stress Europe and that the first victim would be Western Europe’s liberal traditions. Well, this is happening in real time as they say, far faster than I expected. It will only get worse as hundreds of thousands of refugees become millions.
    • The EU and Europe may support a few years of increasing numbers of these failing state refugees, but that is all. They will fairly quickly have to refuse to take even legitimately distressed refugees. The alternative – to take all comers – would likely be not just a failed EU, but a failing Europe.

    Brexit Unnecessary?

    • Calling for an utterly unnecessary referendum by the Prime Minister for superficial and short-term political gain. He could have muddled through anyway. Referenda are dangerous. They allow for the true will of the people to be voiced, informed or ill-informed, manipulated or not. Dangerous. As Churchill said (now much quoted), “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” He might also have commented about the willful laziness of the one-third who never vote.
    • The UK press, the most egregiously editorialized in the developed world. The broad circulation papers goaded and badgered their readers toward Brexit.
    • As for the politicians, forget it. Whimsical theories, back-stabbing disloyalties, a glaring lack of planning and foresight. Above all, completely ignoring the precautionary principle, playing with fire like children. Now those Brexiters that haven’t run away can reap what they have sown, as unfortunately will the whole UK. If you will, the pack of dogs can now try to work out what to do with that darned car.

    Mish Comments

    In absence of prior knowledge, I would suspect few would think the same person wrote both snips.

    Given the math laid out in the first snip, and given the total stubbornness of chancellor Merkel, it was both a mathematical necessity and pragmatic result for the UK to leave the EU.

    Politicians are Dangerous

    Grantham’s statement that “Referenda are dangerous” is no different that saying “elections are dangerous“.

    Since when are politicians guaranteed to be saviors?

    A few dangerous leaders come to mind. George Bush and his ludicrous war in Iraq is a prime example. Lyndon B. Johnson and his idiotic war in Vietnam is another.

    Questions for Grantham

    1. Given a referendum on the idea of a war in Iraq, and a genuine estimate of its true cost, would US citizens have voted for war in Iraq?
    2. Would the UK have voted to follow Bush in a “coalition of the willing”?
    3. Would US citizens have voted to carpet bomb Vietnam?
    4. Would European voters approved a pact with Erdogan to allow visa-free access to the rest of Europe to 80 million Turks?

    Politicians are and their pet goals are far more dangerous than referendums. Chancellor Merkel and her inane, mathematically impossible, open arms welcome of refugees was the #1 Reason UK Voted Leave the EU.

    Let’s not blame the voters or the referendum itself.

    For more on this subject, please see Dear chancellor Merkel: When does Turkey join the EU? When do 80 million Turks have visa-free travel?

  • There Will Be No Second American Revolution: The Futility Of An Armed Revolt

    Submitted by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

    “A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty.” – James Madison

    America is a ticking time bomb.

    All that remains to be seen is who – or what – will set fire to the fuse.

    We are poised at what seems to be the pinnacle of a manufactured breakdown, with police shooting unarmed citizens, snipers shooting police, global and domestic violence rising, and a political showdown between two presidential candidates equally matched in unpopularity.

    The preparations for the Republican and Democratic national conventions taking place in Cleveland and Philadelphia—augmented by a $50 million federal security grant for each city—provide a foretaste of how the government plans to deal with any individual or group that steps out of line: they will be censored, silenced, spied on, caged, intimidated, interrogated, investigated, recorded, tracked, labeled, held at gunpoint, detained, restrained, arrested, tried and found guilty.

    For instance, anticipating civil unrest and mass demonstrations in connection with the Republican Party convention, Cleveland officials set up makeshift prisons, extra courtrooms to handle protesters, and shut down a local university in order to house 1,700 riot police and their weapons. The city’s courts are preparing to process up to 1,000 people a day. Additionally, the FBI has also been conducting “interviews” with activists in advance of the conventions to discourage them from engaging in protests.

    Make no mistake, the government is ready for a civil uprising.

    Indeed, the government has been preparing for this moment for years.

    A 2008 Army War College report revealed that “widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security.” The 44-page report goes on to warn that potential causes for such civil unrest could include another terrorist attack, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters.”

    Subsequent reports by the Department of Homeland Security to identify, monitor and label right-wing and left-wing activists and military veterans as extremists (a.k.a. terrorists) have manifested into full-fledged pre-crime surveillance programs. Almost a decade later, after locking down the nation and spending billions to fight terrorism, the DHS has concluded that the greater threat is not ISIS but domestic right-wing extremism.

    Meanwhile, the government has been amassing an arsenal of military weapons for use domestically and equipping and training their “troops” for war. Even government agencies with largely administrative functions such as the Food and Drug Administration, Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Smithsonian have been acquiring body armor, riot helmets and shields, cannon launchers and police firearms and ammunition. In fact, there are now at least 120,000 armed federal agents carrying such weapons who possess the power to arrest.

    Rounding out this profit-driven campaign to turn American citizens into enemy combatants (and America into a battlefield) is a technology sector that is colluding with the government to create a Big Brother that is all-knowing, all-seeing and inescapable. It’s not just the drones, fusion centers, license plate readers, stingray devices and the NSA that you have to worry about. You’re also being tracked by the black boxes in your cars, your cell phone, smart devices in your home, grocery loyalty cards, social media accounts, credit cards, streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon, and e-book reader accounts.

    All of this has taken place right under our noses, funded with our taxpayer dollars and carried out in broad daylight without so much as a general outcry from the citizenry.

    It’s astounding how convenient we’ve made it for the government to lock down the nation.

    We’ve even allowed ourselves to be acclimated to the occasional lockdown of government buildings, Jade Helm military drills in small towns so that special operations forces can get “realistic military training” in “hostile” territory, and  Live Active Shooter Drill training exercises, carried out at schools, in shopping malls, and on public transit, which can and do fool law enforcement officials, students, teachers and bystanders into thinking it’s a real crisis.

    The events of recent years—the invasive surveillance, the extremism reports, the civil unrest, the protests, the shootings, the bombings, the military exercises and active shooter drills, the color-coded alerts and threat assessments, the fusion centers, the transformation of local police into extensions of the military, the distribution of military equipment and weapons to local police forces, the government databases containing the names of dissidents and potential troublemakers—have all conjoined to create an environment in which “we the people” are more distrustful and fearful of each other and more reliant on the government to keep us safe.

    Of course, that’s the point.

    The powers-that-be want us to feel vulnerable.

    They want us to fear each other and trust the government’s hired gunmen to keep us safe from terrorists, extremists, jihadists, psychopaths, etc.

    Most of all, the powers-that-be want us to feel powerless to protect ourselves and reliant on and grateful for the dubious protection provided by the American police state.

    Their strategy is working.

    The tree of liberty is dying.

    There will be no second American Revolution.

    There is no place in our nation for the kind of armed revolution our forefathers mounted against a tyrannical Great Britain. Such an act would be futile and tragic. We are no longer dealing with a distant, imperial king but with a tyrant of our own making: a militarized, technologized, heavily-financed bureaucratic machine that operates beyond the reach of the law.

    The message being sent to the citizenry is clear: there will be no revolution, armed or otherwise.

    Anyone who believes that they can wage—and win—an armed revolt against the American police state has not been paying attention. Those who wage violence against the government and their fellow citizens are playing right into the government’s hands. Violence cannot and will not be the answer to what ails America.

    Whether instigated by the government or the citizenry, violence will only lead to more violence. It does not matter how much firepower you have. The government has more firepower.

    It does not matter how long you think you can hold out by relying on survivalist skills, guerilla tactics and sheer grit. The government has the resources to outwait, out-starve, outman, outgun and generally overpower you.

    This government of wolves will not be overtaken by force.

    Unfortunately, we waited too long to wake up to the government’s schemes.

    We did not anticipate that “we the people” would become the enemy. For years, the government has been warning against the dangers of domestic terrorism, erecting surveillance systems to monitor its own citizens, creating classification systems to label any viewpoints that challenge the status quo as extremist, and training law enforcement agencies to equate anyone possessing anti-government views as a domestic terrorist.

    What the government failed to explain was that the domestic terrorists would be of the government’s own making, whether intentional or not.

    By waging endless wars abroad, by bringing the instruments of war home, by transforming police into extensions of the military, by turning a free society into a suspect society, by treating American citizens like enemy combatants, by discouraging and criminalizing a free exchange of ideas, by making violence its calling card through SWAT team raids and militarized police, by fomenting division and strife among the citizenry, by acclimating the citizenry to the sights and sounds of war, and by generally making peaceful revolution all but impossible, the government has engineered an environment in which domestic violence has become inevitable.

    What we are now experiencing is a civil war, devised and instigated in part by the U.S. government.

    The outcome for this particular conflict is already foregone: the police state wins.

    The objective: compliance and control.

    The strategy: destabilize the economy through endless wars, escalate racial tensions, polarize the populace, heighten tensions through a show of force, intensify the use of violence, and then, when all hell breaks loose, clamp down on the nation for the good of the people and the security of the nation.

    So where does that leave us?

    Despite the fact that communities across the country are, for all intents and purposes, being held hostage by a government that is armed to the teeth and more than willing to use force in order to “maintain order,” most Americans seem relatively unconcerned. Worse, we have become so fragmented as a nation, so hostile to those with whom we might disagree, so distrustful of those who are different from us, that we are easily divided and conquered.

    We have been desensitized to violence, acclimated to a military presence in our communities and persuaded that there is nothing we can do to alter the seemingly hopeless trajectory of the nation. In this way, the floundering economy, the blowback arising from military occupations abroad, police shootings, the nation’s deteriorating infrastructure and all of the other mounting concerns have become non-issues to a populace that is easily entertained, distracted, manipulated and controlled.

    The sight of police clad in body armor and gas masks, wielding semiautomatic rifles and escorting an armored vehicle through a crowded street, a scene likened to “a military patrol through a hostile city,” no longer causes alarm among the general populace.

    We are fast becoming an anemic, weak, pathetically diluted offspring of our revolutionary forebears incapable of mounting a national uprising against a tyrannical regime.

    If there is to be any hope of reclaiming our government and restoring our freedoms, it will require a different kind of coup: nonviolent, strategic and grassroots, starting locally and trickling upwards. Such revolutions are slow and painstaking. They are political, in part, but not through any established parties or politicians.

    Most of all, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, for any chance of success, such a revolution will require more than a change of politics: it will require a change of heart among the American people, a reawakening of the American spirit, and a citizenry that cares more about their freedoms than their fantasy games.

  • Did "China" Just Buy The Most Important Company In The World?

    In the aftermath of last night stunning announcement that Japan’s Internet giant SoftBank would acquire UK-based ARM Holdings, a company which makes chips present in virtually every mobile and “connected” device, for $32 billion, sending the semiconductor sector surging, questions emerged why the company is doing this.

    On one hand, even the founder of ARM Holdings himself, Hermann Hauser said, told the BBC he believes its imminent sale to Japanese technology giant Softbank is “a sad day for technology in Britain”. Hauser said the result of the Softbank deal meant the “determination of what comes next for technology will not be decided in Britain any more, but in Japan”.

    On the other, the stock of SoftBank has tumbled now that the Japanese market has reopened after a one-day holiday.

    Bloomberg gave the trivial answer first thing this morning in a piece titled ‘Why SoftBank Is Spending $32 Billion on U.K. Chip Designer ARM“, which concluded the following: “Softbank Chairman Masayoshi Son sees ARM’s future in being inside the legion of products that are becoming internet-connected, from street lamps to air conditioners, washing machines to drones — so-called “internet of things” devices.”

    Perhaps. However, a more provocative explanation has emerged courtesy of SouthBay Research, which when looking at the same deal, asks if China (yes China) “just acquired the most important company in the world? “

    Here is SouthBay‘s explanation why:

    ARM Holdings (ARMH) holds the keys to the future of electronics  That’s not hyberbole.

    Not only does ARMH dominate the world of mobile devices, it is rapidly penetrating all electronics: from consumer electronics to the computer network.

    ARMH designs and licenses semiconductors.  Their designs are the core of the critical components of consumer electronics: smartphones, tablets, TVs, and so on.  For example, most of today’s tablets and phones run on Qualcomm chips: they did $26B in sales last year.  These chips re-package ARMH designs.

    As electronics continue to penetrate everything from cars to refrigerators, they use ARM designs.  The Internet of Things (IOT) uses ARMH technology.

    Like a spider in the web, ARMH sits firmly at the heart of the future of all electronics.

    I have reviewed ARMH two different times.

    First, as the life preserver to save Intel.  Intel is unable to survive in the post-PC world and ARMH was a way to buy their way back in.  Unfortunately, anti-trust was probably a factor in preventing the buy.

    Another time I mentioned ARMH was when discussing the future of China’s semiconductor efforts.

    After airplanes, semiconductors are a major capital outflow.  The South Korean and Taiwanese economies are driven by semiconductors.  Beyond economics, semiconductor strength enables national security strength (super computers).   For this and other reasons, the Chinese government has made a domestic semiconductor industry a major strategic goal.  Even going so far as to earmark $10B for intellectual property development.

    The fastest path is acquisition, and ARMH embodies the future.  For China that presents two problems: price (ARMH was $19B last week) and politics (China buying the crown jewels of the internet touches some nerves in the Western world).

    Today Softbank announced an offer to buy ARM Holdings.

    Softbank = China

    Softbank is a Japanese company best known for owning Yahoo Japan and Sprint.
    With their background in telecommunications and the internet, why would they want to buy a major semiconductor company?  And why, with $89B in debt, is Softbank adding another $31B?

    The answer: Softbank is not what they appear.  What isn’t as well known is that Softbank is actually a major player in China’s internet economy.
    For starters, they bankrolled Alibaba.  They control 32% of Alibaba, and through Alibaba, they dominate the Chinese internet economy because Alibaba has invested in the top internet companies in China: Weibo, for example.

    Although based in Japan, Softbank is very much a Chinese company.

    The fact remains that, despite the $10B budget, China has yet to land any major companies.

    Perhaps Softbank on its own is front-running a bigger China budget.

    Or perhaps Softbank was tapped to be the buyer, but not the ultimate buyer.  After all, who is lending them to $31B to close the deal?  And Softbank will earn a lot of political credits for doing a favor for the

    Chinese government effort to ramp-up a semiconductor company.

    Don’t be surprised if we see an announcement in a year or two that ARMH is up for sale and the buyer is a major Chinese company.

    This was a brilliant move.

  • Top Turkish Official In Charge Of Campaign Against ISIS Found Dead, Shot In The Neck

    By now only the most naive believe the official narrative behind Turkey’s Friday coup.

    We say that for two reasons: first, as even the EU commissioner dealing with Turkey’s membership bid, Johannes Hahn, said when discussing the unprecedented arrest purge in Turkey, “it looks at least as if something has been prepared. The lists are available, which indicates it was prepared and to be used at a certain stage. I’m very concerned. It is exactly what we feared.”  He did not exlaborate what exactly he had feared, but one can infer; second, as we caught Turkey’s press openly changing the narrative, Erdogan was not even able to figure out who to blame for the “coup attempt” until this afternoon, first accusing the US, then the former Turkish air force chief, before finally deciding on accusing the 77-year-old Pennsylvania resident, Fethullah Gulen, of being the frail mastermind behind it all.

    To be sure, the western media was happy to glance over these “changeovers” and to spoonfeed a false story to the masses just to maintain the illusion of the official Turkish narrative.

    An example of this is when Erdogan told CNN earlier today that “he escaped death by only a few minutes before coup plotters stormed the resort in southwest Turkey where he was vacationing last weekend. Erdogan’s interview was broadcast late Monday. He told CNN that soldiers supporting the coup killed two of his bodyguards when they stormed the resort early Saturday. “Had I stayed 10, 15 additional minutes, I would have been killed or I would have been taken,” he told CNN through a translator provided by the presidency.”

    And yet, less than a day earlier we wrote that even though “Coup Pilots Had Erdogan’s Plane In Their Sights” they did nothing, prompting a former military officer “with knowledge of the events” to ask “why they didn’t fire is a mystery.” So just hours before two F-16 had radar lock on Erdogan and decided not to kill the dictator, troops from the same alleged “coup” were scrambling to get to Erdogan – many hours after the so-called coup had already started – in his resort hotel, and where they would have killed him… had he stayed “10, 15 additional minutes.”

    We can see why not even the Europeans believe this any more.

