- Could Trump Pull Off A Post-Party Coalition?
Authored by Pepe Escobar, originally posted Op-Ed at SputnikNews.com,
Hillary Clinton, Queen of Chaos, Queen of War, Golden Goldman Girl, for all practical purposes is by now the official bipartisan candidate of US neocons and neoliberalcons alike.
Certified add-ons include Wall Street; selected hedge funds; TPP cheerleaders; CFR (Council on Foreign Relations) interventionists; media barons; multinational corporate hustlers; in fact virtually the whole exceptionalist US establishment, duly underwritten by the bipartisan, mega-wealthy 0.0001%.
That does leave Donald J. Trump in the astonishing position of egomaniac billionaire outsider who somehow dreams he can game the whole system on his own, moved by his inexhaustible chutzpah.
It’s under this dynamic that Trump has been demonized with medieval fervor by US corporate media. His non-stop motormouth – and motortweet – certainly does not help, conveying the impression he’s in the business of antagonizing multitudes non-stop. For the establishment, his billions mean nothing; he’s treated like a bum. He may be impervious to empathy; on the other hand that kind of treatment keeps earning him widespread sympathy among the angry, semi-destitute, non-college educated white masses.
A US industrial renaissance?
Underneath all this sound and fury, something else is (quietly) going on. Powerful business interests discreetly supporting Trump – and away from the media circus — are convinced he’s got the road map to victory. The question is whether he may be able to tame his erratic behavior to seal the deal.
His key message, according to these backers, must revolve around the destruction of US industries by rigged currencies, and the “destruction of the wages of American workers by importing illegal cheap labor from dollar-a-day wage nations.”
And that comes with an all-important military angle as a surefire selling point. As Trump’s backers outline it, “the Pacific Ocean cannot be used for transporting the vital and essential components of our military industrial complex, for in the event of war with Russia or China their advanced silent submarines equipped with advanced anti-ship weapons will block all of our ocean transport, collapsing our military industrial production in any war with catastrophic consequences. These component factories for Intel and others must be repatriated at once through currency adjustments or tariffs.”
So Trump should hammer the message that all new bank credit must be tied to rebuilding destroyed US industries, “either by ending currency rigging or applying tariffs.” Bank credit, Trump backers argue, “should not be used for currency manipulation, or for cash settlement market rigging. There should be no bank credit for speculation and absolutely none for hedge funds. Let’s wipe these speculative vehicles out by huge taxes on short-term trading profits, ending tax concessions on borrowing, and ending all bank credit for speculation. Let these people go to do real work.”
That, in a nutshell, explains Wall Street’s visceral aversion to Trump – from the Bloombergs to the Lloyd Blankfeins. Anyone familiar with Wall Street knows every market, commodity and indexes are rigged by cash settlement manipulations. As a New York-based Trump backer puts it, “This alone is sufficient reason to support Donald J. Trump. We should make the Carl Icahans and George Soroses do real work by taxing away their speculative profits. We need Henry Fords in this nation who create and build industries, and not Wall Street looters, where they rig everything as in 2008 then used their political power over bought politicians for bailouts, after throwing tens of millions of American out of their homes.”
According to this road map, which is already on Trump’s desk – but no one knows whether he read it in full, or will implement it – fighting illegal immigration and rigged currencies side by side would create nothing less than an industrial renaissance in the US to rebuild the devastated Detroits. Essentially, the road map calls for replacing millions of illegal immigrants with millions of unemployed US citizens; Trump’s backers consider the real unemployment rate to be a whopping 23% today, based on the 1955 Bureau of Labor Statistical Methodology, “and not the rigged statistics of today.”
The bottom line is this road map calls for Trump, if elected, to create a cross-party, or trans-party coalition – as once happened in the House and Senate when Jesse Helms on one side and John Conyers and Chuck Schumer on the other side actually did real business.
This all implies Trump should become well versed in the national economy ideas of Friedrich List – whose tariff-protected Zollverein League was essentially the founding method of Prussia to build the German nation.
Some of the above has already filtered out in Trump’s announced economic agenda. Now comes the hard part for a man with an exceedingly short attention span who gets into the groove by tweets and sound bites; to coherently sell the plan without picking up unnecessary fights along the way.
But Vlad has already won it anyway
Polls at the moment seem to be pointing to a Hillary landslide. Trump’s backers though “would not rely on the polls. Everything is rigged.”And then there’s the all-enveloping “Russian aggression” hysteria. Hillary went as far as equating President Putin to Hitler. Trump insists he’s ready to do business with Moscow – starting with a joint operation to end ISIS/ISIL/Daesh for good.
Why bother? The Stupidity-o-Meter as applied to US mainstream media has gone on interstellar overdrive anyway – as the presidential election winner has already been christened: it’s – who else? – the omniscient Vladimir Putin.
A business source familiar with the designs of the real Masters of the Universe cuts seriously to the chase: “As far as Russia is concerned, the issue is decided from above, and that is where the battle has been. The decision is above Hillary and Donald, and Hillary will be ordered to create a rapprochement if she is elected, if that is what is decided. If Trump wins, it is easy; and if he doesn’t, then the fact he brought it up will be used as a catalyst for policy changes toward Russia. The fight is behind the scenes now.”
As much as currency rigging “will be ended, as we already saw Jack Lew give out the orders to Germany and Japan”, a new geoeconomic map – possibly under Trump — would swing towards the end of the oil price war as well. As a Trump backer puts it, “this is a national objective of the United States, as a higher price will make the United States energy independent. This is part of the significance of the Trump revolution.”
According to a source close to the House of Saud, Saudis and Russians are already involved in tortuous pre-negotiations on the possibility of engineering an oil price around $100.00 a barrel; “There should be enough mutuality of interest between the Saudis betrayed by the US under the neocons, and to be destroyed by the neocons eventually, and the Russians who can prevent that.”
An end to the oil price war may be something the Pentagon won’t be able to argue about. As a Trump backer notes, “it is in the vital interest of the military-industrial complex to achieve complete energy independence, and repatriate all its military industries to the shores of the United States.”
Compared to the current, 24/7 mud-wrestling match, all this may seem straight from Alice in Wonderland. There’s no evidence such an ambitious – and contentious – agenda can be sold to movers and shakers from JP Morgan to the Koch brothers. Trump creating a cross-party, trans-party or even post-party movement will only succeed if substantial players in the Power Elite are behind it, and there are no signs of this happening.
What proceeds relentlessly is a massive disinformation campaign – a ghastly remix of those good ol’ Cold War anti-USSR avalanches. The Clinton Media Machine is even vilifying Michael Flynn, former head of the DIA, who supports Trump. Trump was conceptually right when he said Obama and Hillary were the founder and co-founder of ISIS/ISIL/Daesh. That’s exactly what Flynn admitted in that notorious interview when he stressed that the expansion of the phony Caliphate was a “willful decision” taken in Washington.
