- Rule By Brute Force: The True Nature Of Government
Submitted by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
“We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.”
-Ayn Rand
The torch has been passed to a new president.
All of the imperial powers amassed by Barack Obama and George W. Bush – to kill American citizens without due process, to detain suspects indefinitely, to strip Americans of their citizenship rights, to carry out mass surveillance on Americans without probable cause, to suspend laws during wartime, to disregard laws with which he might disagree, to conduct secret wars and convene secret courts, to sanction torture, to sidestep the legislatures and courts with executive orders and signing statements, to direct the military to operate beyond the reach of the law, to act as a dictator and a tyrant, above the law and beyond any real accountability – have been inherited by Donald Trump.
Whatever kind of president Trump chooses to be, he now has the power to completely alter the landscape of this country for good or for ill.
He has this power because every successive occupant of the Oval Office has been allowed to expand the reach and power of the presidency through the use of executive orders, decrees, memorandums, proclamations, national security directives and legislative signing statements that can be activated by any sitting president.
Those of us who saw this eventuality coming have been warning for years about the growing danger of the Executive Branch with its presidential toolbox of terror that could be used—and abused—by future presidents.
The groundwork, we warned, was being laid for a new kind of government where it won’t matter if you’re innocent or guilty, whether you’re a threat to the nation or even if you’re a citizen. What will matter is what the president—or whoever happens to be occupying the Oval Office at the time—thinks. And if he or she thinks you’re a threat to the nation and should be locked up, then you’ll be locked up with no access to the protections our Constitution provides. In effect, you will disappear.
Our warnings went largely unheeded.
First, we sounded the alarm over George W. Bush’s attempts to gut the Constitution, suspend habeas corpus, carry out warrantless surveillance on Americans, and generally undermine the Fourth Amendment, but the Republicans didn’t want to listen because Bush was a Republican.
Then we sounded the alarm over Barack Obama’s prosecution of whistleblowers, targeted drone killings, assassinations of American citizens, mass surveillance, and militarization of the police, but the Democrats didn’t want to listen because Obama was a Democrat and he talked a really good game.
It well may be that by the time Americans—Republicans and Democrats alike—stop playing partisan games and start putting some safeguards in place, it will be too late.
Already, Donald Trump has indicated that he will pick up where his predecessors left off: he will continue to wage war, he will continue to federalize the police, and he will operate as if the Constitution does not apply to him.
Still, as tempting as it may be, don’t blame Donald Trump for what is to come.
If this nation eventually locks down… If Americans are rounded up and detained based on the color of their skin, their religious beliefs, or their political views… If law-and-order takes precedence over constitutional principles…
If martial law is eventually declared… If we find that there really is nowhere to run and nowhere to hide from the surveillance state’s prying eyes and ears… And if our constitutional republic finally plunges headlong over the cliff and leaves us in the iron grip of totalitarianism…
Please, resist the urge to lay all the blame at Trump’s feet.
After all, President Trump didn’t create the police state.
He merely inherited it.
Frankly, there’s more than enough blame to go around.
So blame Obama. Blame Bush. Blame Bill Clinton.
Blame the Republicans and Democrats who justified every power grab, every expansion of presidential powers, and every attack on the Constitution as long as it was a member of their own party leading the charge.
Blame Congress for being a weak, inept body that spends more time running for office and pandering to the interests of the monied elite than representing the citizenry.
Blame the courts for caring more about order than justice, and for failing to hold government officials accountable to the rule of law.
Blame Corporate America for taking control of the government and calling the shots behind the scenes.
Most of all, blame the American people for not having objected louder, sooner and more vehemently when Barack Obama, George W. Bush and their predecessors laid the groundwork for this state of tyranny.
But wait, you say.
Americans are mobilizing. They are engaged. They are actively expressing their discontent with the government. They are demanding change. They are marching in the streets, picketing, protesting and engaging in acts of civil disobedience.
This is a good development, right? Isn’t this what we’ve been calling on Americans to do for so long: stand up and push back and say “enough is enough”?
Perhaps you’re right.
Perhaps Americans have finally had enough. At least, some Americans have finally had enough.
That is to say, some Americans have finally had enough of certain government practices that are illegal, immoral and inhumane.
Although, to be quite fair, it might be more accurate to state that some Americans have finally had enough of certain government practices that are illegal, immoral and inhumane provided that the ruling political party responsible for those actions is not their own.
Yes, that sounds about right. Except that it’s all wrong.
We still haven’t learned a thing.
Imagine: after more than eight years in which Americans remained largely silent while the United States military (directed by the Obama Administration) bombed parts of the Middle East to smithereens—dropping nearly three bombs an hour, and left a trail of innocent civilian deaths in its wake—suddenly, Americans are outraged by programs introduced by the Trump Administration that could discriminate against Muslim refugees. Never mind that we’ve been killing those same refugees for close to a decade.
Certainly, there was little outcry when the U.S. military under Obama carried out an air strike against a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Afghanistan. Doctors, patients—including children—and staff members were killed or wounded. There were also no protests when the Obama Administration targeted Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen in Yemen, for assassination by drone strike. The man was killed without ever having been charged with a crime. Two weeks later, Obama—the recipient of a Nobel Peace Prize—authorized another drone strike that killed al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, also an American citizen.
Most recently, picking up where President Obama left off, President Trump personally authorized a commando raid on a compound in Yemen suspected of harboring Al Qaeda officials. Among those killed were “at least eight women and seven children, ages 3 to 13,” including Nora, the 8-year-old sister of the teenager killed by Obama years before.
