- Washington Makes Endless War And Calls It Peace
Washington Makes Endless War And Calls It Peace
Authored by Daniel Larison via TheAmericanConservative.com,
Andrew Bacevich rightly rejects the idea that there was ever a Pax Americana in the Middle East:
“It took many decades to build a Pax Americana in the Middle East,” X writes. Not true: it took only a handful of hours – the time he invested in writing his essay. The Pax Americana is a figment of X’s imagination.
Defenders of U.S. hegemony like to make what they think is a flattering comparison between the U.S. and the Roman Empire, but where the Romans made a desert and called it peace the U.S. has gone to war in the desert again and again with no end in sight.
Not only has the U.S. not brought peace, but there is little reason to think that our government is capable of doing so. More to the point, the U.S. has no right to keep meddling in the affairs of these nations. It would also be accurate to say that the more American involvement there has been in the region, the less pax there has been there. There is nowhere else in the world where our foreign policy is as intensely militarized, and it is no accident that it is also where our foreign policy is most destructive. If the U.S. genuinely desired stability and the security of energy supplies, it would not be waging an economic war on Iran, and it wouldn’t be fueling a disgraceful war on Yemen. The author of that piece, William Wechsler, notably has nothing to say about either one of those policies.
Opponents of U.S. withdrawal from the Middle East make two major claims: that withdrawal would harm U.S. interests and that it would make the region worse off than it already is.
The second point is wrong but debatable, and the first one depends on an absurdly expansive definition of what U.S. interests are. The piece that Bacevich is answering asserts that “it would be a terrible mistake and deeply harmful to the United States” to withdraw from the region, but the author does not show that current troop levels of more than 50,000 people are necessary or even useful for securing U.S. interests. The U.S. didn’t have and didn’t need a large military presence in the Middle East for the entire Cold War, and it doesn’t need to have one now. Having a military presence in the region has directly contributed to increased threats to U.S. security through terrorism, and it made the Iraq war debacle possible. The greatest harm to U.S. security has come from our ongoing extensive military involvement in this part of the world.
Neither does the author demonstrate that U.S. foreign policy up until now has actually been doing the job he thinks it has. For instance, he mentions “supporting a delicate balance of power that promotes regional stability and protects our allies,” but looking back over just the last twenty years of U.S. foreign policy in the region there is no evidence that the U.S. has been supporting a balance of power or promoted regional stability. On the contrary, to the extent that there was a balance of power at the start of this century, the U.S. set about destroying it by overthrowing the Iraqi government, and it has further contributed to the destabilization of at least three other countries through direct or indirect involvement in military interventions. The clients that the U.S. has in the Middle East aren’t allies and we aren’t obliged to protect them, but the U.S. hasn’t done a terribly good job of protecting them, either. The U.S. has managed to indulge its clients in reckless and atrocious behavior that has also made them less secure and undermined our own security interests. Support for the war on Yemen is a good example of that. Enabling the Saudi coalition’s war has bolstered Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), devastated and fractured Yemen, and exposed Saudi Arabia to reprisal attacks that it had never suffered before.
The other major flaw with the Wechsler piece is that he is warning against something that isn’t happening:
As campaign promises tend to become governing realities for American foreign policy, the prospect of a full U.S. withdrawal from the Middle East now stands before us.
If only that were true. The U.S. has more troops in the region than it did at the start of this year. There is no sign that those numbers will be reduced anytime soon. Support for the war on Yemen continues, and the president has gone out of his way to keep arming the Saudi coalition. Even in Syria, there will still be an illegal U.S. military presence for the foreseeable future. Full withdrawal is nowhere in sight right now. The U.S. is heading in the opposite direction. The author pretends that withdrawal is in the offing and then urges the next president to “reverse this course,” but there is nothing for the next president to reverse. So why rail against something that hasn’t happened and isn’t likely to occur? This is an old tactic of making the option of withdrawing from the region seem so extreme and dangerous that it has to be rejected out of hand, but these scare tactics are less and less effective as we see the mounting costs of open-ended conflict and deep entanglement in the affairs of other countries.
The author wants the next administration “to reestablish American leadership in the Middle East, restore deterrence with our adversaries, and begin renewing trust with our partners and allies,” but he has not made a persuasive case that “American leadership” in the region is worth “reestablishing” even if it were possible to get back to the way things were before the Iraq war. Many of the “partners and allies” in question are themselves unreliable and have become liabilities, and many of the adversaries do not really threaten the U.S. Bacevich concludes that there needs to be a radical overhaul of U.S. foreign policy in the region on account of its colossal failures:
Given the dimensions of that failure, the likelihood of resuscitating X’s illusory Pax is essentially zero.
There is no going back to an imagined Golden Age of American statecraft in the Middle East. The imperative is to go forward, which requires acknowledging how wrongheaded U.S. policy in region has been ever since FDR had his famous tete-a-tete with King Ibn Saud and Harry Truman rushed to recognize the newborn State of Israel.
Once we acknowledge those errors, the next step is not to fall into the same patterns out of a misguided desire for “leadership” and domination. Instead of chasing after a fantasy of imposing peace in some other part of the world, we need to stop our destabilizing and destructive policies that perpetuate conflict and make new wars more likely.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 11/17/2019 – 23:30 - Meet The Man In Charge Of Building Elon Musk's "Boring" Las Vegas Tunnel
Meet The Man In Charge Of Building Elon Musk’s “Boring” Las Vegas Tunnel
So you’ve officially won the contract from Las Vegas to build a “subterranean transit system” by undercutting the bids of established players in the engineering space.
Now what?
Well, now comes the hard part: the Boring Company is going to actually have to prove that they have the technology and the talent to take on a large scale commercial project, instead of a test run using a go-kart on skates in 50 feet of tunnel near Tesla headquarters.
And who better to be in charge of the project than former restaurant owner and Boring Company President Steve Davis, according to Bloomberg. Davis’ former bar, not unlike the Boring Company, was a bit odd. It sold “Ring Pops, kept a Bedazzler on the premises and gave 10% off to anyone who dressed up as Carlton from the TV show Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.”
And now he’s going to be drilling a hole through Las Vegas. Perfect.
Now, Davis will be on site on Friday to mark the beginning of tunnel drilling under the Las Vegas convention center. The $48.7 million project is the first, and only, major project so far for the Boring Company. Pit construction and other preliminary work on the project began two months ago.
The plan is for Las Vegas convention center attendees to be able to board Teslas running along a throughway underground and be moved half the distance of the complex in just 1 minute.
Mike Wongkaew, who was a Boring Co. engineer until late last year, said of Davis: “He has the ability to inspire people. He also rolls up his sleeves and helps out.”
Wongkaew said Davis was among those helping the Boring Company finish its Hawthorne test tunnel. He has been called a “sharp engineer” by colleagues.
Juan Reyes, former acting administrator of the Federal Railroad Administration said: “He’s a technical guy. They really count on him to resolve issues.”
But there are apparently “no shortage of issues” at the Boring Company today. Two major projects – one in Washington and one in Chicago – have both been put on hold. In Chicago, Rahm Emmanuel’s successor, Mayor Lori Lightfoot, called Musk’s promise to build the tunnel without city money “a total fantasy”.
Additional critics have called into question the safety of the company’s tunnels and its lack of experience with large scale project. But the company believes that it is their new, disruptive thinking that is going to allow it to develop technology to build tunnels “faster and cheaper”.
Yeah, just like the alien dreadnaught was going to revolutionize auto manufacturing. Now, we’re building cars in a tent.
Davis has been working for Musk since 2003, when he was hired at SpaceX. He has two master’s degrees – one in particle physics and the other in aerospace engineering. Being with Musk for almost two decades definitely makes him one of Musk’s longest standing employees.
One SpaceX engineer said of him: “He’s been working 16 hours a day every day for years. He gets more done than 11 people working together.”
He has also performed major feats of engineering for Musk. For instance, Musk once assigned him with the task of making a $120,000 part for just $5,000. Davis worked on it for months and figured out a way to make the part for just $3,900.
While working for SpaceX, he also decided to get into the frozen yogurt industry:
At SpaceX, Davis spent a few years working in different locations, including Omelek Island in the Marshall Islands, where the company once had launch facilities, as well as its Southern California headquarters. Then, a little over a decade ago, he moved to Washington to open the company’s D.C. office. There, missing the type of frozen yogurt he’d grown accustomed to in California, he decided to learn to make it himself via trial and error, according to an interview with a local radio station.
As a side project, he opened his own yogurt store, Mr. Yogato, in the city’s Dupont Circle neighborhood, three months before the first successful launch of SpaceX’s Falcon 1 vehicle in 2008. Mr. Yogato customers who answered trivia questions correctly got 10% off, as did anyone who could stump Davis on a Seinfeld question, according to the “Rules of Yogato” posted on the shop’s website. Those who came dressed as tennis star Bjorn Borg got 25% off.