The bottom line, as it stands, is that Trump is not raising enough cash to offset the formidable Clinton cash machine. Now comes the time when he must really take no prisoners to gain maximum exposure – while trying to sell the road map outlined above, one tweet at a time.
And of course there will be a surprise – October and otherwise. Nothing has been decided – yet. Disraeli’s Coningsby was never more appropriate; “So you see, my dear Coningsby, that the world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.”
- In The Next Emergency These "Key Items Will Be Completely Gone" From Shelves
America has become crisis prone, SHTFPlan.com's Mac Slavo explains, the pressure points have been identified, and provoked.
Civil unrest could be triggered on any given day – police killings, or stock market collapse. Maybe something to do with elections.
After the initial 72 hours of confusion and the fog of war, people will be left stranded, hungry, and either ready to turn to government for help or on each other. Holdouts and hoarders are treated as criminals, and shortages on numerous essentials will make everyone desperate. You may need to barter to survival, or learn to store and conceal what you have from intruders, etc.
With luck, you won’t be like those in Venezuela or worse.
So, Which Items Will Disappear First During A Major National Emergency? The Economic Collapse blog's Michael Snyder explains…
One day in the not too distant future, a major emergency will strike this nation, and that will set off a round of hoarding unlike anything we have ever seen before. Just think about what happens when a big winter storm or a hurricane is about to hit one of our major cities – inevitably store shelves are stripped bare of bread, milk, snow shovels, etc. Even though winter storms and hurricanes are just temporary hurdles to overcome, they still cause many people to go into panic mode. So what is going to happen when we have a real crisis on our hands?
We can get some clues about which items will disappear first during a major national emergency by taking a look at where such a scenario is already playing out. One recent survey found that over 80 percent of all basic foodstuffs are currently unavailable in Venezuela, and about half the country can no longer provide three meals a day for their families. Thankfully, some stores still have a few things that they are able to offer, but other key items are completely gone. The following comes from USA Today…
Oh, there are some things to buy. Besides salt, there are fresh vegetables and fruits, dairy products but no milk, some cereal, lots of snacks and a few canned goods.
The only meat is sausages; there are three kinds of cheese. The only problem: A kilogram of each costs more than a fourth of our monthly minimum wage of 15,050 bolivars.
But basic foodstuffs – the things most Venezuelans want to eat such as corn meal, wheat flour, pasta, rice, milk, eggs, sugar, coffee, chicken, mayonnaise, margarine, cooking oil and beef – are conspicuous by their absence. And there is no toilet paper, no sanitary napkins, no disposable baby diapers, no shampoo, no toothpaste, no hand soap and no deodorant.
Do you have plenty of the items in bold above stored up?
If not, you may want to stock up while you still can.
Venezuela was once the wealthiest nation in all of South America, but now lines for food often begin as early as three in the morning. Some people have become so desperate that they are actually hunting cats, dogs and pigeons for food, and there are even a few very sick people that have been killing and eating zoo animals.
Someday similar things will happen in the United States and Europe too.
When that day arrives, will you be prepared?
One of the things that got my attention from the article quote above was the lack of milk. My wife is always telling me that we should store up more dried milk, and I believe that she is right.
Just imagine not having any milk and not being able to get any more.
What would you do?
Another thing that really stood out to me in the article was the fact that there is a severe shortage of personal hygiene items. Most people don’t really think of those as “prepper goods”, but the truth is that life will become very uncomfortable without them very rapidly.
What would you do if there was no more toilet paper?
And if you have a little one, how are you going to manage without any diapers?
In general, it is wise to always have an extra supply of just about everything that you use on a daily basis stored away somewhere in your home. The generation that went through the Great Depression of the 1930s understood this concept very well, but most of us that are younger have had it so good for so long that we don’t even really grasp what a real crisis looks like.
Another thing that we are seeing happen right now in Venezuela is the rise of a barter economy…
Many of my urban friends are now planting vegetables in their outdoor spaces – if they have any – or in pots. Another friend, who is a hairdresser, is charging clients food to do their hair. For a shampoo and dry, she charges a kilo of corn meal, saying that she doesn’t have time to stand in line like some of her clients.
As you prepare for what is ahead, you may want to consider stocking up on some items that would specifically be used for bartering in a crisis situation.
For example, you may not drink coffee, but there are millions upon millions of people that do. In a crisis situation, there will be many that will be extremely desperate to get their hands on some coffee, and so any coffee that you store away now may become a very valuable asset.
We live in a world where one out of every eight people already goes to bed hungry each night, and where one out of every three children is underweight. As global weather patterns become more extreme, as natural disasters continue to become more frequent and more intense, and as terror and war continue to spread, it is inevitable that the stress on the global food system is going to continue to grow.
Today you can waltz into Wal-Mart and buy giant cartloads of very inexpensive food, but it will not always be that way.
Unfortunately, more than half the country is currently living paycheck to paycheck, and most Americans do not have any emergency food stored up at all.
In addition to food and personal hygiene supplies, here are some other items that are likely to disappear very rapidly during a major national emergency…
-Flashlights
-Batteries
-Generators
-Propane
-Can Openers
-Water Filters
-Water Containers
-Anything Related To Self-Defense
-Axes
-Knives
-Sleeping Bags
-Tents
-First Aid Kits
-Matches
-Candles
-Firewood
-Shovels
-Bottled Water
-Warm Clothing
-Lanterns
-Portable Radios
So in addition to food and personal hygiene items, you may want to do an inventory of the items that I have listed above and see where you may have some holes in your preparation plans.
I understand that there will be some people that will read this article and think that all of us “preppers” are being just a tad ridiculous.
But when a major emergency strikes this nation and you haven’t done anything to prepare, you will dearly wish that you had bothered to take action while there was still time remaining to do so.
- Trump Stuns Skeptics With "Regret For Causing Personal Pain"
While we eagerly await news of the Clinton Family Foundation being “unexpectedly” hacked (after today’s Reuters prep piece), with a trove of documents revealing even more shocking crony kickbacks, “favors” and corruption, we are sad to report that should Hillary become president, said foundation will no longer accept foreign and corporate donations, and will bring an end to its annual Clinton Global Initiative meeting regardless of the outcome of the November election.
Well, of course: once Hillary is president, she will no longer need a backdoor way of legally receiving Saudi money: at that moment, billions in Saudi dollars will be perfectly acceptable for passage through the front door, mostly in exchange for weapons and ammo (fine, and the occasional favor), used to kill and maim innocent civilians and to supply the occasional Doctors Without Borders hospital bombing raid (which, oddly enough, has received zero coverage in the US media… how odd).