Likewise, while most Americans failed to show much opposition to the government’s disregard for Americans’ bodily integrity, shrugging their collective shoulders dismissively over reports of their fellow citizens being subjected Americans to roadside strip searches, virtual strip searches, cavity searches and other equally denigrating acts, hundreds of thousands mobilized to protest policies that could be advanced by the Trump administration that might demean or deny equal rights to individuals based on their gender or orientation or take away their reproductive planning choices. Similarly, while tens of thousands have gathered annually for a March for Life to oppose abortion, many of those same marchers seem to have no qualms about the government’s practice of shooting unarmed citizens and executing innocent ones.
This begs the question: what are Americans really protesting? Is it politics or principle?
Or is it just Trump?
For instance, in the midst of the uproar over Trump’s appointment of Steven Bannon to the National Security Council, his detractors have accused Bannon of being a propagandist nationalist, and a white supremacist. Yet not one objection has been raised about the fact that the National Security Council authorizes secret, legal, targeted killings of American citizens (and others) without due process, a practice frequently employed by Obama.
The message coming across loud and clear: it’s fine for the government to carry out secret, targeted assassinations of American citizens without due process as long as the individuals advising the president aren’t Neo-Nazis.
Of course, this national hypocrisy goes both ways.
Conveniently, many of the same individuals who raised concerns over Obama’s “lawless” use of executive orders to sidestep Congress have defended Trump’s executive orders as “taking us back to the Constitution.” And those who sounded the alarm over the dangers of the American police state have gone curiously silent in the face of Trump’s pledge to put an end to “the dangerous anti-police atmosphere in America.”
We can’t have it both ways.
As long as we continue to put our politics ahead of our principles—moral, legal and constitutional—“we the people” will lose.
And you know who will keep winning by playing on our prejudices, capitalizing on our fears, deepening our distrust of our fellow citizens, and dividing us into polarized, warring camps incapable of finding consensus on the one true menace that is an immediate threat to all of our freedoms? The U.S. government.
In her essay on “The Nature of Government,” Ayn Rand explains that the only “proper” purpose of a government is the protection of individual rights. She continues: “The source of the government’s authority is ‘the consent of the governed.’ This means that the government is not the ruler, but the servant or agent of the citizens; it means that the government as such has no rights except the rights delegated to it by the citizens for a specific purpose.”
When we lose sight of this true purpose of government—to protect our rights—and fail to keep the government in its place as our servant, we allow the government to overstep its bounds and become a tyrant that rules by brute force.
As Rand explains:
Instead of being a protector of man’s rights, the government is becoming their most dangerous violator; instead of guarding freedom, the government is establishing slavery; instead of protecting men from the initiators of physical force, the government is initiating physical force and coercion in any manner and issue it pleases; instead of serving as the instrument of objectivity in human relationships, the government is creating a deadly, subterranean reign of uncertainty and fear, by means of nonobjective laws whose interpretation is left to the arbitrary decisions of random bureaucrats; instead of protecting men from injury by whim, the government is arrogating to itself the power of unlimited whim—so that we are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.
Rule by brute force.
That’s about as good a description as you’ll find for the sorry state of our republic.
SWAT teams crashing through doors. Militarized police shooting unarmed citizens. Traffic cops tasering old men and pregnant women for not complying fast enough with an order. Resource officers shackling children for acting like children. Citizens being jailed for growing vegetable gardens in their front yards and holding prayer services in their backyards. Drivers having their cash seized under the pretext that they might have done something wrong.
The list of abuses being perpetrated against the American people by their government is growing rapidly.
We are approaching critical mass.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, it may already be too late to save our republic. We have passed the point of easy fixes. When the government and its agents no longer respect the rule of law—the Constitution—or believe that it applies to them, then the very contract on which this relationship is based becomes invalid.
So what is the answer?
Look to the past if you want to understand the future.
Too often, we look to the past to understand how tyrants come to power: the rise and fall of the Roman Empire; Hitler’s transformation of Germany into a Nazi state; the witch hunt tactics of the McCarthy Era.
Yet the past—especially our own American history—also teaches us valuable lessons about the quest for freedom. Here’s Rand again:
A free society—like any other human product—cannot be achieved by random means, by mere wishing or by the leaders’ “good intentions.” A complex legal system, based on objectively valid principles, is required to make a society free and to keep it free-a system that does not depend on the motives, the moral character or the intentions of any given official, a system that leaves no opportunity, no legal loophole for the development of tyranny. The American system of checks and balances was just such an achievement. And although certain contradictions in the Constitution did leave a loophole for the growth of statism, the incomparable achievement was the concept of a constitution as a means of limiting and restricting the power of the government. Today, when a concerted effort is made to obliterate this point, it cannot be repeated too often that the Constitution is a limitation on the government, not on private individuals—that it does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals, only the conduct of the government—that it is not a charter for government power, but a charter of the citizens’ protection against the government.
You want to save America? Then stop thinking like Republicans and Democrats and start acting like Americans.
The only thing that will save us now is a concerted, collective commitment to the Constitution’s principles of limited government, a system of checks and balances, and a recognition that they—the president, Congress, the courts, the military, the police, the technocrats and plutocrats and bureaucrats—work for us.
- The History Of Money (In One Simple Infographic)
Today’s infographic from Mint.com highlights the history of money, including the many monetary experiments that have taken place since ancient times…
Courtesy of: Visual CapitalistAs VisualCapitalist's Jeff Desjardins notes, some innovations have stood the test of time – precious metals, for example, have been used for thousands of years. Paper money and banknotes are also widespread in use, after first being turned to in China in 806 after a copper shortage prevented the minting of new coins.