Davis also started working on a PhD while at SpaceX, pursuing a degree in economics at George Mason University. There, he wrote his 2010 dissertation at U.S. currency debasement. In the preface to his dissertation, as one does, he noted that he “one day hoped to open a restaurant called ‘Little Yohai,’ perhaps finding inspiration in Morrie Robert Yohai, inventor of the Cheez Doodle.”
He has since sold his bar in 2015 and sold his yogurt shop for $1, after holding a contest to select the new owner. Davis has also “served as a member of the board of advisers of the Atlas Society,” a group dedicated to exploring the philosophy of Ayn Rand.
In 2016, when Musk started Boring Company, he brought Davis on stage with him and joked with him about their plans for using the company’s waste products to sell “Boring Bricks”. Davis seemed to have a good rapport with Musk, which is probably why he has stayed on board with him for so long.
But not everyone is enthused about this friendship. Las Vegas’ mayor, Carolyn Goodman, has taken a stance against the project, citing “the company’s track record of completing zero commercial projects so far.”
But when Davis spoke about the project this spring at a Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority meeting, the group outvoted Goodman and approved the project. An integral part of Davis’ job has been convincing local officials, something he was familiar with at SpaceX, too.
Reyes said: “He was always trying to adjust things so the government would ultimately approve it.”
And now the future of the Boring Company may hinge on it. Other cities that are considering tunnel projects, like San Jose, will be watching closely to see if Davis can pull off the Vegas project without a hitch.
Davis said during his presentation with Musk: “Flying cars … they don’t really exist. Tunnels do exist. And are very buildable.”
Tyler Durden
Sun, 11/17/2019 – 23:00 - Trump Trounces Krugman: "He's Been Wrong About Me From The Start"
Trump Trounces Krugman: “He’s Been Wrong About Me From The Start”
President Trump has been very active on Twitter recently but time away from impeachment attacks to blast another establishment puppet – The New York Times’ Paul Krugman – slamming the nobel prize winner:
“[Krugman] has been wrong about me from the very beginning. Anyone who has followed his “words of wisdom” has lost a great deal of money. Paul, just concede the game, say I was right, and lets start a brand new game!”
President Trump’s comments follow David Harsani’s National Review op-ed, exposing Krugman as “a stopped clock who has yet to be right about Trump.”
This Thursday, Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell told the House Budget Committee that there was “no reason to think, that I can see, that the probability of a downturn is at all elevated.” Not every economic indicator is perfect, but wages are rising (especially on the lower end), unemployment is still at historic lows, and markets are booming.
You might remember that only a couple of months ago, there was a torrent of stories cautioning us about the imminent downturn. Some of the scary coverage, as Robert Shiller warned, consisted of “self-fulfilling prophecies.” Some seemed almost giddy about the political prospects of a downturn. Others just said what they felt. “I feel like the bottom has to fall out at some point,” Bill Maher explained at the time. “And by the way, I’m hoping for it because I think one way you get rid of Trump is to crash the economy. So please, bring on the recession.”
One of the nation’s leading doomsayers has been the New York Times’ perpetually mistaken Paul Krugman, who warned shortly after the 2016 election that Trump’s victory would trigger a global recession “with no end in sight.”
We could file that under “post-election hysteria,” but as late as April of this year he was still telling crowds that the bond-market signals predicted “a pretty good chance of a recession sometime in the next year or so.” And he has kept this going all year:
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February 11: Paul Krugman expects a global recession this year, warns “we don’t have an effective response.”
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August 1: “Why Was Trumponomics a Flop?”
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August 15: “From Trump Boom to Trump Gloom”
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September 5: “Trumpism Is Bad for Business”
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October 3: “Here Comes the Trump Slump”
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October 24: “The Day the Trump Boom Died”
A couple of weeks after the Trump Boom expired, CNBC reported that “October job creation comes in at 128,000, easily topping estimates even with GM auto strike.” This cycle has been going on for three years.
(My favorite Trump-era Krugmanism, though, is when the esteemed economist explains away his bad predictions by claiming that the economy’s successes are really just driven by instances of his own political preferences playing out — “Impeaching Trump Is Good for the Economy,” “The Economics of Donald J. Keynes,” and so on.)
At some point, of course, doomsayers such as Krugman are going to be right. In the past 60 years the United States has been hit with recessions in 1960–61, 1969–70, 1973–75, 1980, 1981–82, 1990–91, 2001, and 2007–09. History says we’re probably due for another one soon. When it hits, Krugman will blame tax cuts, unfettered capitalist greed, a dearth of regulations — and maybe climate change, or whatever hobbyhorse he’s riding at the time. MSNBC hosts will hail him as a seer.
Much like most economists, I have no clue what the future holds. But I do know that Barack Obama, who oversaw the slowest recovery in American history, was constantly being given credit for averting disaster by adopting smart policies (read: spending). Years after the bailouts – which is to say years of D.C. gridlock in which the former president, by his own admission, couldn’t enact any of his preferred economic policies – Democrats were still claiming that short-term first-year spending fixes were the impetus for growth.
There’s a more rational explanation: Washington stopped helping.
Voters vastly overestimate the role that presidents play in economic growth, to be sure. But Trump-era job creation was a far tougher task, since he was operating with less room for job growth than his predecessor. And considering the (self-inflicted) trade wars, political turmoil, and foreign-policy concerns that have dominated much of his first term, conventional wisdom tells us we should be struggling. Yet it’s clear that we’ve had a pretty resilient economy.
What has Trump done? The two things Paul Krugman hates most: Regulatory rollbacks and tax cuts. And yet here we are.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 11/17/2019 – 22:30 -
- China Quietly Bails Out Another Bank With 620 Billion Yuan In Assets
China Quietly Bails Out Another Bank With 620 Billion Yuan In Assets
Late last week, we argued that one could ignore China’s sinking retail sales, industrial production, capital expenditures, record low and declining sub-6% GDP and even its fading monthly credit injections and impotent credit impulse, and instead what matters most for the world’s second biggest economy with the world’s biggest financial system (at around $40 trillion, roughly double that of the US) is the following chart showing the market cap to total assets ratio for the four largest commercial banks in China, which as Saxo Bank found, hit a new all-time low of 5.8% in Q3 as total assets grew an annualized 8% in Q3 while market cap of the four banks declined.
This means that Chinese investors – who happen to know best what is truly going on behind the scenes – are not valuing these new assets as high quality, and the dynamic in China right now is that the current credit expansion is just offsetting the surge in bad loans, whose real amount Beijing has been keeping under wraps ever since the great bank debt for equity swap of 1999, but which we know is far higher the propaganda number of around 1.5% The net effect is zero credit transmission to the real economy in China constraining economic growth, which in turn makes banks especially vulnerable to failure as a result of even modest capital outflows.
Confirming that there is something fundamentally broken with China’s debt transmission mechanism and that, by implication, Chinese bad loans are soaring, two weeks after we reported that there was a bank run at Henan Yichuan Rural Commercial Bank which brought the bank to the verge of collapse, the WSJ reported that Harbin Bank, a politically-linked midsize Chinese lender based in the capital of northeast Heilongjiang province, became the latest Chinese financial institution to get a state bailout after its key private shareholders were replaced by government investors.
Harbin Bank, which is one of the biggest banks in China’s northeast with 622 billion yuan in assets as of June 30, 2019, and trades on Hong Kong’s stock exchange, becomes the fifth bank – after Baoshang Bank , Bank of Jinzhou, Heng Feng Bank, and Henan Yichuan Rural Commercial Bank – to be bailed out by the state, and will be 48%-controlled by two government entities after six private shareholders shed their stakes, according to a bank statement issued late on Friday.
Total consideration for the shares involved came to almost 15 billion yuan, or around $2.1 billion, the bank said, though it described the transactions as transfers rather than stock sales, which is to be expected if the bank was being bailed out instead of actually selling a viable stake.
As has been the customary case, the bank didn’t provide any reason for the transactions in the statement, and Chinese bank regulators made no comment on the action.
And, as was the case with at least one previous bank “rescue”, Harbin Bank was connected to a former oligarch who disappeared not that long ago amid allegations of massive fraud. Indeed, as the WSJ reports, the bank is among a handful of financial businesses in China linked to once-powerful tycoon named Xiao Jianhua who in early 2017 disappeared amid a wave of prosecutions of big private investors. Businesses owned by some of those people, including Wu Xiaohui’s Anbang Insurance Group Co., have also since become government-owned.
Xiao Jianhua Incidentally, the first of the year’s bailouts of a troubled small lenders was that of Baoshang Bank, which as we reported at the time, was also linked to Xiao. Its government takeover in May sparked a funding crisis for many other small banks in China and helped send Harbin Bank’s shares sharply lower. The stock has fallen more than 16.5% in 2019. Incidentally, when discussing the failed lender, China’s PBOC said that Baoshang was being restructured and that the takeover was designed to “stop bleeding” at the bank and contain risks to the financial sector.
So why did Harbin Bank fail?