Bill Clinton made the announcement at an afternoon meeting with foundation staff members, according to participants who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity ahead of the formal announcement. Clinton said the foundation plans to continue its work, but intends to refocus its efforts in a process that will take up to a year to complete. The former president, who turns 70 on Friday, said he will resign from the board, and the foundation will only accept contributions from U.S. citizens and independent charities.
But why, Bill, if – as you and most of the media claim – there is nothing wrong with accepting bribes, pardon, donations from countries that have, in their own words, created ISIS?
Rhetorical questions aside, according to Clinton the foundation will no longer take money from any foreign entity, government, foreign or domestic corporations, or corporate charities.
Additionally, a Clinton spokesman said the former president will also refrain from delivering paid speeches until the November election and will no longer give paid speeches if Hillary Clinton is elected president. Again: we wonder – why? Is there some stigma associated with getting paid $250K-$500K bribes from corporations when your wife is in the White House? Granted we are confident that the $237 million the Clinton family has collected, mostly from speeches, since 2001 will help the pain.
At the staff meeting, AP adds, Clinton said he and his daughter, Chelsea Clinton, did not face any external pressure to make the changes, but wanted to avoid any potential issues or second guessing for Hillary Clinton should she move into the White House. The future of the Clinton Foundation has been one of the overarching questions shadowing Clinton’s campaign.
While Hillary Clinton stepped down from its board after launching her 2016 campaign, her husband and daughter have remained in leadership roles, prompting questions about the ability of the organization to continue its work should Clinton win the White House.
To be sure, questions have persisted about the relationship between the Clintons and donors for years, mostly among Republicans. The Republican National Committee (RNC) on Thursday criticized the Clinton Foundation for stalling on changes to its donation guidelines. “This effort to shield Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation after more than a year of controversy is too little, too late,” chairman Reince Priebus said in a statement.
Priebus added that the Clinton Foundation’s activities had already raised red flags during Clinton’s campaign. “The fact that the Clinton Foundation and its entities continue to accept foreign donations while Hillary Clinton runs for the White House is a massive, ongoing conflict of interest that gets bigger by the day,” he said.
In the last week, prominent voices have called for the organization to be disbanded if Hillary Clinton won the presidency. Former Gov. Ed Rendell (D-Pa.), a supporter of the Clintons, on Wednesday said the charitable organization should close up shop if Clinton wins.
“It’d be impossible to keep the foundation open without at least the appearance of a problem,” the former chairman of the Democratic National Chairman (DNC) told The New York Daily News.
Fair enough, but it wasn’t a “problem” to keep it open for years heading into the election? After all, the concern is influence peddling, and much more influence goes to those who have money in the foundation’s early days rather than now, when it is already a $2 billion behemoth.
The Boston Globe’s editorial board on Tuesday also called for disbanding the Clinton Foundation, saying that doing so would remove “a political — and actual — distraction.”
According to the AP, Bill Clinton denied that the changes were brought about by outside pressure, but said they were motivated by the need to eliminate any concerns if his wife wins the White House.
Finally, there was just one outstanding question:
And if she is not elected? https://t.co/xZci9TX5Qn
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) August 18, 2016
* * *
Meanwhile, in tonight’s other key political news, in what many have said is a first for Donald Trump, the presidential candidate expressed regret on Thursday afternoon during a rally in Charlotte, N.C. and apologized for any damage he inflicted with his blunt rhetoric on the campaign trail as the candidate and his revamped campaign staff look to recover from a rough few weeks.
“As you know, I am not a politician. I have worked in business, creating jobs and rebuilding neighborhoods my entire adult life. I’ve never wanted to learn the language of the insiders, and I’ve never been politically correct – it takes far too much time, and can often make it more difficult to achieve total victory.”
“Sometimes, in the heat of the debate and speaking on a multitude of issues, you don’t choose the right words or you say the wrong thing. I have done that, and I regret it, particularly where it may have caused personal pain. Too much is at stake for us to be consumed with these issues.”
WATCH: @realDonaldTrump says he “regrets” some comments he’s made during campaign https://t.co/wTPAov2ZrB pic.twitter.com/kFBtndiqOA
— CBS News (@CBSNews) August 18, 2016
The speech came less than two days after Trump shook up his campaign leadership, naming pollster and former adviser Kellyanne Conway as campaign manager and Breitbart executive Steve Bannon campaign CEO.
Trump’s expression of regret has come as a shock to those – mostly liberal pundits – who expected Bannon to reject any efforts by other advisers to polish Trump’s message in home stretch of the general election. Conway said she didn’t want Trump to lose his “authenticity.” Then again, ultimately Trump’s biggest “advisor” has always been Trump, both with and without surprises, and the man behind today’s stunning pivot, was most likely Trump himself.
In his Thursday speech, Trump attacked Clinton’s honesty and promised to never lie and always put voters’ interests first. “In this journey, I will never lie to you,” he said. “I will never tell you something I do not believe myself. I will never put anyone’s interests ahead of yours.
And then he pivoted once more, contrasting his brutish political correctness with Hillary’s endless lies.
“Aren’t you tired of the same old lies and the same old broken promises?” Trump asked. Trump said that Clinton “has proven to be one of the greatest liars of all time.”
“So while sometimes I can be too honest, Hillary Clinton is the exact opposite: she never tells the truth. One lie after another, and getting worse each passing day,” he said. Trump continued to criticize the media for focusing on his controversial remarks rather than the problems facing voters.
“The establishment media doesn’t cover what really matters in this country, or what’s really going on in peoples’ lives,” he said. “They will take words of mine out of context and spend a week obsessing over every single syllable, and then pretend to discover some hidden meaning in what I said,” Trump added.
“Just imagine if the media spent this much time investigating the poverty and joblessness in our inner cities. Just think about how much different things would be if the media in this country sent their cameras to our border, or to our closing factories, or to our failing schools.”
Trump added he would not stop ruffling establishment feathers, even if it means conflict with fellow Republicans. “I am glad I make the powerful a little uncomfortable now and again – including some powerful people in my own party. Because it means I am fighting for real change. I am fighting for you.”
Who knows, maybe this particular expression of “regret” is all America wanted to hear to give Trump a second chance. After all, if there is one thing all Americans can agree on, is they love each and every underdog story…
- One Simple Chart Illustrates The Absurdity Of College Cost Inflation
The simple chart below from the American Enterprise Institute beautifully illustrates the absurd inflation of college tuition and textbooks over the past 20 years. In real terms, the cost of college has effectively doubled over that time period. Now what would cause such massive inflation? Could it be our government tripping over itself to provide cheap student loans for children to spend on vacations, iPads and kegs (i.e. "college"; see "What Student Loans Are Used For: Vacations, iPads, Kegs, Entertainment"). Or, per the Daily Caller, perhaps the issue is administrative bloat at our institutions of higher education:
The exact reason prices have increased so much has been hotly debated, but one critical factor at most schools is administrative bloat. While student to faculty ratios have remained relatively steady over time, the number of administrators and other non-teaching staff has exploded at schools across the country.