Other experiments didn’t have much staying power. The adoption of strange currencies such as squirrel pelts, cowry shells, or parmesan cheese are only remembered for their peculiarity.
Further, other attempts to stabilize the monetary system were abandoned early as well. The original U.S. gold standard lasted just 54 years, after FDR ditched it during the Great Depression. The Bretton Woods version (gold-exchange standard) lasted even shorter, abandoned after being in place for 26 years when Nixon ended all convertibility between the U.S. dollar and gold in 1971.
THE NEWEST CHAPTER IN OUR MONETARY HISTORY
Although the infographic ends with the introduction of cryptocurrency in 2009, it should be noted that the newest chapter in the history of money is taking place right before our eyes.
The “War on Cash” has been accelerating in recent years, as governments and central banks have called for the elimination of high denomination banknotes. While these anti-cash motions have also been made in many Western countries, the most vivid example of the demonetization is currently happening in India.
In November 2016, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi demonetized 500 and 1000 rupee notes, eliminating 86% of the country’s notes overnight. While Indians could theoretically exchange 500 and 1,000 rupee notes for higher denominations, it was only up to a limit of 4,000 rupees per person. Sums above that had to be routed through a bank account in a country where only 50% of Indians have such access.
There have been at least 112 reported deaths associated with this demonetization – including suicides and the passing of elderly people waiting in bank queues for days to exchange money. India’s largest organization of manufacturers, the All India Manufacturers Organization, also estimates in a report that micro-small scale industries suffered 35% jobs losses and a 50% dip in revenue in the first 34 days since demonetization.
While demonetization in India is off to a rough start, some believe it can still be ultimately successful in the long-term. Regardless, the “War on Cash” still has incredible global momentum – and the end result – however it turns out – will likely form another important chapter in the history of money.
- FATCA Needs To Go, But Unfortunately, The FATCA "Refugees" Are Never Coming Back
Submitted by Duane via Free Market Shooter blog,
GotNews posted an article yesterday about a “refugee problem” America has, referring to approximately 20,000 Americans who have renounced their citizenship under Obama’s leadership, and suggesting America “repatriate” said citizens:
America has a refugee problem. Not the Syrian refugees. No, not the Afghan ones. No, not even the Cuban refugees. I’m talking about the born-and-raised American citizens who got fed up, gave up their U.S. citizenship, and escaped Obama’s America while they still could.
Yes, that’s right: nearly 20,000 American citizens left Obama’s America and forfeited their American citizenship while Obama was President.
Nearly 20,000 U.S. citizens voluntarily gave up their rights to vote, run for office, and the freedom to pursue “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”, while Obama was in office.
We shouldn’t be allowing anyone from the violent and dangerous Middle East, including so-called “refugees”, into the United States right now. The only refugees who should be entering the United States are the American refugees who fled Obama’s America. Not only do we have that duty to our fellow Americans, but they pose no threat to us like Middle Eastern “refugees” do.
What was missing from the article? Discussion of the Obama-sponsored law that caused many citizens (mostly expats) to renounce their citizenship: FATCA (Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act).
FATCA has been beaten to death by other sources, but surprisingly, very few people are aware of what it does. The whole purpose of the law was to “crack down” on overseas tax evasion. Simon Black of Sovereign Man did an excellent job of summarizing the net effect:
Deep within its bowels fell the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, or FATCA for short. It was a sort of ‘law within a law’, and one of the dumbest in US history.
FATCA effectively commanded every single bank on the planet to enter into an information-sharing agreement with the IRS.
(Well, not so much ‘information sharing’. More like ‘information giving’. Because the US government doesn’t share anything with anyone.)
It all started based on a phony assumption that millions of Americans were hiding trillions of dollars in secret offshore accounts. And given how broke the US government is, they wanted every penny they were entitled to.
So the plan was to turn every bank in the world into a global spy network.
Any bank that didn’t comply was threatened with a crippling 30% withholding tax on every dollar that went in, out, and through the Land of the Free.
In a nutshell, if you are an American expat living abroad, you just had to jump through thousands of hurdles to prove to the IRS that you aren’t evading any taxes, report all this information correctly, and within a confusing legal framework that leaves even the best accountants stumped, often triggering audits for “violation” of FATCA, even if it was not violated at all.
Unsurprisingly, since the law was enacted, the amount of expatriates who renounce their citizenship has risen exponentially:
FATCA forces any American opening a bank account overseas to be in compliance with the law, by having the IRS punish foreign nations that do not comply. Because of FATCA, the majority of foreign banks quickly turned to outright refusal of US clients. Good luck finding one that doesn’t charge a ridiculous litany of fees.
Obviously, you need to live abroad to renounce your citizenship. But who is doing the renouncing? For the most part, permanent expats who have no intention of ever moving back. Eduardo Saverin, the Facebook co-founder whose story was on full display in the movie The Social Network, is the biggest name of the group. However, billionaires like Saverin aren’t most people. A more pertinent real-world example is Rachel Heller:
This state of affairs comes about because the US bases its taxation system on citizenship, unlike the rest of the world, where taxation is residence-based. In other words, while I live in the Netherlands, pay taxes in the Netherlands, and receive services in return for my taxes from the Netherlands, I was also expected to pay in the US, despite the fact that I received no services for my tax dollars.
The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), passed in 2010 and in effect since 2014, was intended to catch “tax cheats”: billionaires living in the US who send their money abroad to hide it from the IRS. The problem is that people like me, who have moved abroad for jobs or for love, are persecuted as a consequence of that effort.