In its financial report for H1 2019, Harbin Bank cited deteriorating asset quality – read surging bad loans – as well as intensified competition for deposits and higher borrowing costs in money markets as China’s economy slows. Yet, paradoxically, the near-insolvent lender also said it recorded a profit of 2.18 billion yuan, or about $311.1 million, though that was off about 16% because of, drumroll, more-aggressive write-offs of bad debts. Which goes to show that corporate earnings reports in China are as “credible” as all other Chinese economic “data.”
As for the oligarch behind not one but two bank failures in the country so far this year, Chinese authorities have publicly said nothing about Xiao since he abruptly left Hong Kong and entered mainland China in early 2017. He has made no public comment and can’t be reached.
Another curious fact: a little over a year ago, Harbin Bank, which in March 2018 had abandoned plans to list its shares in China, announced it would raise over $2 billion in perpetual bonds to replenish its capital after regulators in early 2018 allowed lenders to sell such instruments to bolster their balance sheets. Incidentally, a perpetual bonds is effectively the same thing as equity, but for some bizarre reason sells much better in China where the investing population is apparently stupid enough to be fooled by the clever change in designation. As such, Harbin Bank was the first Chinese lender to announce its intention to sell perpetual bonds to increase its Additional Tier 1 (AT1) capital. We now know what prompted the bank’s rush.
Harbin Bank’s exiting shareholders are business entities owned by a number of individuals, according to the company’s latest annual report. The biggest holder among them, Heilongjiang Keruan Software Technologies owned a 6.55% stake and is identified in the annual report as the subsidiary of another business primarily owned by two individuals.
Who are the bank’s new owners?
Under the transactions disclosed Friday, an entity controlled by Harbin city’s financial bureau, Harbin Economic Development & Investment, will control 29.63%, compared with 19.65% at the end of June. A second, new shareholder will have a 18.55% stake: Heilongjiang Financial Holdings Group Co., which was established in January by the province of Heilongjiang. Combined, these state-owned enterprises would own nearly 50% of the bailed out bank.
Meanwhile, since the PBOC refuses to admit or acknowledge that it has an unprecedented bad loan problem, and thus nothing can be done to address the underlying cause at the heart of China’s failing bank problem, expect more and ever bigger Chinese bank bailouts until eventually a bank fails and its depositors are impacted, sparking a furious scramble by Chinese depositors across the country to redeem their roughly $27 trillion (190 trillion yuan) in bank deposits, which as a reminder, is more than double the total amount of US commercial bank deposits.
They are in for an unpleasant surprise.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 11/17/2019 – 22:05 - Taibbi: Deval Patrick's Candidacy Exposes Democrats' 2020 'Clown Car' Disaster
Taibbi: Deval Patrick’s Candidacy Exposes Democrats’ 2020 ‘Clown Car’ Disaster
Authored by Matt Taibbi via RollingStone.com,
The entrance of the former Massachusetts governor into the presidential race is more proof the party has no clue where the votes are…
Deval Patrick, former governor of Massachusetts and newly-resigned executive of Mitt Romney’s private equity firm Bain Capital, has entered the Democratic primary race, which is shaping up to be the biggest ensemble-disaster comedy since Cannonball Run.
Patrick’s entry comes after news that former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg put himself on the ballot in Alabama and Arkansas. It also comes amid word from Hillary Clinton that “many, many, many” people are urging her to run in 2020, and whispers in the press that an “anxious Democratic establishment” has been praying for alternate candidacies in a year that had already seen an astonishing 26 different people jump in the race.
A piece in the New York Times a few weeks ago suggested Democratic insiders, going through a “Maalox moment” as they contemplated possible failure in next year’s general election season, were fantasizing about “white knight” campaigns by Clinton, Patrick, John Kerry, Michelle Obama, former Attorney General Eric Holder (!), or Ohio’s Sherrod Brown.
The story described “concern” that “party elites” have about the existing field:
With doubts rising about former Vice President Joseph R. Biden’s ability to finance a multistate primary campaign, persistent questions about Senator Elizabeth Warren’s viability in the general election and skepticism that Mayor Pete Buttigieg, of South Bend, Ind., can broaden his appeal beyond white voters, Democratic leaders are engaging in a familiar rite: fretting about who is in the race…
LOL at the non-mention of Bernie Sanders in that passage. If Bernie wins the nomination, “Buttigieg Finishes Encouraging Fourth” is going to be your A1 Times headline.
Patrick in announcing voiced a similar set of “concerns,” basically saying he’s proud to enter this deep, richly experienced field that sucks just enough to force his emergency entrance:
“I admire and respect the candidates in the Democratic field. They bring a richness of ideas and experience and a depth of character that makes me proud to be a Democrat. But if the character of the candidates is an issue in every election, this time is about the character of the country.”
The Times said Patrick’s policy prescriptions place him “closer to the ideological center than to the left.” In another story about Patrick and Bloomberg, the Times explained that both men “believe there is room in the race for a more dynamic candidate who is closer to the political middle than Mr. Biden’s two most prominent challengers, Ms. Warren and Senator Bernie Sanders.”
People like Bloomberg and Patrick seem to believe in the existence of a massive electoral “middle” that wants 15-point plans and meritocratic slogans instead of action. As befits brilliant political strategists, they also seem hyper-concerned about the feelings of the country’s least numerous demographic, the extremely rich. A consistent theme is fear (often described in papers like the Times as “concern”) that the rhetoric of Warren and Sanders might unduly upset wealthy folk.
“I don’t think that wealth is the problem. I think greed is the problem,” Patrick told CBS This Morning.
He added that “taxes should go up on the most prosperous and the most fortunate,” but “not as a penalty.”
What does that mean? Should we impose higher taxes on the rich but include a note from the IRS saying, “It’s not because we don’t love you”?
Along with an alarmingly high number of press figures, politicians like Patrick seem to be trapped in an “electability” concept that hasn’t made sense since the Reagan-Bush years. Outside of a few spots on the Upper East Side and in Georgetown and L.A., the “center” has been gone a long time.
From Donald Trump to Sanders to Warren, the politicians attracting the biggest and most enthusiastic responses in recent years have run on furious, throw-the-bums-out themes, for the logical reason that bums by now clearly need throwing out.
America’s political establishment has created vast inequities not only in the economy, but in criminal justice (where street crime is heavily punished, but white collar crime is not), war (it’s mostly not the sons and daughters of politicians and CEOs getting killed in overseas conflicts), health care (where much of the population lives in fear that getting sick will trigger bankruptcy), debt forgiveness (Wall Street bailout recipients got to write off losses, but people suffering foreclosures and student loan defaults are ruined), and other arenas.
You can’t capture the widespread discontent over these issues if you’re running on a message that the donor class doesn’t deserve censure for helping create these messes. It’s worse if you actually worked — as Patrick did — for a company like Ameriquest, a poster child for the practices that caused the 2008 financial crisis: using aggressive and/or predatory tactics to push homeowners into new subprime mortgages or mortgage refis, fueling the disastrous financial bubble.
If we count Bloomberg, Patrick marks the 28th person to run in the 2020 Democratic race. Pundits from the start have hyped a succession of politicians with similar/familiar political profiles, from Beto O’Rourke to Kamala Harris to Buttigieg to Amy Klobuchar to John Delaney, and all have failed to capture public sentiment, for the incredibly obvious reason that voters have tuned out this kind of politician.
They’ve heard it all before. Every time a long-serving establishment Democrat gets up and offers paeans to “hope” and “unity” and “economic mobility,” all voters hear is blah, blah, blah. They’re not looking for what FiveThirtyEight.com calls a “Goldilocks solution,” i.e. “Buttigieg, but older,” or “Biden, but younger” (or, more to the point in the case of this Bain Capital executive, “Mitt Romney, but black”); they’re looking for something actually different from what they’ve seen before.
The party’s insiders would have better luck finding a winning general election candidate if they randomly plucked an auto mechanic from Lansing, Michigan, or a nail salon owner from Vegas, or any of a thousand schoolteachers who could use the six months of better-paid work, than they would backing yet another in the seemingly endless parade of corporate-friendly “Goldilocks solutions.” That’s assuming they can’t see past themselves long enough to at least pretend they can support someone with wide support bases like Sanders or Warren.
If what the Times calls the “Anxious Democratic Establishment” remains stuck in the same doomed, outmoded “centrist” strategy, next year’s general election season will almost certainly be a miserable repeat of 2016. It seems like everyone sees this but the people with the most money to fund challenges to Trump. Watching people like Patrick talk themselves into running into the populist wood-chipper is a cringe-worthy spectacle, like watching a relative who can’t sing at all talk himself into going on The Voice. Can someone tell these people the bad news?
Tyler Durden
Sun, 11/17/2019 – 21:40 - Epstein's Prison Guards Could Face Criminal Charges
Epstein’s Prison Guards Could Face Criminal Charges
While the political and financial elites across the globe (and certainly in the UK) are doing everything in their power to bury the Epstein scandal – so to speak- both literally and metaphorically, CBS reports that such efforts face a hurdle as Federal prosecutors in New York are considering bringing criminal charges against the two correctional officers responsible for guarding Jeffrey Epstein on the night of his death.