    Then another example of the media forced – and false – narrative came from the Guardian which earlier today published a piece titled “Military coup was well planned and very nearly succeeded, say Turkish officials” which contains pearls, such as the following:

    It was midnight in the Turkish capital, just two and a half hours into the attempted coup, and the group of nine senior ministers who were gathered in a conference room at the prime ministry were convinced that they were all about to meet their end. “They probably will be successful and we will die tonight,” said one of the ministers, according to an official who was present at the meeting. “Let us be ready to die. We will all be martyred in this fight.”

    Such drama… makes you feel like you were almost there.

    Not surprisingly, the bulk of the piece by Kareem Shaheen is poor on facts but heavy on florid descriptions, interpretations, hearsay and all those other literary techniques that make for a good piece of fiction. Some more examples:

    But as Turkey picks up the pieces after the failed coup, new details are emerging of how it unfolded, and just how close the military intervention came to succeeding. Many observers have labelled the attempt amateurish, but accounts by officials contradict this characterisation, describing it as well organised and very nearly successful.

     

    In Ankara on Friday, the day of the coup, the interior minister had been invited, along with other top officials, to a high-level security meeting in military headquarters that was supposed to take place after 5pm, a ploy that turned out to be intended as a pretext to detain him. He did not go because he was too busy, and later when the coup unfolded he was stuck in Ankara’s Esenbo?a airport, setting up a crisis cell there to manage the fallout, protected by crowds that had gathered to oppose the coup.

    Again, zero actual facts. Not surprisingly, the author himself catches this tangent of his “story:

    Stories emerged of those crucial hours, between the president’s address and the successful quelling of the coup by 4am, that are sure to pass into the official mythology of the events. At 1am, officials say the police chief the city of Bursa arrested the local army commander, who possessed a 6-page list that included the names of designated judges and military officials who were to be appointed to various positions in the bureaucracy in the aftermath of the coup. Other pro-coup soldiers possessed lists of secure telephone lines to receive orders.

    Why he would give himself up knowing he would most likely face death if i) the coup was real and ii) Erdogan remained in power… well, let’s not worry about that.

    But then, painfully, we finally stumbled on something which could be factually disproven, i.e. a precious fact. And it may shine a far different light on what happened during the chaos of the staged coup. It was the following:

    The top counter-terrorism official responsible for Turkey’s campaign against Islamic State did go to a “meeting” at the presidential palace in Ankara. He was later found with his hands tied behind his back, shot in the neck, according to a senior official.

    And suddenly so many pieces of the Turkish “puzzle” fall into place, because while the rest of the narrative about the coup is so glaringly fabricated and literally made up on the spot, the death of Turkey’s chief anti-ISIS counter-terrorism official being quietly killed, makes so much sense sense for a country where as we first presented back in November, “The Man Who Funds ISIS is Bilal Erdogan, The Son Of Turkey’s President” followed by “ISIS Oil Trade Full Frontal: “Raqqa’s Rockefellers”, Bilal Erdogan, KRG Crude, And The Israel Connection“, and of course, “Erdogan Says Will Resign If Oil Purchases From ISIS Proven After Putin Says Has “More Proof.”

    Having arrested 20,000 people already, Erdogan’s witch hunts are just starting. However, it appears he had some very loose ends he had to take care of already on Friday night. One such loose end was the man who fought ISIS on behalf of Turkey, the same Turkey which – incidentally – funded and armed ISIS.

    We eagerly look forward to finding out what else will emerge as the fascinating story of Erdogan’s getting rid of all loose ends, is finally revealed.

  • RNC Day 1: Make America Safe Again – Live Feed

    After four months of primaries and barely 12 months after Donald Trump first announced his candidacy for president of the United States, the Republican National Committee’s convention has officially kicked off today in Cleveland with the theme – Make America Great Again. While the 'main event' is not until Thursday; Day 1 of the Republican National Convention's sub-theme is "Make America Safe Again" with Melania Trump headlining (introduced by her husband) along with Duck Dynasty's Willie Robertson, 'Lone Survivor' Marcus Luttrell, Governor Rick Perry, outspoken Milwaukee Sheriff David Clark, and Mark Geist & John Tiegen (Benghazi security team members).

    *  *  *

    Some highlights from earlier in the day include:

    Gingrich Slams Bushes…

    Newt Gingrich says the Bush family is behaving "childishly" for skipping this week's Republican National Convention.

     

    In a Monday morning interview with ABC's "Good Morning America" at the RNC site in Cleveland, the former GOP House speaker said "the Republican party has been awfully good to the Bushes and they're showing remarkably little gratitude."

     

    He says the family needs to "get over" former Florida Governor Jeb Bush's loss to presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump in the primary race.

     

    Gingrich also says he's not disappointed that he was passed over by Trump for the vice presidential slot on the Republican ticket in favor of Indiana Governor Mike Pence. He says if the job is to court support from "regular Republicans," then Pence "will do a much better job."

    Dissidents…

    A group of dissident conservatives says it's gathered the signatures needed to force a showdown vote over Republican rules on the GOP national convention's first day.

     

    Party leaders have been trying to avert the clash in hopes of projecting an image of a united party as delegates gather to formally nominate Donald Trump to be president. They've been lobbying to try to head off the clash, and expect to win if such a vote occurs.

     

    But just after the convention was gaveled into session on Monday, a dissident group called Delegates Unbound said in an email that it had gathered statements calling for a roll call by a majority of delegates from 10 states. Under GOP rules, a roll call can be demanded if most delegates from seven states sign such a statement.

    *  *  *

    Live Feed (main event due to start at 1950ET):

    *  *  *

    Conventions give candidates a second chance to make a first impression, even candidates who have been covered by the media as obsessively as Donald Trump. The Republican convention in Cleveland gives Trump that chance. NPR details six things to watch this week…

    1. Will the Cleveland convention stick to a script?

    Successful conventions drive home a message relentlessly, with every speech, video and testimonial designed to highlight the strengths of the candidate and minimize his weaknesses. Trump has shown that he is allergic to this kind of discipline. Even the rollout of his vice presidential pick was shambolic and off message. Reince Priebus, the Republican National Committee chairman, told the Washington Post that one goal of the convention is to make Trump more "likable." After all, electing a president is more about "Like" Q than IQ.

    Trump has promised to add some "showbiz" to what he says is the usual boring convention formula. He'll have a lot of eyeballs this week. Most analysts predict record audiences, and viewers are expecting something pretty fantastic from the king of reality TV. A boring convention packed with B-list celebrities could drive voters away, or motivate Trump to do or say something even more outrageous to keep their attention.

    2. Does Trump expand his message?

    Trump has shown time and time again that he's more comfortable with a spontaneous stream of consciousness rant than reading a speech from a teleprompter. And he's been phenomenally successful at capturing the emotions of people upset about a way of life they feel is being eroded by wage stagnation, demographic change and terrorist attacks.

    The convention gives him a chance to lay out an actual agenda, to explain with specificity what he would do to improve their lives. The Trump campaign sees its path to the White House running through the Rust Belt — boosting turnout of white-working class men to historic levels. But the message for those voters may clash with what Trump needs to do to attract swing-state voters, suburban women and minorities. The convention will give us a good idea of whether Trump feels he has to modify his message to reach both his base and beyond — or not.

    3. Breakout stars?

    Conventions can give a rising star a chance to break out. That's what happened in 2004 when Barack Obama electrified the Democratic convention in Boston. The absence of so many leading Republicans in Cleveland may give others a chance to shine. We're watching to see if there is a 2004 Obama in the GOP lineup — maybe Ivanka Trump? Tom Cotton, the Arkansas senator? Pro-golfer Natalie Gulbis?

    4. Will Mrs. Trump connect?

    Wives are the best validators a candidate has. They can humanize a politician — the way Ann Romney and Michelle Obama both did in 2012. Melania Trump, with her unusual background as a supermodel, could come across as affecting or too exotic.

    5. Unity — will it happen or not?

    "Never Trump" is nevermore, but there is still less enthusiasm about the nominee than at any modern presidential convention. Trump himself has been ambivalent about whether he really needs a unified party, but he has acknowledged that he doesn't have it yet. And he has admitted that party unity was the reason he chose Mike Pence as his running mate.

    Polls show that Trump is getting the support of only about three-quarters of Republicans, a very low number. Conventions are often derided as four-day infomercials, but they serve an important purpose — getting an entire political party fired up behind the nominee. Will Cleveland do that for Trump?

    6. Will Trump get a bump?

    The average convention poll bounce for Democrats since 1964 is 6.8 percent; for Republicans, it has been 5.3 percent, according to Gallup. Sometimes a candidate gets no bounce at all. Romney didn't in 2012.

    Trump is currently running a few points behind his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. Cleveland gives him a chance to close that gap.

    *  *  *

    Full Republican National Convention Schedule:

  • How Aristocracies Benefit Both From Racism And From Anti-Racism

    Submitted by Eric Zuesse via Strategic-Culture.org,

    A good example of the way in which aristocracies benefit both from racism and from anti-racism, is Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the US Presidency, which is heavily backed by America’s aristocracy, and which is fueled not only by their money but also by the widespread racism in American culture, and especially by the equally widespread repudiation by many Americans against racism.

    Her opponent in the Democratic Party primaries, Bernie Sanders, was loathed by America’s aristocracy, because he was accusing them of destroying the country and was proposing policies to restore democracy to America, by means of various governmental interventions to reverse the existing undemocratic government’s wealth-transfers «from the masses to the classes». Sanders was publicly acknowledging that any government is a societal-prioritizing instrument, and that it therefore transfers wealth from some to others, via taxes and other essential policies, and so the wealth-distribution needs to be an independent focus of governmental policies – not simply ignored by government and subsumed within the «economic growth» concern.

    Here is how Hillary Clinton won the Democratic nomination in the primaries: She won 84% of the Black vote in the crucial South Carolina primary, where 61% of the voters, in that Democratic primary, were Blacks. Sanders won 58% of Whites voting there. Clinton won, of the total SC primary vote, 73% to Sanders’s 26%, a crushing 47% margin of victory. And then in the later southern primaries, her margins of victory among the overwhelmingly high proportion of Blacks in the Democratic Parties those states, were similar, which fact (her numerous primaries crushing him, especially on Super Tuesday) cemented Sanders’s loss, and her win, of the Democratic nomination.

    Whereas both of the primaries that preceded South Carolina (the caucus in Iowa, and the election in New Hampshire) were in overwhelmingly White northern states, which had been little shaped by the legacy of slavery, the racial situation was much more tense in SC, and also in the other southern states, where the culture of slavery still persists, more than a century after the Civil War that was fought over slavery.

    Sanders’s message, that economic inequality is the linchpin of America’s increasing inequality of economic opportunity, was a colossal flop among southern Blacks, for whom the pervasive anti-Black racism amongst their local non-Blacks, seemed to be far more the cause of Blacks’ suppressed economic opportunities than did the existing economic inequality itself. To them, Sanders’s argument (that economic inequality is self-perpetuating, and thus needs specific governmental policies to address) seemed false (because the racism there is so intense). They couldn’t understand rich-versus-poor, because what they saw around them every day was Black-versus-White. As Hillary and Bill Clinton’s, and Barack Obama’s, friend and chief economic advisor, Lawrence Summers, taught to his students at Harvard, «I think we can accept, I think we should accept inequality of results, recognizing that those who earn more are in a better position to contribute more to support society».

     It’s standard aristocratic propaganda, that economic inequality doesn’t result from economic inequality. The aristocracy want the public to believe the lie that inequality of the wealth-distribution isn’t self-perpetuating and thus doesn’t need governmental policy-changes in order to be reduced – wealth-redistribution by means of conscious targeted governmental policy in order to redistribute it. The aristocracy, and their agents, at Harvard and elsewhere, hide from the public (and from students) the fact that wealth-redistribution doesn’t occur on its own and can’t be addressed by policies that also help aristocrats (such as «more spending on infrastructure» etc. – the standard liberal growth-oriented policies, which don’t also really affect the wealth-distribution, which the aristocracy want to remain tilted in their favor). This lie – that economic inequality doesn’t itself stunt the economic opportunity for the public in the future – also caused Sanders’s support to be less among people who had PhD’s and other post-college degrees, than among mere college-graduates. Clinton won biggest among people with no education beyond high school, and with PhD’s and other post-college degrees. Upper-level education is strongly dependent upon funding from the aristocracy, so the more of it one had, the less progressive and more authoritarian one tended to be, and this showed in the vote. Clinton’s high support also among the low-educated mass of Democrats (ones with no exposure to college) resulted from the primacy there of two other stanchions of conservatism: religion and family (including ancestry, which brings in also clan and tribe). Furthermore, those voters are usually working so hard just to stay alive; they haven’t the time to be able to see politics beyond the mass-media, which of course are owned by the aristocrats and thus slanted toward Clinton, against Sanders.

    Clinton also benefited (though only to a lesser extent) from the fact that most of the voters in the South Carolina Democratic primary were women, to whom she was likewise targeting an anti-bigotry pitch: in that case, anti-sexist.

    By «racism» in the title here, is meant also any discrimination against a racial, ethnic, gender, religious, or any other non-economically-defined segment of the population; so, it includes also gender-discrimination and other forms of discrimination. In other words: all forms of bigotry, and of opposition to bigotry, distract from the oppression of the public by the aristocrats (the billionaires and centi-millionaires and their agents), and focus the attention instead against bigotry (or in favor of a particular type of bigotry, against a particular group); and, thus, bigotry and anti-bigotry benefit the aristocracy.

    Clinton’s basic message is that America’s inequality of economic opportunity isn’t a class-phenomenon, but a bigotry-phenomenon, such as discrimination against Blacks, against women, against gays, etc. This message won among the Democratic Party’s many minority-groups (Blacks, Hispanics, etc.), even though the economic inequality that her financial backers foster (and which here policies advance) has produced these people’s rotten education, inability to get out of debt, high assessed interest-rates, high rates of illness, etc. These conceptual connections as blockages against economic opportunity are abstract, whereas the incidences of bigotry against these people are concrete, blatant blockages.

    Clinton’s contest against the other Party’s nominee, the Republican Party’s Donald Trump, is against an aristocratic candidate who has largely been pitching to bigots for his votes – especially to bigots against Muslims, and against Hispanics. He now is faced with two contradictory demands: he can either focus more on the economic-class divide (hoping to draw off some of the Sanders voters), and thereby antagonize America’s aristocracy even more than he already has (by his opposition against Clinton’s record as a war-monger, and against her blatant lying and corruption, things that are mainstays in any aristocracy and thus insult aristocrats including himself), or else he can continue to focus on bigots; but, if he does the latter, then the contest will largely become one between bigots (voting for him) and anti-bigots (voting for Clinton), in which case there will continue to be many aristocrats who (unlike the aristocrat Trump himself) flee from any public association with any form of bigotry (almost all aristocrats pretend to be opposed to it, just as the Clintons and Obama so prominently do) and so (in addition to Hillary’s being an ideal nominee for aristocrats) they’ll starve Trump’s campaign of cash, and he’ll then almost certainly lose – or, at least, that’s the scenario.

    This is not a prediction that he will lose. The current US Presidential contest has no clear historical precedent, although the strategic realities in it are the standard ones in political contests. Trump is an extremely formidable campaigner, who has beaten all of his opponents so far and also every one of the ‘experts’ or pundits. (I’m actually expecting him to win; but that’s neither here nor there.)

    The irony is that what the current contest displays with especially stark clarity is the historically well-established reality, that aristocracies benefit both from racism and from anti-racism. It has hardly been clearer than it is here, despite the other, highly unusual, aspects of the current US Presidential contest.

    One thing that rather directly displays the undemocratic reality of today’s American politics is that both Trump and Clinton have (and throughout the contest did have) exceptionally high net-disapproval ratings from the American public, and that the only two candidates, of either Party, who had net-positive approval-ratings, were Bernie Sanders, and (the Republican candidate) John Kasich. If this country had been a democracy, then those were clearly the most-preferred candidates, and so the final contest would have been between those two, but neither of them even made it to the final round. This fact is yet another example showing that, at the present stage in American history, the US is a dictatorship by its aristocracy (who disliked both of the nation’s most-preferred candidates).

    In theocratic Iran, the clergy determine what final choices the public will have; in aristocratic-dictatorial US, the aristocracy do. Bigotry, and its natural response – anti-bigotry – both advance the cause of the aristocracy, anywhere. It’s not just divide-and-conquer. It’s also redirect-and-distract.