This does not mean that I was trying to avoid paying my “fair share,” the misleading phrase often used by politicians and repeated by the press. Because of a treaty between the US and the Netherlands (and many other countries), I only had to pay US taxes if my income was higher than about $100,000, which, as a teacher, it will never be. Instead, I pay where I live. I am in the 42 percent tax bracket here in the Netherlands, and my husband’s income puts him in the 52 percent bracket. That is much higher than it would be in the US, so I cannot be accused of avoiding taxes. If I wanted to do that, the Netherlands would be the last place I would live.
Nevertheless, I had to fill out US tax forms every year, plus extra forms to claim my foreign tax exemption, all to prove that I in fact do not owe any US taxes.
I repeat: I love the US. But I had to fill out lengthy forms (or rather, I spent almost a thousand euros a year to pay an accountant to do them for me), exposing my and my husband’s accounts to US government scrutiny, and I risked losing the ability to do the sort of banking that any middle-class American would normally take for granted.
Yes, it is true, the majority of US expats are willing to give up their citizenship. It’s not because they aren’t American. It’s because by not living in America, FATCA has effectively rendered them second-class citizens.
The USA is one of only two countries in the world that has this system of taxation. The other is Eritrea, which levies a simple 2% flat tax on its citizens who live abroad. And still, the media, and even the UN have weighed on Eritrea’s simple regime, calling it “authoritarian”:
Nearly every country in the world bases its tax system on residency rather than citizenship. If you’re an Italian citizen, and you leave Italy to live and work in Dubai, you don’t have to pay taxes on the income you earn abroad to the Italian government.
But Eritrea levies a 2% flat tax on its citizens who live abroad. If you’re an Eritrean citizen, you have to pay taxes to the Eritrean government, no matter where you live and work.
The media has condemned this as “extortion” and a “repressive” measure by an “authoritarian” government.
The UN has even weighed in. In Resolution 2023, the UN Security Council condemned Eritrea for “using extortion, threats of violence, fraud and other illicit means to collect taxes outside of Eritrea from its nationals.”
FATCA is far more onerous, costly, and authoritarian than anything Eritrea does. But don’t hold your breath expecting the UN to condemn what the USA is doing to its own citizens.
Rachel Heller went into detail on how difficult the renunciation process is in her above linked article, but even after months and months of interviews, the USA piles on a $2,350 “renunciation fee” and an exit tax on your net worth, in addition to a “doxxing” of your name and personal details in a Federal register, done to “name and shame” you for renouncing your citizenship.
It is sad that Americans have been forced to renounce their citizenship to comply with the onerous restrictions on their rights as a result of the Obama administration’s FATCA law. But they didn’t give up their citizenship because they all of a sudden became un-American; no, they did it because of a law that has turned living and/or working abroad into an expensive, onerous, bureaucratic nightmare for the ordinary American citizen. Repealing FATCA should be almost as high on Trump’s list as repealing Obamacare, but unfortunately for the citizens living abroad, a repeal of this law is not likely anytime soon, as Trump seems quite preoccupied with other affairs at the moment.
What is even more sad, however, is that these citizens who have renounced will not be coming back, or re-applying for citizenship anytime soon. Most were already living abroad permanently, and had no interest in ever moving back. Because of FATCA and the IRS, and nothing else, they will no longer enjoy the protections of afforded to them when they were born. FATCA and its ridiculous system has ensnared law-abiding American expats into a constant battle with the IRS, all over the day-to-day activities all citizens engage in.
Regrettably, no new legislation can change that fact, undo all of the damage FATCA has already caused, or magically bring back the citizenship rights of those who have chosen to give it up, solely to avoid FATCA’s unjust burden.
- This Won't End Well – China Skyscraper Edition
China has been on a skyscraper-building boom for years, but, we suspect, 2016 may have seen the mal-investment boom jump the shark.
As Goldman Sachs illustrates in the following chart, China was head, shoulders, knees, and toes above the aggregate of the rest of the world in terms of skyscraper completions in 2016…
Could record-setting skyscrapers signal economic over-expansion and a misallocation of capital?
EWN Interactive, a subscription service focused on technical analysis, thinks so. The following infographic follows the “Skyscraper Curse” through six different market tops and subsequent crashes over the past century.
It is gigantic in size, so please click here or the below image to access the legible version:
Courtesy of: Visual CapitalistEWM Interactive sums up the infographic with these words:
In the market, extreme optimism results in price bubbles. One of the real-life manifestations of extremely positive social mood is the construction of enormous buildings. Market tops and skyscrapers often seem to emerge simultaneously, because both phenomena are the result of the illusion of infinite prosperity.
But extreme psychological conditions do not last very long. That is the reason why record-breaking buildings, whose construction starts during a market bubble, are often completed after the bubble’s collapse.
* * *
In January we noted a perfect example of the smoke-and-mirror-ness of China's credit-fueled expansion, as a 27-storey high-rise building which was completed on November 15th 2015 was just demolished, "having been left unused for too long."
And just this week, another illustration of Keynesian perfection as China created, then destroyed 19 massive structures, to make room for an even bigger skyscraper. The epic explosion that took place in Wuhan, the capital city of Hubei province, leveled 19 seven to 12-story structures in a controlled demolition, the South China Morning Post newspaper reported, citing local media. The city authorities are planning to demolish at least 32 buildings to make way for a new business center that will reportedly feature a 707-meter tall skyscraper, which is to be one of the tallest buildings in the world.
* * *
The silver-lining – now workers can clean up the mess, dig a bigger hole… and fill that in – all in the name of Keynesian "growth."
