- Exposing The Brennan Dossier: All About A Prime Mover Of Russiagate
Exposing The Brennan Dossier: All About A Prime Mover Of Russiagate
Authored by Aaron Maté via RealClearInvestigations.com,
In the waning days of the Obama administration, the U.S. intelligence community produced a report saying Russian President Vladimir Putin had tried to swing the 2016 election to Donald Trump.
The January 2017 report, called an Intelligence Community Assessment, followed months of leaks to the media that had falsely suggested illicit ties between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin while also revealing that such contacts were the subject of a federal investigation. Its release cast a pall of suspicion over Trump just days before he took office, setting the tone for the unfounded allegations of conspiracy and treason that have engulfed his first term.
What was Brennan’s motive? Among the possibilities is hostility within his camp toward Michael Flynn (foreground), Trump’s future reform-minded national security adviser.
AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais
The ICA’s blockbuster finding was presented to the public as the consensus view of the nation’s intelligence community. As events have unfolded, however, it now seems apparent that the report was largely the work of one agency, the CIA, and overseen by one man, then-Director John Brennan, who closely directed its drafting and publication with a small group of hand-picked analysts.
Nearly three years later, as the public awaits answers from two Justice Department inquiries into the Trump-Russia probe’s origins, and as impeachment hearings catalyzed by a Brennan-hired anti-Trump CIA analyst unfold in Congress, it is clear that Brennan’s role in propagating the collusion narrative went far beyond his work on the ICA. A close review of facts that have slowly come to light reveals that he was a central architect and promoter of the conspiracy theory from its inception. The record shows that:
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Contrary to a general impression that the FBI launched the Trump-Russia conspiracy probe, Brennan pushed it to the bureau – breaking with CIA tradition by intruding into domestic politics: the 2016 presidential election. He also supplied suggestive but ultimately false information to counterintelligence investigators and other U.S. officials.
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Leveraging his close proximity to President Obama, Brennan sounded the alarm about alleged Russian interference to the White House, and was tasked with managing the U.S. intelligence community’s response.
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While some FBI officials expressed skepticism about the Trump/Russia narrative as they hunted down investigative leads, Brennan stood out for insisting on its veracity.
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To substantiate his claims, Brennan relied on a Kremlin informant who was later found to be a mid-level official with limited access to Putin’s inner circle.
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Circumventing normal protocol for congressional briefings, Brennan supplied then-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid with incendiary Trump-Russia innuendo that Reid amplified in a pair of public letters late in the election campaign.
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After Trump’s unexpected victory, Brennan oversaw the hasty production of the tenuous Intelligence Community Assessment.
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Departing from his predecessors’ usual practice of staying above the political fray after leaving office, Brennan has worked as a prominent analyst for MSNBC, where he has used his authority as a former guardian of the nation’s top secrets to launch vitriolic attacks on a sitting president, accusing Trump of “treasonous” conduct.
Now Brennan is among the most vocal critics of the more comprehensive of the two Justice probes, the criminal investigation run by U.S. Attorney John Durham and Attorney General William Barr. “I don’t understand the predication of this worldwide effort to try to uncover dirt, real or imagined, that would discredit that investigation in 2016 into Russian interference,” he recently said on MSNBC.
The Trump-Russia collusion theory was not propagated by a few rogue figures. Key Obama administration and intelligence officials laundered it through national security reporters who gave their explosive claims anonymous cover. Nevertheless, Brennan stands apart for the outsized role he played in generating and spreading the false narrative.
‘Raised Concerns in My Mind’
The government’s official story as detailed in special prosecutor Robert Mueller’s April 18 report casts the Trump-Russia probe as an FBI operation. It asserts that the bureau launched its investigation, code-named “Crossfire Hurricane,” on July 31, 2016, after receiving information that junior Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos was informed that Russians had politically damaging information about Hillary Clinton.
John Durham: His probe aims “to better understand the intelligence that flowed from the C.I.A. to the F.B.I. in the summer of 2016,” as the New York Times put it.
United States Attorney’s Office, District of Connecticut/Wikimedia
But a great deal of evidence – including public testimony and news accounts – undermines that story. It indicates that the probe started earlier, with Brennan a driving force. Many of the clues are buried in public testimony and reports published by the New York Times and Washington Post, the primary vehicles for intelligence community leaks throughout the Russiagate saga.
One signal came in June when the Times reported that the Barr-Durham investigation had “provoked anxiety in the ranks of the C.I.A.” Among Barr’s aims, the paper noted, was “to better understand the intelligence that flowed from the C.I.A. to the F.B.I. in the summer of 2016.”
That intelligence “flowed from the C.I.A. to the F.B.I” underscores that the agency played a larger role in the early stages of the Trump-Russia probe than is publicly acknowledged. Late last month, the Times ran a more ominous piece suggesting that the CIA may have been a prime mover of the probe through deception. It reported that Durham has been asking interview subjects “whether C.I.A. officials might have somehow tricked the F.B.I. into opening the Russia investigation.” In anticipation of being asked such questions, the paper added, “[s]ome C.I.A. officials have retained criminal lawyers.”
If that reflects an accurate suspicion on Durham’s part, then Brennan, by his own account, has already outed himself as a key suspect. Brennan has publicly taken credit for the Russia probe’s origination and supplying critical information to the FBI after it began. “I encountered and am aware of information and intelligence that revealed contacts and interactions between Russian officials and U.S. persons involved in the Trump campaign that I was concerned about,” he told Congress in May 2017. That information, Brennan added, “raised concerns in my mind about whether or not those individuals were cooperating with the Russians,” which then “served as the basis for the FBI investigation to determine whether such collusion-cooperation occurred.”
A BBC report suggests that Brennan may be referring to April 2016 – a month before Papadopoulos allegedly mentioned Russian dirt and three months before the FBI launched its probe – when “an intelligence agency of one of the Baltic States” provided Brennan with “a tape recording” that “worried him” – “a conversation about money from the Kremlin going into the U.S. presidential campaign.”
Stefan Halper: This CIA and FBI informant targeted Carter Page as early as May 2016, Page says.
Oxford Union/YouTube
It is not clear whether the BBC account is accurate, but the April date coincides with other activity suggesting an earlier start date to the collusion probe than the official version. Former Attorney General Loretta Lynch testified before a congressional panel that in the “late spring” of 2016 then-FBI Director James Comey briefed National Security Council principals about concerns surrounding newly appointed Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. According to the Guardian newspaper, former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele began briefing the FBI on his discredited dossier in London as early as June; after that, “his information started to reach the bureau in Washington.” In mid-July, veteran CIA and FBI informant Stefan Halper made contact with Page at a British academic conference; according to Page, the invitation had come at the end of May or early June.
Halper has also been accused of taking part in a smear operation aimed at spreading false information about National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and Russian nationals. In May, Halper was sued in the U.S. by Svetlana Lokhova, a Russian-born British academic, for defamation. Lokhova alleges that Halper, while working as a U.S. intelligence asset, spread rumors suggesting that she and Flynn had an improper relationship.
While Russiagate’s exact starting point is murky, it is clear that Brennan placed himself at the center of the action. After the investigation officially got underway in the summer of 2016, as Brennan later told MSNBC, “[w]e put together a fusion center at CIA that brought NSA and FBI officers together with CIA to make sure that those proverbial dots would be connected.” (It is not clear whether this was a Freudian slip suggesting the center included Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm hired by the Clinton campaign that produced the Steele dossier of fictitious Trump-Russia dirt – but regardless, it is likely that at least some of Brennan’s “dots” came from the firm.) According to the New Yorker, also that summer Brennan received a personal briefing from Robert Hannigan, then the head of Britain’s intelligence service the GCHQ, about an alleged “stream of illicit communications between Trump’s team and Moscow that had been intercepted.” A U.S. court would later confirm that Steele shared his reports with at least one “senior British security official.”
As Brennan helped generate the collusion investigation, he also worked to insert it into domestic American politics – at the height of a presidential campaign. Starting in August, Brennan began giving personal briefings to the Gang of Eight, high-ranking U.S. senators and members of Congress regularly apprised of state secrets. Breaking with tradition, he met them individually, rather than as a group. His most consequential private meeting was with Harry Reid.
Harry Reid: Brennan gave this top Senate Democrat an irregular individual briefing, putting the collusion narrative in motion.
AP Photo/Sait Serkan Gurbuz.,File
Afterward, the Democrats’ Senate leader sent a pair of provocative public letters to FBI Director Comey. Reid’s messages – released to the public during the final months of the presidential race – made explosive insinuations of illicit ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, putting the collusion narrative into motion. “The prospect of individuals tied to Trump, WikiLeaks and the Russian government coordinating to influence our election raises concerns of the utmost gravity and merits full examination,” Reid wrote on Aug. 27. Russia, he warned, may be trying to “influence the Trump campaign and manipulate it as a vehicle for advancing the interests of Russian President Vladimir Putin.”
Two days after Comey’s “October surprise” announcement that newly discovered emails were forcing him to reopen the bureau’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server while serving as secretary of state, Reid followed up with even more incendiary language: “It has become clear,” he complained to Comey, “that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors and the Russian government.”
Reid’s letters show the extent to which Brennan maneuvered behind the scenes to funnel collusion to a public audience. In their book “Russian Roulette,” Michael Isikoff and David Corn report that Reid “concluded the CIA chief believed the public needed to know about the Russia operation, including the information about the possible links to the Trump campaign.”
Nunes: ‘Whatever Brennan Told Reid, He Didn’t Tell Me.’
The separate briefings and the Reid letters gave rise to suspicion that Brennan was driven by what Reid, according to Isikoff and Corn, saw as an “ulterior motive.” Although Brennan has claimed publicly that he “provided the same briefing to each gang of eight member,” Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) says that is not true. Nunes, who was then the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, is quoted in journalist Lee Smith’s new book, “The Plot Against the President,” saying, “Whatever Brennan told Reid, he didn’t tell me.”
Reid’s letters also undermine a common, but false, talking point used to defend Brennan and other U.S. intelligence officials behind the Russia investigation: If they really sought to hurt the Trump campaign, they would have made their Trump-Russia collusion speculation public. As Comey put it: “If we were ‘deep state’ Clinton loyalists bent on stopping him, why would we keep it secret?” Reid’s extraordinary letters – released at the height of the campaign – were one of the ways in which Brennan did exactly the opposite.
FBI’s Peter Strzok texted Lisa Page suggesting the CIA was “leaking like mad.” And he wrote colleagues of his concern the agency was deceiving both the bureau and the public.
AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta
After Trump’s election victory in November, Brennan’s CIA was the source of yet more leaks. Reports in early December claimed that the agency had assessed that Russia interfered in the 2016 election with the explicit aim of helping Trump. The leaks sparked worry inside the FBI.
“Think our sisters have begun leaking like mad,” Peter Strzok, the lead FBI agent on the Russia probe, texted his colleague Lisa Page on Dec. 15. “Scorned and worried and political, they’re kicking in to overdrive.” In an April 2017 email to colleagues, Strzok worried the CIA was deceiving both the bureau and the public. “I’m beginning to think the agency got info a lot earlier than we thought and hasn’t shared it completely with us,” he wrote. “Might explain all these weird/seemingly incorrect leads all these media folks have. Would also highlight agency as a source of some of the leaks.”