  • The Hamptons Housing Market Has Crashed: Luxury Home Sales Drop By Half As Prices Plunge

    It is not looking good for the US housing market.

    One week ago, when we reported that “On Manhattan’s “Billionaire’s Row”, A Death Knell Just Tolled For Luxury Real Estate“, we documented the sudden trapdoor that opened beneath the ultra-luxury segment in the Manhattan housing market. Then several days later, we observed that it is not just the luxury NYC market that is in trouble, but the broader market across all of the US, when we noted three “Red Flags” that the broader US housing market was starting to roll over, among which i) a surge in inexperienced, third-party “mom and pop” auction buyers who were arriving just as institutional investors are starting to flee the auction market, ii) a collapse in retail purchases for home goods and furniture – traditionally a coincident or slightly lagging indicator of home purchasing activity, and iii) a plunge in housing buyer traffic according to the Credit Suisse real-estate agent survey.

    Then this afternoon, another flashing red flag emerged when we learned that overall sales in the Hamptons plunged by half and home prices fell sharply in the second quarter in the toniest enclaves of the Hamptons, New York’s weekend haunt for the wealthy. Reuters blamed this on “stock market jitters earlier in the year” which  damped the appetite to buy, however one can also blame the halt of offshore money laundering, a slowing global economy, the collapse of the petrodollar, and the drastic drop in Wall Street bonuses. In short: a sudden loss of confidence that a greater fool may emerge just around the corner, which in turn has frozen buyer interest.

    And frozen it has.

    According to realtor Town & Country Real Estate, total sales volume in East Hampton fell 53% from a year ago to $44.7 million as the median sale price fell 54% to $2.38 million. In fact, a drop this steep has not been observed since the financial crisis. 

    A beachfront residence is seen in East Hampton, New York, March 16, 2016.

    In Southampton, total sales fell 48% from the second quarter of 2015 to $45.3 million, with the median sale price falling 21 percent to $1.65 million, data showed.

    In East Hampton, only 12 homes were sold and 17 in larger Southampton, due to a lack of inventory and because sales typically lag when the stock market underperforms, said Judi Desiderio, chief executive at Town & Country.

    “This is just a shift of the needle that I expected because 2014 was a high cycle for the high end,” said Desiderio, who says luxury home sales in the Hamptons run in seven-year cycles. The stock market surged 30 percent in 2013, with record sales in excess of $100 million set the following year.

    In the 12 submarkets that make up the Hamptons, sales volume slipped 18 percent from a year ago, with the median price falling to $999,000 from $1.1 million, Town & Country data showed.

    Sales in the Hampton submarkets of Shelter Island and Sag Harbor surged after several years of poor performance. The median sale price in Sag Harbor jumped 37 percent to $1.43 million, and 27 percent to $950,000 in Shelter Island.

    Despite the clear crash, local tealtors remain hopeful: third-quarter sales should pick up, in part because Wall Street touched record highs the past week and because the summer months are usually better, Desiderio said.  Then again, if they don’t, what is merely a trickle of selling now will become an all out liquidation as the greater fool bid is now officially dead.

  • It Is A Smoking Gun – Prince Bandar And Other Saudis Financed The 9/11 Terrorists

    Submitted by Justin Raimondo via Anti-War.com,

    News reports about the recently released 28 pages of the Joint Inquiry into the 9/11 attacks are typically dismissive: this is nothing new, it’s just circumstantial evidence, and there’s no “smoking gun.” Yet given what the report actually says – and these news accounts are remarkably sparse when it comes to verbatim quotes – it’s hard to fathom what would constitute a smoking gun.

    To begin with, let’s start with what’s not in these pages: there are numerous redactions. And they are rather odd. When one expects to read the words “CIA” or “FBI,” instead we get a blacked-out word. Entire paragraphs are redacted – often at crucial points. So it’s reasonable to assume that, if there is a smoking gun, it’s contained in the portions we’re not allowed to see. Presumably the members of Congress with access to the document prior to its release who have been telling us that it changes their entire conception of the 9/11 attacks – and our relationship with the Saudis – read the unredacted version. Which points to the conclusion that the omissions left out crucial information – perhaps including the vaunted smoking gun.

    In any case, what we have access to makes more than just a substantial case: it shows that the Saudi government – including top officials, such as then Saudi ambassador to the US, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, and other members of the royal family – financed and actively aided the hijackers prior to September 11, 2001.

    Support for at least two of the hijackers when they arrived in the US was extended by three key individuals:

    • Omar al-Bayoumi – Bayoumi was clearly a Saudi intelligence agent: the FBI all but identifies him as such. His salary was paid for by companies directly owned and operated by the Saudi government, although he apparently rarely showed up for “work.” He was directly subsidized by the wife of then Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar, and these subsidies were substantially increased when the hijackers arrived in the US. It was Bayoumi who hovered over two of the hijackers – Nawaf al-Hamzi and Khalid al-Midhar – as soon as they arrived in the United States. He got them an apartment, co-signed the rental agreement, chauffeured them around – and helped them obtain information on flight schools.

    • Osama Bassnan – This individual, who, according to the report, has “many ties to the Saudi government,” boasted to an informant that he did more for the two hijackers than Bayoumi. He was certainly in a position to do so, since he lived directly across the street from them in San Diego. The FBI characterized him as “an extremist and supporter of Osama bin Laden”: like Bayoumi, his longtime associate – with whom he was in constant communication at the time of the hijackers’ American sojourn – Bassnan was subsidized by the Saudi royal family, and specifically Prince Bandar and his wife. A search of Basnan’s apartment turned up indications that he had cashiers checks amounting to $74,000. Bandar’s wife’s account had a standing arrangement to send monthly checks to Basan’s wife for “nursing services.” There is no evidence that such services were ever performed. The suppressed 28 pages cite direct payments from Prince Bandar to Basnan:

      “On at least one occasion, Bassnan received a check directly from Prince Bandar’s account. Accordion to the FBI, on May 14, 1998, Bassnan cashed a check from Bandar in the amount of $15,000. Bassnan’s wife also received at least one check directly from Bandar She also received one additional check froth Bandar’s wife, which she cashed on January 8, 1998 for 10,000.”

    • Shayk Fahah al-Thumairy – He was a diplomat at the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles and imam of the King Fahad mosque, which is a focal point of Muslim-Saudi activity in the area. US intelligence avers that “initial indications are that al-Thumairy may have had a physical or financial connection to al-Hamzi and al-Midhar.” Both attended the King Fahad mosque. Thumairy was interviewed by US law enforcement after fleeing to Saudi Arabia, and denied having any contact with the two hijackers – in spite of evidence that he was in telephonic contact with them. This, he asserted, was an attempt to “smear” him.

    The two hijackers had extensive contacts with Saudi naval officers in the United States, according to telephone records. And when Abu Zubaydah, one of the accused 9/11 conspirators, was captured in Pakistan, they found the phone number of a Colorado company that managed “the affairs of the Colorado residence of the Saudi Ambassador.” Prince Bandar is practically the star of the suppressed 28 pages – no wonder the Bush administration, which had close ties to him, fought so hard to keep this secret.

    The 28 pages also reveal that an individual – name redacted – associated with al-Qaeda and the hijackers sneaked into the US, avoiding Customs agents and the INS due to the fact that he was traveling with a member of the Saudi royal family. We are also told that “Another Saudi national with close ties to the Saudi Royal Family, [redacted], is the subject of FBI counterterrorism investigations and reportedly was checking security at the United States’ southwest border in 1999 and discussing the possibility of infiltrating individuals into the United States.”

    The Saudi government’s financial and operational ties to at least two of the 9/11 hijackers are myriad, and largely substantiated. Furthermore, although some of these links as detailed in the 28 pages are tentative, it’s important to remember that this report was written in 2002, and that the intelligence community was strongly admonished to follow up because lawmakers deemed the lack of investigation into the Saudi connection “unacceptable.” So what did they find out in the fourteen years after that admonition was delivered? Inquiring minds want to know….

    Prince Bandar went on to become head of Saudi intelligence: his personal relationship with the Bush family is well-known, and his access to US government officials – and his powerful influence in Washington – makes his starring role in the nurturing of the two hijackers into a gun that, while not quite smoking, is exuding vapors of a highly suggestive nature.

    “Circumstantial evidence”? Perhaps – but people have been convicted of murder on the basis of such evidence, and, in this case, there is such a preponderance of evidence that a guilty verdict is unavoidable.

    It would not be stretching the evidence to bluntly state that the suppressed 28 pages of the Joint Inquiry report on the 9/11 terrorist attacks places agents of the Saudi government at the epicenter of the plot. In short, there’s no two ways about it: the Saudis did 9/11.

    Why did our government cover up this shocking evidence for so long?

    The reason is because they had no desire to retaliate against the real perpetrators of 9/11. Instead, as we now know, they were determined to pin the blame on Saddam Hussein: indeed, the Bush administration pressed this talking point relentlessly, until it was forced to backtrack. We attacked Iraq, in the words of neocon grise eminence and top Bush administration official Paul Wolfowitz, because it was “doable.” A years long neoconservative campaign to target Iraq gained new impetus in the wake of 9/11, and the administration and its journalistic camarilla pushed the lie that Iraq was behind the attack. The evidence that the Saudis were involved had to be suppressed – because the Bush administration’s war plans depended on it.

    Now that we know the truth, what do we do about it?

    To begin with, if any other government had connections to a terrorist attack on the US of this nature, their capital would’ve been a smoking ruin. I’m not suggesting we do that, but at the very least the Saudis must be made to pay a high price for their complicity, starting with a moratorium on all US aid and arms sales to the Kingdom. We imposed trade sanctions on Russia for far less. Cutting off the Saudis from the US banking system should put a crimp in their extensive international network of terror-financing and money-laundering. And I know it’s too much to expect a public statement from our President pointing out that a US “ally” aided and abetted those who murdered over 3,000 people on 9/11, but I can dream, can’t I?

    The Saudis aren’t our allies: as the 28 pages make all too clear, they are our deadly enemies. And they ought to be treated as such.

  • Millennials Face An Existential Crisis: "It Won't Be A Short Period Of Difficulty"

    Authored by John  Mauldin, originally posted at MauldinEconomics.com,

    Psychologists from Sigmund Freud forward have generally agreed: our core attitudes about life are largely locked in by age five or so. Changing those attitudes requires intense effort.

    Neil Howe and William Strauss took this obvious truth and drew an obvious conclusion: if our attitudes form in early childhood, then the point in history at which we live our childhood must play a large part in shaping our attitudes.

    It’s not only early childhood, however, that forms us. Howe and Strauss think we go through a second formative period in early adulthood. The challenges we face as we become independent adults determine our approach to life.

    These insights mean we can divide the population into generational cohorts, each spanning roughly 20 years. Each generation consists of people who were born and came of age at the same point in history.

    These generations had similar experiences and thus gravitated toward similar attitudes.

    At this year’s Strategic Investment Conference, Howe illustrated the point with this cartoon. (I think we should now add an illustration of a couple texting on their phones, saying “Let’s tell our friends online first.”)

    Amusing, yes, but true. Young love, a universal experience, took different forms for Americans who grew up in the 1950s vs. the 1970s vs. the 1990s. Ditto for many other aspects of life.

    Four generational archetypes: Heroes, Artists, Prophets, & Nomads

    In their book The Fourth Turning, Howe and Strauss identified four generational archetypes: Hero, Artist, Prophet, and Nomad. Each consists of people born in a roughly 20-year period. As each archetypal generation reaches the end of its 80-year lifespan, the cycle repeats.

    Each archetypal generation goes through the normal phases of life: childhood, young adulthood, mature adulthood, and old age. Each tends to dominate society during middle age (40–60 years old) then begins dying off as the next generation takes the helm.

    This change of control from one generation to the next is called a “turning” in the Strauss/Howe scheme. The cycle repeats on a “fourth turning” as a new hero generation comes of age and replaces the nomads. Each fourth turning, however, is a great crisis.

    (The turnings have their own characteristics, which I describe in detail in this article. Today’s economic and political landscape, unfortunately, makes it clear we are about halfway through the fourth turning.)

    Now, let’s get back to the archetypes and see how they match the generations alive today.

    The characteristics of each archetype aren’t neatly divided by the calendar; they are better seen as evolving along a continuum. (This is a very important point. It’s why we get trends and changes, not abrupt turnarounds. Thankfully.) People born toward the beginning or end of a generation share some aspects of the previous or following one.

    Hero generations are usually raised by protective parents. Heroes come of age during a time of great crisis. Howe calls them heroes because they resolve that crisis, an accomplishment that then defines the rest of their lives.

     

    Following the crisis, heroes become institutionally powerful in midlife and remain focused on meeting great challenges. In old age, they tend to have a spiritual awakening as they watch younger generations work through cultural upheaval.

     

    The G.I. Generation that fought World War II is the most recent example of the hero archetype. They built the US into an economic powerhouse in the postwar years and then confronted youthful rebellion in the 1960s.

     

    Further back, the generation of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, heroes of the American Revolution, experienced the religious “Great Awakening” in their twilight years.

     

    Artists are the children of heroes, born before and during the crisis. They are, however, not old enough to be an active part of the solution. Highly protected during childhood, Artists are risk-averse young adults in the post-crisis years.

     

    They see conformity as the best path to success. They develop and refine the innovations forged in the crisis. Artists experience the same cultural awakening as heroes but from the perspective of mid-adulthood.

     

    Today’s older retirees are mostly artists, part of the “Silent Generation” that may remember World War II but were too young to participate. They married early and moved into gleaming new 1950s suburbs.

     

    The Silent Generation went through its own midlife crisis in the 1970s and 1980s before entering a historically affluent, active, gated-community retirement.

     

    Prophet generations experience childhood in a period of post-crisis affluence. Having not seen a real crisis, they often create cultural upheaval during their young adult years. In midlife, they become moralistic, values-obsessed leaders and parents. As they enter old age, prophets lay the groundwork for the next crisis.

     

    The postwar Baby Boomers are the latest prophet generation. They grew up in generally comfortable times with the US at the height of its global power. They expanded their consciousness when they came of age in the “Awakening” period of the 1960s. They defined the 1970s/1980s “yuppie” lifestyle and are now entering old age, having shaped the culture by virtue of sheer numbers.

     

    Nomads are the fourth and final archetype. They are children during the “Awakening” periods of cultural chaos. Unlike the overly indulged and protected prophets, nomads go through childhood with minimal supervision and guidance. They learn early in life not to trust society’s basic institutions. They come of age as individualistic pragmatists.

     

    The most recent nomads are Generation X, born in the 1960s and 1970s. Their earliest memories are of faraway war, urban protests, no-fault divorce, and broken homes.

     

    Now entering midlife, Generation X is trying to give its own children a better experience. They find success elusive because they distrust large institutions and have no strong connections to public life. They prefer to stay out of the spotlight and trust only themselves. Their story is still unfolding today.

    Millennials are a new hero generation

    After the nomad archetype, the cycle repeats with another hero generation: the Millennials (born from 1982 through about 2004) are beginning to take root in American culture.

    They are a large generation numerically, filling schools and colleges and propelling new technology into the mainstream. If the pattern holds, they will face a great crisis. It will influence the rest of their lives… just as World War II shaped the G.I. Generation heroes.

    It’s not going to be a short period of difficulty. It will be an existential crisis, one in which society’s strongest institutions collapse (or are severely challenged and stressed) and national survival is in serious doubt. The Crisis can be economic, cultural, religious, military, or all the above.

    Using Neil Howe’s timeline, we are currently about halfway through the fourth turning. We may have another decade to go. Maybe not. We’ll figure this out soon.

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Jul 18

Today’s News 18th July 2016

  • Why Hillary Clinton's Email Case Is Still Not Closed

    Authored by Eric Zuesse, originally posted at Strategic-Culture.org,

    Normally, when the head of the FBI under one President says something like «no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case», as the FBI reported regarding Hillary Clinton's emails, that would be the end of the matter; but Clinton actually still isn’t off the prosecutorial hook of this criminal case, unless and until she becomes President herself.