- The Other 'Ban' That Was Quietly Announced Last Week
Submitted by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,
Most of the world is in an uproar right now over the travel ban that Donald Trump hastily imposed late last week on citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries.
But there was another ban that was quietly proposed last week, and this one has far wider implications: a ban on cash.
The European Union’s primary executive authority, known as the European Commission, issued a “Road Map” last week to initiate continent-wide legislation against cash.
There are already a number of anti-cash legislative measures that have been passed in individual European member states.
In France, for example, it’s illegal to make purchases of more than 1,000 euros in cash.
And any cash deposit or withdrawal to/from a French bank account exceeding 10,000 euros within a single month must be reported to the authorities.
Italy banned cash payments above 1,000 euros back in 2011; Spain has banned cash payments in excess of 2,500 euros.
And the European Central Bank announced last year that it would stop production of 500-euro notes, which will eventually phase them out altogether.
But apparently these disparate rules don’t go far enough.
According to the Commission, the presence of cash controls in some EU countries, coupled with the lack of cash controls in other EU countries, creates loopholes for criminals and terrorists.
So that’s why the European Commission is now working to standardize a ban on cash, or at least implement severe restrictions and reporting, across the entire EU.
The Commission’s roadmap indicates that forthcoming legislation, likely to be enacted next year.
This is happening. And it may serve as the perfect case study for the rest of the world.
A growing bandwagon of academics and policy makers in other countries, including the United States, UK, Australia, etc. has been calling for prohibitions against cash.
It’s always the same song: cash is a tool for criminals and terrorists.
Harvard economist Ken Rogoff is a leading voice in the War on Cash; his new book The Curse of Cash claims that physical currency makes the world less safe.
Rogoff further states “all that cash” is being used for “tax evasion, corruption, terrorism, the drug trade, human trafficking. . .”
Wow. Sounds pretty grim.
Apparently pulling out a $5 bill to tip your valet makes you a member of ISIS now.
Of course, this is total nonsense.
A recent Gallup poll from last year shows that a healthy 24% of Americans still use cash to make all or most of their purchases, compared to the other options like debit cards, credit cards, checks, bank transfers, PayPal, etc.
And the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco released a ton of data late last year showing that:
- 52% of grocery purchases, along with personal care products, are made in cash
- 62% of purchases up to $10 are made in cash
- But even at much higher amounts over $100, nearly 1 in 5 purchases are still made using physical cash
This doesn’t sound life nefarious criminal activity to me.
It seems that perfectly normal, law-abiding citizens still use cash on a regular basis.
But that doesn’t seem to matter.
A bunch of university professors who have probably never been within 1,000 miles of ISIS think that a ban on cash would make us all safer from terrorists.
You probably recall the horrible Christmas attack in Berlin last month in which a Tunisian man drove a truck through a crowded pedestrian mall, killing 12 people.
Well, the attacker was found with 1,000 euros in cash.
The logic, therefore, is to ban cash.
I’m sure he was also found wearing pants. Perhaps we should ban those too.
This idea that criminals and terrorists only deal in bricks of cash is a pathetic fantasy regurgitated by the serially uninformed.
I learned this first hand, years ago, when I was an intelligence officer in the Middle East: criminals and terrorists don’t need to rely on cash.
The 9/11 attackers spent months living in the United States, and they routinely used bank accounts, credit cards, and traveler’s checks to finance themselves.
And both criminal organizations and terrorist networks have access to a multitude of funding options from legitimate businesses and charities, along with access to a highly developed internal system of credit.
A cash ban wouldn’t have prevented 9/11, nor would it have prevented the Berlin Christmas attack.
What cash controls do affect, however, are the financial options of law-abiding people.
These policymakers and academics acknowledge that banning cash would reduce consumers’ financial privacy. And that’s true.
But they’re totally missing the point. Cash isn’t about privacy.
It’s one of the only remaining options in a financial system that has gone totally crazy.
Especially in Europe, where interest rates are negative and many banks are on the verge of collapse, cash is a protective shelter in a storm of chaos.
Think about it: every time you make a deposit at your bank, that savings no longer belongs to you. It’s now the bank’s money. It’s their asset, not yours.
You become an unsecured creditor of the bank with nothing more than a claim on their balance sheet, beholden to all the stupidity and shenanigans that they have a history of perpetrating.
Banks never miss an opportunity to prove to the rest of the world that they do not deserve the trust that we place in them.
And for now, anyone who wishes to divorce themselves from these consequences can simply withdraw a portion of their savings and hold cash.
Cash means there is no middleman standing between you and your savings.
Banning it, for any reason, destroys this option and subjects every consumer to the whims of a financial system that is stacked against us.
- Can Trump Deliver?
Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,
My view of Trump is conditional and awaits evidence. I am encouraged by the One Percent’s opposition to Trump, or we have just experienced the greatest ruse in history. Indeed, a pointless ruse, as the Establishment had its candidate in Hillary.
Trump’s executive orders don’t support the argument that he is acting for the One Percent. Trump nixed the global corporations’ beloved TPP. He is trying to close down the mass immigration that the corporations use to suppress domestic wage rates. He is committed to normalizing relations with Russia, much to the discomfort of the neoconservatives and the military/security complex.
As for Mnuchin, he left Goldman Sachs in 2002, the same year that Nomi Prins left Goldman Sachs. That was 14 years ago. We know for a fact that Nomi, a former managing director, is not an operative for Goldman Sachs, so my position is to wait and see what Mnuchin does before we declare him to be a Goldman Sachs agent. For a different view see Nomi Prins in the Guest section of this website.