But we don't want to stress out our young Millennials too much. We're quite sure the debt burden associated with your $200,000 anthro degree will be socialized very soon.
- Why A Deutsche Bank Whistleblower Turned Down A $8.25 Million Reward: In His Own Words
At the height of the financial crisis, when risk assets were imploding and counterparties were in danger of overnight collapse, Deutsche Bank avoided failure and nationalization by fabricating the value of its $130 billion derivative portfolio of “leveraged super senior” trades.
Some history: back in 2005, these trades were seen as “the next big thing” in the world of credit derivatives, something which DB at the time was building a massive position in. They were designed to behave like the most senior tranche of a typical collateralised debt obligation, where assets such as mortgages or credit default swaps are pooled to give investors varying degrees of risk exposure. Deutsche became the biggest operator in this market, which involved banks buying insurance against the possibility of default by some of the safest companies, the FT writes.
There was just one problem: when it was building up its portfolio, Deutsche never accounted for the possibility of the financial world nearly collapsing. Which is why as the illiquid portfolio was careening, instead marking it to market – an act that would have resulted in the bank’s insolvency – DB’s risk managers misstated the value of the positions by anywhere from $1.5bn to $3.3bn.
Several years later, in 2012, the SEC found out about this, and in 2015 slapped a $55 million fine on Deutsche Bank for this criminal fabrication (nobody went to jail). “At the height of the financial crisis, Deutsche Bank’s financial statements did not reflect the significant risk in these large, complex illiquid positions,” said Andrew Ceresney, director of the SEC’s enforcement division. “Deutsche Bank failed to make reasonable judgments when valuing its positions and lacked robust internal controls over financial reporting.”
The reason why the SEC learned about DB’s massive mismarked derivative exposure, is because two former employee whistleblowers, Matthew Simpson and Eric Ben-Artzi, told it: the duo alleged that if Deutsche had accounted properly for its positions, its capital would have fallen to dangerous levels during the financial crisis and it might have required a government bailout to survive. The highest estimate for the unaccounted loss was $12bn. Which explains why Deutsche Bank was desperate to manipulated the numbers.
End result: DB got its wristslap with a token fine, the SEC came out looking like it knew what it was doing, and – as we learned today – the two whistleblowers got major awards for helping the SEC collected the $55MM fine, amounting to 15% each.
Only, something unexpected happened: as the FT writes, one of the whistleblowers who helped expose the false accounting at Deutsche Bank turned down a multimillion-dollar award from the Securities and Exchange Commission in protest against the agency’s failure to punish executives at the bank.
Eric Ben-Artzi, the former Deutsche risk officer, told the SEC he is declining his share of a $16.5 million payout — the third largest in the whistleblower program’s history — which represents 30% of the $55 million Deutsche Bank fine.
But why turn down enough money that most people, even ex-Wall Streeters, could comfortably retire on? Ben-Artzi said the fine should be paid by individual executives, not shareholders, and suggested the “revolving door” of senior personnel between the SEC and Germany’s largest bank had played a role in executives going unpunished (understandably he had no comment about the spike in Deutsche Bank suicides in 2013-2014, particularly those emanating from its legal department).
“This goes beyond the typical revolving-door story,” Mr Ben-Artzi wrote in an opinion article for the Financial Times. “In this case, top SEC lawyers had held senior posts at the bank, moving in and out of top positions at the SEC even as the investigations into malfeasance at Deutsche Bank were ongoing,”
Which, incidentally, reminds us of a post we wrote back in May 2010, explaining why former Deutsche Bank General Councel, and then-SEC Director of Enforcement, “Robert Khuzami Stands To Lose Up To $250,000 If He Pursues Action Against Deutsche Bank.” We were right: neither Khuzami, nor the SEC, nor anyone else, pursued any charges against Deutsche Bank in the early years after the financial crisis. In retrospect, now that the German bank has been revealed to have manipulated literally everything, such oversight on behalf of the SEC was even more criminal than what DB did over the years.
Six years later, the FT comments on this too:
“Robert Khuzami, director of enforcement at the SEC between 2009 and 2013, was Deutsche’s former general counsel for the Americas. Between 2004 and 2013 Robert Rice was a senior lawyer at Deutsche Bank, where he led an internal investigation into the valuation claims; he then went to the SEC as chief counsel. Both Mr Khuzami and Mr Rice were recused from the investigation. Dick Walker was enforcement director at the SEC between 1998 and 2001 and then joined Deutsche, later becoming general counsel; he left the bank this year. All three declined to comment. “
Needless to say, there is zero risk to Khuzami’s current job as partner in Kirkland’s Government & Internal Investigations Practice Group, which he joined in 2013. But hopefully, one day there will be, and if so it will be partially thanks to op-eds such as the one – written by Eric Ben-Artzi, who is currently a vice-president of risk analytics at BondIT – published in today’s FT and republished below.
For all those wondering why someone would turn down a $8.25 million whistleblower award, here is the explanation, straight from the source.
* * *
We must protect shareholders from executive wrongdoing
Eric Ben-Artzi
I turned down a whistleblower award, writes former Deutsche Bank employee Eric Ben-Artzi
I just got word from the Securities and Exchange Commission that I am to receive half of a $16.5m whistleblower award. But I refuse to take my share. My award, which comes from a fund allocated by Congress, amounts to 15 per cent of the $55m fine the SEC imposed on Deutsche Bank in May 2015 after I informed regulators that my colleagues at the bank had been inflating the value of its massive portfolio of credit derivatives.
I was a risk officer at the bank, and one of the three whistleblowers who in 2010-11 reported the improper accounting internally and to regulators around the globe.
The SEC attorney who oversaw the investigation told the New York Times: “It’s the only enforcement action where we allege that a major financial institution failed to properly value a significant portion of its portfolio of complex securities.”
But Deutsche did not commit this wrongdoing. Deutsche was the victim. To be precise, the bank’s shareholders and its rank-and-file employees who are now losing their jobs in droves are the primary victims.
Meanwhile, top executives retired with multimillion-dollar bonuses based on the misrepresentation of the bank’s balance sheet. It is therefore especially disappointing that in 2015, after a lengthy investigation helped by multiple whistleblowers, the SEC imposed a fine on Deutsche’s shareholders instead of the managers responsible.