‘We Needed More’
At the same time that he was sharing his “concerns” about alleged Trump-Russia contacts with the FBI and Congress, Brennan was raising alarm bells at the White House about an alleged Russian interference campaign. In the process, he went to significant lengths to safeguard his claims from internal scrutiny.
In early August, Brennan told the White House about supposed intelligence from a Kremlin mole that Vladimir Putin had personally ordered an interference operation to hurt Clinton and install Trump in the White House. Brennan, the New York Times reported, “sent separate intelligence reports, many based on the source’s information, in special sealed envelopes to the Oval Office.” Brennan made sure that those envelopes evaded scrutiny.
On Brennan’s orders, Greg Miller of the Washington Post reported, “no information on Russia’s interference was ever included in the president’s daily brief.” Brennan’s purported fear was that even a highly restrictive distribution list might prove too leaky for the CIA’s explosive claims about Putin’s supposed secret orders to elect Trump.
Miller also reported that Brennan holed up in his office to pore over the CIA’s material, “staying so late that the glow through his office windows remained visible deep into the night.” Brennan ordered up, not just vetted, “‘finished’ assessments – analytic reports that had gone through “layers of review and revision,” but also “what agency veterans call the ‘raw stuff,’ the unprocessed underlying material,” Miller adds.
John Kiriakou, ex-CIA analyst: Brennan’s actions were “a very big red flag.”
AP Photo/Cliff Owen
To former CIA analyst and whistleblower John Kiriakou, all of this raises “a very big red flag” that suggests Brennan circumvented his colleagues and normal intelligence safeguards. “As a matter of practice, you never, ever give the raw data to the policymaker,” Kiriakou says. “That was something that was done during the George W. Bush administration where Vice President Cheney demanded the raw intelligence. But more often than not raw intelligence is just simply incorrect – it’s factually incorrect, or it’s the result of the source who’s a liar, or it’s the result of the source who has only part of the story. And so you can’t trust it. You have to vet it and compare it to the rest of your all-source information to see what’s true, what’s not true, and then only the true information you use in your analysis. For the director of the CIA to be using the raw data is highly unusual because that’s what you have a staff of thousands to do for you.”
The timing of Brennan’s supposed delivery of the information sourced to the mole – later identified as Oleg Smolenkov – also raises questions. Although it is unclear when Smolenkov would have conveyed his intelligence to the CIA, the Washington Post reported Brennan delivered it to the White House in early August 2016 – just days after the FBI officially launched its Russia investigation. But if Smolenkov was able to capture Putin’s orders to conduct a sweeping election interference campaign – which allegedly began in March – it would be odd that this information arrived only after the U.S. election interference investigation began, and not – at minimum – months earlier, when Putin’s supposed operation would had to have been ordered.
When Brennan’s material did reach eyes outside Obama’s inner circle, “other agencies were slower to endorse a conclusion that Putin was personally directing the operation and wanted to help Trump,” the Washington Post reported. “‘It was definitely compelling, but it was not definitive,’ said one senior administration official. ‘We needed more.'” Faced with that skepticism, Brennan “moved swiftly” to brief congressional leaders — including Reid.
The Mole
The internal doubts about Brennan’s claims now make more sense in light of the recent outing of the supposed Kremlin mole that he relied on to make them.
Smolenkov has been revealed to be a mid-level Kremlin official who was outside of Putin’s inner circle. According to Russian media, Smolenkov disappeared during a visit to Montenegro in June 2017, in what other reports call a CIA extraction over fears that a loose-lipped Trump could put him in peril. After that, Smolenkov turned up in the U.S., remarkably living under his own name – easily discoverable in public records – in the Virginia suburbs.
Even putting aside Putin’s reputation for having operatives abroad hunt down and assassinate those who cross him, Kiriakou said this open visibility is “astounding.” CIA informants, Kiriakou says, “were never, ever resettled in their own names and they were almost never resettled in the Washington area. That tells me a couple of things: one, this source wasn’t as sensitive as we may have been led to believe; or, two, even if he was sensitive, the information that he provided either has been overtaken by events, or isn’t really that important in the long run.”
Nevertheless, Brennan’s Kremlin mole remains the only known direct source for a central claim that Putin worked to elect Trump.
‘Unusually Constrained’
Brennan has countered questions about the intelligence process he directed by insisting that his conclusions were broadly shared and corroborated. That is misleading.
During private briefings to Congress in December 2016, it was the CIA that aggressively pushed the belief that Putin had ordered a secret campaign to elect Trump, while FBI officials said that the intelligence was not conclusive. An unnamed official told the Washington Post that “a secret, new CIA assessment” made “direct and bald and unqualified” statements that the Russian government sought to elect Trump. But days later, “a senior FBI counterintelligence official” appearing before the committee gave “fuzzy and “ambiguous” remarks on the same issue. “It was shocking to hold these [CIA] statements made about Russian intentions and activities, and to hear this guy basically saying nothing with certainty and allowing that all was possible,” an official who attended the briefing told the Post.
James Clapper: He suggested the Steele dossier influenced the Intelligence Community Assessment. Brennan denied it.
AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais, File
A March 2018 report from Republican members of House Intelligence Committee fleshed out these concerns. It determined that the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, which Brennan managed, was subjected to an “unusually constrained review and coordination process, which deviated from established CIA practice.” Contrary to the widespread portrayal of a vetted, consensus-based intelligence product, the ICA was in fact “drafted by CIA analysts” working under Brennan and merely “coordinated with the NSA and the FBI.” The report found that the ICA also suffered from “significant intelligence tradecraft failings that undermine confidence in the ICA judgments regarding Russian President Vladimir Putin’s strategic objectives for disrupting the U.S. election.”
Another question is whether the Steele dossier influenced the ICA’s production. Brennan has insisted in congressional testimony that the dossier was “not in any way used as the basis for the intelligence community’s assessment,” and that he was unaware of the fact that Hillary Clinton’s campaign had funded it. But multiple accounts, including in RealClearInvestigations, report that the dossier was inserted as an appendix to the ICA, and that Brennan personally advocated its inclusion. In an October 2017 interview with CNN, where he works as analyst, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper acknowledged that “some of the substantive content of the dossier we were able to corroborate in our Intelligence Community Assessment” – suggesting that it was indeed relied on.
President Obama’s role in U.S. intelligence is yet one more mystery. In both the final months of his presidency and in the period since, Obama has said very little publicly about the Russia investigation. But he attended various meetings with top officials about Trump-Russia theories. It’s not clear what he said, but their efforts ramped up in the months that followed.
Most of Obama’s documented efforts occurred during his final days in office. On Jan. 5, 2017 he convened a meeting where he and top principals decided to withhold details about the ongoing FBI investigation of the incoming Trump administration. A week later his administration issued a new rule allowing the NSA to disseminate throughout the government “raw signals intelligence information.” Republicans viewed this as an effort to make it easy to leak damaging information against Trump and harder to identify the leakers. Also after the election, Obama made the curious decision to nix a proposal from inside his own administration to form a bipartisan commission that would have scrutinized Russian interference and the U.S. response.
‘I Think I Suspected More Than There Actually Was’
Since stepping down from the CIA in January 2017, Brennan’s incendiary rhetoric has fanned the flames. From MSNBC to the New York Times to Twitter, Brennan has denounced Trump as “treasonous,” “in the pocket of Putin,” and dismissed the president’s now substantiated “claims of no collusion,” as “hogwash.” In the final weeks of the Mueller probe, Brennan boldly predicted a wave of indictments against Trump’s inner circle for a Russia conspiracy. When Mueller completed his probe with no such indictments, Brennan changed his tone: “I don’t know if I received bad information, but I think I suspected there was more than there actually was,” he told MSNBC.
Brennan is now a bitter Trump critic on MSNBC.
MSNBC/”The Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell”
The Mueller report accepted Brennan’s claim that Russia meddled in the 2016 election. But as a previous RCI investigation found, the report’s evidence failed to support its claim of a “sweeping and systematic” interference campaign. Nor did it show that such interference impacted the outcome.
It is still not clear why the Obama administration, with major media playing along, not only embraced the false Trump-Russia narrative but also used it as a rationale to spy on a presidential campaign and then on a presidency. Brennan’s reasons also remain opaque.
One early motivation may have been the intelligence community’s broad dislike of Flynn – Trump’s first national security adviser, who was one of the earliest targets of the collusion narrative.
Flynn had served as Obama’s head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, but fell out of favor by 2014, in part because of his opposition to the Iran nuclear deal and the CIA’s arming of anti-Assad militants in Syria. Obama had specifically warned Trump against hiring Flynn.
A longtime critic of the bureaucracy, Flynn earned particular enmity from Brennan’s CIA with an effort to create a new Pentagon spy organization, Foreign Policy reported in 2015.
One of Trump’s first high-profile supporters, Flynn was also the subject of the first news articles – starting in February of 2016 – portraying members of the Trump campaign as overly sympathetic to Russia. In February 2017, “nine current and former officials” from multiple agencies leaked about him to the Washington Post over his contacts with the Russian ambassador — an article that helped the Post win a Pulitzer Prize with the New York Times. The episode also brought Flynn much grief, including a widely questioned “process crime” conviction for lying to the FBI, which he is now trying to reverse. Meanwhile, a CIA “whistleblower” hired and placed in the White House by Brennan has provided the impetus for the current Democrat-led impeachment effort against President Trump.
The Barr-Durham probe is set to determine, among other things, whether Brennan’s actions and faulty information amounted to incompetence or something considerably worse.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/16/2019 – 23:30 -
- Here Are The States Where Trump Trade War Is Hammering China Exports
Here Are The States Where Trump Trade War Is Hammering China Exports
New data from the US Commerce Department shows at least 30 states, many of them Trump states, have observed double-digit declines in merchandise exports to China through Sept. of this year.
In Wyoming, which exports chemical products to China, recorded a -80% plunge in shipments in the first nine months. Alabama’s automobile industry reported a -49% fall in shipments, Idoha -46%, Washington -45%, Aaraknsa -44%, Florida -40%, and Texas -39%. Merchandise exports to China as a whole slumped 15% to $78.8 billion during the period.
Brad Setser, a senior fellow for international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations, spoke to Bloomberg about the trade war devastation impacting manufacturing hubs in US states.
Setser said as the trade war escalated this year, China’s demand for imports in many Trump states fell off a cliff.
He warned that some of these manufacturing hubs “will never recover,” even if there’s a trade deal.
It’s becoming increasingly apparent that China, has struck back at the Trump administration, though it was silent, and now what appears to be very targeted, it could turn out to be a disaster for the administration ahead of an election year.
With manufacturing hubs across the country crushed, it should be no surprise that the manufacturing recession continues to deepen into Q4.
Already, preliminary estimates for Q4 GDP data has fallen to a dismal 0.4% on Friday, take out government spending, and it’s likely the recession has already started.
On November 15, the #GDPNow model nowcast of real GDP growth in Q42019 is 0.3%. View GDPNow for more details. https://t.co/T7FoDdgYos pic.twitter.com/wOR961QYtv
— Atlanta Fed (@AtlantaFed) November 15, 2019
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
US economic data has been rather poor since Sept., including today’s disappointing retail sales and dismal industrial production as the US economic surprise index has slipped back into the negative after peaking in late September.
The manufacturing recession and services slowdown has already led to a downturn in employment. This will start to hit consumer spending trends and lead to a reverse in sentiment.