Think about it this way: If Trump is sincere, and the Ruling Establishment seems to think that he is, about cleaning out a nest of outlaws, what better help could he have than one of the outlaws?
Change from the top requires tough mean people. Anyone else would be run over.
My position is to wait for the evidence. For years my readers have said that they need some hope. Trump’s attack on the Ruling Establishment gives them hope. Why take this hope away prematurely?
From the beginning my concern has been that Trump has no experience in the economic and foreign policy debates. He doesn’t know the issues or the players. But he knows two big things: the middle and working class are hurting, and conflict with Russia could result in thermo-nuclear war. My view is support him on these two most important of all issues.
My worry is that Trump has already gone off course on better relations with Russia. Trump had the sense to speak during his first week in office with Russia’s President Putin. Reports are that the one hour conversation went well. However, the report from the Trump administration is that the sanctions were not mentioned and that Trump is considering connecting the removal of the sanctions with a reduction in nuclear arms.
Clearly, Trump needs more astute advisors than he has. Confronted with 28 NATO countries, Russia, the population of which is dwarfed by this collection of countries and armaments, relies on its nuclear weapons to deal with the potential threat. During the Obama regime, the threat to Russia must have seemed to be very real, as the demonization of Russia and its President were based entirely on obvious lies and reached levels of provocation seldom seem in history without leading to war.
If I had been Trump’s advisor, I would have insisted that the first thing that Trump tell Putin is that “the sanctions are history and I apologize for the insult based on the fabricated lies of my predecessor.”
This is what was needed. Once trust is restored, then the matter of reduction in nuclear arms can be raised without making the Russian government concerned that the duplicitous Americans are setting them up for attack.
If you were a Russian, if you were a member of the Russian government, if you were president of Russia, if you had experienced an American coup that overthrew the elected government of Ukraine, a province that was part of Russia for 300 years, if you had experienced an American inspired attack on the Russian residents and Russian peace-keeping forces in South Ossetia, long a province of Russia, that caused the intervention of the Russian armed forces, an intervention blamed by the US government on “Russian aggression,” would you trust the United States? Only if you are a complete fool.
Trump needs advisors sufficiently knowledgable to tell him about the situation that he has committed himself to improve.
Who are these advisors?
Consider now the “Muslim ban.” Muslim refugees are a problem for the US and Europe because the US and its NATO puppets have bombed a large number of Muslim countries entirely on the basis of lies. One might have thought, that with all its experience of war, the Western countries would be aware that wars produce refugees. But apparently not.
The easiest and most certain way to deal with the problem of Muslim refugees is to stop the bombings that produce refugees.
Apparently, this solution is beyond the grasp of the Trump administration. According to news reports—and considering the presstitute status of news organizations one never knows—the new Trump administration authorized a SEAL team attack in Yemen that murdered an 8 year old girl along with a number of women and children on January 29. As far as I can ascertain, no women are marching in opposition to the Trump administration’s continuation of the policy of the Bush/Obama regime of murdering Muslims in the name of a hoax “war on terror.”
Trump’s Archilles’ heel is his belief in the “Muslim threat,” an orchestrated threat cooked up by the neoconservatives. If Trump wants to defeat ISIS, all he needs to do is to stop the US government and CIA from funding ISIS. ISIS is Washington’s creation, used to overthrow Libya and sent to Syria to overthrow Assad until the Russians intervened.
Someone needs to have enough geo-political knowledge to tell Trump that he cannot simultaneously mend relations with Russia and revive the conflict with Iran and threaten China.
As I feared, Trump has no idea who to appoint in order to achieve his agenda.
Now let’s turn to Trump’s critics: Identity Politics, that is, the explanation of Western history as the victimization of everyone by white heterosexual males. The attacks on Trump lack legitimacy, and everyone except those immersed in victim politics sees that. The same people who march against Trump and condemn his Muslim ban do not march against the wars that produce the Muslim refugees and immigrants. Trump’s opponents are in the illogical position of supporting the “war on terror” and the 9/11 story on which the war is based, but objecting to the ban on entry of “Muslim terrorists” into the US. If Muslims are terrorists as the Bush/Obama narative claims, it is totally irresponsible to admit into the US Muslims harmed by Washington’s attacks on their countries who might have thoughts of revenge.
The liberal/progressive/left long ago abandoned the working class. The consequence of their illegitimate complaints will be to lump all dissent into their illegitimate category. Thus truth-tellers along with fiction-tellers will be shut down. The public will not be able to differenate between the orchestrated attacks on Trump and those telling the truth.
My conclusion is that the stupidity of Identity Politics by discrediting dissent will empower the worst elements of the right-wing. If Goldman Sachs is also operating against us, as Nomi Prins believes, then the US is history.
- California Considering Legislation To Become First Ever Sanctuary State
We’ve written frequently in recent weeks/months about the brewing battle between the Trump administration and so-called “sanctuary cities” where local police officers are specifically instructed to ignore federal immigration laws. Now, the leftist state of California is considering a new senate bill that would have the entire state become America’s first “sanctuary state.”
According to CBS Los Angeles, Senate Bill 54, written by Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de Leon of Los Angeles, will come to the floor for it’s first public hearing today. While Democrat-controlled cities like Los Angeles, San
Francisco and Sacramento are already considered sanctuary cities, SB54
would enforce the same protections for illegal immigrants on more
conservative California cities in the San Joaquin Valley and elsewhere.As if that weren’t enough, CBS points out that the bill will also consider providing taxpayer dollars to fund lawyers for illegal immigrants facing deportation.