As a reminder, Epstein, who was 66 at the time of his death, was found unresponsive in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City on August 10.
The official explanation for Epstein’s death was suicide, although skeptics have suggested that Epstein’s sudden death was all too convenient as it also buried the toxic secrets of countless implicated “luminaries” and Wall Street and Beltway VIPs across all sectors of US life.
As a reminder, Epstein, who had been charged with sexually abusing a number of underage girls, was placed on suicide watch the month before his death after he was found on his cell floor with bruising on his neck. But multiple sources said that Epstein had been taken off suicide watch after about a week, and placed into a high-security housing unit where he was supposed to be checked on every 30 minutes.
At the end of October, prominent forensic expert Michael Baden refuted the official narrative, stating at the end of October that Epstein was “strangulated.”
https://video.foxnews.com/v/embed.js?id=6099044550001&w=500&h=281
More recently, a viral meme claiming that “Epstein did not kill himself” has taken America by storm…
… culminating with an interview involving Matt Taibbi and outspoken radio host Joe Rogan, in which the viral phrase “Epstein was died” was born.
Prosecutors offered the officers the opportunity to plead guilty to the charges, but the officers declined the offer, the source added. And while the CBS source said it was not a plea deal, CNN’s reporting suggested otherwise, noting that “at least one federal prison worker on duty the night before Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in his prison cell was offered a plea deal in connection with the multimillionaire’s death.” As CNN elaborated, plea deal negotiations between prosecutors and attorneys indicate forthcoming charges by the Department of Justice relating to Epstein’s death.
The two prison staff members who are allegedly the target of a criminal probe were guarding the unit where Epstein died by apparent suicide failed to check on him that night for about three hours, even though they were supposed to check on detainees in the special housing unit every 30 minutes.
Of the two officers who had the responsibility to monitor Epstein, one was not a detention guard but was temporarily reassigned to that post, according to CNN reporting. The guard, a man not identified by officials, had previously been trained as a corrections officer but had moved to another position. Rules at the Federal Bureau of Prisons allow people who work in other prison jobs, such as teachers and cooks, to be trained to fill in for posts usually manned by regular guards.
The second staff member on Epstein duty was a woman fully trained as a guard, according to the person briefed on the matter. Both guards were working overtime shifts, but it’s unclear whether that was mandatory.
As questions about how such a high-profile prisoner could have died on the correctional center’s watch, both the FBI and the Justice Department’s inspector general investigating the death.
Meanwhile, as reported earlier, in the latest scandal to emerge from Epstein’s death – and life – the attempt by the UK’s Prince Andrew – the second son of Queen Elizabeth II – to explain away his friendship with the pedophile financier in a high-profile TV interview “degenerated into a farce“, which as Bloomberg notes, threatens to be the British royal family’s biggest public relations disaster since its handling of the death of Princess Diana in 1997.
It is so bad, in fact, that Prince Andrew’s PR Adviser Jason Stein resigned over his catastrophic interview:
Sky News confirms Prince Andrew’s PR adviser Jason Stein resigned over the Duke’s decision to agree to the interview with the BBC
— Sky News Breaking (@SkyNewsBreak) November 17, 2019
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So yes, some embarrassment for the Queen and her immediate circle, but will there be any long-term consequences? Hardly: we are confident the royal family will spend enough PR money to put this scandal to bed in the coming days and weeks, meanwhile all those people whose secrets could have been exposed had Epstein “talked” will be delighted that their skeletons will remain forever in the closet with Epstein’s
murdersuicide, because whoever ordered the Epstein hit was hardly dumb enough to leave any “fingerprints.”As such, any criminal probe into Epstein’s guards will, sadly, end with them.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 11/17/2019 – 21:15 - The Hugely Important OPCW Scandal Keeps Unfolding. Here's Why No One's Talking About It
The Hugely Important OPCW Scandal Keeps Unfolding. Here’s Why No One’s Talking About It
Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,
The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons is now hemorrhaging evidence that the US and its allies deceived the world once again about yet another military intervention, which should be a front-page story all over the world.
Yet if you looked at American news media headlines you’d think the only thing that matters right now is indulging the childish fantasy that Donald Trump might somehow magically be removed from office via supermajority consensus in a majority-Republican Senate.
CounterPunch has published an actual bombshell of a report by journalist Jonathan Steele containing many revelations about the OPCW scandal which were previously unknown to the public. Steele is an award-winning reporter who worked as a senior foreign correspondent for The Guardian back before that outlet was purged of all critical thinkers on western imperialism; he first waded into the OPCW controversy last month with a statement made on the BBC revealing the existence of a second whistleblower on the organisation’s investigation into an alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma, Syria.
If you haven’t been following this story you can click here for a timeline of events to fully appreciate the significance of these new revelations about the Douma incident, but just to quickly recap, in April of last year reports surfaced that dozens of civilians had been killed in that city by chemical weapons used by the Syrian government under President Bashar al-Assad. This immediately drew skepticism from people who’ve been paying attention to the narrative manipulation campaign against Syria, since Assad had already won the battle for Douma and had no strategic reason to employ banned weapons there knowing that there would be a military strike in retaliation from western powers. True to form, a few days later the US, France and the UK launched airstrikes on the Syrian government.
The OPCW released its final report on Douma in March of this year, but that report has been contradicted by two separate whistleblowers from the Douma investigation. The first surfaced in May of this year with a leaked Engineering Assessment claiming the chlorine cylinders found at the crime scene were unlikely to have been dropped from the air, and that it was far more likely that they were manually placed there, i.e. staged, by the occupying opposition forces in Douma. The second whistleblower came forward last month with a day-long presentation in Brussels before a panel of experts assembled by the whistleblowing defense group Courage Foundation, the findings of which were published by WikiLeaks.
Chemical weapons watchdog accused by its own inspectors: see https://t.co/RRCu540aJv
— Jonathan Steele (@steelejourno) November 15, 2019
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This new report by Steele focuses on information provided to him by the second whistleblower, who is going by the pseudonym “Alex” out of fear for his safety. The information provided by Alex has turned out to be far more incendiary even than the leaked Engineering Assessment. Here are seven major highlights (hyperlinks go to the relevant article text they reference):
1- US government officials attempted to pressure OPCW investigators into believing that the Assad government was responsible for the Douma incident. The officials were placed in the same room as the investigators by the OPCW’s then-cabinet chief Bob Fairweather, which the investigators of course felt was a grossly inappropriate breach of the OPCW’s commitment to impartiality. For the record the US government already has a known history of bullying the OPCW, an ostensibly independent and international body, to force it to allow the advancement of pre-existing regime change agendas.
2- Alex reports that internal dissent on the OPCW’s official publications on the Douma incident was far more ubiquitous than previously known, saying “Most of the Douma team felt the two reports on the incident, the Interim Report and the Final Report, were scientifically impoverished, procedurally irregular and possibly fraudulent.”
3- All but one member of the team agreed with the Engineering Assessment that it was far more likely that the chlorine cylinders were manually placed on the scene by people on the ground.
4- Ian Henderson, the South African ballistics expert whose name was signed on the leaked Engineering Assessment, seems to have been responsible for leaking it. The identity of the leaker was not previously known to the public.
5- Investigators experienced pressures against saying anything about their mounting findings that no chemical attack occurred, with Alex calling it “the elephant in the room which no-one dared mention explicitly”.
6- The OPCW’s Final Report on the Douma incident explicitly claimed the investigation found “reasonable grounds that the use of a toxic chemical as a weapon took place. This toxic chemical contained reactive chlorine. The toxic chemical was likely molecular chlorine.” Yet according to Alex the levels of chlorinated organic chemicals found on the scene “were no higher than you would expect in any household environment” and were in fact “much lower than what would be expected in environmental samples”, comparable to or even lower than the World Health Organisation’s recommended chlorine levels for drinking water. This extremely crucial fact was actively and repeatedly omitted from the OPCW’s public reporting in a way Alex describes as “deliberate and irregular”.
7- Steele mentioned last month that he’d unsuccessfully reached out to the OPCW for comment on the second OPCW whistleblower’s revelations, and in his new article he confirms that the organisation is still dodging him, with both Fairweather and the OPCW’s media office refusing to respond. La Repubblica’s Stefania Maurizi has also been reporting that the OPCW is dodging the press on this important matter. The OPCW did respond to press inquiries after the first whistleblower surfaced in May, but it appears that someone has given the order to cease doing so with the claims of this second whistleblower.
This story — 2 whistleblowers accusing OPCW of suppressing evidence, under US pressure, to reach a conclusion that justified US strikes on Syria —
should be a global scandal. Instead it’s widely ignored, except for a principled few like @caitoz who’ve called it from the start: https://t.co/hGSMVAan0d— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) November 16, 2019
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If there were any correlation between newsworthiness and actual news coverage, the OPCW scandal would be making front-page international headlines today. Instead, the mounting evidence that the US and its allies committed a war crime based on false information and that a supposedly independent watchdog organisation helped them cover it up barely registers. Why is that?