Put this all together, and a broader slowdown is already underway — contagion has spread from manufacturing to services. Trump states are getting hit the hardest. It’s only a matter of time before the next recession begins.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/16/2019 – 23:00 - Everything You Need To Know About Trump (But Were Afraid To Admit You Wondered)
Everything You Need To Know About Trump (But Were Afraid To Admit You Wondered)
Authored by Sylvain LaForest via Oriental Review,
The timing is right for everyone to understand what Donald Trump is doing, and try to decrypt the ambiguity of how he is is doing it. The controversial President has a much clearer agenda than anyone can imagine on both foreign policy and internal affairs, but since he has to stay in power or even stay alive to achieve his objectives, his strategy is so refined and subtle that next to no one can see it. His overall objective is so ambitious that he has to follow random elliptic courses to get from point A to point B, using patterns that throw people off on their comprehension of the man. That includes most independent journalists and so-called alternative analysts, as much as Western mainstream fake-news publishers and a large majority of the population.
About his strategy, I could make a quick and accurate analogy with medication: most pills are designed to cure a problem, but come with an array of secondary after-effects. Well, Trump is using medication solely for their after-effects, while the first intent of the pill is what’s keeping him in power and alive. By the end of this article, you’ll see that this metaphor applies for just about every decision, move or declaration he’s made. Once you understand what Trump is about, you’ll be able to appreciate the extraordinary presidency he’s conducting, like no predecessor ever came close to match.
To start off, let’s clear the one aspect of his mission that is straightforward and terribly direct: he’s the first and only American President to ever address humanity’s worst collective flaw, its total ignorance of reality. Because medias and education are both controlled by the handful of billionaires that are running the planet, we don’t know anything about our history that’s been twisted dry by the winners, and we don’t have a clue about our present world. As he stepped in the political arena, Donald popularized the expression «fake news» to convince the American citizens, and the world population as well, that medias always lie to you. The expression has now become commonplace, but do you realize how deeply shocking is the fact that nearly everything you think you know is totally fake?
Media lies don’t just cover history and politics, but they have shaped your false perception on topics like economy, food, climate, health, on everything. What if I told you that we know exactly who shot JFK from the grassy knoll, that the foreknowledge of Pearl Harbor was proven in court, that the CO2 greenhouse effect is scientifically absurd, that our money is created through loans by banks who don’t even have the funds, or that science proves with a 100% certainty that 911 was an inside job? Ever heard of a mainstream journalist, PBS documentary or university teacher telling you about any of this? 44 Presidents came and went without even raising one word about this huge problem, before the 45th came along. Trump knows that freeing the people out of this unfathomable ignorance is the first step to overall freedom, so he started calling mainstream journalists and their news outlets for what they are: pathological liars.
«Thousands of mental health professionals agree with Woodward and the New York Times op-ed author: Trump is dangerous.»
– Bandy X. Lee, The Conversation 2018
«The question is not whether the President is crazy but whether he is crazy like a fox or crazy like crazy.»
– Masha Gessen, The New Yorker 2017
Let’s make one thing clear: to the establishment, Trump isn’t mentally challenged, but he’s definitely seen as a possible nemesis of their world. Ever since he moved in the White House, Trump has been depicted as a narcissist, a racist, a sexist and a climate-skeptic, loaded with shady past stories and mental issues. Even though an approximate 60% of the American people don’t trust medias anymore, many have bought the story that Trump might be slightly crazy or unfit to rule, and the statistic climbs even higher when you get out of the USA. Of course, Donald isn’t doing anything special to change the deeply negative perception that so many journalists and people alike have about him. He’s openly outrageous and provocative on Twitter, he sounds impulsive and dumb most of the time, acts irrationally, lies on a daily basis, and throws out sanctions and threats as if they were candy canes out of an elf’s side bag in a mall in December. Right away, we can destroy one persistent media myth: the image Trump is projecting is self-destructive and it’s the exact opposite of how pathological narcissists act, since they thrive to be loved and admired by everyone. Donald simply doesn’t care if you like him or not, which makes him the ultimate anti-narcissist, by its psychological definition. And that’s not even up for opinion, it’s a quite simple and undeniable fact.
His general plan exhales from one of his favorite motto: «We will give power back to the people», because the United States and its imperialist web woven over the world have been in the hands of a few globalist bankers, military industrials and multinationals for more than a century. To achieve his plan, he has to end wars abroad, bring back the kids, dismantle the NATO and CIA, get control over the Federal Reserve, cut every link with foreign allies, abolish the Swift financial system, demolish the propaganda power of the medias, drain the swamp of the deep state that’s running the spying agencies and disable the shadow government that’s lurking in the Council on foreign relations and Trilateral Commission’s offices. In short, he has to destroy the New World Order and its globalist ideology. The task is huge and dangerous to say the least. Thankfully, he’s not alone.
Before we get on his techniques and tactics, we have to know a little bit more about what’s really been going on in the world.
Mighty Russia
Since Peter the Great, the whole history of Russia is a permanent demonstration of its will to maintain its political and economical independence from international banks and imperialism, pushing this great nation to help many smaller countries fighting to keep their own independence. Twice Russia helped the United States against the British/Rothschild Empire; first by openly supporting them in the Independence War, and again in the Civil War, when Rothschild’s were funding the Confederates to politically break down the nation to bring it back in the British colonial Empire’s coop. Russia also destroyed Napoleon and the Nazis, whom were both funded by international banks as tools to crush economically independent nations. Independence is in their DNA. After almost a decade of Western oligarchy taking over Russia’s economy after the fall of USSR in 1991, Putin took power and drained the Russian swamp. Since then, each and every move that he has made aims to destroy the American Empire, or the entity that replaced the British Empire in 1944, which is the non-conspiracy theory name of the New World Order. The new empire is basically the same central banking scheme, with just a slightly different set of owners that switched the British army for NATO, as their world Gestapo.
Until Trump came along, Putin was single handedly fighting the New World Order who’s century-old obsession is the control of the world oil market, since oil is the blood running through the veins of the world economy. Oil is a thousand times more valuable than gold. Cargo ships, airplanes and armies don’t run on batteries. Therefore, to counter the globalists, Putin developed the best offensive and defensive missile systems, with the result that Russia can now protect every independent oil producer such as Syria, Venezuela and Iran. Central bankers and the US shadow government are still hanging on to their dying plan, because without a victory in Syria, there’s no enlarging Israel, thus ending the century-old fantasy of uniting the Middle East oil production in the hands of the New World Order. Ask Lord Balfour if you have any doubt. That’s the real stake of the Syrian war, it’s nothing short of do or die.
A century of lies
Now, because a shadow government is giving direct orders to the CIA and NATO in the name of banks and industries, Trump has no control over the military. The deep state is a rosary of permanent officials ruling Washington and the Pentagon, that only respond to their orders. If you still believe that the «Commander in chief» is in charge, explain why every time Trump ordered to pull out of Syria and Afghanistan, more troops came in? As I’m writing this text, US and NATO troops pulled out of the Kurdish zones, went to Iraq, and came back with heavier equipment around the oil reserves of Syria. Donald has a lot more of swamp draining to do before the Pentagon actually listens to anything he says. Trump should be outraged and denunciate out loud that the military command doesn’t bother about what he thinks, but this would ignite an unimaginable chaos, and perhaps even a civil war in the US, if the citizens who own roughly 393 million weapons in their homes were to learn that private interests are in charge of the military. It would also lead to a very simple but dramatic question: «What is exactly the purpose of democracy?» These weapons are the titanium fences guarding the population from a totalitarian Big Brother.
One has to realize how much trouble the US army and spying agencies have been going through in creating false-flag operations for more than a century, so that their interventions always looked righteous, in the name of democracy promotion, human rights and justice around the planet. They blew up the Maine ship in 1898 to enter the Hispanic-American war, then the Lusitania in 1915 to enter WW1. They pushed Japan to attack Pearl Harbor in 1941, knew about the attack 10 days in advance and said nothing to the Hawaiian base. They made up a North Vietnamese torpedo aggression on their ships in the Tonkin Bay to justify sending boots on the Vietnamese ground. They made up a story of Iraqi soldiers destroying nurseries to invade Kuwait in 1991. They invented mass destruction weapons to attack Iraq again in 2003, and organized 911 to shred the 1789 Constitution, attack Afghanistan and launch a War on terror. This totally fake mask of virtue has to be preserved for controlling the opinion of the American citizens and their domestic arsenal, who have to believe that they wear the white cowboy hats of democracy.
So how did Trump react when he learned that American troops were re-entering Syria? He repeated again and again in every interview and declaration that «we have secured the oil fields of Syria», and even added «I’m thinking about sending Exxon in the region to take care of the Syrian oil». Neocons, Zionists and banks were thrilled, but everyone else is outraged, because the vast majority doesn’t understand that Trump is swallowing this pill solely for its after-effects. On this single bottle is written in fine print that «the use of this drug might force American-NATO troops out of Syria under the pressure of the united world community and flabbergasted American population.» Trump made the situation unsustainable for NATO to stay in Syria, and how he’s been repeating this deeply shocking, politically incorrect position clearly shows his real intention. He destroyed over a century of fake virtue in a single sentence.
Trump is a historical anomaly
Trump is only the fourth president in US history to actually fight for the people, unlike all 41 others, who mainly channeled the people’s money in a pipeline of dollars that ends up in private banks. First there was Andrew Jackson who was shot after he destroyed the Second National Bank that he openly accused of being controlled by the Rothschild and The City in London. Then there was Abraham Lincoln, who was murdered after printing his «greenbacks», national money that the state issued to pay the soldiers because Lincoln had refused to borrow money from Rothschild at 24% interest. Then there was JFK, who was killed for a dozen reasons that mostly went against the banks and military industries profits, and now is Donald Trump, who shouted that he would «Give America back to the people».
Like most businessmen, Trump hates banks, for the formidable power that they have over the economy. Just take a peek at Henry Ford’s only book, «The International Jew» to find out how deep was his distrust and hatred of international banks. Trump’s businesses have suffered a lot because of these institutions that basically sell you an umbrella, only to take it back as soon as it rains. Private banking’s control over money creation and interest rates, through every Central Bank of almost every country is a permanent power over nations, far above the ephemeral cycle of politicians. By the year 2000, these nation looters were only a few steps away from their planetary totalitarian dream, but a couple of details stood still: Vladimir Putin and 393 million American weapons. Then came along orange-faced Donald, the last piece in the puzzle that we the people, needed to terminate 250 years of the banking empire.
Techniques and tactics
Early in his mandate, Trump naively tried the direct approach, by surrounding himself with establishment rebels like Michael Flynn and Steve Bannon, then by annoying each and everyone of his foreign allies, shredding their free-trade treaties, imposing taxes on imports and insulting them in their face in the G7 meetings of 2017 and 2018. The reaction was strong and everyone doubled-down on the Russiagate absurdity, as it looked like the only option to stop the man on his path of globalism destruction. Predictably, the direct approach went nowhere; Flynn and Bannon had to go, and Trump was entangled in a handful of inquiries that made him realize that he wouldn’t get anything accomplished with transparency. He had to find a way to annihilate the most dangerous people on the planet, but at the same time, stay in power and alive. He had to smarten up.