    The decision as to whether or not to prosecute her on this matter is not made by the FBI Director, but by the Attorney General. The current one, Loretta Lynch, was appointed by (and holds her job at the discretion of) the man who has endorsed Ms Clinton to become his own successor: the current US President, Barack Obama. If Clinton doesn’t become the next President, the next Attorney General won’t be appointed by Clinton, and that person will then be making any decision as to whether or not to present the Clinton emails case to a grand jury; and, if an indictment results, then to present it to a trial jury.

    Even the Obama appointee to be the FBI’s chief, Mr Comey, introduced his statement there, by acknowledging that «there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information». As regards his opinion that «no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case», reasonable prosecutors already have brought such cases, and they have won convictions on these cases. So, just based on that record, Mr Comey clearly lied there.

    The independent journalist who goes by the pseudonym 'Tyler Durden' headlined, only a day after Mr Comey on July 5th exonerated Ms Clinton, «Meet Bryan Nishimura, Found Guilty For ‘Removal And Retention Of Classified Materials’», and that conviction was won on the same statute for which Comey as Clinton’s would-be policeman, jury, and judge, has peremptorily exonerated her (exonerated his own next boss if she becomes President). «Durden», at his famous Zero Hedge site, noted: «Here is the FBI itself, less than a year ago, charging one Bryan H. Nishimura, 50, of Folsom [California], who pleaded guilty to ‘unauthorized removal and retention of classified materials’ without malicious intent, in other words precisely what the FBI alleges Hillary did (h/t@DavidSirota)». He linked to this case. If that’s not the spitting-image of what Clinton was investigated by the FBI for, then nothing is – but Nishimura did far less of that crime than Clinton did – and yet he was sentenced «to two years of probation, a $7,500 fine, and forfeiture of personal media containing classified materials. Nishimura was further ordered to surrender any currently held security clearance and to never again seek such a clearance». As America’s President, Ms Clinton wouldn’t even qualify to receive the CIA’s daily national security brief. But, according to Mr Comey, «no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case». He simply lied.

    Furthermore, even before Comey had announced Clinton’s exoneration, Josh Gersten at Politico had already headlined on 27 May 2016, «Sub sailor’s photo case draws comparisons to Clinton emails», and he reported that, «A Navy sailor entered a guilty plea Friday in a classified information mishandling case that critics charge illustrates a double standard between the treatment of low-ranking government employees and top officials like former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and ex-CIA Director David Petraeus … To some, the comparison to Clinton’s case may appear strained. Clinton has said none of the information on her server was marked classified at the time. In many cases, it was marked as unclassified when sent to her by people in the State Department more familiar with the issues involved».

    However, even Mr Comey noted in his statement of exoneration of Ms Clinton, that, among the tens of thousands of Clinton’s emails that were able to be recovered after she had tried to destroy them all, were the following: «Eight of those [email]chains contained information that was Top Secret at the time they were sent; 36 chains contained Secret information at the time; and eight contained Confidential information, which is the lowest level of classification. Separate from those, about 2,000 additional e-mails were 'up-classified’ [by the State Department during its reconstruction of her email record] to make them Confidential; the information in those had not been classified at the time the e-mails were sent». Some of the emails that Clinton had tried to destroy had, in fact, been marked «Confidential», «Secret», and even «Top Secret».

    Consequently, when Politico’s reporter, Mr Gersten, exonerated Clinton by saying (and leaving it at that), «Clinton has said none of the information on her server was marked classified at the time. In many cases, it was marked as unclassified when sent to her by people in the State Department more familiar with the issues involved», he was quoting (without even challenging) a liar. That standard (Hillary’s having been sending and receiving information that was classified at the time) was reported by Mr Comey to have actually been met, for her prosecution – Comey simply chose to deny that reality, by then saying, «no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case». He undeniably lied.

    On July 6th (the same day as the report from «Tyler Durden»), the Hillary Clinton propaganda-site Slate headlined, from their Fred Kaplan, «The Hillary Clinton Email Scandal Was Totally Overblown: We learned nothing new from the investigation or James Comey’s statement». He wrote: «Did she commit a crime? Would anyone else – a lower-ranking official, someone who’s not a presidential candidate, someone who’s not named Clinton – have been charged with a crime? Absolutely not. And Comey said as much. ‘Our judgment,’ he said, ‘is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.’ In the annals of the Justice Department’s history, he went on, ‘we cannot find a case that would support bringing criminal charges on these facts’». That type of ‘reporting’ is called stenographic ‘journalism’: it’s exactly what America’s press did with regard to ‘Saddam’s WMD,’ for which fabricated reason we invaded Iraq in 2003. Stenographic ‘journalism’ is still the US norm. The American press hasn’t changed since then.

    On July 9th, Salon bannered «DOJ veterans weigh in on FBI Director James Comey’s handling of Clinton email probe», and reported many serious irregularities – and false assertions by Comey – in the FBI Director’s handling of this matter.

    However, the huge scandal of the FBI’s handling of this matter goes far deeper than any of this, because the real mega-scandal here is that the FBI were extremely selective in regards to what federal criminal laws they would investigate her for having possibly broken. There are at least six federal criminal laws which accurately and unquestionably describe even what Ms Clinton has now publicly admitted having done by her privatized email system, and intent isn’t even mentioned in most of them nor necessary in order for her to be convicted – the actions themselves convict her, and the only relevance that intent might have, regarding any of these laws, would be in determining how long her prison sentence would be.

    I have already presented the texts of these six laws (and you can see the sentences for each one, right there), and any reader can easily recognize that each one of them describes, without any doubt, what she now admits having done. Most of these crimes don’t require any intent in order to convict (and the ones that do require intent are only «knowingly… conceals», or else «with the intent to impair the object’s … use in an official proceeding», both of which «intents» would be easy to prove on the basis of what has already been made public – but others of these laws don’t require even that); and none of them requires any classified information to have been involved, at all. It’s just not an issue in these laws. Thus, conviction under them is far easier. If a prosecutor is really seeking to convict someone, he’ll be aiming to get indictments on the easiest-to-prove charges, first. That also presents for the prosecutor the strongest position in the event of an eventual plea-bargain. As Alan Dershowitz said, commenting on one famous prosecution: «They also wanted a slam-dunk case. They wanted the strongest possible case». Comey didn’t. His presentation was simply a brazen hoax by him. That’s all.

    That’s the real scandal, and nobody (other than I) has been writing about it as what it is – a hoax. But what it shows is that maybe the only way that Clinton will be able to avoid going to prison is by her going to the White House. Either she gets a term in the White House, or else she gets a (much longer) term in prison – or else our government is so thoroughly corrupt that she remains free as a private citizen and still above the law, even though not serving as a federal official.

    If Donald Trump doesn’t soon start talking about each one of those six laws, then his supporters should be asking him whether he himself is hiding something, because those six laws make crystal-clear that Hillary Clinton committed serious crimes, such that, even if she is convicted only on these six slam-dunk statutes (and on none other, including not on the ones that Comey was referring to), she could be sentenced to a maximum of 73 years in prison (73=5+5+20+20+3+10+10). Add on others she might also have committed (such as the ones that Comey was referring to, all of which pertain only to the handling of classified information), and her term in prison might be lengthier still.

    Motive is important in Ms Clinton’s email case, because motive tells us why she was trying to hide from historians and from the public her operations as the US Secretary of State: was it because she didn’t want them to know that she was selling to the Sauds and her other friends the US State Department’s policies in return for their million-dollar-plus donations to the Clinton Foundation, and maybe even selling to them (and/or their cronies) US government contracts, or why? However, those are questions regarding other crimes that she might have been perpetrating while in public office, not the crimes of her privatized email operation itself; and those other crimes (whatever they might have been) would have been explored only after an indictment on the slam-dunks, and for further possible prosecutions, if President Obama’s people were serious about investigating her. They weren’t. Clearly, this is selective ‘justice’.

    So, the basic question here is: Is this a democracy, at all? Or, are some people just brazenly above the law?

     

    The character and content of this country are at stake here. This issue is important not only as substance, but as symbolism. Of course, that’s also true with any criminal conviction or refusal even to prosecute; but, in Clinton’s email case, the symbolism is simply enormous: it’s a bold statement, to the entire world, about today’s America, and about whether this government’s routine pontifications, regarding other nations’ not being «democratic», are little – if at all – more than a very black pot deriding some kettle for not being sufficiently white. A crony-capitalist country is in no moral position to dictate anything to the rest of the world. Hiding what it is (a foul oligarchy), only makes what it is, even worse, and more dangerous. Its allies – in NATO, the EU, and elsewhere – are then members of an international gang, which has no justifiable reason even to exist, and which is incredibly harmful not only to their own people, but to all nations. And, if the next US President refuses to prosecute this case, then the continuation of hiding it, the continuation of that cover-up, will not only be blatant; it will show, to the entire world, that nothing short of a revolution can rectify the situation in America. If this country is that crooked at the top, what can it be down below?

     

  • A Message To Pokemaniacs: "Think About Your Life Choices"

    Now that a Google april fools’ joke appears to have spawned the zombie apocalypse, one local landlord has finally had enough.

    h/t @StigAbell

    Then again, where else will the non-Pokemummified part of the population apply all those anti-zombie skills acquired while watching the Walking Dead…

  • Baton Rouge Killer Was Racist Member Of "Nation Of Islam", Railed Against 'Crackers' On YouTube

    The 29 year old ex-marine, Gavin Eugene Long, who ambushed and killed three unsuspecting Baton Rouge police officers on Sunday morning, hated those who did not share his skin-tone and harbored a particular hatred for the police. As revealed in the hours after the shootings, a Youtube account operated by Long under the handle I Am Cosmo where the alleged killer posted dozens of clips, provides insight into what motivated the young man to kill three police officers and wound  three more on his 29th birthday.

    In the Youtube videos, Long rants against “crackers, and makes multiple references to the July 5th killing of Alton Sterling at the hands of police officers only five miles away from Sunday’s attack. The videos also detail that Long is a member of the Nation of Islam, labelled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center for its black supremacist and racist views towards Jews, Asians, and whites which the group’s leaders argue have “sucked the blood from and exploited the black community.

    As Daily Caller details, the 29-year-old was a native of Kansas City, Missouri and was honorably discharged from the Marines in 2010 after reaching the rank of E-5. He preferred to go by the name Cosmo Ausar Setepenra rather than Gavin Eugene Long.

    In a video published on Thursday, the racist shooter says that “If I would have been there with Alton – Clap” before promoting a book that he wrote that discusses black liberation ideology. “I wrote it for my dark-skinned brothers,” said Long. “If you look at all the rebels like Black Panthers, Huey P. Newton, Malcolm X, and Elijah Muhammad, they was light-skinned. But we know how hard y’all got it.”

    Phone numbers on buildings in the video show that it was filmed in Baton Rouge. Calls placed to the numbers were not answered because they were out of service.

    “I just got here I’m not really into the protesting. I do education because that’s our real freedom,” he is heard telling two men in the video. He called protesting “emotional” and “for the women.”

    In another video recorded while Long was in Dallas after the police shooting, he laid out his thoughts on protesting, oppresion and how to deal with bullies. Nothing too earthshattering there.

     

    Long, who operated a self-motivation website called “Convos with Cosmo,” also appears to have tweeted hours before the attack unfolded. In one video posted in recent weeks, Long left a cryptic message that may have foretold Sunday’s attack. And though he said he was once a member of the Nation of Islam, the radical sect led by Louis Farrakhan, Long also said that he had no affiliations with outside groups.

     

    “I thought my own thoughts. I made my own decisions. I’m the one who’s got to listen the judgement. That’s it. And my heart is pure,” he said.

    “If anything happens with me, because I’m an alpha male, I stand up, I stand firm, I stand for mine, until the end,” he said. “Yeah, I also was a Nation of Islam member. Don’t affiliate me with it. Don’t affiliate me with anything.”

    Just 4 days ago on his Twitter account (under the handle @ConvosWithCosmo), Long wrote that violence is not the answer but “at what point do you stand” up so your people dont become extinct. Four days later he answered his own question.

    Another time he tweeted “have u ever seen white people march for the things they needed”?

    The assailant also suggested that the black community should buy only from black-owned businesses rather than “working for the white people.”

    In one video Long is heard lamented “working for the white people.” He encouraged one man riding in his vehicle as he filmed using a body camera to shop only at black-owned businesses. He brought up a hypothetical scenario in which a family member who wanted to buy carpet was forced to buy from non-black business owners saying – “Who’s she going to f— with? The cracker, the Arab, the Chinese?”

    “These Arabs, these Indians, they don’t give two fucks about us,” said the shooter.

    Come to think of it, he may have a point.

  • America Wastes Half The Food It Produces While Hunger Runs Rampant Around The Globe

    Submitted by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

    Is the United States the most wasteful nation on the entire planet?  We are all certainly guilty of wasting food.  Whether it is that little bit that you don’t want to eat at the end of a meal, or that produce that you forgot about in the back of the refrigerator that went moldy, the truth is that we could all do better at making sure that good food does not get wasted.  It can be tempting to think that wasting food is not a big deal because we have so much of it, but an increasing number of people around the world are really hurting these days.  In fact, it has been estimated that there are more than a billion hungry people around the globe right now.  So as a society we need to figure out how to waste a whole lot less food and how to get it into the mouths of those that really need it.

    According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, close to a third of all food in the United States gets wasted after it gets to the store.  This is commonly referred to as “downstream” waste.  When you add all of this “downstream” waste up, it comes to a grand total of 133 billion pounds of food each year…

    Nearly a third of the 430 billion pounds of food produced for Americans to eat is wasted, a potential catastrophe for landfills and a wake-up call to officials scrambling to feed the hungry, according to a stunning new report from the Department of Agriculture.

     

    The just-issued report revealed that in 2010, 31 percent, or 133 billion pounds, of food produced for Americans to eat was wasted, either molded or improperly cooked, suffered “natural shrinkage” due to moisture loss, or because people became disinterested in what they purchased.

    How many people do you think we could feed with 133 billion pounds of food?

    But that isn’t all of the food that we waste.  In addition to “downstream” waste, we also have to add “upstream” waste to the equation.  Massive amounts of food are wasted each year because American consumers don’t want to eat fruits and vegetables that are “imperfect”.  The following comes from the Guardian…

    Americans throw away almost as much food as they eat because of a “cult of perfection”, deepening hunger and poverty, and inflicting a heavy toll on the environment.

     

    Vast quantities of fresh produce grown in the US are left in the field to rot, fed to livestock or hauled directly from the field to landfill, because of unrealistic and unyielding cosmetic standards, according to official data and interviews with dozens of farmers, packers, truckers, researchers, campaigners and government officials.

    And I know that as a consumer I am guilty of this.  Just yesterday, I was picking through the apricots at the grocery store looking for the prettiest ones that I could find.  Of course they were all good to eat, but most of us are in the habit of wanting produce that looks as “perfect” as possible.

    As a result, a lot of perfectly good food that may look a little ratty ends of being wasted…

    “Sunburnt” or darker-hued cauliflower was ploughed over in the field. Table grapes that did not conform to a wedge shape were dumped. Entire crates of pre-cut orange wedges were directed to landfill. In June, Kirschenman wound up feeding a significant share of his watermelon crop to cows.

    As the Guardian article quoted above noted, when you add “downstream” waste and “upstream” waste together, we end up wasting about half our food.

    This is tragic, because there are a whole lot of people in our own country that could use this food.  According to one estimate, there are 49 million Americans dealing with food insecurity.  But if we didn’t waste nearly half our food, we could likely feed just about everyone sufficiently.

    Globally, about one-third of all food is wasted. That is better than the U.S. number, but it is still way too high.

    At this point, we just don’t have a lot of resources to waste.  So many people are suffering these days, and this includes an explosion of crushing poverty in the country that is hosting the Olympics this summer.  Just yards away from the primary stadium that will be used by the Olympic games, people actually have raw sewage running through their homes…

    In the Mangueira ‘favelas’ no more than 750m away from the Maracana stadium in Rio de Janeiro, which will host the Rio 2016 Olympic Games, young families are living in makeshift houses with no sanitation.

     

    The stadium will stage both the opening and closing ceremonies for the Olympics in August, and as global superstars such as Usain Bolt, Mo Farah, Jessica Ennis-Hill and Justin Gatlin take to the track, the favela residents will be dealing with raw sewage running through their homes.

    It has been estimated that more than 20 percent of the population of Rio lives in “favelas”.  But instead of doing something for those people, the government of Brazil has spent hundreds of millions of dollars hosting the World Cup and the Olympics.

