Mar 16

Today’s News 16th March 2018

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

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

    Salman

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

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

    The bodyguard was later arrested, per Reuters.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Via The Saker,

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

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

    Lies and the unapologetic denial of reality:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Skripal by nerve gas

    • Litvinenko by polonium

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

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

    • Khattab by sarin or a sarin-derivative

    • Yushchenko by dioxin

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

    • Moskalenko by mercury

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

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

    Right.

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

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

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

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

    Willful ignorance as a universal cop-out

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

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

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

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

    The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior

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

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

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

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

    That willful ignorance easily defeats history, facts or logic.

    Here is a simple question a journalist could ask:

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

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

    Hypocrisy as a core attribute of the modern man

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

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

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

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

    Hysteria as the highest form of (pseudo-)liberalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The Consumer Debt Bomb

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

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

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

    The Corporate Debt Bomb

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The National Debt Bomb

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

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

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

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

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

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

    *  *  *

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

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

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

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

    Pod

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

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

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

    …

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

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

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

    …

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

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

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

    Authored by Michael McCaffrey,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    What the hell is going on?

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

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

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

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

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

    Authored by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Here’s what I mean. From The Hill:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Ladies and gentlemen, meet “the resistance.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

    From The Intercept:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Now here’s the best part…

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

    Gotta love CNN.

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

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

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

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    See how this works? We lose either way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

    *  *  *

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

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

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

    Students

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

    Even Democrats Have Their Doubts

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

    Gallup

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

    Disillusionment Is Deepening

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

    Gallup

    Fewer Students Prefer Campus That Allows All Types of Speech

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

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

  • Remembering Bear Stearns & Co

    Authored by Chris Whalen via TheInstitutionalRiskAnalyst.com,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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