That’s when his genius exploded on the world. He completely changed his strategy and approach, and started taking absurd decisions and tweeting outrageous declarations. As threatening and dangerous as some of these first looked, Trump didn’t use them for their first degree meaning, but was aiming at the genuine second degree effects that his moves would have. And he didn’t care about what people thought of him as he did, for only results count in the end. He would even play buffoon over Twitter, look naive, lunatic or downright idiotic, perhaps in the hope to impregnate the belief that he didn’t know what he’s doing, and that he couldn’t be that dangerous. He’s willfully being politically incorrect to show the ugly face that the United States are hiding behind their mask.
The first test on his new approach was to try to stop the growing danger of an attack and invasion of North Korea by NATO. Trump insulted Kim Jung-Un through Twitter, called him Rocket Man, and threatened to nuke North Korea to the ground. His raging political incorrectness went on for weeks until it sank in everyone’s minds that those were not good reasons to attack a country. He paralyzed NATO. Trump then met Rocket Man, and they walked in the park with the start of a beautiful friendship, laughing together, while accomplishing absolutely nothing in their negotiations, since they have nothing to negotiate about. Many were talking about the Nobel price for peace, because many don’t know that it’s usually handed to whitewash war criminals like Obama or Kissinger.
Then came Venezuela. Trump pushed his tactic a step further, to make sure that no one could support an attack on the free country. He put the worst neo-cons available on the case: Elliott Abrams, formerly convicted of conspiracy in the Iran-Contras deal in the ’80s and John Bolton, famous first-degree warmonger. Trump then confirmed Juan Guaido as his choice for president of Venezuela; an empty puppet so dumb that he can’t even see how much he’s being used. Again, Trump threatened to burn the country to rubbles, while the world community watched in awe the total lack of subtlety and diplomacy in Trump’s behavior, with the result that Brazil and Colombia backed away and said they wanted nothing to do with an attack on Venezuela. Trump’s medicine left only 40 satellite countries worldwide, with Presidents and Prime Ministers brain dead enough to shyly support Guaido the Jester. Donald checked the box beside Venezuela on his list and kept scrolling down.
Then came the two gifts to Israel: Jerusalem as a capital, and the Syrian Golan Heights as its confirmed possession. Netanyahu whom isn’t the sharpest pencil in the box jumped of joy, and everyone yelled that Trump was a Zionist. The real after-effect result was that the whole of the Middle East united against Israel, which no one can support anymore. Even their historical accomplice Saudi Arabia had to openly disapprove this huge slap in the face of Islam. The two Trump gifts were in fact back stabs in the Israel state, whose future doesn’t look too bright nowadays, since NATO will have to move out of the region. Check again.
As reality sinks in
But there’s more! With his lack of control over NATO and the army, Trump is very limited in his actions. At first glance, the outstanding multiplication of economical sanctions on countries like Russia, Turkey, China, Iran, Venezuela and other nations look tough and merciless, but the reality of these sanctions pushed those countries out of the Swift financial system designed to keep enslaving nations through the dollar hegemony, and they’re all slipping away from the international banks’ grip. It forced Russia, China and India to create an alternative system of trade payments based on national currencies, instead of the almighty dollar. The bipolar reality of the world is now official, and with his upcoming next sanctions, Trump will push more countries out of the Swift system to join the other side, while important banks are starting to fall in Europe.
Even in the political hurricane Trump is in, he still finds time to display his almost childish arrogant humor. Look at his grandiose mockery of Hillary Clinton and Barrack Obama, as he sat down with the most straight-faced generals he could find, to take a picture in a so-called «situation room» as they faked the monitoring of the death of Baghdadi somewhere he couldn’t be, exactly like his criminal predecessors did a long time ago with the fake Bin Laden killing. He even pushed the farce to adding the details of a dog recognizing Daesch’s fake caliph by sniffing his underwear. Now that you understand what Trump is really about, you will also be able to appreciate the show, in all of its splendor and true meaning.
«We have secured the oil fields of Syria». Indeed, with this short sentence, Trump joined his voice to that of General Smedley Butler who rocked the world 80 years ago with a tiny book called «War is a racket». Looting and stealing oil is definitely not as virtuous as promoting democracy and justice. What amazes me is those numerous «alternative» journalists and analysts, who know on the tip of their fingers every technical problem about 911, or scientific reality on the absurd global warming story, but still don’t have a clue about what Trump is doing, 3 years in his mandate, because they bought the mainstream media that convinced everyone that Trump is mentally challenged.
For those who still entertain doubts about Trump’s agenda, do you really believe that the obvious implosion of American Imperialism over the planet is a coincidence? Do you still believe that its because of the Russian influence on the 2016 election that the CIA, the FBI, every media, the American Congress, the Federal Reserve, the Democratic party and the warmongering half of the Republicans are working against him and are even trying to impeach him? Like most stuff that comes out of medias, reality is the exact opposite of what you’re being told: Trump might be the most dedicated man to ever set foot in the Oval office. And certainly the most ambitious and politically incorrect.
Conclusion
The world will change drastically between 2020 and 2024. Trump’s second and last mandate coincides with Putin’s last mandate as President of Russia. There may never be another coincidence like this for a long time, and both know that it’s now or perhaps never. Together, they have to end NATO, Swift, and the European Union should crumble. Terrorism and anthropogenic global warming will jump in the vortex and disappear with their creators. Trump will have to drain the swamp in the CIA and Pentagon, and he has to nationalize the Federal Reserve. Along with Xi and Modi, they could put a final end to private banking in public affairs, by refusing to pay a single penny of their debts, and reset the world economy by shifting to national currencies produced by governments, as private banks will fall like dominos, with no more Obama-like servant to bail them out at your expense. Once this is done, unbearable peace and prosperity could roam the planet, as our taxes pay for the development of our countries instead of buying useless military gear and paying interests on loans by bankers who didn’t even have the money in the first place.
If you still don’t understand Donald Trump after reading the above, you’re hopeless. Or you’re might be Trudeau, Macron, Guaido, or any other useful idiot, unaware that the carpet under your feet has already slipped away.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/16/2019 – 22:30 - Even With Better Education, Millennials Earn 20% Less Than Baby Boomers, Study Finds
Even With Better Education, Millennials Earn 20% Less Than Baby Boomers, Study Finds
The generational wealth gap has widened to historic levels, according to a recent study comparing millennial earnings to older generations’, according to CNBC.
When adjusted for inflation, millennials earn 20% less than baby boomers did at the same stage in their careers, according to the study, entitled “the Emerging Millennial Wealth Gap”. Median incomes for workers aged 18 to 34 are way down from their levels in the 1980s. The disparity is nothing new: Other studies have arrived at a similar conclusion. Despite being the most well-educated generation of all time (aside from Gen Z, probably), millennials earn comparatively less than their older peers did during similar periods.
Nearly 40% of millennials have at least a bachelor’s degree, compared with 25% of baby boomers, and 30% of Gen Xers during the same period.
The lower wages will likely lead to long-term problems for millennials, the experts said. Already, many millennials are struggling with jobs that are either inconsistent, like contract or freelance work (which doesn’t offer benefits), or don’t pay enough. This is already having a serious impact on their ability to build wealth, since most millennials still can’t afford basics like their own home. For prior generations, homes were important tools for building wealth, in addition to providing a place to live.
Among young families, households headed by someone under the age of 35 in 2016 had an average net worth of $10,900, roughly half the level from 1995.
Much of this disparity stems from the Great Recession. Those who entered the workforce in its aftermath came in with low wages, leaving them at a career disadvantage. Many are also struggling with the $1.4 trillion-plus pile of student loan debt that has been accumulated by American students. For many, student debt payments make building wealth and buying homes unthinkable.
“Even as the economy steadily added back jobs lost, the protracted recovery was experienced unevenly, with well-off households doing better at the expense of others,” said Reid Cramer, director of the office that oversaw the study.
Using data from the St. Louis Fed, CNBC put together a generational “balance sheet” to illustrate how economic circumstances have changed.
Unfortunately for millions of workers, the uneven he recovery left many behind, and wealthier households typically found it easier to get back on their feet. By 2016, the top 10% of the country’s highest income earners received half of the total income generated in the US, a dramatic increase from just 38% of the country’s total income in 1992.
Anybody interested in reading the entire study can find it here.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/16/2019 – 22:00 - 'War On Terror' Has Killed Over 801,000 People & Cost $6.4 Trillion: New Study
‘War On Terror’ Has Killed Over 801,000 People & Cost $6.4 Trillion: New Study
Authored by Jessica Corbett via CommonDreams.org,
The so-called War on Terror launched by the United States government in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks has cost at least 801,000 lives and $6.4 trillion according to a pair of reports published Wednesday by the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.
“The numbers continue to accelerate, not only because many wars continue to be waged, but also because wars don’t end when soldiers come home,” said Costs of War co-director and Brown professor Catherine Lutz, who co-authored the project’s report on deaths.
A U.S. Army soldier fires an M4 carbine rifle during partnered live fire range training at Tactical Base Gamberi, Afghanistan on May 29, 2015. (Photo: Capt. Charlie Emmons/U.S. Army/Flickr/cc) “These reports provide a reminder that even if fewer soldiers are dying and the U.S. is spending a little less on the immediate costs of war today, the financial impact is still as bad as, or worse than, it was 10 years ago,” Lutz added. “We will still be paying the bill for these wars on terror into the 22nd century.”
The new Human Cost of Post-9/11 Wars report (pdf) tallies “direct deaths” in major war zones, grouping people by civilians; humanitarian and NGO workers; journalists and media workers; U.S. military members, Department of Defense civilians, and contractors; and members of national military and police forces as well as other allied troops and opposition fighters.
The report sorts direct deaths by six categories: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria/ISIS, Yemen, and “Other.” The civilian death toll across all regions is up to 335,745 — or nearly 42% of the total figure. Notably, the report “does not include indirect deaths, namely those caused by loss of access to food, water, and/or infrastructure, war-related disease, etc.”
By the end of 2020, the post-9/11 wars will have cost over 801,000 lives and $6.4 trillion. See our latest figures, released today at https://t.co/6aoJd0LazZ. pic.twitter.com/Ge5S85MmkR
— The Costs of War Project (@CostsOfWar) November 13, 2019
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Indirect deaths “are generally estimated to be four times higher,” Costs of War board member and American University professor David Vine wrote in an op-ed for The Hill Wednesday. “This means that total deaths during the post-2001 U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, and Yemen is likely to reach 3.1 million or more —around 200 times the number of U.S. dead.”
“Don’t we have a responsibility to wrestle with our individual and collective responsibility for the destruction our government has inflicted?” Vine asked in his op-ed. “Our tax dollars and implied consent have made these wars possible. While the United States is obviously not the only actor responsible for the damage done in the post-2001 wars, U.S. leaders bear the bulk of responsibility for launching catastrophic wars that were never inevitable, that were wars of choice.”
Referencing the project’s second new report, United States Budgetary Costs and Obligations of Post-9/11 Wars Through FY2020: $6.4 Trillion (pdf), Vine wrote, “Consider how we could have otherwise spent that incomprehensible sum — to feed the hungry, improve schools, confront global warming, improve our transportation infrastructure, and provide healthcare.”
“At a time when everyone from Donald Trump to Democratic Party candidates for president is calling for an end to these endless wars, we must push our government to use diplomacy — rather than rash withdrawals, as in northern Syria — to end these wars responsibly,” he concluded. “As the new Costs of War report and 3.1 million deaths should remind us, part of our responsibility must be to repair some of the immeasurable damage done and to ensure that wars like these never happen again.”