Compare this outcome with a contemporaneous SEC enforcement action against the less connected executives of a smaller firm, Trinity Capital, and its subsidiary Los Alamos National Bank. The violations at Trinity seem similar to Deutsche, but orders of magnitude smaller. Five executives at Trinity were charged, the chief executive settled and paid a fine, and litigation continued against two senior officers.
“We will hold senior executives liable when they misstate the company’s performance and fail to come clean with shareholders,” explained Andrew Ceresney, director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement.
So why did the SEC not go after Deutsche’s executives? The most obvious concern is that Deutsche’s top lawyers “revolved” in and out of the SEC before, during and after the illegal activity at the bank. Robert Rice, the chief lawyer in charge of the internal investigation at Deutsche in 2011, became the SEC’s chief counsel in 2013. Robert Khuzami, Deutsche’s top lawyer in North America, became head of the SEC’s enforcement division after the financial crisis. Their boss, Richard Walker, the bank’s longtime general counsel (he left the bank this year) was once head of enforcement at the SEC.
This goes beyond the typical revolving door story. In this case, top SEC lawyers had held senior posts at the bank, moving in and out of top positions at the regulator even as the investigations into malfeasance at Deutsche were ongoing.
This took place on the watch of Mary Jo White, the current chair of the SEC, whose relationship with Mr Khuzami and Mr Rice dates back 20 years. She bears ultimate responsibility for the Deutsche fine. In 2010 I joined Deutsche from Goldman Sachs as a vice-president in the market-risk department. I am a mathematician and had worked in risk-modelling at other banks. When I joined Deutsche I was not made aware that an internal “investigation” was already under way into the inflated valuation of the bank’s $120bn portfolio of exotic credit derivatives.
Within a few months, though, I realised something was very wrong, and I called the internal hotline. That is when I met Mr Rice. He was then Deutsche’s top lawyer for compliance and regulatory affairs, and asserted that our conversations were subject to “attorney-client” privilege and could not be disclosed. I did not agree and was fired. My Wall Street career was ruined.
When I first helped the SEC investigation, the whistleblower award was a powerful incentive. My lawyers and ex-wife have a claim on a portion of my award, which I am not at liberty to reject.
Although I need the money now more than ever, I will not join the looting of the very people I was hired to protect. I never intended to turn a job in risk management into a crusade, but after suffering at the hands of the Deutsche executives I will not join them simply because I cannot beat them.
I request that my share of the award be given to Deutsche and its stakeholders, and the award money clawed back from the bonuses paid to the Deutsche executives, especially the former top SEC attorneys.
I would then be happy to collect any award for which I am eligible.
- State Department Admits Obama Lied – $400 Million Payment To Iran Was Contingent On Prisoner Release
If you define "ransom" as "a payment exchanged contingent on the release of a hostage" then you find yourself forced to admit that President Obama lied last week when he aggressively denied (and was irked at the question) that he paid Iran a $400 million ransom for the return of 4 hostages. Today, The State Department's spokesperson John Kirby told the truth that the Iran payment was contingent on the prisoner release… but of course spun this 'ransom' payment as masterful diplomacy "deliberately leveraging the moment."
As Bloomberg reports,
The U.S. withheld a $400 million cash payment to Iran earlier this year as leverage to ensure that American prisoners would be released as the country had promised, State Department spokesman John Kirby said.
“We were able to conclude multiple strands of diplomacy within a 24-hour period,” Kirby told reporters in Washington on Thursday. “We deliberately leveraged that moment.”
Kirby was responding to a report in the Wall Street Journal that the U.S. wouldn’t let Iran take control of the money — which the country was owed as part of a $1.7 billion settlement over a long-running dispute — until a plane carrying the American prisoners had left Iran in January.
Disputes over the timing of the payment have fueled criticism of the administration’s nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic. While the U.S. has said talks over the release of the prisoners were held separately from last year’s negotiations on the payment and the nuclear deal, Kirby’s comments represented an acknowledgment that those two matters eventually converged.
Previously, US official stated on the record that the $400 million payment to Iran was separate from the hostages. This is what State Dept. spokesman John Kirby told the WSJ two weeks ago:
“As we’ve made clear, the negotiations over the settlement of an outstanding claim… were completely separate from the discussions about returning our American citizens home,” State Department spokesman John Kirby had told the Wall Street Journal.
Which should serve as a reminder: if lying, especially as a president, don't leave a trail, and definitely don't get caught.
* * *
Simply put – The Administration just could not keep track of the lies and the facts leaked out. And now the fact is – The US President lied directly to the American people… no matter how much lipstick is applied to this disgusting pig.
And finally, why should anyone cast aspersions at Ryan Lochte (who will likely be ruined by his l'ies') when the nation's Commander-in-chief has trouble keeping the truth straight (and will likely suffer no consequences whatsoever)?
* * *
As a reminder of how we got here, The Hill reported last week that, President Obama chastised the press for their coverage of the payment, noting that the deal with Iran was announced months ago as part of a larger diplomatic settlement.
"This wasn’t some nefarious deal," Obama said.
“It’s been interesting to watch this story surface,” the president said. “Some of you may recall, we announced these payments in January. Many months ago. There wasn’t a secret, we announced them to all of you.”
"What we have is the manufacturing of outrage on a story that we disclosed in January,” he added later.
"The notion that we would somehow start now in this high-profile way, and announce it to the world, even as we’re looking in the faces of other families whose loved ones are being held hostage and say to them, ‘we don’t pay ransom,’ defies logic," Obama said.
Defies logic indeed – because having slammed the press for suggesting this was a "ransom payment," we discovered that is exactly what The Justice Department warned…
In his remarks, the president didn’t mention the objections raised by his own appointees within the Justice Department, where, according to people familiar with the discussions, many officials raised alarms that the timing of the cash payment would look like ransom. (via WSJ)
The head of the national security division at the Justice Department was among the agency’s senior officials who objected to paying Iran hundreds of millions of dollars in cash at the same time that Tehran was releasing American prisoners, according to people familiar with the discussions.
John Carlin, a Senate-confirmed administration appointee, raised concerns when the State Department notified Justice officials of its plan to deliver to Iran a planeful of cash, saying it would be viewed as a ransom payment, these people said. A number of other high-ranking Justice officials voiced similar concerns as the negotiations proceeded, they said.
The U.S. paid Iran $400 million in cash on Jan. 17 as part of a larger $1.7 billion settlement of a failed 1979 arms deal between the U.S. and Iran that was announced that day. Also on that day, Iran released four detained Americans in exchange for the U.S.’s releasing from prison—or dropping charges against—Iranians charged with violating sanctions laws. U.S. officials have said the swap was agreed upon in separate talks.