California may prohibit local law enforcement from cooperating with federal immigration authorities, creating a border-to-border sanctuary in the nation’s largest state as legislative Democrats ramp up their efforts to battle President Donald Trump’s migration policies.
The legislation is scheduled for its first public hearing Tuesday as the Senate rushes to enact measures that Democratic lawmakers say would protect immigrants from the crackdown that the Republican president has promised.
While many of California’s largest cities — including Los Angeles, San Francisco and Sacramento — have so-called sanctuary policies that prohibit police from cooperating with immigration authorities, much of the state does not.
The Democratic legislation, written by Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de Leon of Los Angeles, comes up for debate less than a week after Trump signed an order threatening to withdraw some federal grants from jurisdictions that bar officials from communicating with federal authorities about someone’s immigration status.
The Senate Public Safety Committee considers SB54 Tuesday morning. The Judiciary Committee will also consider fast-tracked legislation that would spend state money, in an amount that has not been disclosed, to provide lawyers for people facing deportation.
Of course, this new California bill comes just as Trump signed an executive order to make good on his campaign pledge to block federal funding
to states and cities where local law enforcement refuse to report
undocumented immigrants they encounter to federal authorities. Here are recent comments from White
House press secretary Sean Spicer:“The American people are no longer going to have to be forced to subsidize this disregard for our laws,” Spicer said.
Spicer said an executive order signed by Trump on Wednesday directs the Secretary of Homeland Security to look at federal funding to cities to figure out “how we can defund those streams.”
The move by the Trump administration threatens $2.3 billion in annual funding to the nation’s 10 largest cities.
As we noted a few days ago, California has already threatened counter measures to withhold tax payments to the U.S. Treasury to the extent Trump makes good on his promise to block federal grants to the rogue state.
KPIX5 reports that officials are looking for money that flows through Sacramento to the federal government that could be used to offset the potential loss of billions of dollars’ worth of federal funds if President Trump makes good on his threat to punish cities and states that don’t cooperate with federal agents’ requests to turn over undocumented immigrants, a senior government source in Sacramento said.
It almost feels like this showdown between Trump and California Governor Jerry Brown should be a Pay-Per-View event.
And here is the full text of California Senate Bill 54, for your reading pleasure:
- Sizing Up The Bubble – A Major Inflection Point Is Coming
Submitted by John Rubino via DollarCollapse.com,
Fund manager John Hussman is always good for dramatic charts. Here’s a recent one:
This ratio is even scarier than it looks, says Hussman:
Historically-reliable valuation measures now approach those observed at the 2000 bubble peak. Yet even this comparison overlooks the fact that in 2000, the overvaluation featured a subset of very large-capitalization stocks that were breathtakingly overvalued, while most stocks were more reasonably valued (see Sizing Up the Bubble for details). In many ways, the current speculative episode is worse, because it has extended to virtually all risk-assets.
To offer some idea of the precipice the market has reached, this chart shows the median price/revenue ratio of individual S&P 500 component stocks. This median now stands just over 2.45, easily the highest level in history. The longer-term norm for the S&P 500 price/revenue ratio is less than 1.0. Even a retreat to 1.3, which we’ve observed at many points even in recent cycles, would take the stock market to nearly half of present levels.
One of the reasons share prices have risen so dramatically relative to revenues is that corporations are earning a lot more on each dollar of sales these days. How are they doing that? By squeezing their workers.
The following chart, from the Economic Policy Institute shows labor’s share of corporate income plunging recently.
The next chart illustrates the same point from a different angle. Workers, it seems, have been producing more per hour but their pay hasn’t kept up as their bosses held onto more of the resulting profit.
A big part of this has been due to offshoring. If you close a factory where the workers make $30 an hour and set up in a place where your new workers make $5, then the $25 difference flows to the bottom line. Other contributors are automation, which is both inexorable and hugely favorable for the guys who own the robots, and the fact that the minimum wage in many states has kept up with neither the true inflation rate nor the increase in free-trade driven corporate earnings.
As EPI’s Josh Bivens puts it:
This 6.8 percentage-point decline in labor’s share of corporate income might not seem like a lot, but if labor’s share had not fallen, employees in the corporate sector would have $535 billion more in their paychecks today. If this amount was spread over the entire labor force (not just corporate sector employees) this would translate into a $3,770 raise for each worker.
For stock market investors, the scary thing about this imbalance between capital and labor is that it’s only temporary. As the details and magnitude of the scam have been exposed, the political tide has shifted. At the national level, fed-up US workers have installed an anti-free trade administration that is already tilting the playing field towards domestic workers. At the state and local level, calls for a higher minimum wage are being heard and acted upon. A major French party has even nominated a presidential candidate who wants to tax robots.
So it’s safe to assume that the above charts will develop serious inflection points going forward, as a rising share of profits flow to the nether regions of the org chart and investors respond by lowering the value they place on a given dollar of corporate revenues.
As Hussman notes, just a return to 1990s valuation levels would cut the average US stock in half.
- Meet America's Newest Supreme Court Justice: Judge Neil Gorsuch
Confirming a choice that many had already pegged as a front-runner to fill Antonin Scalia’s vacant seat, President Trump officially announced Judge Neil Gorsuch as his nominee for the Supreme Court of the United States. Gorsuch, 49, the youngest supreme court nominee in 25 years, was among a group of federal judges reported in recent weeks to be on Trump’s shortlist. A strict adherent of judicial restraint known for sharply-written opinions and bedrock conservative views, Gorsuch, a Colorado native, is popular among his peers and is seen as having strong backing among Republicans generally.