If you ask Syria narrative managers like The Guardian’s George Monbiot or The Intercept’s Mehdi Hasan, this isn’t a big story because even if Assad wasn’t responsible for the Douma incident, it doesn’t matter because he’s still a very bad man. But this is an extremely intellectually dishonest obfuscation on their part, because this has nothing to do with whether or not Bashar al-Assad is a nice person. The OPCW covering up its findings exculpating the Syrian government on Douma wouldn’t be significant because it would mean that Assad is a good person, it would be significant because it would mean the US deceived the world about yet another military intervention. And it would make it much harder for the US to manufacture public support for other military interventions in the future.
Which is of course the real reason the political/media class is ignoring the OPCW scandal. Military violence is the glue that holds the US-centralized empire together, which means it is of utmost strategic importance that that empire retain the ability to manufacture consent for military violence going forward. Because plutocrat-controlled news media outlets are set up in such a way that their employees know their careers depend on protecting the empire upon which the plutocratic class is built, the OPCW scandal is an obvious no-go for anyone who wishes to remain in the business.
The only way this story will get mainstream coverage is if it goes viral without the assistance of the mainstream media, at which point the propagandists will be forced to report on it to save face and begin the near-impossible task of trying to regain control of the narrative. This will only happen if enough of us work together to shove the OPCW scandal into mainstream attention. I think this would end up being a very good thing for the world.
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Tyler Durden
Sun, 11/17/2019 – 20:50 - Bannon Wanted Eric Ciaramella Kicked Off National Security Council Amid Concerns Over Leaks
Bannon Wanted Eric Ciaramella Kicked Off National Security Council Amid Concerns Over Leaks
Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon said in a Friday interview that in 2017, he was involved in an effort to remove alleged whistleblower Eric Ciaramella from the National Security Council over concerns about leaks.
“When I was in the White House there was a number of people in the National Security Council — the named individual eventually got let go, I believe because people were suspicious, not me, but other people around him were suspicious about his leaking, and that’s why he was let go,” Bannon told VICE in an interview which published Friday.
Bannon served in the White House until August 2017, while Ciaramella – who became former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster’s personal aide in June 2017, was called out as a leaker by journalist Mike Cernovich that same month.
The whistleblower, who is reported to be a CIA analyst, filed a complaint on Aug. 12 accusing President Donald Trump of abusing his office in his dealings with Ukraine.
Bannon said he does not believe that the whistleblower needs to be identified publicly, but he did confirm his involvement in efforts to remove an individual now rumored to be the whistleblower from the NSC.
“I don’t think the individual naming of the whistleblower is important, although there was a story in The Washington Times … that tied me to the efforts to get, at least, the gentleman who was named out of the National Security Council,” said Bannon, who left the White House on Aug. 18, 2017.
“Is that true?” a VICE reporter asked Bannon.
“The individual that was named, absolutely true,” he replied. –Daily Caller
Watch:
Tyler Durden
Sun, 11/17/2019 – 20:25 - Here's The Real Reason Why Hong Kong Authorities Are Desperate To Regain Control Of University
Here’s The Real Reason Why Hong Kong Authorities Are Desperate To Regain Control Of University
The last few days have seen scenes of utter carnage appearing on social media round the world as Hong Kong authorities (with the ‘generous support’ of the PLA) have fought with students at various universities.
However, the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) was apparently the main focus of the police, and became a literal battleground.
Poly U entrance in flames as riot police try to storm in #HK #HongKongProtests #StandwithHongKong pic.twitter.com/egcKyS4X5j
— James Pomfret (@jamespomfret) November 17, 2019
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Why?
As The Epoch Times’ Tang Jingyuan points out, the answer may be simpler (and more ominous) than many suspect. Many CUHK students suspect that the real goal of the police is to control the internet, as Hong Kong’s internet center which handles 99 percent of the city’s internet traffic is located inside the CUHK campus.
The police fired multiple rounds of tear gas, rubber bullets, bean bag rounds and a water cannon on Nov. 12. Students retaliated by throwing bricks and petrol bombs at the police. At least 60 students were injured, several were hit in the head. A reporter at the scene was also hit by rubber bullets in the head and lost consciousness, according to local media.
Even CUHK Vice Chancellor Rocky Tuan, who tried to negotiate with the police as a peacemaker, was among those affected by tear gas.
Many are wondering why the Hong Kong police focused on CUHK when almost all universities in Hong Kong are involved in anti-government protests. What’s more, the police seemed to be very determined to take control of the campus.
Is there anything unique and special about CUHK? The answer is yes. CUHK is the hosting university of Hong Kong Internet eXchange (HKIX)—the internet exchange center of Hong Kong.
HKIX is a cooperative project initiated by the Information Technology Services Centre of CUHK, providing service free of charge. It is now operated by HKIX Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary of the CUHK Foundation.
The function of HKIX is to connect internet service providers (ISPs) in Hong Kong so that intra-Hong Kong traffic can be exchanged locally without routing through the United States or any other country. About 99 percent of Hong Kong’s internet traffic goes through the center. According to Cloudflare, HKIX is the largest internet exchange point in Asia.
Many CUHK students suspect that the police is actually going after HKIX, because taking control of HKIX means Beijing can either shut down the internet or monitor internet communications.
Based on the current situation, Hong Kong authorities are more likely to control the internet than shutting it down. In theory, every single message going through the HKIX center can be intercepted and monitored if the police gain access to the center.
Needless to say, the Chinese communist regime and their Hong Kong puppet rulers indeed have the motivation to control and monitor the internet. For China’s top leaders, quickly quelling the protest in Hong Kong is now a number one political task, with a higher priority than the U.S.-China trade negotiations.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 11/17/2019 – 20:00 - Fukushima Will Be Reincarnated As A $2.7 Billion Wind And Solar Energy Hub
Fukushima Will Be Reincarnated As A $2.7 Billion Wind And Solar Energy Hub
Almost nine years after the century’s worst nuclear crisis – which by some counts has eclipsed Chernobyl in total radioactive emissions – nearly a thousand storage tanks are scattered across the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, holding a staggering 1.1 million tons of treated water used to keep its melted reactor cores cool while they rust in the sun.
Storage tanks containing treated water surround the six reactors at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant on Feb. 5. | Photo: Tokyo Press Plant manager Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc., or Tepco, plans to build more of the gigantic tanks to hold another 0.27 million tons, which is roughly the equivalent of 108 Olympic-size swimming pools. The new tanks are expected reach full capacity in four or five years. Each tank takes seven to 10 days to fill and holds between 1,000 to 1,200 tons of liquid, Tepco officials told reporters during a tour in February organized by the Japan National Press Club.
In March 2011, Fukushima No. 1 suffered three core meltdowns triggered by tsunami following the Great East Japan Earthquake, but the situation with the tanks indicates that Tepco has yet to get the facility under control.
“Space isn’t a big issue at this point in time, but five or 10 years from now, after we’ve started removing the melted fuel debris, we’re going to need facilities to store and preserve it,” Akira Ono, president of Fukushima No. 1 Decontamination and Decommissioning Engineering Co., a Tepco unit overseeing the decommissioning process, said at a news conference in January.
The water issue is eating up both space and resources, but a solution is unlikely to emerge anytime soon.
In November 2018, the International Atomic Energy Agency published a report that said the physical constraints of the site “leave little room for additional tanks” beyond what Tepco has allocated. The IAEA report went on to say it believes storing tainted water in “above ground tanks . . . can only be a temporary measure while a more sustainable solution is needed” and a “decision on the disposition path should be taken urgently.”
Worse, beyond 2020 Tepco has not allocated any additional space for holding treated water on the site and has no plans to do so at this time as a viable long-term sustainability plan remains elusive. The utility said the tanks will likely become a headache if they remain at the plant. “At that point, we may need to rethink how we’re using the space,” Ono said.
Yet even though Japan has failed to propose any credible, long-term plan of how to dispose of the aftermath of the 2011 nuclear power plant catastrophe, it is already looking beyond that mere “triviality”, and as the Nikkei reports, Japan’s prefecture of Fukushima, which was devastated during the 2011 earthquake and nuclear disaster, is looking to transform itself into a renewable energy hub.
A plan is under way to develop 11 solar power plants and 10 wind power plants in the prefecture, on farmlands that cannot be cultivated anymore due to radioactive fallout from the 2011 disaster, as well as on mountainous areas from where population outflows continue.
The total cost is expected to be in the ballpark of 300 billion yen, or $2.75 billion, until the fiscal year ending in March 2024.
The government-owned Development Bank of Japan and private lender Mizuho Bank are among a group of financiers that have prepared a line of credit to support part of the construction cost. Ultimately, we are confident that the Bank of Japan will be called in to monetize the “green new debt.”
In theory, the maximum power output from the new hub is estimated to be about 600 megawatts, or roughly two-thirds of a nuclear power plant. The produced electricity will be sent to the Tokyo metropolitan area which was impacted by the Fukushima 1 explosion.