The objection of senior Justice Department officials was that Iranian officials were likely to view the $400 million payment as ransom, thereby undercutting a longstanding U.S. policy that the government doesn’t pay ransom for American hostages, these people said. The policy is based on a concern that paying ransom could encourage more Americans to become targets for hostage-takers.
Of course, the denials kept on coming from The White House.
However, just this week, as The Wall Street Journal now reports, new details of the $400 million U.S. payment to Iran earlier this year depict a tightly scripted exchange specifically timed to the release of several American prisoners held in Iran, based on accounts from U.S. officials and others briefed on the operation…
U.S. officials wouldn't let Iranians take control of the money until a Swiss Air Force plane carrying three freed Americans departed from Tehran on Jan. 17, the officials said.
Once that happened, an Iranian cargo plane was allowed to bring the cash back from a Geneva airport that day, according to the accounts.
President Barack Obama and other U.S. officials have said the payment didn’t amount to ransom, because the money was owed by the U.S. to Iran as part of a longstanding dispute linked to a failed arms deal from the 1970s. U.S. officials have said that the prisoner release and cash transfer took place through two separate diplomatic channels.
But the handling of the payment and its connection to the release of the Americans have raised questions among lawmakers and administration critics.
…
One of the Americans released in January as part of the prisoner exchange, a Catholic pastor named Saeed Abedini, said he and other American prisoners were kept waiting at Mehrabad airport for more than 20 hours from Jan. 16 to the morning of Jan. 17.
He said in an interview that he was told by a senior Iranian intelligence official at the time that their departure was contingent upon the movements of a second airplane.
Just as Trump had suggested (before oddly retracting his suggestion), the exchange did take place and as the BBC reported. a video did indeed exist of the events, referring to a documentary called "The Rules of the Game" which was broadcast on Iranian state TV in February. In the clip, one can see shots of an airport are accompanied by commentary which references 17 January in Tehran's Mehrabad Airport.
Specifically, the video shows a loaded crate, partially blurred out, which allegedly shows the money in question.
And another version:
A translation of the commentary with the pictures, per BBC, reads as follows.
"Early hours of 17 January 2016, Mehrabad Airport (Tehran), $400m cash was transported to Iran by an airplane.
"A little bit later, part of the interest money was also paid to Iran, and the US government made a commitment to pay the rest of Iran's money."
While it is not clear if this is intended to be a literal description or whether the shots are just general views of the airport.
The video is shown below, and the pettets of cash appear at the 11:00 mark.
The video It can also be found on YouTube, and was also hosted and discussed by MEMRI tv at one point, and was also in a BBC Journalist twitter feed. Here are the links to the short and the full version of the Iranian Documentary. Finally here is another version.
It is unclear where Donald Trump might have caught the clip of the video, and whether or not the cash disclosed is what Iran claims it is (in light of the WSJ revelations it is very likely that this is indeed the alleged payment in question) but the footage was widely discussed several months ago when the hostages were released. The Iranian TV ran it with a title “The Rules of The Game." It was released on BBC TV during a segment discussing the release of the prisoners.
In other words, it did exist.
* * *
So to summarize – Obama lied; the administration did indeed make a $400 million in exchange for the release of four hostages (if it walks like a ransom, and talks like a ransom, it is a ransom), and Trump was right.
Finally, this is far from over, as The Wall Street Journal concludes, Republican lawmakers have charged that the $400 million payment equated to a ransom paid by the White House to gain the release of the Americans.
Republican leaders said they are preparing to hold hearings on the $400 million transfer once Congress returns from its summer break in September. Rep. Sean Duffy (R., Wis.), chairman of a House investigative body, sent letters to the Justice and Treasury Departments, as well as the Federal Reserve, on Aug. 10 requesting all records related to the Iran exchange.
Mr. Duffy asked Attorney General Loretta Lynch to identify all “persons within the Department authorizing or otherwise taking steps to carry out the payment.”
Obama administration officials have confirmed that they have paid the remaining $1.3 billion to Iran as part of the settlement reached in January on the failed arms deal. This marked the interest accrued over the past 37 years on the original $400 million paid by Iran. U.S. officials, however, have refused to disclose how the Obama administration made this additional payment. Lawmakers are seeking to determine whether this money was also paid in cash or if the Treasury Department was able to wire it electronically.
- Yes They Exist – Meet The Democrats For Trump
Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,
We’ve all heard the rumors of lifelong Democrats who support Trump in 2016. It’s time to meet a few of them.
The Washington Post reports:
WEIRTON, W.Va. — The Ohio Valley is filled with registered Democrats, the kind that hung portraits of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman and John F. Kennedy on their living room walls. It is made of coal and steel towns and union workers, and stretches from the Pittsburgh exurbs across West Virginia’s panhandle into Ohio.
But here in Weirton — where Weirton Steel Company employed 12,000 people and now only 900 — many say they will cast their ballots for Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. They talk about him over beers at local taverns and at church socials. For many of those in the unions, he’s the first Republican for whom they’ll vote — even as national unions, including the United Steelworkers and the AFL-CIO, have endorsed Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
“When the steel industry was going good and the coal was good, it was blue,” said George Psaros, 76, a retired Weirton Steel engineer who voted for President Obama in 2008 and 2012. “Well, the world has changed.”
Now even one of the most reliably Democratic groups — union members — may be turning red, drawn by Trump’s free-trade bashing and resentful of Clinton’s past support for certain international trade agreements.
“I don’t know what Trump would do if he’s elected,” said Mark Glyptis, president of the United Steelworkers Local 2911 and a Trump supporter, who voted for Obama in the past two elections. “But I know what Hillary would do.”
Nationally, union households have increasingly voted for conservative candidates, data show. In 1996, only 30 percent of union households voted for Republican candidates. In 2012, that increased to 40 percent, and political analysts expect that rise this election cycle.
And increasingly, these distressed workers are associating free trade with the Democrats. In Glyptis’s office hangs a poster that says “Free Traders are Traitors.” To many this election season, that means Democrats.
“You have to get a decent-paying job, that’s the first step of anything,” said John Balzano, 78, and the Local 2911 benefits coordinator, who said he is undecided about for whom to vote. He has worked at the mill since age 21. “And it branches out, whether you’re going to be a good family man, whether you’re going to get a divorce, whether you’re going to live in the community, whether you’re going to become a good, community-minded person, the job will dictate that. We don’t have them around here.”
During his election bid, he felt the same anger voters are taking out now on Clinton. They feel spurned by trade deals, he said as he sipped coffee at the union hall.
“We didn’t see a damn thing in return,” he said of the North American Free Trade Agreement. China’s 2000 admission to the World Trade Organization and the 2004 Dominican Republic-Central American Free Trade Agreement inundated U.S. markets with cheap foreign metal.