    What is wrong with that picture?

    Meanwhile, things continue to get even worse elsewhere in South America.  In Venezuela, 47 percent of the country can no longer provide three meals a day for their families, and the lack of toilet paper has become a national crisis…

    Venezuela’s government said it occupied Kimberly-Clark Corp.’s local plant, days after the company had halted operations because of shortages of raw materials in the socialist crisis-stricken country.

     

    “Kimberly-Clark will continue producing for all Venezuelans and is now in the hands of the workers,” Labor Minister Oswaldo Vera said Monday in a televised address from the company’s plant in central Aragua state, before signing an order to take it over, according to WSJ. The labor ministry claims Kimberly-Clark had violated Venezuelan law by firing more than 900 workers without consulting the government.

     

    “It doesn’t matter who’s running the factory,” said Henkel Garcia, director of the Caracas business consultancy Econometrica told WSJ. “The bottom line is that there are no raw materials that anyone can afford to import.”

    As the global economy continues to deteriorate, the need to waste less food and less resources will become even more acute.  Over the past several decades, we have grown accustomed to not even thinking twice about wasting food.  In fact, I rarely come across parents that insist that their children finish everything on their plates these days.

    But in the not too distant future, things are going to completely change.  Even in the United States, we will eventually get to the point where every scrap of food is considered to be precious.

    We are moving into a time when wasting nearly half our food will no longer be an option, and so we should start coming up with better ways of doing things as soon as we can.

  • PoCa-HYPoCRiTe, PACToNS and $HiTTiNG BuLL…

    DNC PLAYERS 2016

  • "Not A White Problem"

    Submitted by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform blog,

    The statistics in the chart below are representative of every Democrat controlled urban shithole city in America. Obama and his anti-gun activist minions are peddling a false narrative about guns because they understand most Americans are dumber than a sack of hammers and easily manipulated by propaganda. Obama uses every high profile shooting to blame guns, in order to deflect people from seeing the truth. And the truth is guns are not a problem in white America.

    It’s only a problem in the urban ghettos with the toughest gun laws run by Democrat mayors and city councils. Chicago is a perfect example of Obama ignoring the real problem. Fifty years of welfare programs and treating black people like victims has created a dysfunctional system leading to hopelessness, crime, and perpetual poverty. Chicago is 32% white, but they commit only 3.5% of the murders. Over 96% of the murders are committed by non-whites. Essentially, it is young black men murdering other black men. White people are not in the equation and are not part of the problem. It’s a black problem framed as a gun problem by Obama and his lying apparatchiks.

     

    There are approximately 8,000 gun related homicides annually in the U.S. The vast majority occur in the urban ghettos and are committed by blacks and hispanics against other blacks and hispanics. They use illegally acquired guns, so more gun laws will do nothing. Their lawless culture, requiring no personal responsibility by those who father children, creates the dysfunction and crime. The urban ghetto kill zones all have the same thing in common – run by liberal Democrats for decades, with poverty created by their welfare policies, dreadful public schools, and a black population who don’t work and take no personal responsibility for their lives or their children.

    Here are the murders by city for a sampling of these shitholes:

    • Los Angeles – 587
    • Chicago – 508
    • NYC – 333
    • Detroit – 316
    • Phila – 248
    • Baltimore – 233
    • New Orleans – 150
    • Indianapolis – 129
    • Memphis – 124
    • St. Louis – 120
    • Newark -112
    • Milwaukee – 104
    • Washington DC – 103

    There are dozens of other shitholes like Camden, Kansas City, Atlanta, Oakland, Pittsburgh, and Miami with extremely high murder rates, and in every case more than 90% are committed by non-whites. Why don’t you hear Obama giving speeches about black communities policing themselves and taking responsibility for the crime, drugs and murder in their neighborhoods? He has no problem with proclamations about white people clinging to their guns in middle America where there are virtually no murders.

    The entire gun narrative peddled by liberals is false. The crime rate has been falling for 25 years. There were 24,703 murders in 1991 when the population was 253 million. Murders in 2014 totaled 14,249 with a population of 317 million. The willfully ignorant American public completely buys the falsehoods presented by Obama and believes murders and crime are skyrocketing.

    Today, the national crime rate is about half of what it was at its height in 1991. Violent crime has fallen by 51 percent since 1991, and property crime by 43 percent. In 2013 the violent crime rate was the lowest since 1970. And this holds true for unreported crimes as well. According to the National Crime Victimization Survey, since 1993 the rate of violent crime has declined from 79.8 to 23.2 victimizations per 1,000 people.

    So, with homicides at a 25 year low and completely confined to the urban ghettos where young black men kill other young black men, we need new gun laws to restrict what white people can own? It makes you wonder. Why has the government militarized local police forces across the country in white communities when crime and murder is virtually non-existent in those communities? Why is Obama and his liberal nazi hordes trying to ban any gun capable of providing defense against a tyrannical government? Why has this become a war on whites when it is solely a black problem? It’s almost as if the government is treating working class whites with guns as the enemy. I wonder.

  • 29-Year-Old Black Male Dead After Killing 3 Cops, Wounding 3 More In Baton Rouge "Cowardly" Ambush

    Summary:

    • Three police officers were shot to death Sunday and three others wounded in Baton Rouge, the same city where Alton Sterling was killed two weeks ago, after they responded to a call of shots fired when they were attacked by at least one gunman, Baton Rouge Mayor Kip Holden said. The three officers had died in what he described as "an ambush-style deal."
    • The gunman, who has been killed, has been identified as 29 year old, black male named Gavin Eugene Long of Kansas City, Missouri. CBS News reports the suspect gunned down three Baton Rouge police officers on his birthday. He was born July 17, 1987.
    • According to CBS News, Long was honorably discharged from the Marines in 2010.
    • Authorities initially believed that two other assailants might be at large, but hours later said the dead gunman was the only person who fired at the officers. However, a state police spokesman said investigators were unsure whether he had some kind of help from others. “We are not ready to say he acted alone,” Major Doug Cain said.
    • President Barack Obama condemned the "attack on law enforcement in Baton Rouge" and vowed that justice would be done. "We may not yet know the motives for this attack, but I want to be clear: There is no justification for violence against law enforcement. None. These attacks are the work of cowards who speak for no one," Obama said in a statement.
    • Sen. Bill Cassidy told CNN “there’s a war right now on police.”

    A timeline of today's events:

    • About 9 a.m.: Less than one mile from police headquarters, shots fired at police officers from the Baton Rouge Police Department and the East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Office. Five officers are rushed to Our Lady of the Lake Hospital. Three are dead on arrival, one is in serious condition and another in fair condition. One gunman is killed while two other possible suspects are at large. The scene of the shooting remains active as police continue their search of the area. State SWAT officers arrive, and a robot is sent in to scan for explosive devices.  A witness told television station WAFB that he saw a masked man in black shorts and shirt running from the scene where the three officers were killed.
    • 12:06 p.m.: Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards tweets a statement calling the act "unspeakable" and "unjustified."
    • 12:30 p.m.: Dallas police chief David Brown, whose department lost five officers last week in their own ambush of police, tweets support to Baton Rouge.

    Live Feed:

     

    Update 18: Hillary Clinton condemned the attack on law enforcement in Baton Rouge. In a statement on Sunday afternoon the Democratic presidential nominee said, "There is no justification for violence, for hate, for attacks on men and women who put their lives on the line every day in service of our families and communities."

    * * *

    Update 17: A spokesman for the Louisiana state police says they believe the gunman who killed three officers in Baton Rouge was the only shooter but that officials are unsure whether he had accomplices.

    Major Doug Cain said Sunday, "we are not ready to say he acted alone." Cain says two people had been detained in another town called Addis, which is near Baton Rouge, and called them "persons of interests."

    * * *

    Update 16: Baton Rouge gunman identified as 29 year old, black male named Gavin Eugene Long of Kansas City, Missouri.

    * *  *

    Update 15:   The governor of Louisiana says the attack on law enforcement in Baton Rouge was unjustified. Gov. John Bell Edwards told media Sunday afternoon that the gunman committed, "an absolutely unspeakable, heinous attack."  Edward says the hatred has got to stop.Three officers are confirmed dead in the attack outside a store in Baton Rouge about a mile from police headquarters early Sunday morning. Three others are injured. The gunman was fatally shot.

    Police added there is no active shooter in Baton Rouge where three police officers were killed Sunday morning. Col. Mike Edmonson told media, "We believe that the person who shot and killed our officers that he was the person that was shot and killed at the scene.

    * * *

    Update 14 –  Attorney General Loretta Lynch, responding to the police shootings Sunday in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, says there is no place in the United States for such appalling violence.

    In a statement issued Sunday, Lynch says she condemns the shooting deaths of three officers and the wounding of several others "in the strongest possible terms." She also is pledging the full support of the Justice Department as the investigation unfolds. The attorney general says Agents from the FBI and Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms are on the scene, and Justice Department will make available victim services and federal funding support, and provide investigative assistance to the fullest extent possible.

    Lynch says everyone's hearts and prayers are with the fallen and wounded officers, their families and the entire Baton Rouge community in "this extraordinarily difficult time."

    * * *

    Update 13 – The White House releases a statement proclaiming "There is no justification for violence against law enforcement. None."

    *  *  *

    Update 12 – Confirmation of multiple suspects:

    A sheriff's spokesman in Baton Rouge said earlier that one suspect is dead and two others are believed to be at large.

    *  *  *

    Update 11 – Louisiana GOP delegation issues statement from Cleveland on BatonRouge: "We will stand united and prayerful against evil"

    *  *  *

    Update 10 – Donald Trump respons to Baton Rouge police shootings… (via Facebook)

    We grieve for the officers killed in Baton Rouge today.

     

    How many law enforcement and people have to die because of a lack of leadership in our country?

     

    We demand law and order.

    *  *  *

    Update 9 – It just got serious – President Obama has been made aware of the murders…

    The White House says President Barack Obama has been briefed on the shooting of police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and has asked to be updated throughout the day as more details become available.

     

    The White House has been in contact with local officials in Baton Rouge and offered any assistance necessary.

     

    Obama spent most of last week focused on trying to reduce tensions and helping build trust between police and the communities they serve.

    It's not working!

    *  *  *

    Update 8 – Police in Louisiana say they are using a specialized robot to check for explosives near the body of a suspect who was shot and killed in Baton Rouge early Sunday.
     

     

    The suspect is believed to have been involved in the shooting of law enforcement officers in the Louisiana city early Sunday. Three officers are dead and three are hospitalized with injuries. The shooting occurred less than 1 mile from police headquarters

    *  *  *

    Update 7 – Reports of shots fired at Cortana Mall in Baton Rouge

    *  *  *

    Update 6 – BATON ROUGE OFFICERS ARE IN AN ARMED STANDOFF WITH ONE OF THE SUSPECT via @pzf

    * * *

    Update 5 – CBS adds that while 1 suspect is dead, 2 other suspects may still be at large.

    * * *

    Update 4 – the East Baton Rouge Sheriff's office reports that while the scene is still active, it is now "contained"

    Update 3 – BREAKING NEWS: BATON ROUGE POLICE CONFIRM THREE SHOOTERS INVOLVED. ONLY 1 DETAINED – BREAKING NEWS FEED

    * * *

    Update 2 – AT LEAST 8 POLICE OFFICERS SHOT IN BATON ROUGE – WAFB

    Update 1 – CNN is reporting

    Three officers are feared dead after a shooting in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, officials said.

    Kip Holden, the mayor-president of East Baton Rouge Parish, said authorities were still trying to get a handle on the situation, but added, "The count is three officers dead possibly."

    The victims may include police officers and sheriff's deputies.

    "There is still an active scene. They are investigating," he said. "Right now we are trying to get our arms around everything."

    *  *  *

    As we detailed earlier, police have closed streets between Baton Rouge Police Headquarters and I-12 where at least three law enforcement officers have been shot. According to local media WBRZ, shots were fired around 9 a.m. Sunday morning kicking off a manhunt for the shooter or shooters. There is an active shooter situation in the area of Airline and Old Hammond Highways according to The Advocate. A police spokesperson was not ready to release specifics as of yet.

    Obviously, police-community relations in Baton Rouge have been especially tense since the killing of 37-year-old Alton Sterling, a black man killed by white officers earlier this month after a scuffle at a convenience store.

    A witness told WBRZ News 2, a man was dressed in black with his face covered shooting indiscriminately when he walked out between a convenience store and car wash across from Hammond Air Plaza.

    “The scene seems to be contained right now,” said Sgt. Don Coppola, Baton Rouge Police Department. “We’re asking everyone to stay out of the area.”

    * * *

    While we hope it is unrelated, it is notable that ovenright WBRZ reported that Baton Rouge residents gathered Saturday afternoon to form the newest chapter of the New Black Panther Party.  The New Black Panthers arrived in Baton Rouge last Saturday to protest the officer-involved shooting death of 37-year-old Alton Sterling. Two videos of the shooting sparked national outcry and protests across Baton Rouge.

    Jerald Justice said the group was approached by local residents like Edwin Smith to help establish a Baton Rouge chapter. 

     

    “It is time for new leadership and a new organization to step forward in Baton Rouge,” Smith said. “I feel like the New Black Panther Party is the organization that can bring new leadership to Baton Rouge.”

     

    Founders met Saturday to formally establish the chapter as well as gather names for new members. WBRZ News 2’s Earl Phelps was able to briefly attend the event on the condition that he does not reveal the meeting’s location.

     

    “With the help of the New Black Panther Party, these members should be able to handle any or everything in their city,” Justice said.

     

    Over the course of five days, authorities arrested 185 protesters in Baton Rouge. Friday, District Attorney Hillar Moore said that his office will not prosecute 100 protesters who were only charged with misdemeanor crimes.

     

    Justice said that the Black Panthers were involved in the protests, but none of their members were arrested or were carrying guns during the demonstrations.

    * * *

    Live Feed:

    *  *  *

    SWAT now on scene…

     

     

  • U.S. Warships Surround Disputed Chinese Waters, Prepared For War: "WWIII At Stake"

    Submitted by Mac Slavo via SHTFPlan.com,

    Territorial disputes are a delicate thing… and potentially deadly as well.

    That’s why the U.S. is backing up its positions with an ever-increasing presence of warships  in the South China Sea.

    China is very touchy about these territories, and unwilling to give up what they perceive as their waters, even as a UN tribunal just denied their claims and strengthened the U.S. hand.

    Indeed, the entire situation is combustible and very dangerous.

    As James Holbrooks of the Underground Reporter noted:

    In a congressional hearing on Wednesday, former Director of National Intelligence and retired Navy admiral Dennis Blair told the panel that the United States should be prepared to use military force to oppose Chinese aggression in the South China Sea.

     

    “I think we need to have some specific lines and then encourage China to compromise on some of its objectives,” Blair, who headed the U.S. Pacific Command while in the Navy, said at the hearing.

     

    The admiral’s recommendation came the day after a United Nations tribunal invalidated China’s claim of territorial rights to nearly all of the waters in the South China Sea.

     

    The U.S., citing the territorial dispute and security concerns raised by its allies in the region, have for months been sending warships into the South China Sea as a check against Chinese hostility.

     

    Beijing, acutely aware of the military buildup off its coast, has publicly warned the U.S. it’s more than ready to defend against provocations. “China hopes disputes can be resolved by talks… but it must be prepared for any military confrontation.”

    It seems that the situation is being deliberately stoked into conflict, and that tensions are programmed to reach a boiling over point. If true, there is no indication of where the point of no return would be.

    The U.S. has the excuse of protecting its ally, and former territory, the Philippines, and thus has a pretext to play policeman in the region.

    But in turn, that is only a thinly-veiled ruse to amplify the military pressure, and let bloated speech and menacing saber-rattling episodes set the tone for ‘diplomacy’ with the Red Dragon.

    Now, there is not only an escalation, but an acknowledgement on both sides of the Pacific that things are headed towards war – and it is being openly discussed in those stark terms:

    “If our security is being threatened, of course we have the right to demarcate a zone,” Vice Foreign Minister Liu Zhenmin said Wednesday at a briefing in Beijing. “We hope that other countries will not take this opportunity to threaten China and work with China to protect the peace and stability of the South China Sea, and not let it become the origin of a war.”

     

    And war, it appears, is becoming increasingly likely by the day — with other countries in Southeast Asia beginning to take sides.