The plan also envisions the construction of an 80-km wide grid within Fukushima to connect the generated power with the power transmission network of Tokyo Electric Power Co. That part of the project is expected to cost 29 billion yen.
And while we applaud Japan’s vision, we wonder if instead of spending billions on its own version of a “green new deal”, the money wouldn’t be better spent on at least coming up with some plan that at least ensures that Fukushima won’t be the source of an unprecedented leak of radioactivity into the ocean once the current plan for containing the fallout is no longer feasible, especially since the 2020 Tokyo summer Olympics are scheduled to take place a mere 240 kilometers from the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 11/17/2019 – 19:30 - Bolivia Proves That Latin America Cannot Exit The American Empire, PCR
Bolivia Proves That Latin America Cannot Exit The American Empire, PCR
Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,
Update: Racist statements come out of the mouth of Bolivia’s self-declared president:
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Jeanine Anez, one of the Bolivian Spanish elite, has declared herself the President of Bolivia. She is one of the elite allied with Washington who accused Evo Morales of rigging his reelection. But the CIA’s Bolivian lackeys who forced Morales to resign his presidency don’t bother with elections. They just declare themselves president like Juan Guaido, the CIA creep in Venezuela, who hoped to unseat Maduro, the elected president, by declaring himself president. Neither Anez nor Guaido ran for the office. They just self-appointed themselves president. The organization of American States, a CIA front organization, accepted the unelected presidents as rightful rulers. President Trump declared the CIA coup to be an increase in freedom and democracy.
As Trump approves of the attempted coup against Venezuela’s Maduro and the successful coup against Bolivia’s Morales, how can he complain about the CIA/DNC ongoing coup against him?
Live by the sword and die by the sword.
The whores that constitute the Western “media” pretend that self-declared “presidents” are the real presidents, and those elected by the people are not. Every Latin American election that does not elect Washington’s candidate is reported by the Western presstitutes as a “disputed election.” It doesn’t matter if the winning candidate gets 85% of the votes. As he is the wrong candidate from Washington’s standpoint, his election is disputed and illegitimate.
Washington paid the corrupt Bolivian military to unseat Morales, the elected president. This has always been the way Washington has ruled the entirety of Latin America. Buy the corrupt military. They will prostitute their wives for money.
In Latin America everyone is accustomed to being bought. Only Cuba and Venezuela and perhaps Nicaguara have avoided this subservience to Washington. With the pressures on them mounting, how long these three progressive regimes can hold out against Washington remains to be seen. I wouldn’t bet my life on their survival as independent countries. Even Russia and China are threatened by regime change, and both governments seem to be in self-denial about it.
It is a mystery why any Latin American country or any country that hopes to be independent would permit any US presence in the country. US presence in a Latin American country or any country precludes any independence on the part of the country’s government. I suppose it is the money.
Latin Americans would rather have Washington’s money than their independence.
In order to have an American presence in Russia, the Russian government accepts all sorts of humiliations. China is the same. Look at what Washington has done to China in Hong Kong. It is extraordinary that the Chinese government was so insouciant that China set itself up for this embarrassment.
Russia’s sizeable investments in Bolivia will now be lost. With the Spanish elite put back in control by the CIA, Russia’s investments will be appropriated by US firms. One wonders why Russia didn’t do more to protect Morales, the legitimate President. If Putin had sent Morales a regiment of Russian troops, the Bolivian military would have stood down, and democracy, instead of American Imperialism, would still exist in Bolivia.
What has happened everywhere in the world is that nothing is any longer important but money. Therefore, everything is sacrificed for money. There is no shame, no honor, no integrity, no truth, no justice.
Maybe the biblical prophesies are true, and Armageddon is our future. Who can say we don’t deserve it.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 11/17/2019 – 19:10 - National Home Bidding-War Rate Collapses To Decade Low
National Home Bidding-War Rate Collapses To Decade Low
A new Redfin report specifies that only 10% of all offers written by Redfin agents on behalf of their homebuying clients faced a bidding war in October, down from 39% the same time last year and now at a 10-year low. Not even a plunge in mortgage rates this year could attract new buyers.
Three of the top metropolitan area for bidding wars in October were located in California — San Francisco (34.8%), San Jose (20.5%), and San Diego (15.6%). On the East Coast, most of the bidding wars across major cities were non-existent, except for Philadelphia (13.8%).
The rate of bidding wars across major metro areas in California have collapsed in the last 12 to 16 months.
For example, 50% to 85% of all Redfin transactions in San Francisco from 2017 through 2Q18 faced fierce competition among buyers. But as soon as summer rolled around, demand plunged, and so did the bids, as the bidding war rate crashed to near zero by 1Q19 — but has since bounced back to 34.8% in October.
During the same period, the national bidding war rate plummeted, now making a new 10-year low at 10.1% last month.
Seattle’s bidding war among homebuyers was just 8.8% of all transactions in October, well below the 10.1% national average, and also at a 10-year low.
“Homebuyers in Seattle know that in the current market, they don’t necessarily have to go through the emotional heartburn that comes with bidding wars,” said Seattle Redfin agent Jessie Boucher.
“Even though there aren’t a ton of homes for sale right now, buyers are able to preserve their contingencies and maybe even get a great deal,” Boucher said.
Redfin’s report is a warning that homebuyers are beginning to recognize a possible housing market top.
Many homebuyers don’t want to pay top dollar for homes that have seen rapid price inflation over the last eight or so years. Also, home prices have risen faster than wages over the same period, so it’s possible that a structural high as been put in — one where the average American can no longer afford a home, hence why fierce bidding has disappeared across the country.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 11/17/2019 – 18:45 - Hedge Fund: It Is Astonishing That MSCI And Bloomberg/Barclays Index Force Global Pensioners To Fund China's Communist Party
Hedge Fund: It Is Astonishing That MSCI And Bloomberg/Barclays Index Force Global Pensioners To Fund China’s Communist Party
Submitted by Eric Peters, CIO of One River Asset Management
“They can no longer get their money out,” said the investor, a builder of global institutional portfolios.
“Allocators who made private equity investments in mainland China over the past 5-10yrs are now trapped,” he continued. “Not metaphorically trapped – they’re literally not permitted to move cash proceeds out of China as those investments are sold. The problem is widespread and the sums so large that we now have internal people focused on helping these allocators hedge the exchange rate risk.”
A worse fate than having your capital simply imprisoned in a foreign country, is having it locked-up and then devalued while you plot an escape.
“As investments mature and private equity managers distribute renminbi, they now ask clients who cannot get that money out of China to re-invest in their latest funds.” But even as the globe’s most sophisticated institutional investors find their capital quietly held hostage by Beijing, passive retail retirement savings is flowing into Chinese stocks and bonds at an accelerating pace.
In March 2019, MSCI quadrupled the share of Chinese onshore equities in their indexes. The increase is estimated to force between $80bln-$125bln of overseas savings into Chinese onshore stocks. MSCI left room to go further – to get to their full weighting, another $160bln-$250bln of passive equity flows will move to Beijing. And the Bloomberg Barclays Global Aggregate index introduced a 6% weighting to China’s $13trln domestic bond market for the first time this March. An estimated $125bln-$150bln of inflows followed.
If other bond index providers follow Bloomberg/Barclays, an additional $125bln-$150bln will race in.
After decades of ever rising global capital flows, it is easy to forget that capital enters and exits nations only with the express permission of those in power.
“In the midst of rising East/West conflict and knowing that institutional investors are struggling to get their money out, it is astonishing that MSCI and Bloomberg/Barclays index boards have forced global pensioners to fund the Party.”
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As an aside, we at ZH are quite confident that Kyle Bass – and Trump too, once the trade war theater finally implodes – will agree with all of the above.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 11/17/2019 – 18:20 - Greatest Economy Ever: Small Businesses Forced To Use GoFundMe To Stay Solvent
Greatest Economy Ever: Small Businesses Forced To Use GoFundMe To Stay Solvent
While most people think of GoFundMe as a way to raise money for medical debt, funeral costs or small personal items, things have gone so well for our “greatest economy ever” that it is now being used as a tool by small businesses to raise cash.
Struggling businesses are now using the site, ranging from comic book stores to drive-in movie theaters, according to the Wall Street Journal. Small businesses have opened campaigns across 19 countries.
GoFundMe’s Chief Executive Rob Solomon said: “These independent businesses become pillars in a community, and when they can’t stay open, the communities really rally.”
Books of Wonder One company, Books of Wonder in Manhattan has raised $23,000 toward a $250,000 goal for moving expenses. Its owner, Peter Glassman, says he needs the money to move the store from 18th Street to a more affordable and high trafficked space in the Flatiron District. He has struggled to pay his $600,000 annual lease, he said. A previous location of his store served as the inspiration for the children’s bookshop in the movie “You’ve Got Mail”.
In 2012, Glassman raised $100,000 using Indiegogo to keep his doors open.
He said of his customers and donors: “They understand that the things that have gone wrong for us are things beyond our control. The attitude is, ‘It’s a miracle you’re still here.’”