They are absolutely right not to trust Hillary when it comes to the TPP. Here’s why:
Nobody Knows Who’s Paying for the Privately Funded Democratic National Convention
Obama Administration Delays Release of Hillary Clinton TPP Emails Until After the Election
Where Does Hillary Stand on the TPP? 45 Public Statements Tell You Everything You Need to Know
- Uber Determines Pittsburgh Lives Most Expendable; Plans To Unleash Autonomous Vehicles There Within Weeks
Uber just announced plans to introduce autonomous, well semi-autonomous anyway, vehicles to carry passengers in Pittsburgh later this month. Per an interview with Bloomberg, in a plan described as "audacious, even reckless," Uber CEO Travis Kalanick says autonomous cars are "going commercial" because they "cant' just be about science."
Even though the long-term plan is to have completely autonomous vehicles, for now cars in Pittsburgh will have engineers in the driver seat ready to take over at any moment while simultaneously monitoring for "bugs" in the system. As one Uber engineer pointed out, there's a need to keep human drivers in the cars for now as his "autonomous" vehicle suddenly went "un-autonomous" earlier this week while crossing the Allegheny River…but, as he points out, "bridges are really hard." Who cares about bridges? If your car happens to go tumbling off the edge there's usually water below to soften your fall.
On a recent weekday test drive, the safety drivers were still an essential part of the experience, as Uber’s autonomous car briefly turned un-autonomous, while crossing the Allegheny River. A chime sounded, a signal to the driver to take the wheel. A second ding a few seconds later indicated that the car was back under computer control. “Bridges are really hard,” Krikorian says. “And there are like 500 bridges in Pittsburgh.”
As we pointed out in a post earlier this week, to the extent the technology works consistently, avoiding the nasty consequences of death and mayhem in the event of failure, autonomous vehicles are worth big money to Uber and consumers…though not so much for the automotive OEMs (see "Ford Announces Plans To Self-Destruct Starting In 2021"). As we pointed out, the cost of paying drivers is a substantial portion of the ~$1.00 per mile charge paid by Uber riders. To the extent that cost can be removed from the equation then fares charged by companies like Uber will decline materially.
In the long run, Kalanick says, prices will fall so low that the per-mile cost of travel, even for long trips in rural areas, will be cheaper in a driverless Uber than in a private car.
Unfortunately, for the auto OEMs the story is the exact opposite. In theory, truly autonomous cars could result in substantial increases in passenger car utilization rates and, therefore, declines in annual car sales. But apparently, Volvo CEO Hakan Samuelsson isn't worried (yes, we can sense the pure optimism in the quote below):
“That could be seen as a threat,” says Volvo Cars CEO Hakan Samuelsson. “We see it as an opportunity.”
But still, even if the technology works, the question remains how quickly consumers will adopt it, if at all. There certainly has been no shortage of gruesome videos hitting Youtube lately of Tesla vehicles crashing while driving in autopilot mode. As pointed out by an Uber engineer, the sheer statistics of operating vehicles in an uncontrolled environment means that accidents are inevitable.
Although Kalanick and other self-driving car advocates say the vehicles will ultimately save lives, they face harsh scrutiny for now. In July a driver using Tesla’s Autopilot service died after colliding with a tractor-trailer, apparently because both the driver and the car’s computers didn’t see it. (The crash is currently being investigated by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.) Google has seen a handful of accidents, but they’ve been less severe, in part because it limits its cars to 25 miles per hour. Uber’s cars haven’t had any fender benders since they began road-testing in Pittsburgh in May, but at some point something will go wrong, according to Raffi Krikorian, the company’s engineering director. “We’re interacting with reality every day,” he says. “It’s coming.”
While we're sure autonomous vehicles will be commonplace at some point in the future we have our doubts as to whether they're ready for prime-time just yet. It should be interesting to monitor Uber's success in Pittsburgh.
- The Benefits (And Hazards) Of Trumpism
Submitted by Justin Raimondo via AntiWar.com,
Donald Trump’s most recent foreign policy speech, in which he explained how he would deal with the Islamic State (ISIL) and the Middle East in general, contained multitudes – everything good and everything questionable about his brand of “America First” nationalism. Here is Trumpism on full display, the common-sensical and the nonsensical intertwined. While I realize a presidential election campaign is not the time for nuance, it behooves us to pull apart these disparate strands if we want to understand this moment in our history.
He starts out by defining the problem: the series of attacks that have horrified the world and flummoxed our law enforcement agencies. And what’s notable here is that he just doesn’t talk about what’s going on overseas, as you might expect in a speech ostensibly about foreign policy: he talks about San Bernardino and Orlando alongside Paris and Brussels. In short, he brings it all home.
This underscores his entire orientation: it’s what “America First” is all about. Why should Americans care about ISIL? Well, folks, says Trump, it’s because they’re attacking us right here on the home front. Contrast this with the usual neocon-Hillaryite politically correct gobbledygook: we have to spread Democracy and Goodness throughout the Middle East! They don’t have gay rights in Afghanistan! We must defend the “international order”!
There’s the problem: ISIL. So what caused it? Trump’s answer:
“The rise of ISIS is the direct result of policy decisions made by President Obama and Secretary Clinton.”
What? I seem to remember some guy named George W. Bush – didn’t he invade Iraq or something? – who vowed to pursue the goal of “ending tyranny in our world.” Why, as I recall, he even invoked Doestoevsky’s novel about revolutionary nihilism, The Possessed, and pledged to ignite “a fire in the mind” throughout the Middle East – and the world! And the fire is still burning….
In fairness, Trump gets to the Iraq war later on in the speech, but this omission is telling, although it probably says more about who’s advising him than it does about the candidate himself.
In any case, Trump goes on to denounce the disastrous military interventions that empowered ISIL in Syria and Libya: so far so good. He also notes US support for the Muslim Brotherhood’s revolution in Egypt, another aspect of the post-“Arab Spring” turn in US policy that ended badly. Then we get the Fox News version of history: the Iran deal put Tehran “in a dominant position of regional power and, in fact, aspiring to be a dominant world power.”
This makes zero sense, especially after his long peroration about the horrors of ISIL: does he not know that Iran is fighting ISIL in Syria? Does he not realize that Iranian-backed militias in Iraq are fighting alongside Iraqi government forces to defeat the pro-ISIL pro-al Qaeda Sunni insurgency?
Does he know anything?
We get yet more Fox News revisionist history with his description of President Obama’s Cairo speech as an “apology tour,” followed by this:
“The failure to establish a new Status of Forces Agreement in Iraq, and the election-driven timetable for withdrawal, surrendered our gains in that country and led directly to the rise of ISIS.”