     

    […]

     

    So, with the U.S. demanding compromise from a China who refuses to bow down — and forcing local powers to choose sides in the process — it seems the stage is being set for a potential military conflict in the South China Sea that could engulf the entire region.

    Are we really to expect a looming world war from China, who has played the parts of villain, ally, trade partner and rival all at the same time?

    No one can say, but there is plenty of worry that war could really happen. Even billionaire George Soros warned that the potential danger of WWIII breaking out with China was ‘not an exaggeration’:

    The US government has little to gain and much to lose by treating the relationship with China as a zero-sum game. In other words it has little bargaining power. It could, of course, obstruct China’s progress, but that would be very dangerous. President Xi Jinping has taken personal responsibility for the economy and national security. If his market-oriented reforms fail, he may foster some external conflicts to keep the country united and maintain himself in power. This could lead China to align itself with Russia not only financially but also politically and militarily. In that case, should the external conflict escalate into a military confrontation with an ally of the United States such as Japan, it is not an exaggeration to say that we would be on the threshold of a third world war.

    And yet, President Obama and numerous other U.S. officials have been deliberately stoking the tension and adding fuel to the fire with provocation in the disputed waters.

    As Michael Snyder wrote several months ago:

    Barack Obama sent a guided missile destroyer into disputed waters in the South China Sea to see if the Chinese would start shooting at it. Yes, this is what he actually did. Fortunately for us, the Chinese backed down and did not follow through on their threats to take military action. Instead, the Chinese have chosen to respond with very angry words. The Chinese ambassador to the United States, Cui Tiankai, says that what Obama did was “a very serious provocation, politically and militarily.” And as you will see below, a state-run newspaper stated that China “is not frightened to fight a war with the US in the region”. So why in the world would Obama provoke the Chinese like this? Yes, the Chinese claims in the South China Sea are questionable. But there are other ways to resolve things like this.

     

    Most Americans assume that an actual shooting war between the United States and China is not even within the realm of possibility, but many of our leaders see things very differently. For instance, just check out what CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell thinks…

     

    The current posturing in the area has led to heightened tensions between the world’s preeminent military powers, and in May Former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell told CNN that the confrontation indicates there is “absolutely” a risk of the U.S. and China going to war sometime in the future.

    Not long ago, the U.S. also demonstrated ballistic missiles – armed with nuclear warheads – over the coast of California in an apparent demonstration towards China regarding the readiness and seriousness of their clash.

    Though it isn’t on the front burner right now amid other sensational headlines, keep an eye to the fact that World War III is slowly being brewed on the back burner. Someday, it could ignite into a full blown nightmare. Stay vigilant. Hope for peace, prepare for war.

  • The Struggling Norwegian Economy Illustrated in Charts

    Submitted by Alexander Grover in Oslo, Norway

    The Norwegian Economy Illustrated in Charts

    Norges Bank continues to hold rates at .5%, signaling an upward bias but willing to cut if needed, depending on unforeseen external shocks like BREXIT. In my opinion, they really don’t know what to do while the country heads for stagflation (simultaneous rising unemployment and inflation).  They are in a “damned if they do and damned if they don’t situation.”

    As the currency weakens, import prices rise.  If they raise rates to quell inflation, they will slow down an already lethargic economy and may burn down the housing market in the process. If they cut, inflation will continue to accelerate.  Staying put appears to be the best option, waiting for the oil sector continues to recover.  However, then they are betting against the engineering profession, determined to drive down extraction costs or make oil irrelevant. Rising rig counts in America and the return of Iran and Libya to the marketplace further dim hope for North Sea oil.

    Siv Jensen (Finance Minister) stated that the Norwegian economy is “Rock Solid.”  Instead, it is more like ice (in reverse): solid only under specific (temperature and pressure) conditions and wobbly otherwise, unable to support a meaningful load.   Above the $70/barrel threshold, the Norwegian economy is invincible, able to support generous social programs while making deposits to sovereign wealth fund (referred to as The Fund). Below $70, “the ice melts;” the rate of which depends on the ambient temperature above freezing.  If the oil is only slightly below $70, The Fund could cover budget gaps indefinitely, replenishing the drawdown with capital gains, interest and dividend payments.  Perhaps they could levy some new taxes as well.  However, when substantially below the key threshold, the melting accelerates, drawing down the fund quicker than it can be restored.  

    Although, The Fund holds over $800 billion, covering near-term budget gaps with ease. Waiting for $70/barrel is like waiting for hell to freeze over or the Americans to join the EU.  Also, The Fund carries various risks, investing mostly in US and European based assets.  The big question is when will Norwegian housing prices peak and reverse course. That day is impossible to predict.

    The goal of this article is to give normal hardworking people insight into what is happening around them, which is difficult to comprehend. The following charts and commentary examine the underlying economy:

    Real Interest Rates:


    Sources: Norges Bank (The Norwegian Central Bank) and SSB.no (Norwegian Statistics Bureau)


    Sources: US Federal Reserve and Bureau of Labor Statistics

    The real interest rate, which subtracts inflation from the nominal one, is already negative, meaning that saving is losing. The weakening currency also makes Norwegian companies susceptible to foreign takeover, sending the profits abroad. Real interest rates should be at least zero and ideally positive, enticing people to put their money into the bank.  Compared to the USA, which is also facing headwinds, Norway’s negative rate situation is accelerating.  Negative rates make it difficult to sell bonds and the public starts to lose trust in the currency. People generally want to be rewarded for parting with their cash during a given period.  Moreover, negative rates cause the public to question their government.  Central banks and Governments can normalize rates to zero either by either raising rates or quelling demand, which brings down inflation, using various methods: allowing unemployment to rise, raising taxes or “open mouth operations.” Central bankers often posture, talking a lot, attempting to maintain the delicate balancing act without actually touching anything.

    In Layman’s terms: I would never lend money to any person or entity, knowing that I will get back less in the future, even if guaranteed or “risk-free.” I would prefer to invest in whiskey, cigarettes or keep my money in the mattress.  

    Negative interest rates, combined with digitalized currency (most transactions in Norway are cashless), raises an important question: What is a “bank?” In the past, it was a place with a secure vault where people could deposit their cash. The banks would lend this money, after doing extensive due diligence, to those who needed to buy a home or wanted to start a business. Since there were many banks, they had to entice depositors by paying interest. If the currency is digital, potentially storable on a USB stick, on iTunes or in my Dropbox account, and bank interest rates are negative, charged to store your money, then what is the bank’s purpose? Perhaps lending? However, with peer to peer lending platforms like Viventor, an investor can lend directly to a borrower, authenticated and verified during the signup process. The investor and borrower can work out interest rates and collateral agreements between themselves or with a lawyer, arranged by the platform, signing documents at the notary or even online, using Altinn and electronic signatures.  The investor can be an individual with some “bits” socked away on a USB stick, hidden in the attic, or a cash-rich company, like Leroy Seafood Group.  So, once again, ask yourself, “what is a bank?” 

    It is worth noting that it’s better to pay the one-time 2% fee (1% in and 1% out and no storage fees) with the new BitGold platform than it is to deposit money in a bank or buy bonds. (this is not a paid endorsement nor advice but a simple observation. It remains to be seen if BitGold is legitimate or another Mt.Gox). 

    Real Economic Growth


    Sources: Norges Bank and SSB.no

    Even with negative interest rates, supposedly encouraging people to withdraw their money from the bank and spend, the economy continues to decline when accounting for inflation. Stating economic growth, without considering inflation, is a common parlor trick. Although goods and services production increased, it is discounted by the cost of inputs rising faster. 

    In Layman’s terms, one gets a pay raise for 200 NOK per month, but rent goes up by 210 per month.  You may feel richer, but you are falling behind. 

    Oil Prices

    Source: Baker Hughs and EIA

    Source: Rystad Energy via CNN

    As oil approaches $50/barrel, American rig counts (mainly fracking) started to recover.  The idle rigs are portable and able to be restarted with ease. The other 1400 may either end up in Ukraine or Poland or moved to new locations. This scenario is plausible since the US now has more untapped oil than Saudi Arabia or Russia. Therefore, Øystein Olsen’s (Head of Norges Bank) prediction last year, oil recovering to $65, may be another case of misplaced optimism. Although oil has recovered, it seems to be having difficulty in the high $40’s. Recently there was a surprise inventory build in the US, supporting the thesis that betting against innovation is risky at best.     


    Source: Government.no and Statsbudsjettet.no  

    70% of lottery winners end up bankrupt: Sudden wealth creates a sense of euphoria, making the lottery winner think they are invincible and powerful, like Batman. They often give away too much money to friends and family. They start expecting more and more, becoming difficult to turn off the spigot and reverse course. New millionaires often neglect to seek help, managing their fortune for the long term. Norway won the lottery back in 1969. Initially, they managed responsibly, creating a The Fund, adding surpluses on the back of consistently strong oil prices.

    Perhaps, to get elected or appointed, politicians told voters that they could sit back and collect the dividends when the oil is gone.  They assumed that stocks, bonds and real estate, in financial centers, are constants or absolutes and not variables, subject to natures whims.  Life in paradise would go on. Economic diversification would take care of itself.  Selling apps to iPhone users would be the new economy, replacing petroleum. There was nothing to worry about. After all, “even when it rains in Norway, the sun is still shining!” Nevertheless, the budget is more or less the same, ticking up, while tax revenues decline, falling $3 billion (25 BNOK) year-over-year, and The Fund’s holdings are at risk.  Let’s hope that Norway does not go the way of most lottery winners.   

    Unemployment, Oil Prices & Inflation:

    Sources: EIA (Energy Institute of America) and SSB.no

    The Norwegian economy mostly depends on oil and therefore unemployment rises as oil falls.  Normally, rising unemployment mitigates inflation, cooling demand, causing prices to fall. However, this inflation is from the supply side and not demand driven.  The cost of imported inputs, priced in foreign currencies, are rising regardless of demand.

    Consumer Debt:


    Source: SSB.no

    All the while, consumer debt keeps rising, mostly driven by lending for apartments. Debt levels are higher now than they were during the 2007-2008 financial crisis. If Norges Bank were forced to raise interest rates by ca. 3%, getting real rates to zero, safeguarding the Krone, it would be catastrophic to the average person. Their loan payments would skyrocket. We can expect debts to rise since many have “Champaign taste but only beer money.” There may be other troubles ahead for indebted consumers. DnB, Norway’s largest bank, reported huge and unexpected loan losses, attributed to the struggling oil sector. DnB and other banks may be forced to make this up by raising consumer rates and fees.

    Trade Balance


    Source: Google Finance


    Sources: SSB.no and EIA


    Sources: Norges Bank and SSB.no

    Declining currency theoretically boost exports. That has not been the case for Norway. Although fish and knit sweaters have seen the benefit, the overall balance is down because no one needs expensive oil (the leading export). These charts indicate that there is an urgent need for new and substantial export related industries.

    Conclusions & Thoughts:

    Norges Bank, although seeming reluctant to cut rates, may have to do so, trying to stimulate the economy and postpone housing’s day of reckoning (defined as the price when real rates are zero). To correct the current imbalances, either productivity will have to grow by leaps and bounds, getting more done with less or interest rates will have to jump, guarding the Krone against people like Kyle Bass and George Soros (currency shorts).  Norges Bank has already joined the BREXIT bailout party, injecting $2.73 billion into the banks and readying rate cuts, indicating that going negative to support GDP growth is an option.  

    We are also seeing the introduction of socialist solutions applied to free market problems, predicted last year.  The Oslo Municipality purchased 154 properties for ca. $60 million (514 MNOK), mostly in the more affluent west side of the city, to house refugees. The total 2016 budget for this programs is ca. $105 million (885 MNOK).  The European/Bernie Sanders approach, giving people free stuff without responsibility and incentive, does nothing to empower them. Being unemployed in a good neighborhood, where everyone knows the government pays or subsidizes the rent, could make things worse for both the refugees and society as a whole.  Consider that there are 24 hours in a day.  Eight are for sleep; two are for getting ready and meals and another two for fitness and transportation. What are the consequences of idling people for the remaining twelve hours? Let’s be honest. At the micro (personal) level, Norwegian (in general) society is not that open or welcoming.  Winters are long and brutal, further making contact difficult. Isolation, alienation, combined with not much to do in a culture that generally discourages achievement, being the best you can (Janteloven), can’t lead to anything good. Only a person with incredible will power and a strong “compass” can overcome such barriers.  If Norway is going to continue with their ideological approach, saving the world, perhaps they need to re-examine their culture at the individual level. People need the pursuit or hunt when obtaining income. It is rewarding, building confidence. The culture may need an adjustment, embracing merit, defining character through hard work and encouraging upward mobility, encouraging immigrants to get in the game and excel. The current welfare society model only works when there is money growing on trees (North Sea Oil).

    In my opinion, the better approach, mimicking the US Homestead Act, would be to settle them in areas where there are labor shortages, giving them an opportunity to earn their way. Northern Norway (Nordland and Finnmark) needs thousands of people as of May 2016.  America takes refugees. In fact, it’s the top country for resettlement.  However, I never heard of refugees being settled in Midtown Manhattan – all expenses paid.  If this happened, I am sure many Americans would toss their identification, quit their jobs and line up at the refugee center, claiming to be from somewhere else.

    When I was in college, I had an Afghan roommate. His parents settled as refugees in central Kansas, taking a job at a meat packing factory.  The saved their money and eventually started their own business. Through the process of work, dealing with adversity, and moving forward, day by day, they became an integral part of the community, paying taxes and adding to the economy. The process of struggle and advancement made them stronger, self-assured and, eventually, affluent. Hence, a proper integration strategy, matching economic needs and limitations, needs to be developed.

    Øystein Olsen stated, in September 2015, that he has no problem with inflation hitting 3.5% and saw it moderating to 3%. He is also predicted better times in 2017 with unemployment peaking at 3.4%. It is already H2-2016, and the latest inflation print (June 2016) is 3.7%.  As of June 2016, unemployment hit 4.6%, still considered full employment. Nevertheless, the rate of increase is worrisome.   If unemployment continues to rise, the national and local governments may have to buy more apartments, supporting housing while tax and oil revenues decline. That will further stress the budget, resulting in withdrawals from The Fund.

    Skepticism is very much ingrained into the Norwegian psyche. Hence, I remain skeptical that the Norwegian Government and Central Bank can deal with the coming crisis in a way where the people, who did honest work but were tricked into “drinking the Kool-Aid,” are least affected, and those responsible take the brunt of the damage. I suspect that they will tell the public to sacrifice for the greater good (banks and large corporations) without telling the whole story. 

    Bankruptcy means that those who fail in business or banking must liquidate their assets, selling to those who were saving and living modestly, to get their debts forgiven. Those who got them in debt may also be at risk for irresponsible lending. They attempt to build an enterprise with a better business model at lower cost, catering to current needs. In the case of a bank failure and housing. The failed bank would liquidate their loan portfolio at a discount, passing on the benefit to borrowers. For example, the buyer of this paper acquires a loan with a 4 MNOK obligation, paying 3% interest, for a distressed price. Let’s say 2 MNOK. They could then settle with the struggling homeowner, offering a revised loan of 2.2 MNOK at 4% interest. Both sides win while asset prices move to sustainable levels. (It’s the same things as when a pizzeria in New Jersey goes bankrupt, selling their equipment for pennies on the dollar to an aspiring entrepreneur. The new guy gets into the game, starting a new business at lower cost, and life goes on. Often, he will hire failed entrepreneur because he still knows how to make a good pizza but not allow him near the cash register.) 

    Oil prices (Brent on EIA.gov) averaged $77/barrel from the beginning of 2007 to the end of 2009 whereas they are hovering under $50 per barrel today – well under the $70/barrel threshold.  Therefore, managing that crisis compared to the coming one is the difference between misplacing your wallet, finding it a few hours later with $50 missing, versus losing your job at middle age to robot automation while having a huge mortgage and spoiled kids enrolled in a private college.  Sounding an alarm, Tine Choi, Nordea analyst, located in Denmark, warned about negative interest rates leading to hyper-inflation (article in Danish). She warns that we are in uncharted territory. She warns that a massive bond sell-off would spike inflation, causing interest rates could explode. Hence, the concern is extending past those of us seen as “wearing tin foil hats.” 