On GoFundMe, customers can cash out everything they raise, regardless of whether or not they hit their goal. The website charges a 2.9% free.
Nicky Perry/WSJ Jessica Walker, president and chief executive of the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce, said:
“Small and midlevel independent businesses are squeezed by rising rents, minimum-wage increases and mandatory sick leave. Crowdfunding can help fill the gap.”
She continued: “If a business is struggling, it’s much harder to get a bank loan. It’s most helpful to people, such as women and people of color, who don’t necessarily have access to a ton of wealth within their networks or an abundance of angel investors waiting in the wings.”
Nicky Perry, who owns a British grocery, the restaurant Tea & Sympathy and the fish-and-chip shop A Salt & Battery in Greenwich Village, has a similar story. She started a GoFundMe to raise $100,000 and has raised about $52,000 so far.
She commented: “We just couldn’t pay the rent. The rent is so astronomical.”
Tea and Sympathy/WSJ She has already cut costs by changing payroll companies, reducing headcount and redoing its menu. She says she would consider turning to GoFundMe again in the future, should she need it. Reaction to her fundraiser has been “overwhelmingly positive”, she said.
Perry said: “We couldn’t believe it. I’ve had little old ladies on two different occasions waiting for me outside on my bench to give me $50 checks.”
Bruce Bachenheimer, a professor at the Lubin School of Business at Pace University, said that the GoFundMe campaigns provide more than just money – they provide reassurance.
After a successful campaign, owners may say “‘I should hang on, I should keep going,’” Bachenheimer concluded.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 11/17/2019 – 17:55 - Social Media Censorship Reaches New Heights As Twitter Permanently Bans Dissent
Social Media Censorship Reaches New Heights As Twitter Permanently Bans Dissent
Mnar Muhawesh, founder, CEO and editor in chief of MintPress News, speaks with journalist Daniel McAdams about being permanently banned from Twitter, social media censorship and more.
It’s an open secret. The deep state is working hand in hand with Silicon Valley social media giants like Twitter, Facebook and Google to control the flow of information. That includes suppressing, censoring and sometimes outright purging dissenting voices – all under the guise of fighting fake news and Russian propaganda.
Most recently, it was revealed that Twitter’s senior editorial executive for Europe, the Middle East and Africa is an active officer in the British Army’s 77th Brigade, a unit dedicated to online warfare and psychological operations.
In other words: he specializes in disseminating propaganda.
The news left many wondering how a member of the British Armed Forces secured such an influential job in the media.
The bombshell that one of the world’s most influential social networks is controlled in part by an active psychological warfare officer was not covered at all in the New York Times, CNN, CNBC, MSNBC or Fox News, who appear to have found the news unremarkable.
But for those paying attention and for those who have been following ’MintPress News’ extensive coverage of social media censorship, this revelation was merely another example of the increasing closeness between the deep state and the fourth estate.
Amazon owner, and world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos was paid $600 million by the CIA to develop software and media for the agency, that’s more than twice as much as Bezos bought the Washington Post for, and a move media critics warn spells the end of journalistic independence for the Post.
Meanwhile, Google has a very close relationship with the State Department, its former CEO Eric Schmidt’s book on technological imperialism was heartily endorsed by deep state warmongers like Henry Kissinger, Hillary Clinton and Tony Blair.
In their book titled, The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business, Eric Schmidt and fellow Google executive Jared Cohen wrote:
What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century…technology and cyber-security companies [like Google] will be to the twenty-first.”
Another social media giant partnering with the military-industrial complex is Facebook. The California-based company announced last year it was working closely with the neoconservative think tank, The Atlantic Council, which is largely funded by Saudi Arabia, Israel and weapons manufacturers to supposedly fight foreign “fake news.”
The Atlantic Council is a NATO offshoot and its board of directors reads like a rogue’s gallery of warmongers, including the notorious Henry Kissinger, Bush-era hawks like Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, James Baker, the former head of the Department of Homeland Security and author of the PATRIOT Act, Michael Chertoff, a number of former Army Generals including David Petraeus and Wesley Clark and former heads of the CIA Michael Hayden, Leon Panetta and Michael Morell.
39 percent of Americans, and similar numbers of people in other countries, get their news from Facebook, so when an organization like the Atlantic Council is controlling what the world sees in their Facebook news feeds, it can only be described as state censorship on a global level.
After working with the council, Facebook immediately began banning and removing accounts linked to media in official enemy states like Iran, Russia and Venezuela, ensuring the world would not be exposed to competing ideas and purging dissident voices under the guise of fighting “fake news” and “Russian bots.”
Meanwhile, the social media platform has been partnering with the U.S. and Israeli governments to silence Palestinian voices that show the reality of life under Israeli apartheid and occupation. The Israeli Justice Minister proudly revealed that Facebook complied with 95 percent of Israeli government requests to delete Palestinian pages. At the same time, Google deleted dozens of YouTube and blog accounts supposedly connected to the government of Iran.
In the last week alone, Twitter has purged several Palestinian news pages, including Quds News Network — without warning or explanation.
Electronic Intifada co-founder Ali Abunimah wrote,
This alarming act of censorship is another indication of the complicity of major social media firms in Israel’s efforts to suppress news and information about its abuses of Palestinian rights.”
Alternative voices not welcome
The vast online purge of alternative voices has also been directed at internal “enemies.”
Publishers like Julian Assange and whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning are still being held in solitary confinement in conditions that international bodies and human rights groups call torture, for their crime of revealing the extent of the global surveillance network and the control over the media that Western governments have built.
As attempts to re-tighten the state and corporate grip over our means of communication increases, high-quality alternative media are being hit the hardest, as algorithm changes from the media monoliths have deranked, demoted, deleted and disincentivized outlets that question official narratives, leading to huge falls in traffic and revenue.
The message from social media giants is clear: independent and alternative voices are not welcome.
One causality in this propaganda war is Daniel McAdams, Executive Director of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, a public advocacy group that argues that a non-interventionist foreign policy is crucial to securing a prosperous society at home. McAdams served as Senator Paul’s foreign affairs advisor between 2001 and 2012. Before that, he was a journalist and editor for the Budapest Sun and a human rights monitor across Eastern Europe.
McAdams, who spent much of his time on Twitter calling out the war machine supported by both parties, was recently permanently banned from the platform for so-called “hateful conduct.” His crime? Challenging Fox News anchor Sean Hannity over his hour-long segment claiming to be against the “deep state,” while simultaneously wearing a CIA lapel pin. In the exchange, McAdams called Hannity “retarded,” claiming he was becoming stupider every time he watched him.
Yes, despite that word and its derivatives having been used on Twitter over ten times in the previous minute, and often much more aggressively than McAdams used it – only McAdams fell victim to Twitter’s ban hammer. Something didn’t make sense about this ban. One only needs to read the replies under any of President Trump’s tweets to see far more hateful speech than what McAdams displayed to suspect foul play.
I spoke with McAdams about the ban and began by asking him if he accepts the premise of the ban, or if he believes something else was afoot.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 11/17/2019 – 17:30 - Baltimore State's Attorney: "Over-Militarization Of Police Departments" Biggest Threat To Civil Rights
Baltimore State’s Attorney: “Over-Militarization Of Police Departments” Biggest Threat To Civil Rights
Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn J. Mosby was quoted at the University of Baltimore Law’s 400 Years: Slavery and the Criminal Justice System conference in saying one of the most significant civil rights issues facing African Americans in Baltimore City is the “flawed” criminal justice system that has kept many in a perpetual state of mass incarceration and economic oppression, reported The Baltimore Sun.
“Black people are six times more likely to be arrested and become a part of the criminal justice system [than] whites,” Mosby said at the two-day conference on Saturday.
Mosby blamed the “over-militarization of police departments” in inner cities and unfair laws as a significant contributor to the economic disparities affecting African American communities not just in Baltimore but in major cities across the country.
“You have an over-militarization of police departments all across the country, racially unjust application of laws against poor black and brown people, [and] collateral consequences of these convictions that have kept black and brown people and communities [as] second-class citizens,” she said.
Other speakers shared similar views at the conference, such as defense attorneys, law students, academics, community leaders, and city residents.
Mosby said the civil rights of African Americans in the poorest Baltimore City neighborhoods are being threatened by city police officers who are enforcing racist laws. Mass incarceration in the city has created limited economic mobility for black youth, she added.
She said her decision to stop prosecuting marijuana possessions is a new direction for the criminal justice system that would help to address racial inequities built into the system that has led to the mass oppression of low-income communities.
Mosby’s five years of laissez-faire attitude on crime in Baltimore City has coincided with five-years of homicides climbing over 300 or more per year.
David Fakunle, the acting chairman of the Maryland Commission on Truth and Reconciliation, was recently quoted by The Sun as saying there needs to be a significant overhaul of the city’s criminal justice system that is disproportionately affecting African Americans.
Fakunle was recently heard at a separate conference in saying, “Respect my existence, or expect my resistance.”