The project’s $6.4 trillion figure accounts for overseas contingency operations appropriations, interest for borrowing for OCO spending, war-related spending in the Pentagon’s base budget, medical and disability care for post-9/11 veterans (including estimated future obligations through FY2059), and Department of Homeland Security spending for prevention of and response to terrorism.
US budgetary costs and obligations of post-9/11 wars through FY2020 will equal an estimated $6.4 trillion https://t.co/caRRIleayD pic.twitter.com/2ajYQ4ynPB
— The Costs of War Project (@CostsOfWar) November 13, 2019
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Costs of War co-director and Boston University professor Neta Crawford co-authored the project’s death toll report and authored the budget report. For the latter, she wrote that “the major trends in the budgetary costs of the post-9/11 wars include: less transparency in reporting costs among most major agencies; greater institutionalization of the costs of war in the DOD base budget, State Department, and DHS; and the growing budgetary burden of veterans’ medical care and disability care.”
Both reports were released as part of the project’s new “20 Years of War” series. Crawford, Lutz, and fellow Costs of War co-director Stephanie Savell were in Washington, D.C. Wednesday to present the reports’ findings at a briefing hosted by the U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services.
“We have already seen that when we go to Washington and circulate our briefings, they get used in the policymaking process,” Lutz said in a news story published by Brown Wednesday. “People cite our data in speeches on the Senate floor, in proposals for legislation. The numbers have made their way into calls to put an end to the joint resolution to authorize the use of military force. They have real impact.”
Lutz pointed out that “if you count all parts of the federal budget that are military-related— including the nuclear weapons budget, the budget for fuel for military vehicles and aircraft, funds for veteran care — it makes up two-thirds of the federal budget, and it’s inching toward three-quarters.”
“I don’t think most people realize that, but it’s important to know,” she added. “Policymakers are concerned that the Pentagon’s increased spending is crowding out other national purposes that aren’t war.”
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/16/2019 – 21:30 - Apple Is Now Bigger Than The Entire US Energy Sector; Disney Is Bigger Than Europe's Top 5 Banks
Apple Is Now Bigger Than The Entire US Energy Sector; Disney Is Bigger Than Europe’s Top 5 Banks
Something fascinating took place on January 3: on that day AAPL slashed its revenue guidance, blamed China, and triggered a cascade of flash crashes across various carry currency pairs. More importantly, that day also saw the lowest stock print for AAPL since the summer of 2017, and triggered an unprecedented ramp in AAPL stock which since then is up a mindblowing 86%…
… largely as a by-product of its gargantuan stock buyback program, which started in Q3 2013, and which has seen a third of AAPL’s total stock repurchased in the past 6 years. If one extrapolates the current trend, AAPL will fully LBO itself, i.e., have no public shares outstanding some time in 2030.
And while a record buyback in an abysmally illiquid market can do miracles to give the impression that there is a natural buyer, there is only so much that Tim Cook can do to offset the inevitable selloff that will follow the collapse of the US-China trade talks which will also drag down any company that has exposure to the Chinese market, not to mention the next recession which will see consumer spending on AAPL service grind to a halt, until that moment comes, Bank of America’s Michael Hartnett has made a stunning observation: with a market cap of $1.17tn, AAPL now has a greater capitalization than the entire US energy sector.
And there is more to come: Apple this week issued a euro-denominated bond with a 0% coupon (whose proceeds AAPL will then promptly use to repurchase even more stock), which as Hartnett puts it is the “QE-induced bull market in “growth” & “yield” in a nutshell.“
There’s more. Now that Walt Disney has joined the deflation fray by trying to snatch market share from Netflix and Amazon by offering its streaming video service at roughly half the price (with remarkable success so far, adding 10 million users in just 24 hours) it too has enjoyed an amazing lift in its stock price now that it too is seen as a “growth” company, and at a market cap of $268 billion, Disney is now bigger than market cap of the 5 largest European banks – BNP, Santander, ING, Intesa and Credit Agricole.
Hartnett’s take: this is the “QE-induced bull market of “growth” over “value” in a nutshell.”
What happens next? Stock buybacks aside, as Hartnett puts it, 2019 was anything but data dependent… oh, and Bank of America once again has no qualms about calling “NOT QE” by its true name – “QE”:
Powell ’19 rate cuts & QE a success…recovery in credit market (US BBB credit 14.1% YTD), housing market (purchase & refi mortgage activity strongest since 2013 – MBAVBASC), stock market (global market cap up $12.1tn YTD), labor market still strong (unemployment 3.6%);
The punchline: “Fed now on hold but QE remains supportive for risk (Fed + ECB will buy $420bn assets next 6 months).” Here, regular readers will recall that at the start of August, this website was the first to correctly predicted that QE is coming, and just over two months later it was proven correct. And so the Fed has once again decided to reflate assets – of not the real economy – at any price, which means that until Powell stops, or more likely is forced to stop, the best trade may well be not to fight the Fed and the liquidity gusher it has again unleashed.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/16/2019 – 21:02 - Artificial Intelligence Will Enable The Future, Blockchain Will Secure It
Artificial Intelligence Will Enable The Future, Blockchain Will Secure It
Authored by Kristina Lucrezia Cornèr via CoinTelegraph.com,
Speaking at BlockShow Asia 2019, Todalarity CEO Toufi Saliba posed a hypothetical question to the audience:
“How many people would take a pill that made you smarter, knowing they can be controlled by a social entity?”
No one raised their hand, and he was unsurprised.
“That’s the response that I get, zero percent of you,” he continued.
“Now imagine at the same time the pill has autonomous decentralized governance so that no one can control or repurpose that pill but the host – yourself.”
This time hands were raised in abundance.
Decentralized governance represents a necessary step for the tech community to build up a trust in digital developments related to securely managing big data.
“Economics and ethics can go together thanks to decentralization,” commented SingularityNET CEO Ben Goertzel.
But does the decentralized governance represent a step forward from centralization, or it is just an illusion of evolution?
image courtesy of CoinTelegraph
Cole Sirucek, co-founder of DocDoc, shared his vision:
“It is when we are at a point of centralizing data that you can begin to think about decentralization. For example, electronic medical records: in five years the data will be centralized. After that, you can decentralize it.”
Goertzal didn’t fully agree: “I don’t think it is intrinsic. The reason centralized systems are simpler to come by is how institutions are built right now. There is nothing natural about centralization of data.” He elaborated on the mutual dependence of two important technologies:
“Blockchain is not as complex as AI, but it is a necessary component of the future. Without BTC, you don’t have means of decentralized governance. AI enables the future, blockchain secures it.”
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/16/2019 – 20:30 - For Sale: Gently-Used ICBM Silo In Arizona Desert
For Sale: Gently-Used ICBM Silo In Arizona Desert
Looking for a fixer-upper to kick back, relax and survive a nuclear apocalypse? Look no further!
Located 20 minutes outside of Tucson, Arizona underneath 12 acres of land, potential buyers are looking at a “BOLD opportunity to owned a decommissioned Titan II missile complex” of their own – for just $395,000!
According to the listing:
This property was once one of the most top secret of government assets and is now ready to fulfill a new mission. That mission is for you to define amongst the limitless scenarios. Secure storage facility? Underground bunker? Remarkable residence – literally living down under? The property is situated on a 12 + acre parcel with boundless views. Private yet not too remote.
The new owner will enter their ‘quaint’ complex via a ladder which descends into the missile Launch Control Complex (LCC) – where “three Titan II crewmen, the Missile Combat Crew Commander, the Deputy Missile Combat Crew Commander, Ballistic Missile Analyst Technician, and the Missile Facilities Technician lived in shifts,” according to Popular Mechanics.
Some background on Titan II missile facilities:
The Titan II missile entered service with the U.S. Air Force in 1963. Titan II was an intercontinental ballistic missile, capable of being launched from the U.S. and striking targets across the Northern Hemisphere, particularly the Soviet Union and China. The Titan II carried a single W-53 thermonuclear warhead with the explosive power of 9 megatons, or 9,000,000 tons of TNT. By comparison, the Hiroshima bomb was a relatively paltry 16,000 tons of TNT.
Titan II was also the first U.S. missile that was based in missile silos. These silos were sprinkled across the U.S., and some were parked outside Tuscon, Arizona. – Popular Mechanics
Sure, you’ll have to deal with the rust, and there’s no internal plumbing (septic system required) or electricity, or water – BUT the listing notes that the buyer is welcome to drill for a well.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/16/2019 – 20:00 - New Legislation Will Throw People In Jail For Disrespecting Cops
New Legislation Will Throw People In Jail For Disrespecting Cops
Authored by Matt Agorist via TheFreeThoughtProject.com,
In the land of the free, the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution explicitly prohibits the government from abridging the freedom of speech. However, we’ve seen citizens pepper-sprayed, assaulted, and arrested for there acts of free speech, showing just how little law enforcement cares about upholding the oaths they swore to this very Constitution. Now, a new piece of legislation that is quickly passing through the legal process in New York goes one step further.
If you annoy a police officer in upstate New York, you could find yourself facing massive fines and even jail time. Seriously.
In a vote this week, lawmakers in the Monroe County Legislature passed a proposal in a 17-10 vote to fine and/or jail a person who annoys, alarms or threatens the personal safety of an officer. The jail sentence is up to one year and the fine is up to $5,000.
According to the legislation, the anti-disrespecting applies to all first responders, not just cops.
Naturally, those who have respect for the constitution and freedom of speech in general, are up in arms over the passage of such a tyrannical piece of legislation.
As PIX 11 reports, “Iman Abid with the New York Civil Liberties Union said it will have a chilling effect on complaints against police. Abid said she is also concerned over what the legislation could mean for communities of color.”
“Members of the community have every right to challenge police officers, particularly those that engage in unnecessary behavior,” she said in a statement.
“At a time when more accountability of police departments is needed, this law takes us incredibly backward.”
But advocates for this tyranny claim that it “looks after those who look out for us” — because people need to be jailed if they talk back to a cop.
“This local law aims to crack down on behaviors of disrespect and incivility toward law enforcement and first responders in the hopes that these smaller incidents do not escalate,” County Legislator Kara Halstead said in a statement.
According to PIX 11:
Delores Jones-Brown, professor emerita at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said courts have found that the use of the words annoying or alarming in statue is overbroad and unconstitutionally vague.
The legislation, she said, could create a situation where people are scared to exercise their First Amendment rights. An officer could be annoyed by a person who asks them their badge number or who records them with a cellphone while on the job, Jones-Brown said.
“This statute definitely has the capacity to make people afraid to do that,” she said
We agree. This legislation is nothing short of tyranny and is paving the way for abuse by snowflake cops who cannot handle citizens talking back or disrespecting their authority. Instead of making respect a two-way street and earning it, this legislation sets out to mandate it through the threat of violence and kidnapping.
In the land of the free, a person can be kidnapped and thrown in a cage for arbitrary sounds made with their mouth or raising their middle finger that causes harm to no one.
Aside from this being clearly asinine, it’s well established by the Supreme Court that arresting someone for swearing and raising the middle finger is unconstitutional.