    I still do not foresee Norges Bank buying gold to hedge against unprecedented times or working with Stortinget (parliament) to engineer a soft landing, bringing us back to balance.  I do not see the Cultural Ministry acknowledging that the current Bernie Sander’s like approach to society lacks the necessary mathematical foundation for long-term sustainability. I only see a lot more inflation than forecast.  

    So what to do?

    Start by aiming your skepticism towards the government instead of those wearing tin foil hats or living in bunkers. Contact your politicians and voice concerns about the banks, potentially having a monopoly to store your digital money, at a forced loss (real negative interest rates). Also push for gold and silver to get status as money instead of as an asset, ensuring personal inflation protection. That is possible in a democracy. The British did BREXIT, and the predicted fallout appears to have been hyped. Already, Americans, Chinese and Indians are “lining up” to make agreements. The GBP is already moving back up; The Bank of England did not panic.  Moreover, don’t forget that the Icelanders voted in a new government after a major banking scandal. I have faith that Norwegians will start waking up and using their democracy, preserving the way of life.

           

    Description

    4-Jan-16

    15-Jul-16

    Change

    GOLD in NOK (per ounce)

    9,536

    11,345

    19%

    Oslo Børs (Stock Exchange)

    601

    622

    4%

    Oslo Apartments (NOK/sqm)*

    60,606

    68,883

    14%

    Oslo Apartments (USD/sqm – calculated)

    6,846

    8,226

    20%

    Oslo Apartments (Oz Gold/sqm – calculated)

    6.36

    6.07

    -4%

    USDNOK

    8.8525

    8.3737

    -5%

    * SSB.no Table 05963 Freeholder – average apartment price per sqm.
    Price from 2015 Q4 (YE) to 2016 Q2
           

    Source: See Links – There are alternatives to dollars, housing, and stocks.


    Source: BitGold.com – When you buy gold, you are ”buying the inflation” and then some.  

Digest powered by RSS Digest

Jul 17

Today’s News 17th July 2016

  • Surging "Intercommunity Confrontations" In France Mean "Civil War Is Inevitable"

    Submitted by Yves Mamou via The Gatestone Institute,

    • For French President François Hollande, the enemy is an abstraction: "terrorism" or "fanatics".

    • Instead, the French president reaffirms his determination to military actions abroad: "We are going to reinforce our actions in Syria and Iraq," the president said after the Nice attack.

    • So confronted with this failure of our elite who were elected to guide the country across nationals and internationals dangers, how astonishing is it if paramilitary groups are organizing themselves to retaliate?

    • In France, the global elites made a choice. They decided that the "bad" voters in France were unreasonable people too stupid to see the beauties of a society open to people who often who do not want to assimilate, who want you to assimilate to them, and who threaten to kill you if you do not. The elite took the side against their own old and poor because those people did not want to vote for them any longer. They also made a choice not to fight Islamism because Muslims vote collectively for this global elite.

    "We are on the verge of a civil war." That quote did not come from a fanatic or a lunatic. No, it came from head of France's homeland security, the DGSI (Direction générale de la sécurité intérieure), Patrick Calvar. He has, in fact, spoken of the risk of a civil war many times. On July 12th, he warned a commission of members of parliament, in charge of a survey about the terrorist attacks of 2015, about it.

    French police shoot dead a Tunisian-born Islamist terrorist who murdered 84 people in Nice, France, July 14, 2016. (Image source: Sky News video screenshot)

    In May 2016, he delivered almost the same message to another commission of members of parliament, this time in charge of national defense. "Europe," he said, "is in danger. Extremism is on the rise everywhere, and we are now turning our attention to some far-right movements who are preparing a confrontation".

    What kind of confrontation? "Intercommunity confrontations," he said — polite for "a war against Muslims." "One or two more terrorist attacks," he added, "and we may well see a civil war."

    In February 2016, in front of a senate commission in charge of intelligence information, he said again: " We are looking now at far-right extremists who are just waiting for more terrorist attacks to engage in violent confrontation".

    No one knows if the truck terrorist, who plowed into the July 14th Bastille Day crowd in Nice and killed more than 80 people, will be the trigger for a French civil war, but it might help to look at what creates the risk of one in France and other countries, such as Germany or Sweden.

    The main reason is the failure of the state.

    1. France is at War but the Enemy is Never Named.

    France is the main target of repeated Islamist attacks; the more important Islamist terrorist bloodbaths took place at the magazine Charlie Hebdo and the Hypercacher supermarket of Vincennes (2015); the Bataclan Theater, its nearby restaurants and the Stade de France stadium, (2015); the failed attack on the Thalys train; the beheading of Hervé Cornara (2015); the assassination of two policemen in Magnanville in June (2016), and now the truck-ramming in Nice, on the day commemorating the French Revolution of 1789.

    Most of those attacks were committed by French Muslims: citizens on their way back from Syria (the Kouachi brothers at Charlie Hebdo), or by French Islamists (Larossi Abballa who killed a police family in Magnanville last June) who later claimed their allegiance to Islamic State (ISIS). The truck killer in Nice was Tunisian but married to a French woman, whith whom he had three children together, and lived quietly in Nice until he decided to murder more than 80 people and wound dozens more.

    After each of these tragic episodes President François Hollande refused to name the enemy, refused to name Islamism — and especially refused to name French Islamists — as the enemy of French citizens.

    For Hollande, the enemy is an abstraction: "terrorism" or "fanatics". Even when the president does dare to name "Islamism" the enemy, he refuses to say he will close all Salafist mosques, prohibit the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafist organizations in France, or ban veils for women in the street and at university. No, instead, the French president reaffirms his determination for military actions abroad: "We are going to reinforce our actions in Syria and Iraq," the president said after the Nice attack.

    For France's president, the deployment of soldiers in the homeland is for defensive actions only: a deterrent policy, not an offensive rearmament of the Republic against an internal enemy.

    So confronted with this failure by our elite — who were elected to guide the country through national and international dangers — how astonishing is it if paramilitary groups are organizing themselves to retaliate?

    As Mathieu Bock-Côté, a sociologist in France and Canada, says in Le Figaro:

    "Western elites, with a suicidal obstinacy, oppose naming the enemy. Confronted by attacks in Brussels or Paris, they prefer to imagine a philosophical fight between democracy and terrorism, between an open society and fanaticism, between civilization and barbarism".

    2. The Civil War Has Already Begun and Nobody Wants to Name It.

    The civil war began sixteen years ago, with the second Intifada. When Palestinians executed suicide attacks in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, French Muslims began to terrorize Jews living peacefully in France. For sixteen years, Jews — in France — were slaughtered, attacked, tortured and stabbed by French Muslim citizens, supposedly to avenge Palestinian people in the West Bank.

    When a group of French citizens who are Muslims declares war on another group of French citizens who are Jews, what do you call it? For the French establishment, it is not a civil war, just a regrettable misunderstanding between two "ethnic" communities.

    Until now, no one wanted to establish a connection between these attacks and the murderous attack in Nice against people who were not necessarily Jews — and name it as it should be named: a civil war.

    For the very politically correct French establishment, the danger of a civil war will begin only if anyone retaliates against French Muslims; if everyone just submits to their demands, everything is all right. Until now, no one thought that the terrorist attacks against Jews by French Muslims; against Charlie Hebdo's journalists by French Muslims; against an entrepreneur who was beheaded a year ago by a French Muslim; against young Ilan Halimi by a group of Muslims; against schoolchildren in Toulouse by a French Muslim; against the passengers on the Thalys train by a French Muslim, against the innocent people in Nice by an almost French Muslim were the symptoms of a civil war. These bloodbaths remain seen, to this day, as something like a tragic misunderstanding.

    3. The French Establishment Considers the Enemy the Poor, the Old and the Disappointed

    In France, who most complains about Muslim immigration? Who most suffers from local Islamism? Who most likes to drink a glass of wine or eat a ham-and-butter sandwich? The poor and the old who live close to Muslim communities, because they do not have the money to move someplace else.

    Today, as a result, millions of the poor and the old in France are ready to elect Marine Le Pen, president of the righ-wing Front National, as the next president of the Republic, for the simple reason that the only party that wants to fight illegal immigration is the Front National.

    Because, however, these French old and poor want to vote for the Front National, they have become the enemy of the French establishment, right and left. What is the Front National saying to these people? "We are going to restore France as a nation of French people". And the poor and the old believe it — because they have no choice.

    Similarly, the poor and the old in Britain had no choice but to vote for Brexit. They took the first tool given them to express their disappointment at living in a society they did not like anymore. They did not vote to say, "Kill these Muslims who are transforming my country, stealing my job and soaking up my taxes". They were just protesting a society that a global elite had begun to transform without their consent.

    In France, the global elites made a choice. They decided that the "bad" voters in France were unreasonable people too stupid, too racist to see the beauties of a society open to people who often do not want to assimilate, who want you to assimilate to them, and who threaten to kill you if you do not.

    The global elites made another choice: they took the side against their own old and poor because those people did not want to vote for them any longer. The global elites also chose not to fight Islamism, because Muslims vote globally for the global elite. Muslims in Europe also offer a big "carrot" to the global elite: they vote collectively.

    In France, 93% of Muslims voted for the current president, François Hollande, in 2012. In Sweden, the Social Democrats reported that 75% of Swedish Muslims voted for them in the general election of 2006; and studies show that the "red-green" bloc gets 80-90% of the Muslim vote.

    4. Is the Civil War Inevitable? Yes!

    If the establishment does not want to see that civil war was already declared by extremist Muslims first — if they do not want to see that the enemy is not the Front National in France, the AfD in Germany, or the Sweden Democrats — but Islamism in France, in Belgium, in Great Britain, in Sweden — then a civil war will happen.

    France, like Germany and Sweden, has a military and police strong enough to fight against an internal Islamist enemy. But first, they have to name it and take measures against it. If they do not — if they leave their native citizens in despair, with no other means than to arm themselves and retaliate — yes, civil war is inevitable.

  • Friday Night Lights – Another Brexit moment for FX

    It seems that such events are always planned for the weekend.  News of the attempted Turkish coup reached FX investors just hours before the close.  

    Turkey’s currency is an exotic currency, commonly traded against USD, EUR, and JPY.  Near the close, a huge spike in USD/TRY:

    Just as FX traders were worried about not having another Brexit moment for a few more years, only weeks later here’s another.  But this time it happened just before Friday’s close at 5pm NYT so we’ll see how the market opens Sunday night.  

    EUR/USD sold off on the news as well, but only reached its channel lows.

    From CNBC: 

    The U.S. dollar gained as much as 5.5 percent against the Turkish lira after a group within Turkey’s military apparently attempted to overthrow the government on Friday.

    The dollar was last up 4.72 percent against the lira.

    It seems this FX event is a sign, that Europe is going to be full of “Brexit” moments in the coming years, and that FX is going to be the market defining this next epoch of investing.  

    For those who don’t understand Forex, the above chart represents the US Dollar against the Turkish Lira, that means when you see a spike UP, it means US Dollar going UP and Turkish Lira going DOWN.  

    So, here’s another boost to the good ol’ USD, who is now being accused of the coup itself.

    FX traders patiently wait for markets to open, 24 hours from now.

    To learn more about Forex, checkout Splitting Pennies – Understanding Forex the book. 

  • Erdogan's Arch-Enemy Accuses Turkish President Of Staging Coup, Compares Him To Hitler

    Long before Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish cleric who lives in self-imposed exile on 1857, Mt.Eaton Road in  Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania, last night and again today of being the “terrorist” mastermind behind Friday’s failed coup attempt and demanding – unofficially, on prime time TV but not via diplomatic channels – that the US extradite the 77 year old, he was doing precisely that. For years, Erdogan had used the cleric as a scapegoat punching bag, who had somehow managed to create an entire “parallel state” in Turkey which was just waiting for its opportunity to pounce and snatch Turkey from Erdogan. Hence the perpetual (fake) fear of coups. Hence the public displays of (fake) paranoia. Hence the relentless – and all too real – concentration of power.

    And as many expected, Erdogan once again accused Gulen of being responsible for the Friday coup, no matter how ridiculous such an allegation sounded. This time Turkey went so far as accusing the US of being “behind the coup” for harboring Gulen.  “Today, after this coup attempt, I’m once again calling on you, I’m saying: Extradite this man in Pennsylvania to Turkey now,” Erdogan said on Saturday in televised remarks from Istanbul in a personal appeal to President Barack Obama. Turkey’s secretary of labor, Suleyman Soylu, went one better and told TV channel Haberturk: “The US is behind this coup.”

    As for Gulen’s position, he had denied as recently as yesterday, the accusations and said Saturday morning in an emailed statement through a spokeswoman that he denounced the overnight coup attempt. In a video released by the New York Times, a man appearing to be a doctor measured Mr. Gulen’s blood pressure, possibly to point out the cleric’s ailing health. 

    “I don’t know if they are my followers, but because of all things that have taken place (in Turkey) they may have been sympathetic…But honestly, I don’t know any of them,” Mr. Gulen said in the video, shown apparently sitting on a couch in his Pennsylvania home.

    However, for the best explanation of Gulen’s position, one which incidentally also is accurate in describing what happened in Turkey on Friday night, we go to the FT, which was granted a rare interview from Gulen’s residence in rural Pennsylvania and where a “frail Mr Gulen” said accusations by Mr Erdogan that he had masterminded the uprising were absolutely groundless.

    In fact, as the FT reports, Gulen “has tried to turn the accusation against his political rival by suggesting that Mr Erdogan’s ruling AKP party had staged the uprising.“

    “I don’t believe that the world takes the accusations made by president Erdogan [against me] seriously,” the moderate Islamic preacher said from a room inside his home at the Golden Generation Worship and Retreat Center, nestled in the rolling hills of the Pocono Mountains..

    An aerial view of Gulen’s Golden Generation Worship and Retreat Center in rural PA.

    “There is a possibility that it could be a staged coup [by Mr Erdogan’s AKP] and it could be meant for further accusations” against Gulenists and the military, he said.

    Considering just how poorly executed the coup was, and how much Erdogan stood to gain by crushing it with the help of a Skyped conversation as he “heroically” flew back to Istanbul, to be followed shortly thereafter by the arrest of nearly 3000 judges and prosecutors, we have a feeling Gulen is spot on in which assessment.

    Gulen then said that he was not worried about being deported from America despite Turkey putting further pressure on the US government to extradite him in the aftermath of Friday’s coup attempt. He said Erdogan’s calls for his extradition were just his latest bluff, as he compared the Turkish president’s political tactics to those of Adolf Hitler’s Nazis in 1940s Germany.“

    It is very clear that there is intolerance among the leadership of the ruling party and the president,” Mr Gulen said, speaking in Turkish and communicating with reporters through a translator.

    “They have confiscated properties and media organisations, broken doors and harassed people in a fashion similar to Hitler’s SS forces,” Mr Gulen said, as he described how his followers in Turkey had been mistreated over recent years by Mr Erdogan’s party.

    Come to think of it…

    Then again, maybe Erdogan will get his witch after all.

    The FT adds that in a sign of the rising tension around Mr Gulen, about a dozen people started assembling outside his compound around noon on Saturday, shattering the rural calm that usually surrounds the residence. “The US should stop protecting him,” screamed a woman wearing a headscarf and waving a Turkish flag in her right hand and a flag portraying Mr Erdogan in the other. “Gulen is a criminal,” she shouted as protesters gathered outside the Imam’s residence.

    Meanwhile, Pennsylvania state troopers and a small group of armed private security forces hired by Mr Gulen’s centre were keeping the protests at bay. Gulen told reporters that he had not received any communications from the US government about a potential extradition.

    Here Alp Aslandogan, a media adviser to Mr Gulen, repeated precisely what we said earlier today: Erdogan wants “the best of both worlds, accusing him of being a puppet for the US and also asking the US to extradite him,” Mr Aslandogan said.

    Gulen, who is aged 77, was visibly weak. He suffers from diabetes and heart disease, according to his doctor. The preacher, who has been living in self imposed exile in Pennsylvania since 1999, lives in modest conditions despite the vast expanse of the complex. The FT was able to access his bedroom and praying areas, which were ornately decorated with Islamic art and several Turkish flags.

    Despite accusing Mr Erdogan’s ruling party of having put democracy at risk in Turkey, Gulen said that he was against all kinds of military coups, as he had been a victim of such uprises in the past.