He blames Obama, but this is false: it was the Bush administration that negotiated the Status of Forces Agreement and established the withdrawal timetable. President Bush signed a memorandum of understanding that stipulated all US troops must leave Iraq by December 31, 2011. The withdrawal wasn’t “election-driven” – it was Bush-driven.
Surely the Bush administration wanted to keep US troops in Iraq: to do otherwise would be to admit, in deeds if not in words, that the invasion had been a disastrous mistake. The sticking point was the question of immunity of US soldiers from Iraqi law: given the horrific history of Abu Ghraib, and other numerous instances of US troops committing war crimes in Iraq, the Iraqis insisted that any US soldiers accused of engaging in such acts would have to be subject to trial in Iraqi courts. The US, which has a policy of not allowing its soldiers to be tried in foreign courts, refused to go along with this. And that was the end of that.
While it’s true that the Obama administration tried to resurrect the agreement, the US prohibition on foreign legal jurisdiction over our troops was considered nonnegotiable.
What comes next is the under-appreciated sight of a Republican candidate for President trying to prove that he was against the Iraq war from the beginning. Trump cites an interview with Neil Cavuto in which he said the economy is a bigger problem and we shouldn’t “be going in yet.” (Yet?) He cites a fuller and more definitive statement made to Esquire magazine in 2004:
“What was the purpose of this whole thing? Hundreds and hundreds of young people killed. And what about the people coming back with no arms and legs? Not to mention the other side. All those Iraqi kids who’ve been blown to pieces. And it turns out that all of the reasons for the war were blatantly wrong. All this for nothing.”
So, if it was all “for nothing,” then it was a good thing we pulled out, and indeed we should’ve pulled out sooner. Right? Of course not!
“So I have been clear for a long time that we should not have gone in. But I have been just as clear in saying what a catastrophic mistake Hillary Clinton and President Obama made with the reckless way in which they pulled out.
“After we had made those hard-fought sacrifices and gains, we should never have made such a sudden withdrawal – on a timetable advertised to our enemies. Al Qaeda in Iraq had been decimated, and Obama and Clinton gave it new life and allowed it to spread across the world.”
The myth of Victory Denied is a longstanding right-wing trope that refuses to die: they say the same thing about the Vietnam war. If these people had their way, US troops would still be fighting in the Mekong delta. “We weren’t allowed to win!” is the one point where neoconservatism and Trumpian nationalism intersect. Except it has nothing to do with reality. The Iraqis kicked us out – and in Vietnam we were militarily defeated. Neither war was winnable.
Indeed, every war we’ve fought on the Asian landmass has ended in, at best, a stalemate, as in Korea, and at worst a complete rout, as in Vietnam. Iraq is no different: and neither, for that matter, is Syria, or Libya, or any of the other interventions Trump denounces. The choice we faced in all of these wars was: either permanent occupation, or else withdrawal. There’s no in-between. Our troops are still in Korea, more than half a century after the fighting ended, a fact that Trump complains about. Does he want Iraq to turn into another Korea?
He slyly acknowledges this contradiction when he goes into his unbelievably stupid “we-should’ve-kept-the-oil” riff:
“This proposal, by its very nature, would have left soldiers in place to guard our assets. In the old days, when we won a war, to the victor belonged the spoils. Instead, all we got from Iraq – and our adventures in the Middle East – was death, destruction and tremendous financial loss.”
What this means, in effect, is that we’ll be in the Middle East forever, guarding “our assets.” And, by the way, the “old days” Trump refers to are really ancient times: when the Romans sacked cities and lugged the loot back to Rome. America’s wars didn’t involve us collecting anything but the war debts of our shiftless allies: after World War I, we effectively canceled the war debts owed by Great Britain and France. After World War II, the Marshall Plan subsidized the nations of devastated Europe, and the Brits didn’t pay off their debt to us until 2006 (after multi-year suspensions of payments). These wars, and indeed all the wars waged by us in modern times, resulted in nothing but “death, destruction, and tremendous financial loss.”
Trump then turns around and declares “The era of nation-building will be ended.” Great! But we’ll still be fighting in Iraq, and god knows where else.
So how will Trump deal with the Islamic State? Well, beyond calling “an international conference,” we don’t know. He doesn’t want to “telegraph” his Grand Plan to “our enemies.” And he also doesn’t want to tell the American people what he plans to do – but we can glean the implications from what he does say. And I have to say it’s not encouraging.
Trump’s immigration proposals – “ideological vetting” of potential immigrants, a “temporary” ban on immigrants from countries rife with terrorism, a “Commission on Radical Islam” to study the problem – are vague placebos in place of a real policy. France has a large Muslim population. So does Britain. So does Germany. Are these countries, all of which have been the scenes of homegrown terrorist activities, among those he wants to impose his “temporary” ban on? He never tells us which countries he’s talking about. As for the “vetting” process: will any would-be terrorist answer truthfully when asked if he or she believes in Sharia law, as opposed to the US Constitution? Grow up!
If Trump were serious about using immigration policy as a weapon in the “war on terrorism,” he would advocate an immigration moratorium. He used the word “extreme” a half a dozen times when he talked about who should be allowed to enter the country, but apparently this is too extreme even for him – and yet it’s the only realistic approach to take. I’m not saying I would endorse such a proposal, but at least it has the virtue of being both practical and honest.
To sum up: on the plus side we have Trump denouncing the Iraq war and the interventions in Libya, Syria, and Egypt that gave ISIL a pathway to prominence. That a Republican candidate for President is saying these words is more significant than anyone is willing to admit: it represents a sea change for the GOP, and it means there’s no going back to the neoconservative nostrums of the past. There’s also his willingness to cooperate with Russia, which would mark a decisive break with the new cold warriors who inhabit the Beltway and infest both parties. And you’ll note that, when listing our Muslim allies in the Middle East, Trump didn’t mention the Saudis or the Gulf emirates. They surely noticed this glaring omission, although no one else did.
On the negative side, we see that Trump is a captive of the ridiculous idea that once we’re in we have to stay in and fight until we achieve “victory.” What he doesn’t realize is that when you’ve dug yourself into a hole the way out is to stop digging – and his failure to understand this simple principle is surely replicated by the way he’s conducted his campaign so far.
What Trump’s critics don’t understand is that his victory in the primaries represents a break with Bush Republicanism, which is why the neoconservatives have been his most vocal and embittered opponents. He really does oppose the first principle of interventionism, which is that “American leadership” is the singular answer to the world’s problems. What he doesn’t get, however, is that we can’t allow ourselves to get sucked back into the Middle East maelstrom under the pretext of cleaning up the mess made by the globalists.
Digest powered by RSS Digest
Saving...