In Cohen v. California, the U.S. Supreme court upheld a citizen’s First Amendment right to wear a jacket to court that read “F**k the Draft,” the court held:
“WHILE THE PARTICULAR FOUR-LETTER WORD BEING LITIGATED HERE IS PERHAPS MORE DISTASTEFUL THAN MOST OTHERS OF ITS GENRE, IT IS NEVERTHELESS OFTEN TRUE THAT ONE MAN’S VULGARITY IS ANOTHER’S LYRIC. INDEED, WE THINK IT IS LARGELY BECAUSE GOVERNMENTAL OFFICIALS CANNOT MAKE PRINCIPLED DISTINCTIONS IN THIS AREA THAT THE CONSTITUTION LEAVES MATTERS OF TASTE AND STYLE SO LARGELY TO THE INDIVIDUAL.”
What’s more, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in City of Houston v. Hill, that police must tolerate even more abusive speech than an average citizen—which certainly includes looking at someone’s middle finger. The court concluded that “in the face of verbal challenges to police action, officers and municipalities must respond with restraint,” and added that, “the First Amendment protects a significant amount of verbal criticism and challenge directed at police officers.”
Here at the Free Thought Project, we feel there are no such things as ‘bad words’ but, rather, certain words some people don’t like to hear. The same goes with raising random fingers.
The arbitrary nature of government enforcing laws that dictate what vocabulary a person can use and which finger they can display to a cop is as ridiculous as it is tyrannical. Sadly, it remains a part of society and as this legislation illustrates, it is getting worse.
Have we learned nothing from history?
Telling people what words they can and can’t say or which fingers they can raise, to ‘protect’ a cop’s feelings is chilling. Freedom of speech does not come with terms and conditions.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/16/2019 – 19:30 - Trump's $50 Billion Farm Deal Is Fantasy After Trade War Market Shifts
Trump’s $50 Billion Farm Deal Is Fantasy After Trade War Market Shifts
Industry insiders have told South China Morning Post (SCMP) that President Trump’s alleged $50 billion agriculture deal with China is merely a fantasy, used to stimulate his Farm Belt supporters ahead of an election year, and even used as a communication tool to drive the stock market to new highs. Still, the likelihood of it actually happening is very low.
SCMP notes that China has never confirmed the $50 to $60 billion agriculture deal that President Trump consistently tweets about and touts in headlines.
The deal I just made with China is, by far, the greatest and biggest deal ever made for our Great Patriot Farmers in the history of our Country. In fact, there is a question as to whether or not this much product can be produced? Our farmers will figure it out. Thank you China!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 12, 2019
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Agricultural analysts said even if China agreed to purchase additional US agriculture products, the numbers that the Trump administration uses are incorrect.
Darin Friedrichs, senior Asia commodity analyst at trading house INTL FCStone in Shanghai, told SCMP that since the African swine fever wiped out 50% of the pigs in China, demand for soybean and corn has disappeared.
“With the African swine fever, there’s just not much demand for the stuff that the US has to offer in terms of corn or soybeans to feed pigs – because we just do not have any pigs. We’ve lost half of them!” said Friedrichs.
With soybean prices falling from $13 per bushel two years ago to $9 today, “even if they [China] bought the same amount they did before the trade war, it’s just not going to make the same dollar value,” Friedrichs added.
Nick Marro, head of the Economist Intelligence Unit in Hong Kong, told SCMP that there is a tremendous “disconnect between the political and economic realities here.”
“China has made real efforts to diversify its meat sourcing in recent months, signing export deals with France and Brazil. From the US too, diversification has been the order of the day.”
Chinese buyers are rushing to diversify away from the US and have signed landmark deals with Argentina and Brazil for corn and soybean. They’ve also signed trade deals in Australia, Europe, South America, and New Zealand for beef, dairy, and pork to fill supply gaps.
John Reeve, director at Agree Commodities Australia, said China sourced very little beef from Australia in 2012 — but at present day, China is purchasing an unbelievable amount, as it continues diversifying from the US.
“We’ve gone from virtually no beef going to China in 2012 to it being our biggest market now. There are 30 to 40 years of hard graft in developing the premium name, so we are very vulnerable to any fluctuation in the trade policy related to tariffs,” Reeve said.
An overwhelming number of analysts found that it would be challenging for the US to restore its market share in China considering the damage the Trump administration caused by escalating the trade war.
Even though China is purchasing some agriculture products from the US in recent weeks, the numbers President Trump uses are propaganda to hype up his base for re-election and send the stock market to new highs.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/16/2019 – 19:00 - Facebook App Is Secretly Accessing iPhone Users' Camera
Facebook App Is Secretly Accessing iPhone Users’ Camera
Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,
While unsuspecting iPhone users read their daily dose of mainstream media news, the Facebook app is secretly accessing the camera on their smartphones. But Facebook says not worry: it’s only a bug…
Users, however, are rightly concerned that Facebook is recording them as they use the app. Unlike on Apple’s computers, there is no indicator when an app is accessing the camera, so it is possible for an app to do so in secret, as reported by The Independent.
Facebook says the strange behavior is caused by a bug that was added to the code by accident and that there is no indication that photos or videos are being sent to its servers. The company claims an update has already been submitted to Apple that should remove it. In the meantime, the potential security flaw can be avoided by a simple fix in the iPhone settings that keeps Facebook from seeing the camera at all.
The bug first came to light after users noted that the app would occasionally shift the entire feed over to the right, as part of what appeared to be a bug. Underneath that main app a different screen could be seen – which showed video from the phone’s built-in camera. –The Independent
“We recently discovered that version 244 of the Facebook iOS app would incorrectly launch in landscape mode,” a Facebook spokesperson said.
“In fixing that issue last week in v246 (launched on 8 November) we inadvertently introduced a bug that caused the app to partially navigate to the camera screen adjacent to News Feed when users tapped on photos.
“We have seen no evidence of photos or videos being uploaded due to this bug. We’re submitting the fix for this to Apple today.”
“We’ve confirmed that we didn’t upload anything to FB due to this bug and that the camera didn’t capture anything since it was in preview mode. We’ve submitted a fixed version to the App Store which is already rolling out,” wrote Facebook’s vice president of integrity Guy Rosen in a series of Tweets.
The problem can be fixed by revoking Facebook’s access to the camera. That is done by heading into the Settings app and navigating to the Facebook option – clicking that should bring up a number of permissions that have been granted to the app, including the ability to access the camera, which can be turned off by changing the toggle.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/16/2019 – 18:30 - Meet The Company Building A Lithium Ion Battery That's "Less Likely To Explode"
Meet The Company Building A Lithium Ion Battery That’s “Less Likely To Explode”
Paging Elon Musk…
SimpliPhi is a company based in Oxnard, California that is trying to tackle the problem of making a clean battery to store power. The company makes what it calls “clean, safe lithium-ion batteries, free of cobalt, the toxic element that can lead batteries to overheat and catch fire.”
The company’s power systems use lithium iron phosphate (LFP), which is a compound that doesn’t carry the risks of traditional lithium ion batteries, according to Bloomberg. Companies like Blue Planet Energy and Sonnen are also using the LFP technology to make safer batteries.
ClintoSimpliPhi’s batteries have already been adopted by groups like the n Foundation, who has installed their batteries, management software and other tools in hospitals and clinics on Puerto Rico after it was ravaged by Hurricane Maria. The model is also working for California homeowners and businesses that are dealing with persistent blackouts as a result of the state’s ongoing wildfires.
Each of these companies is also competing with Tesla and other battery makers to play a larger role in shifting energy away from fossil fuels.
Lithium ion batteries are a decades old technology and are considered crucial to widespread adoption of green energy, like wind and solar, because the electricity generated needs to be stored somewhere. Energy storage worldwide is expected to “multiply exponentially” over the next 20 years, necessitating $662 billion in investments. The market today relies on cobalt chemistries, but the LFP compound is increasing in its market share.
Even better yet is the fact that SimpliPhi hasn’t burned through hundreds of millions of dollars, like every other startup company. It has been profitable since 2013 and has been doubling or tripling revenue annually. It expects to do $20 million in revenue in 2019. Its systems – tens of thousands of them – have been deployed in more than 40 countries. All of its employees are part-owners.
Electrical engineer Josh Crosby, president of power-system consulting firm CatalystE in Huntsville, Ala., has been using SimpliPhi’s batteries in projects for the U.S. military since 2014. He said:
“Their safety track record, efficiency, and price—two to three times less than what military battery makers charge—led [me] to SimpliPhi. Its batteries have been tested at the U.S. Army Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland and the Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune in North Carolina and deployed in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. Cobalt is more energy-dense and lighter, but it’s not going to last as long, and you have an inherent risk of fire.”
Catherine Von Burg, SimpliPhi’s co-founder said:
“How can we talk about clean energy if we’re using a chemistry that is fundamentally hazardous and toxic?”
That’s a great question: maybe someone should ask Elon Musk.
Recall, it was only days ago we wrote about one Tesla owner not being able to dispose of his wrecked vehicle as a result of the toxins in its battery.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/16/2019 – 18:00 - Democrats Flipped From "Quid Pro Quo" To "Bribery" Because A 'Focus Group' Told Them To
Democrats Flipped From “Quid Pro Quo” To “Bribery” Because A ‘Focus Group’ Told Them To
Authored by ‘Allahpundit’ via HotAir.com,
Something to bear in mind the next time Pelosi starts burbling about how “prayerful” this process has been for them.
Apparently Jesus told her to start focus-grouping battleground states to find the way forward.
Chris Wallace passed along the info to Fox viewers this morning…
Chris Wallace on “how political” impeachment is: House Dems changed messaging after focus grouphttps://t.co/6fnpkZ5E4w pic.twitter.com/NsbU3hhHsj
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) November 15, 2019
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
…and WaPo reported on it last night:
Several Democrats have stopped using the term “quid pro quo,” instead describing “bribery” as a more direct summation of Trump’s alleged conduct.
The shift came after the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee conducted focus groups in key House battlegrounds in recent weeks, testing messages related to impeachment. Among the questions put to participants was whether “quid pro quo,” “extortion” or “bribery” was a more compelling description of Trump’s conduct. According to two people familiar with the results, which circulated among Democrats this week, the focus groups found “bribery” to be most damning. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because the results have not been made public.
Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), a House Intelligence Committee member, kicked off the effort to retire “quid pro quo” from the Democratic vocabulary during a Sunday appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” where he said “it’s probably best not to use Latin words” to explain Trump’s actions.
It makes me laugh to think of Dems needing a focus group to explain to them that “bribery,” a concept even kindergarteners grasp as wrong, is a bit more effective than “quid pro quo” when trying to turn public opinion against the president. That’s so elementary that I assumed they switched to bribery in their messaging for legal reasons, because it’s an impeachable offense specified in the Constitution. No more hiding by the GOP behind the vagueness of the term “high crimes and misdemeanors”! Pelosi was about to put them on the spot: This is bribery, son. It’s right there in black and white in Article II. If the facts are there, you must vote to remove.
But no, turns out she and Schiff needed a group of average joes to officially confirm that bribe sounds worse than some Latin term known mainly to lawyers.
I’m surprised Trump hasn’t highlighted the focus-grouping on Twitter yet.
Not only does it underline that impeachment is a political process, being run by people who stand to gain electorally by investigating him, but it leaves Democrats open to the claim that they’re not just tweaking the terminology based on public opinion, they’re tweaking the actual charges. If the facts, which haven’t changed materially since this started, told a straightforward story of bribery all along then why was the less definitive “abuse of power” cited until recently as the core claim against POTUS?