And referring to Fakunle’s comments, Law Enforcement Today said, “Hopefully citizens don’t take those words out of context or use them to the extreme while dealing with police encounters, as resistance to members of law enforcement is dangerous for both the officers and the subject.”
There’s no question that Baltimore’s criminal justice system needs a drastic overhaul, and it certainly seems that the city is nowhere close in determining which reforms will be the best solutions to end mass incarcerations that could one day liberate hundreds of thousands out of poverty.
In the meantime, Baltimore City will continue its death spiral until meaningful reform is seen. It could be decades before the real change arrives.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 11/17/2019 – 17:00 - Rubino: "I Don't See How We Can Go On Much Longer"
Rubino: “I Don’t See How We Can Go On Much Longer”
Via Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com,
Financial writer and book author John Rubino says he can see the end of the economic expansion fueled by massive debt creation.
Rubino explains, “Every sector of the U.S. economy is so over indebted I don’t see how we go on much longer…”
“The Fed is desperately trying to prolong this thing. We are running trillion dollar deficits now, and what that is for is to keep the system from falling apart. We are 11 years into an expansion, a record. This is the longest bull market in history, and this is the longest economic expansion in history…
These guys don’t know exactly what’s going to happen in the next recession, but they are afraid that the system is so highly leveraged that even a garden variety three quarters of a percent of negative growth and a garden variety of 20 % drop in stock prices might be fatal.
The system might not be able to handle that because it would cause so much damage and there are so many different places that can blow up that the system would spin out of control. We would get 2008-2009 again but on steroids because the numbers are so much bigger this time around. So, they want to avoid that at all costs.”
Rubino points out, “Fear is the enemy in a fiat currency system…”
“Everything is based on our assumption that the guys in charge know what they are doing and that the confidence in them is good. You take that away, and they let us see them sweat, and it’s over. There is no real bottom for the dollar, euro or the yen. Their intrinsic value is zero. When the economic players out there in the global financial system realize that the central banks of the world are out of ammo, and nothing these guys do is going to fix our problem, then all hell breaks loose…
What worries me about today’s world is that everything falls apart all at once, and there is no way to fix what went wrong…
We have a lot of examples of governments doing crazy things when everything falls apart.”
In closing, Rubino points out riots and protests around the world, such as in South America and Europe. Rubino says,
“This is happening largely because of financial mismanagement… They see a corrupt elite siphoning off all the wealth in their society. Does that sound familiar? That’s what a lot of people think of the U.S. right now. That’s in an expansion when there are jobs. So, take away a lot of those jobs, but leave that elite in place, and you have a powder keg. You lit the fuse that could get very, very scary. I hate this. The Mad Max scenario is a tragedy beyond belief for some place like the U.S. where it did not have to happen.”
Join Greg Hunter as he goes One-on-One with John Rubino, founder of the popular website DollarCollapse.com.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 11/17/2019 – 16:30 - Are Democrats "Gerrymandering The Population" With Their Open-Borders Plans?
Are Democrats “Gerrymandering The Population” With Their Open-Borders Plans?
In an impassioned interview with Fox Business’ Trish Regan, ‘Die Hard’ actor Robert Davi accused Democrats of “gerrymandering the population” with policies that encourage and protect illegal immigrants.
Why are Democrats so desperate to welcome people into the country with no visas and then, turn around and offer them healthcare? @RobertJohnDavi says Dems are gerrymandering the population. #TrishRegan pic.twitter.com/PTDT6TOEeo
— Trish Regan (@trish_regan) November 13, 2019
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
“Every single thing that they do,” Davi began.
“The Democrats and the cabal of the GOP globalists, they’ve let down the American people for gerrymandering the population.”
As The Daily Caller’s Virginia Kruta notes, Davi also referenced the Immigration and Naturalization Act, passed by former President Lyndon B. Johnson and “argued by Teddy Kennedy,” saying that they had promised the law would not encourage further illegal immigration.
“This is what’s happening, it’s pure and simple,” Davi continued.
“What they want to do is change the shape and the ideology of this nation by letting people in that have not been educated in the system. Trish, I was just in New York, I spoke to immigrant cab drivers from Bangladesh to the Dominican Republic, guys that are working their butts off that have been here legally, and they’re angry.”
Which appears to be exactly what Democrats are doing as Pat Buchanan recently noted on Bernie Sanders’ Open-Borders plan:
Democrats are moving toward an “open door” policy on the U.S. border, an open borders embrace of any and all who wish to come.
America, apparently, does not belong to those who live here and love the country. America belongs to anyone who chooses to come. America belongs to the world.
Consider Bernie Sanders’ immigration proposal, outlined the week of the massacre of Mormon women and children.
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On Day One, President Sanders would declare a moratorium on deportations and offer a “swift pathway to citizenship” for all illegal migrants who have been here for five years.
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Bernie would break up ICE.
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Border-jumping would cease to be a crime and become a civil offense like jaywalking.
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The “Muslim ban” would be abolished.
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President Sanders would back sanctuary cities that refuse to work with U.S. law enforcement.
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Asylum seekers would not have to wait in Mexico as their claims were processed but would be welcomed into the USA.
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Family separations would end.
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Trump’s wall, which Bernie calls “racist,” would be history.
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The administration’s treatment of illegal immigration “as a criminal and national security matter is inhuman, impractical and must end.”
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Migrants who enter illegally would qualify for federal health care and the same social welfare benefits as U.S. citizens.
Immigrant officials say Sanders’ proposals would create an irresistible magnet for millions of migrants from all over the world to stampede into the USA.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 11/17/2019 – 16:00 -
- This Is How The Chinese Are Evading Capital Controls And Secretly Getting Money Out Of The Country
This Is How The Chinese Are Evading Capital Controls And Secretly Getting Money Out Of The Country
Submitted by Eric Peters, CIO of One River Asset Management
“The only way I know to get money out is to set up a Japanese company,” he whispered.
“That’s why so many Chinese nationals are in Japan. First of all, you can get a visa and permanent residency. Second of all, Japan and China don’t exchange tax information because they’re still bent out of shape about WWII. And thirdly, China’s police can’t come get you. Chinese billionaires don’t get ‘disappeared’ in Japan like they do in HK and NY,” he explained.
“That’s why they’re buying homes in Tokyo and Osaka.”
“Despite capital controls, you can settle renminbi transactions in Yen,” he continued.
“So you set up a Japanese shell company, get a bank account,” he said. “Then you transfer renminbi to your company’s bank in Tokyo, settled in Yen. At that point, the money basically vanishes. The account name is in kanji. And I’m sure it doesn’t work for really big transactions, and you can’t do it as a US citizen, but the Chinese have probably set up 100k of these companies.”
In H1 2019 Chinese inquiries about Japanese property jumped 13x.
Avoiding RMB
Goldman sold a 4% stake in Taikang Life. Allianz paid them 800mm euros, valuing Taikang at E20bln. Goldman bought its Taikang stake in 2010 from AXA at a E7bln valuation. AXA inherited Taikang in its 2006 acquisition of Swiss insurer Winterthur (Credit Suisse subsidiary). Winterthur bought its Taikang stake in 2000 alongside Softbank and GSIC.
The buyers/sellers have flipped Taikang shares in dollars/euros ever since, avoiding RMB. Chen Dongsheng started Taikang in 1996 (married Mao’s granddaughter too). He’s worth $4.8bln.
Anecdote
“They can no longer get their money out,” said the investor, a builder of global institutional portfolios. “Allocators who made private equity investments in mainland China over the past 5-10yrs are now trapped,” he continued. “Not metaphorically trapped – they’re literally not permitted to move cash proceeds out of China as those investments are sold. The problem is widespread and the sums so large that we now have internal people focused on helping these allocators hedge the exchange rate risk.”
A worse fate than having your capital simply imprisoned in a foreign country, is having it locked-up and then devalued while you plot an escape. “As investments mature and private equity managers distribute renminbi, they now ask clients who cannot get that money out of China to re-invest in their latest funds.” But even as the globe’s most sophisticated institutional investors find their capital quietly held hostage by Beijing, passive retail retirement savings is flowing into Chinese stocks and bonds at an accelerating pace.
In March 2019, MSCI quadrupled the share of Chinese onshore equities in their indexes. The increase is estimated to force between $80bln-$125bln of overseas savings into Chinese onshore stocks. MSCI left room to go further – to get to their full weighting, another $160bln-$250bln of passive equity flows will move to Beijing. And the Bloomberg Barclays Global Aggregate index introduced a 6% weighting to China’s $13trln domestic bond market for the first time this March. An estimated $125bln-$150bln of inflows followed. If other bond index providers follow Bloomberg/Barclays, an additional $125bln-$150bln will race in.
After decades of ever rising global capital flows, it is easy to forget that capital enters and exits nations only with the express permission of those in power. “In the midst of rising East/West conflict and knowing that institutional investors are struggling to get their money out, it is astonishing that MSCI and Bloomberg/Barclays index boards have forced global pensioners to fund the Party.”
Tyler Durden
Sun, 11/17/2019 – 15:30
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