    * * *

    Meanwhile, Erdogan lives in a brand new palace which cost more than $600 million to build, with 1.6 million square feet of floorspace, 1,000 – yes, really – rooms, features thousands of trees imported from Italy at a cost of up to $10,000 each; the taxpayer-footed electricity bill from the palace will run $313K/month.

  • 'Black Lives Matter' Organizer "Triggered" By White People, Demands Money For Being A "Fat, Black Bitch"

    Authored by Paul Joseph Watson, originally posted at InfoWars.com,

    According to ‘Black Lives Matter’ organizer Ashleigh Shackelford, white people aren’t welcome at Black Lives Matter rallies and instead should just hand over “reparations” to black people so that they can purchase new cellphones and laptops.

    In an article for ‘Wear Your Voice’, an “intersectional feminist media” outlet, Shackelford says that she finds the presence of white people at Black Lives Matter rallies “triggering,” and that black people are “frightened” by whites, adding that their roles should be confined to acting as human “buffers against the police”.

    “Why are you going to a protest when you’re the oppressor?” asks Shackelford, adding, “WHITE PEOPLE ARE KILLING US. So when I see white people show up to rally excited and smiling, ready to march like it’s a hobby — I’m disgusted and absolutely fucking livid….I’m ready to fight.”

     

    Decrying the fact that white people are promoting a message of love and unity in the spirit of Martin Luther King, Shackelford complains that, “White people are 400 years too fucking late for a round of applause for a damn tweet with a hashtag, or for showing up to a damn rally.”

    She then pushes the demented dogma that white people living today owe blacks “reparations” for slavery (only 1.4 percent of white Americans owned black slaves at the height of slavery).

    “Nothing you have is yours. Let me be clear: Nothing you have is yours. Also, Let me be see through: Reparations are not donations, because we are not your charity, tax write off, or good deed for the day. You are living off of stolen resources, stolen land, exploited labor, appropriated culture and the murder of our people. Nothing you have is yours,” writes Shackelford.

    “Y’all spent hundreds of years selling, mutilating, raping and beating our bodies and labor but you think money doesn’t matter to our freedom and liberation? Cute. Write me a check for this shade because it comes with 400 years of trauma,” she adds.

    Shackelford wants white people to give blacks money so that they can buy cellphones, laptops and land, asserting, “Be ready to write checks and give up your car keys.”

    She then includes a link to her personal Paypal account at the end of the article asking people to send money to support her “emotional and intellectual labor.”

    “Whiteness operates in a way that means that using your privilege “for good” often requires Black folks to still be a position to be “saved” or “in need.” We don’t need white saviorism. We don’t need white people to speak for us. We don’t even really need white people to show up to rallies. We need our reparations, we need intentional disruption that involves high risk and we need y’all to stop playing,” concludes Shackelford, while also straying into extremist rhetoric by asking whites, “Are you willing to kill for us?”

    Shackelford describes herself as a “queer, nonbinary Black fat femme writer, artist, and cultural producer,” because of course she does.

    In some of her other articles, she chastises black men for dating white women, whines about the “backlash” she gets for being “fat and visible” and complains about the “body positivity” movement being too “white”.

    In an article entitled Fuck You, Pay Me: Reparations for Fat Black Bitches and Everything We Provide, Shackelford demands that she should be paid money for being a ‘fat black bitch’.

    “FUCK YOU. PAY ME. Pay me a check, pay me consistently, provide me safe housing, offer me a job with benefits, run me those Beyonce tickets, finance my clothes and wigs and aesthetics, cultivate accessibility to spaces and provide seats that fit me, see and validate my humanity,” she demands.

    Shackleford’s role as a ‘Black Lives Matter’ organizer comes as no surprise whatsoever given how divisive the group has become, even to the point of pushing segregation by banning white people from BLM events and rallies.

    Instead of promoting a message of unity and understanding, BLM is appealing to extremist, fringe elements of the far-left and has been completely taken over by social justice warriors like Shackleford, whose absurd and irrational drivel will thankfully ensure the entire movement’s eventual disappearance into obscurity.

  • "This Is Going To Get Very Ugly" – Former Top CIA Officer Says "Obama Has Lost Control Of The Middle East"

    With Thursday’s tragic mass killing by a resclusive, truck-driving Tunisian maniac in Nice having been violently drowned out by the frentic late Friday news of a failed (and perhaps staged) coup in Turkey, the news cycle has once again shifted its attention away from a far greater threat to the global economy than whether Erdogan can concentrate even more power in his grasp. Namely, both lone-wolf and organized terrorism in Europe (and elsewhere). And according to at least one CIA field commander, Gary Bernsten, it is all Obama’s fault.

    As the Hill reports, the decorated former CIA career officer who served in the Directorate of Operations between October 1982 and June 2005, said on Friday that Obama has lost control of the Middle East following attacks in France that left at least 84 dead.  “This is going to get very, very ugly,” Gary Bernsten said on Fox & Friends Friday.

    “The president of the United States, as Newt Gingrich has stated, has failed in his responsibilities to defend the United States. He has lost control of the Middle East. It is in flames, and that is what he will leave when he leaves office.”  One can also make the argument that it is not so much Obama, as his first secretary of state, the person who in less than 4 months may be America’s next president.

    We wonder what Bernsten would add after last night’s even more disturbing events in Turkey. As we just witnessed over the past 24 hours, the Middle East is indeed in flames, and what’s worse, the US has zero control. As Ali Watkins reported overnight,  US officials were caught completely off guard by Friday’s attempted Turkish coup.

    The State Department scrambled to alert citizens in Turkey, urging them to shelter in place and check in with family members in the U.S. The White House said President Obama had spoken with Secretary of State John Kerry, and both urged “all parties” in Turkey to support the democratically elected government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and “avoid violence or bloodshed,” but the statement avoided using the word “coup.” 

     

    Across Washington, it was clear that responses were purely reactionary — it took more than two hours after first reports emerged of the violence for the White House to make any public statement. In the hours immediately following the attempted overthrow, officials across the White House, State Department and Pentagon simply said they were monitoring as the situation unfolded. If the U.S. was indeed blindsided by the attempted overthrow Friday afternoon, it will have to take a long, hard look at why such a consequential event — with a NATO ally, no less— took them by such surprise.

     

    As of Friday night, the attempted coup had “no impact” on the U.S.’s military operations in the country, a U.S. official told BuzzFeed News. “[U.S.] air ops have continued from Incirlik. Literally birds in the sky.”

    As of Saturday morning, however, things are very different.

    Ironically, this time Obama lucked out on a major change in the geopolitical arena (perhaps because the entire coup attempt was staged or simply because it was very disorganized); but what happens when this – or another-  key US ally and NATO member undergoes a military coup. Will the US once again have no response? As of this moment, the CIA officer’s assessment is absolutely spot on.

    He had some parting thoughts about “eliminating” the ISIS threat: “We can take care of these ISIS thugs in about a month.” One still wonders why that hasn’t happened…

  • C.I.A. – Controlling It All

    Via The Daily Bell,

    How the CIA Hoodwinked Hollywood… Since its inception, the agency has wooed filmmakers, producers, and actors in order to present a rosy portrait of its operations to the American public.

     

    –Atlantic

    This is a good article by the Atlantic, a neo-con publication that aspires to be a “thought publication.”

    This article rehashes the history of the CIA in Hollywood and, in fact, is fairly comprehensive and touches on a number of compelling points.

    More;

    The CIA has a long history of “spooking the news,” dating back to its earliest days when the legendary spymaster Allen Dulles and his top staff drank and dined regularly with the press elite of New York and Washington, and the agency boasted hundreds of U.S. and foreign journalists as paid and unpaid assets.

     

    In 1977, after this systematic media manipulation was publicly exposed by congressional investigations, the CIA created an Office of Public Affairs that was tasked with guiding press coverage of intelligence matters in a more transparent fashion.

     

    The agency insists that it no longer maintains a stable of friendly American journalists, and that its efforts to influence the press are much more above board. But, in truth, the intelligence empire’s efforts to manufacture the truth and mold public opinion are more vast and varied than ever before. One of its foremost assets? Hollywood.

    This is an honest appraisal so far as it goes. As is the article’s conclusion:

    With few exceptions, Hollywood has long functioned as a propaganda factory, churning out jingoistic revenge-fantasy films in which American audiences are allowed to exorcise their post-9/11 demons by watching the satisfying slaughter of countless onscreen jihadis.

     

    This never-ending parade of square-jawed secret agents and bearded, pumped-up commandos pitted against swarthy Muslim madmen straight out of central casting has been aided and abetted by a newly emboldened CIA all too happy to offer its “services” to Hollywood.

    The article, thousands of words long, still managed to miss some important points, however.

    It doesn’t provide us with much in the way of a frame of reference. The control that the CIA exercises over Hollywood is multiplied many times by the control the CIA exercises over the communications industry generally.

    At the top of the CIA, executives are responsive to the City of London. Intelligences agencies were manufactured by banking families initially.

    Only later on, were their functions laid off onto governments. Now the cash flow comes from tax dollars, but the agencies themselves are still controlled out of the City.

    This goes for other countries as well, including Israel, which was created by the City, which still runs it.

    It is probably not too much of an exaggeration to say that its spooks run both Facebook and Google – especially given that the CIA invested in both companies when they were just beginning.

    Basically, the Atlantic article makes it sound as if the CIA’s control over Hollywood is evolutionary and even voluntary. This is to misstate the way the CIA works.

    Surreptitious intel operations have doubtless been in charge of Hollywood since its inception. If anyone doubts that, simply take a look at the movies Hollywood produced in the 1930s and especially in the 1940s.

    These days, Hollywood movies have staked their main franchise on superhero movies.

    These superheroes fly high in the sky fighting “bad guys” and determining whether or not the world will be safe and function properly.

    They are above the law and gratitude is always due to them for their exploits.

    The resemblance to the coming implementation of technocracy is undeniable.

    In the world, as it is to be, technocrats running vast corporations will make decisions affecting millions. In fact, they already do.

    Conclusion: This sort of organization and its privileges will not seem unusual to those regarding them. The parallels to today’s movies will already have desensitized people to what is occurring. This is the fundamental paradigm of modern Hollywood, the basic assertion of control.

  • Saturday Humor: Ten Years Later

    Presented with no comment, since we could not have said it any better…

     

    Source: @KirkDBorne

  • "Janet Yellen Sounds Like A Fumbling Idiot No Matter What She Does"

    Via FinancialRepressionAuthority.com,

    FRA Co-Founder Gordon T.Long and Jeffrey Snider, Head of Global Investment Research at Alhambra Investment Partners discuss earnings, the Chinese Yuan, Japanese Yen and the falling credibility of central banks.

     

    EARNINGS

    “It is no doubt that earnings have been under-performing.”

    What’s even more concerning is that not even is the top line falling off, but the cash flow is falling dramatically and this impacts credit along with everything else. With no earnings and no cash flow it puts us in a high risk environment. The only thing that has been holding up the market has been excessive corporate buybacks which has come out of cash flow, and to a lesser degree, borrowing. But to borrow is tough when you don’t have the cash flow to justify the credit ratings.

    “How long can buybacks continue to support a market which is standing on a fundamentally flawed premise?”

     

    We have had 4 to 5 quarters of falling revenue but the US market seems to ignore it. At some point reality has got to set in. But it is also important to note that trade problems are a systemic factor to the decline in earnings. China’s imports are down 17% year over year, but these imports are coming from basically the emerging markets and commodity markets. They have also borrowed upwards of 9 trillion USD in the last 7 years that has suddenly gotten very expensive for them, I think there is more pain to come.

    CHINESE YUAN

    “The health of the Yuan is tied into the global economy and the fact that the global economy is stumbling.”

    Less growth in China combined with less growth around the world again increases financial risk which fuels more reluctance to funnel dollars into China; it has become a vicious cycle. The Chinese have no choice but to continue going in one direction, they are in a rock in a hard place. As the Chinese Yuan has been falling, the Yen has been rising in strength. This has become a huge issue for Japan to add to their already lost list of issues to deal with. A fracture is likely around the corner, China and Japan cannot go long without devaluing the Yen.

    The markets are reassessing what central banks can actually do. And what markets found was that central banks aren’t actually as powerful as everyone believes them to be and Japan is a perfect example of that. No matter what the BOJ does that Yen continues to move on up. It fits into the paradigm of the economy, the financial risk, everyone reevaluating what central banks are capable of etc. The markets are reevaluating central banks because they see that a tight money environment despite efforts from central banks to fuel stimulation.

    “Some major European bank stocks are indicative of an incoming banking crisis. We see already low interest rates around the world getting lower with each passing day; this is indicative of tight money conditions. Low rates are not stimulating.”

    TROUBLING MATTERS OF DEBATE

    “Most troubling thing to me currently is that there are not many answers available.”

    What I see is an unstable global currency regime which we are completely unprepared for. There is no solution that has been presented that would allow for a stable currency to take over Euro dollars which clearly doesn’t work. Generally the central banks can fix liquidity problems, but they cannot fix solvency problems. We see that the credit cycle has turned from non-performing loans so on and so forth.

    The idea behind QE for Japan, America and Europe was to kick start a robust recovery. Now that central banks has lost credibility as well as support.  Then you have all the unintended consequences that come with almost zero money. We have nearly zero price discoveries and risk is greatly mispriced.

    “Policy makers and economists have simply run out of ideas.”

    Desperation is a big role of why markets are reevaluating central banks. If we go back 20 years where Alan Greenspan was a genius and he didn’t even do anything, all he did was talk and he made a career out of not talking. No matter what he did he was taken as a genius. Whereas 20 years later, Janet Yellen sounds like a fumbling idiot no matter what she does. All her actions come across as desperate because the credibility has been blown away. The Fed has been forced into action and by being forced into action it has only highlighted what the Fed can’t do.

    “Resource allocation is the main benefit of price discovery; it is the life blood of the economy. The more we damage price discovery the more fatal situations will become.”

    We need to look at this as an opportunity in the long run. Now that the power of central banks has come to surface and credibility has been shot, it in turn opens the door to credible solutions. The fact of the matter is that the economy is nothing like what it should be and people know that something is wrong and change is needed.

  • How A Google April Fools' Joke Unleashed The Zombie Apocalypse

    Remember the “Google Maps Pokemon Challenge”? Probably not. It was a one time event that took place on April Fools day in 2014.

    This is how Google explained it.

    Dozens of wild Pokémon have taken up residence on streets, amidst forests and atop mountains throughout Google Maps.

     

    To catch ’em all, grab your Poké Ball and the newest version of Google Maps for iPhone or Android. Then tap the search bar, “press start,” and begin your quest.

     

    And, follow Google Maps on Google+, Facebook or Twitter for hints and tips for the most dedicated trainers.

    The ad in question:

     

    Many laughed and quickly brushed it aside… but not Niantic Labs, a software development company founded in 2010 incidentally as one of Google’s own internal startups. Niantic – which all the way back in 2012 was developing location-based mobile games – was spun off as an independent entity in September 2015 and less than a year later released Pokemon Go together with Ninentdo (quickly resulting in Nintendo becoming the most-traded stock in Japanese history).

    And while we are delighted that Niantic CEO John Hanke has been unquestionably successful with his adaptation of an “April Fools” joke in the form of Pokemon Go, we are a little concerned that he has also unleashed the Zombie Apocalypse.

    Dont believe us? This is what USA Today wrote today, when the sighting of a rare Pokemon made hundreds of New Yorkers into Central Park-stomping zombies.

    On the one hand, this might be video evidence of people officially going insane. But, on the other hand, it’s also a Vaporeon, which are super rare Pokemon.

     

    First, some quick Pokemon background: Eevees are cute little fox-type Pokemon that, unlike other Pokemon, can evolve in eight different directions. They only evolve once, and after they do, they can’t evolve any more.

     

    What that means is that if you want to catch all the Pokemon, you have to either catch eight different Eevees and evolve them all in different ways — which is really tough to do — or you have to catch the other, rare evolutions when they do appear.

     

    And, well, one appeared in Central Park late on Saturday night. A Vaporeon. Here’s what that one looks like…

    And here’s what it looks like when a bunch of Pokemon addicts actually see one.

     

    It’s not just the Vaporeon. This is what happened when something called a Charizard appeared.

    In retrospect, if ISIS had really wanted to destroy western civilization it should have skipped all the suicide bombers and “made in the San Fernando Valley” decapitation videos, and just hired a few good programmers…

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