Ah well, doesn’t matter. Probably no one is watching these hearings who hasn’t already been persuaded one way or the other already:
Lots of Democrats are watching, no doubt because they’re psyched to see Trump formally accused of wrongdoing by witnesses. Lots of Republicans are not watching, either because they don’t want to see it or because they’re not going to be convinced by some Democratic production. Maybe the numbers will move for Trump’s Senate trial, when the stakes are higher and the GOP is in charge.
If I were Pelosi, I’d be worried about those independent numbers, though. It stands to reason that they’re the most persuadable voters out there. It’s one thing for partisan Republicans to skip the hearings but if indies are tuning out too then whose mind is to be changed by them? No one’s. As they’re increasingly coming to realize.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/16/2019 – 17:30 - Baltimore City Hits 300 Homicides For 5th Consecutive Year Amid Murder Crisis
Baltimore City Hits 300 Homicides For 5th Consecutive Year Amid Murder Crisis
Baltimore has just hit 300 homicides for the fifth consecutive year, reported The Baltimore Sun.
On a per-capita basis, Baltimore is one of the most dangerous cities in America. If you have plans on going to Baltimore for the holidays — cancel them immediately — that’s because the city is imploding on itself, likely to get worse in the early 2020s.
The murder crisis in Baltimore could hit a record this year. There are 47 days left, and as of Saturday morning, 301 homicides have been logged into The Baltimore Sun murder map — as shown below:
Homicides trends for the year are above average — even in the “greatest economy ever,” where President Trump continues to pump headlines detailing how black youth are doing better than they ever have. As to why anyone would believe government jobs data ahead of an election year is beyond us — come to Baltimore, and you’ll see first hand many of the inner cities stuck in a decades-long depression of extreme wealth inequality that has led to the collapse of economic mobility for hundreds of thousands of African Americans.
The murder crisis isn’t slowing down but rather accelerating into year-end. One would think because of seasonal factors, such as cold weather, that homicide trends would weaken — but not this year — it’s likely total homicides for the year will range from 330 to 345.
Baltimore Police Commissioner Michael Harrison told reporters on Thursday that the murder crisis is “ruining families and it’s horrifying, and we’re all disgusted by it.”
Harrison is right, the disgust among working-class families is so high that a massive exodus has been seen in the last several years as the city’s total population has collapsed to 100-year lows. Many are fleeing for the suburbs, escaping death and destruction.
Harrison, who previously served as New Orleans’ police chief, told reporters last week that it could be several years before crime trends are reversed.
He said a new deployment strategy in Baltimore had been implemented to address the “culture of violence” in the city affecting the youth.
So if you have holiday plans to visit Baltimore City — please cancel them if you value your life.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/16/2019 – 17:00 - Stablecoins 'Threaten Global Financial Stability', Fed Warns
Stablecoins ‘Threaten Global Financial Stability’, Fed Warns
Authored by William Suberg via CoinTelegraph.com,
Stablecoins could “complement” other payment systems and improve conditions for consumers, but need constant checks, says the United States Federal Reserve.
In its November 2019 Financial Stability Report released on Nov. 15, the Fed highlights stablecoins and their potential impact on the U.S. and beyond.
image courtesy of CoinTelegraph
Fed: Unregulated stablecoins “pose risks”
Rather than dismissing the phenomenon, officials eye potential use cases for the future but insist any stablecoin must adhere to regulatory demands.
“Innovations that foster faster, cheaper, and more inclusive payments could complement existing payment systems and improve consumer welfare if appropriately designed and regulated,” the report explains.
At the same time, the Fed warns:
“However, the possibility for a stablecoin payment network to quickly achieve global scale introduces important challenges and risks related to financial stability, monetary policy, safeguards against money laundering and terrorist financing, and consumer and investor protection.”
It added rare official praise of Facebook’s embattled Libra concept, describing it as an example of stablecoins, which “have the potential to rapidly achieve widespread adoption.”
“A global stablecoin network, if poorly designed and unregulated, could pose risks to financial stability,” it states elsewhere.
Better fractional reserve coin?
The report comes as the Fed takes an increasing interest in digital currency. As Cointelegraph reported earlier this month, the central bank is currently looking for a dedicated research manager for the sphere, as China prepares to launch its state-backed digital currency.
At the same time, a former advisor to U.S. President Donald Trump revealed last month he plans to issue his own stablecoin, which is not fully backed by reserves.
U.S. lawmakers have sought to vet existing stablecoin offerings, notably market leader Tether (USDT), which currently faces a multibillion-dollar lawsuit that Bitcoin (BTC) figures have broadly dismissed.
This week, Fed chair Jerome Powell meanwhile admitted that the $23 trillion U.S. national debt was no longer “sustainable,” but that the consequences of not paying it off were not critical.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/16/2019 – 16:30 - Leaked Chinese Government Documents Prove Muslims Are Being Detained In Massive Numbers
Leaked Chinese Government Documents Prove Muslims Are Being Detained In Massive Numbers
There’s now substantial evidence – in the Chinese government’s own words – that they are detaining Muslims in massive numbers.
403 pages of internal documents have been leaked to the New York Times that describe a clampdown in Xinjiang – a resource-rich territory located on the border of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia – where authorities have “corralled as many as a million ethnic Uighurs, Kazakhs and others into internment camps and prisons over the past three years.”
In Xinjiang, Muslim ethnic minority groups make up more than half the region’s population of 25 million. The largest group is the Uighurs. Beijing has fought with the Uighurs for decades, who have offered resistance to Chinese rule.
The current crackdown began after a surge of antigovernment and anti-Chinese violence, including ethnic riots in 2009 in Urumqi, the regional capital, and a May 2014 attack on an outdoor market that killed 39 people just days before Mr. Xi convened a leadership conference in Beijing to set a new policy course for Xinjiang.
The Chinese government has called these camps “job training centers” to fight Islamic extremism, but the documents seem to confirm the coercive nature of the crackdown in the words of the Chinese government.
The campaign is being called “ruthless and extraordinary”. Senior party leaders are recorded ordering “drastic and urgent” action, including mass detentions. The leaked papers show how the country carried out its “most far-reaching internment campaign since the Mao era.”
President Xi Jinping laid the groundwork for the camps during speeches to officials in Xinjiang in April 2014, after Uighur militants stabbed more than 150 people at a train station, killing 31. In his speech, Xi called for “an all-out struggle against terrorism, infiltration and separatism using the organs of dictatorship and showing absolutely no mercy.”
Xi also said: “The methods that our comrades have at hand are too primitive. None of these weapons is any answer for their big machete blades, ax heads and cold steel weapons. We must be as harsh as them and show absolutely no mercy.”
Xi also urged his party to “emulate aspects of America’s war on terror after the Sept. 11 attacks.”
“We say that development is the top priority and the basis for achieving lasting security, and that’s right. But it would be wrong to believe that with development every problem solves itself,” Xi said in one speech.
In another speech, he said: “After the United States pulls troops out of Afghanistan, terrorist organizations positioned on the frontiers of Afghanistan and Pakistan may quickly infiltrate into Central Asia. East Turkestan’s terrorists who have received real-war training in Syria and Afghanistan could at any time launch terrorist attacks in Xinjiang.”
The camps expanded rapidly in 2016 when Chen Quanguo was appointed new party boss for the region. He handed out Xi’s speeches to stay on message and implored his officials to “round up everyone who should be rounded up.” Any local leaders that stood in Chen’s way were immediately purged, including one official who was jailed.
And the leak suggests that there could be discontent from within the party. The Chinese, who often undertake policymaking under the cloak of secrecy, are certainly not known for leaking internal government documents.
Since 2017, hundreds of thousands of Muslims have been detained in Xinjiang. One leaked document describes how to handle minority students returning home to Xinjiang in summer 2017 to find that their relatives have been detained. The document says that students should be informed that their relatives are receiving “treatment”.
One document ordered: “Keep up the detentions. Stick to rounding up everyone who should be rounded up. If they’re there, round them up.”
Officials in Eastern Xinjiang drafted the Q and A script and distributed the guide across the region, urging officials to use it as a model.
The document says: “Returning students from other parts of China have widespread social ties across the entire country. The moment they issue incorrect opinions on WeChat, Weibo and other social media platforms, the impact is widespread and difficult to eradicate.”
Authorities suspected that the answers wouldn’t work well with students and also supplied answers to follow up questions like:
- When will my relatives be released?
- If this is for training, why can’t they come home?
- Can they request a leave?
- How will I afford school if my parents are studying and there is no one to work on the farm?
The guide recommends answers that get firmer in nature, eventually culminating telling students that their relatives have been “infected” by the “virus” of radical Islam and must be quarantined and cured. Even grandparents could not be spared, officials were told to say.
One answer says: “If they don’t undergo study and training, they’ll never thoroughly and fully understand the dangers of religious extremism. No matter what age, anyone who has been infected by religious extremism must undergo study.”
Another says: “Treasure this chance for free education that the party and government has provided to thoroughly eradicate erroneous thinking, and also learn Chinese and job skills. This offers a great foundation for a happy life for your family.”
The authorities are using a scoring system to see who can be released from camps. Students are told that the system takes into account their daily behavior, which has a direct effect on when their relatives may be released.
“There must be effective educational remolding and transformation of criminals. And even after these people are released, their education and transformation must continue,” President Xi said during one trip to Xinjiang.
You can read the New York Times’ full longform piece, including all of the leaked documents, here.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/16/2019 – 16:00 - Goldman's Euphoria Indicator Just Hit An All-Time High: What Happens Next?
Goldman’s Euphoria Indicator Just Hit An All-Time High: What Happens Next?
With the S&P closing above 3,100 and the Dow sprinting higher in the last seconds of Friday trading to close above 28,000 for the first time ever, one can argue that the long awaited melt-up has finally arrived.
After a year of relentless retail and institutional outflows from equity funds yet which has seen a record buyback tide prop up the entire stock market (just last week BofA recorded its 6th busiest week on record for client buybacks, up 26% from the already record buyback pace in 2018 and making a mockery of the so-called buyback blackout period), equity flows are finally picking up as bond flows slow down. According to EPFR, flows into bond funds (+$4.2bn) slowed sharply this week from the very strong pace seen for most of this year ($10bn a week on average), while flows into equity funds (+$9.6bn) on the other hand remained strong for a third straight week, in contrast to the trend for almost a year (-$5bn a week since December) according to Deutsche Bank. Indeed, over the last three weeks, flows into equity funds ($33bn) overtook those into bonds ($23bn), for the first time since early December 2018 over comparable rolling three week periods.
Yet with most pieces in place to explain the melt up, there was one minor glitch in the matrix: even as US stocks soared in the past few weeks with just 2 down days the entire month of November, equity flows are rotating away from the US. Within equities, US (-$0.4bn) funds saw outflows this week which were more than offset by strong inflows into EM (+$3.2bn), Europe ($1.5bn) and funds with a global mandate (+$5.2bn). Within global funds in particular, Deutsche Bank noted that those which invest only outside the US saw very strong inflows ($3.1bn), their strongest since March of last year. Meanwhile, for European funds, inflows over the last four weeks have been the strongest since March of last year.
Actually, it’s not just outflows from US stocks that doen’t fit the narrative: recent US data has been unexpectedly disappointing, with the Citi US economic surprise index sliding back in the red after surging from deep negative in June, until it hit the most positive print in the past year at the end of September.
At the same time, various GDP Nowcasts and consensus estimates have tumbled, with the average Q4 GDP print now expected to come in at around 0.83%, down sharply from just last week’s 1.25%.
Then there are US corporate earnings: according to Factset, with 92% of the companies in the S&P 500 reporting, the blended earnings decline for the index for the third quarter is -2.3%. Meanwhile, consensus EPS forecasts have tumbled in recent weeks, and Q4 EPS growth is now also in the red, suggesting US corporations are knee-deep in an earnings recession.
What is amusing, is Goldman strategist Alessio Rizzi summarizes these recent transformations, writing on Friday that “since the end of the summer, the baton has been passed from monetary policy to global growth, supporting a sharp re-rating of risky assets led by the underperformers in the first part of the year.”
This is, in a word, laughable: not only has the baton not been passed to global growth, as US growth is once again backsliding, and Germany just escaped a recession by literally the smallest of possible margins growing at just 0.1% in Q3, the same dismal growth as Japan, but the latest Chinese data have been downright miserable, with GDP now expected to print below 6% and China’s credit impulse just barely rebounding from cycle lows at a time when China’s total credit injection was the lowest in years.
Perhaps what Rizzi meant to say is that the baton has been passed from monetary policy to NOT QE as investors has plowed into risk assets following the Fed’s recent decision to buy $60 billion in T-Bills per month (which as both Bank of America last week, and Citi’s Matt King on Friday now admit IS in fact, QE). Incidentally, anyone who wishes to understand what is really going on in the market is urged to read Matt King’s latest “Has the monetary tsunami restarted?” (spoiler alert: yes).
Source: Carl Quintanilla Yet where the Goldman strategist is right is that as a result of the Fed’s latest intervention, the bank’s Risk Appetite Momentum indicator – also known as Goldman’s “euphoria meter” – is now at all-time highs.
This is a problem, because while Goldman may have totally butchered the cause and effect of the recent NOT QE (but really QE)-driven meltup, where it does provide some actionable information is that record high levels of its Risk Appetite Momentum, those above 1, have historically signaled negative asymmetry for equity returns.
And while the sharp increase in risk appetite has likely been exacerbated by bearish positioning, the high RAI Momentum suggests that investors have started to price in a bottoming of the growth slowdown, which thanks to the market’s reflexivity, increases the risk of disappointments: after all, the catalyst for the Q4 2018 crash was the collapse in central bank liquidity and fears that the Fed would hike even more (obviously, all that ended in Q1 of 2019 after the market’s mini bear market on Christmas Eve 2018).
There is another risk according to Rizzi – one where investors turn from overly bearish to overly bullish, or as he put it, as markets shift from TINA (there is no alternative) to FOMO (fear of missing out), “there is a risk of an overshoot vs. the data, especially as noise around growth is likely to remain high.”
So far, early signs of FOMO are coming from the options market, where call options have been well bid. Indeed, after a record high at the end of September, implied volatility skew has declined sharply across assets, equity spot-vol correlation has become much less negative and call vs. put volume has risen materially.
That said, for now it appears that euphoria is largely confined to the near future with longer-term option pricing still pointing to a less constructive stance. To wit, “while 1m equity call skew has become more expensive, long-dated call skew still looks considerably cheaper.”
In addition, equity put skew has only marginally declined and the volatility term structure is now very steep, as long-term volatility has materially lagged the decline in short-term vol. This suggests investors’ concerns over 2020 remain high, likely owing to the US political agenda – i.e., will Warren beat Trump in the 2020 presidential elections – and uncertainty around the growth upside.
Add to the above observed euphoria the fact pointed out at the very beginning of this article that investors are finally throwing in the towel on defensive positioning and rotating into risk assets, and one can correctly conclude that the latest melt up has arrived.
Goldman’s Rizzi is not fully convinced just yet, noting that “overall positioning does not appear very bullish” but as he warns “with market prices moving sharply higher recently and our RAI Momentum indicator being at historical highs, the hurdle rate for further positive surprises that sustain the strong momentum seems to have increased.”
As such, Goldman concludes that “a moderation in the pace of the ‘risk on’ move is now more likely, unless a more sizeable improvement in the macro and political outlook materializes”, or, more accurately, unless the Fed doubles down on its NOT QE. Alternatively, it is quite possible that the blow-off top accelerates into year end without any justification – besides the Fed’s latest massive liquidity injection which have boosted the Fed’s balance sheet by nearly $300 billion in the past 2 months, a faster rate than that observed during QE3.
Incidentally, the last time we had a similar market melt-up was in late January 2018, just before vol sellers overextended themselves, resulting in the overnight annihilation of the entire inverse VIX ETN complex, and the market collapsed. Back then, however, the Fed and other central banks were actually on hiatus from explicitly supporting risk assets; this time, however, with the Fed and ECB once again engaging in full-blown debt monetization, a sudden loss of confidence in risk assets – and by extension central banks – could prove catastrophic, especially with a record number of investors shorting the VIX…
… potentially setting up the biggest VIX short squeeze in history.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/16/2019 – 15:30 - "Voters Don't Want To See Crazy Stuff" – Obama Asks WTF Are 2020 Democrats Doing
“Voters Don’t Want To See Crazy Stuff” – Obama Asks WTF Are 2020 Democrats Doing
Former President Obama cautioned 2020 Democratic candidates not to move too far to the left, as messages of sweeping societal and government transformations risk turning off the party’s moderate base, according to the New York Times.
“Even as we push the envelope and we are bold in our vision, we also have to be rooted in reality,” said Obama – who told a room of wealthy liberal donors: “Even as we push the envelope and we are bold in our vision we also have to be rooted in reality.”
“The average American doesn’t think we have to completely tear down the system and remake it.”
Obama joins House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, former Florida Senator Bill Nelson, and other moderate Democrats in his implicit warning over plans by Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) who have called for a “political revolution” and “big structural change” with ideas that would eliminate private health insurance and place a moratorium on deportations according to The Hill.
The comments marked an extraordinary entrance into the primary contest by the former president, who has been careful to avoid even the appearance of influencing the direction of the race.
His remarks offered an implicit critique of Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who have urged voters to embrace “political revolution” and “big, structural change,” as well as proposals once widely considered to be left to the liberal fringes of the party, including court packing and decriminalizing illegal border crossings. –NYT
“I don’t think we should be deluded into thinking that the resistance to certain approaches to things is simply because voters haven’t heard a bold enough proposal and if they hear something as bold as possible then immediately that’s going to activate them,” added Obama. “There are a lot of persuadable voters and there are a lot of Democrats out there who just want to see things make sense. They just don’t want to see crazy stuff. They want to see things a little more fair, they want to see things a little more just. And how we approach that I think will be important.”
In April, the former president said “One of the things I do worry about sometimes among progressives in the United States — maybe it’s true here as well — is a certain kind of rigidity where we say, ‘Uh, I’m sorry, this is how it’s going to be,’ and then we start sometimes creating what’s called a ‘circular firing squad,’ where you start shooting at your allies because one of them has strayed from purity on the issues,” adding “And when that happens, typically the overall effort and movement weakens.”
In early November, Pelosi suggested that 2020 Democrats may strike out against Trump with ultra-liberal policies that may fire up coastal leftists, but may not go over well elsewhere.
“What works in San Francisco does not necessarily work in Michigan,”Pelosi said in a wide-ranging interview with Bloomberg. “What works in Michigan works in San Francisco — talking about workers’ rights and sharing prosperity.”
Bill Nelson, meanwhile, also said earlier this month that if Warren or Sanders become the party’s nominee in 2020 that Democrats would effectively be ceding Florida to Trump.
“The answer is yes,” said Nelson – a Biden supporter who narrowly lost his re-election in 2018. “I say this with the greatest respect and admiration and friendship for those other senators who embrace Medicare for All. But the hard reality is, it is going to be a stretch too far for the Democrat candidate.“
And while Obama is now cautioning 2020 progressives against straying too far left, he’s still not endorsing his former VP Joe Biden, the moderate Democratic frontrunner.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/16/2019 – 15:00 - Chinese Soldiers Deployed Onto Street Of Hong Kong To "Help Clean Up"
Chinese Soldiers Deployed Onto Street Of Hong Kong To “Help Clean Up”
Dozens of People’s Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers were spotted on the streets of Hong Kong’s Kowloon Tong neighborhood on Saturday afternoon, cleaning up bricks and roadblocks left behind by pro-democracy protestors, according to broadcaster Radio Television Hong Kong (RTHK).
Chinese People’s Liberation Army (#PLA) soldiers in shorts and t-shirts joined pro-#China residents in #HongKong on Saturday (Nov 16) to clean up barricades and debris after anti-government protests blocked roads pic.twitter.com/czZH5k8o3R https://t.co/hlqLj5TtMZ
— Atlantide (@Atlantide4world) November 16, 2019
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PLA is in #HongKong, claimed voluntarily to clear the road block.
What if next time they come out for maintaining the order with guns voluntarily? The main point is: PLA is already IN Hong Kong. #HongKongProstest #PoliceState pic.twitter.com/CwAJinAhjC
— J. L😷 (@JL30905014) November 16, 2019
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#BREAKING: A PLA commander tells press “this is a volunteer mission. Stopping violence in #HongKong is every one’s responsibility.” He refuses to say if the action is requested by #HongKongPolice or govt pic.twitter.com/r3E27jvpLc
— Victor Ting (@VictorTing7) November 16, 2019
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This was the first time PLA soldiers have entered the streets of the city since the violent protests began in June.
VIDEO: PLA ‘#arbeitsdienst’ at work on the streets of HongKong pic.twitter.com/U0eRFaA31F #ViolencesPolicieres #Beijing #CCP #fascism #PRC #PLA #Corbyn #CarrieLam #Chinazi
— Sam Pye (@freddie1999) November 16, 2019
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The soldiers, unarmed, dressed in olive T-shirts with a Chinese flag on the sleeves, used buckets and brooms for about one hour to clean up streets around the barracks in Kowloon Tong, RTHK said.
One PLA soldier told the South China Morning Post that their actions weren’t related to any direct orders from the Government of Hong Kong.
“We initiated this! ‘Stopping violence and ending chaos’ is our responsibility,” he said, quoting a phrase used by President Xi Jinping.
So far, there hasn’t been any official statement from the Government of Hong Kong about PLA soldiers on the streets.
According to Article 14 of the Garrison Law, PLA soldiers are permitted to enter the streets of Hong Kong to assist with disaster relief or maintaining public order if requested by the local government.
On Thursday, President Xi broke his silence over the chaos in the city at the 11th BRICS Summit in Brazil.
President Xi said the violent protests in Hong Kong threatened the rule of law and social order, which has sent the city into crisis.
“We will continue to firmly support the chief executive in leading the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government to govern in accordance with the law, firmly support the Hong Kong police in strictly enforcing the law, and firmly support the Hong Kong judicial bodies in severely punishing the violent criminals in accordance with the law,” he said.
If violent protests persist, it could be entirely possible that PLA soldiers are re-deployed with riot control gear and weapons.
Garrison Law: #PLA can be deployed only upon HK govt’s request.
However, PLA said that they initiated to clean the barricases in Hong Kong Baptist University today. They are violating the law of #HongKong. They cannot intervene affairs of Hong Kong.#HKBU pic.twitter.com/Rc1URHgqUK— HKgirl_ilovehk (@HkgirlI) November 16, 2019
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Hong Kong has recently entered a technical recession. The city is on the verge of financial collapse.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/16/2019 – 15:00
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