A fly-fishing enthusiast and skier who lives outside Boulder, Colorado, Gorsuch lived in Washington DC as a boy, after his mother Anne Gorsuch Burford was appointed by Reagan to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. After graduating from Columbia University, Gorsuch, who is said to have “an inexhaustible store of Winston Churchill quotes”, went on to Harvard Law school and attended Oxford University on a Marshall scholarship. He worked as a corporate lawyer in Washington for a decade before his appointment to the circuit court by George W Bush in 2006, a post to which the Senate confirmed him by voice vote.
Per Politico, Gorsuch has the typical pedigree of a Supreme Court Justice with degrees from Columbia, Harvard and Oxford. Moreover, Gorsuch’s professional background includes time at a Washington law firm, the Department of Justice and clerkships with Justices Byron White and Anthony Kennedy, and some conservative analysts theorize that he could assert a rightward influence on the centrist Ronald Reagan nominee.
Gorsuch has the typical pedigree of a high court justice. He graduated from Columbia, Harvard and Oxford, clerked for two Supreme Court justices and did a stint at the Department of Justice. He attended Harvard Law with former President Barack Obama.
His work background includes time as a partner with the Washington law firm Kellogg Huber Hansen Todd Evans & Figel, a stint with the U.S. Department of Justice and clerkships with Supreme Justices Byron White and Anthony Kennedy.
Since 2006, he has served on the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, in Colorado. His supporters note that he is an outdoorsman who fishes, hunts and skies. On the court, conservatives hope he could become the intellectual heir to Scalia, long the outspoken leader of the conservative bloc.
For conservatives, Gorsuch meets conservative standards as an originalist and a textualist — someone who interprets the Constitution and statutes as they were originally written. His family has ties to the Republican party locally and in Washington, and at the age of 49, he could sit on the high court for decades — a big plus for conservative supporters. Per The Denver Post:
Gorsuch is best known nationally for taking the side of religious organizations that opposed parts of the Affordable Care Act that compelled coverage of contraceptives. In one of those cases, Burwell vs. Hobby Lobby Stores, he wrote of the need for U.S. courts to give broad latitude to religious beliefs.
“It is not for secular courts to rewrite the religious complaint of a faithful adherent, or to decide whether a religious teaching about complicity imposes ‘too much’ moral disapproval on those only ‘indirectly’ assisting wrongful conduct,” he noted in a concurring opinion.
The Supreme Court later ruled in favor of Hobby Lobby, which now is not required to subsidize birth control that it finds objectionable.
Gorsuch also has written against euthanasia and assisted suicide, the latter of which Colorado legalized last November. “All human beings are intrinsically valuable and the intentional taking of human life by private persons is always wrong,” he wrote in his 2006 book “The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia.”
Of course, while his conservative record will no doubt be enticing to Republican Senators, Gorsuch’s past support of term limits may draw criticism from both sides of the aisle, as can’t have anyone disrupting the power structure of Washington D.C. now can we.
One position that might give pause to the lawmakers voting on his nomination is his past advocacy on behalf of term limits. In 1992 he co-wrote a paper for the Cato Institute that argued term limits are “constitutionally permissible.”
“Recognizing that men are not angels, the Framers of the Constitution put in place a number of institutional checks designed to prevent abuse of the enormous powers they had vested in the legislative branch,” he wrote. “A term limit, we suggest, is simply an analogous procedure designed to advance much the same substantive end.”
As the Guardian notes, Trump’s nominee has the potential to tip the court one way or the other on those questions. If confirmed, Gorsuch would return the court to nine justices, filling a seat left vacant since the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February 2016. Working for the last year with an even number of justices, the court issued split 4-4 decisions on high-stakes questions such as the protection of undocumented immigrants and the health of public unions, leaving lower court rulings in place.
The next justice to be confirmed may break such ties, giving new strength to the court’s conservative bloc, which could be further buttressed by future Trump nominations in the case of the retirement or death of a justice. One of the four liberal-leaning justices on the court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, turns 84 in March. Justice Anthony Kennedy, a centrist on the court who has sometimes split tie votes for the progressive wing, is 80 years old.
Gorsuch’s track record as a judge on the US court of appeals for the 10th circuit does not shed obvious light on how he might rule as a supreme court justice on hot-button topics such as abortion and marriage equality. He is the author of a book about euthanasia in which he writes, “to act intentionally against life is to suggest that its value rests only on its transient instrumental usefulness for other ends.”
Ideological strands running through Gorsuch’s appeals court rulings would seem likely to endear him to congressional Republicans and Trump’s conservative base. He has shown himself to be solicitous to claims of religious exemptions from the law, to gun rights claims and to the prosecution of death penalty cases.
During Trump’s announcement, Gorsuch addressed the crowd briefly, declaring himself “honored and humbled” and promising to be a “faithful servant to the constitution and laws of this great country” and paying tribute to the principles of partiality, independence, collegiality and courage.
For a lawyer’s view on Gorsuch, read this SCOTUSblog profile on Gorsuch. Some of his key legal positions are below
- Second Amendment: He wrote in United States v. Games-Perez these rights “may not be infringed lightly.”
- Roe v. Wade: Gorsuch has never had the opportunity to write on Roe v. Wade. But, for any indication on how he would vote on abortions, the “right to privacy” defense from the dormant commerce clause is relevant, and he isn’t buying it. This clause, known as “dormant” since it is not explicitly written out in the Constitution, indicates that since Congress regulates interstate commerce, states cannot pass legislation that unduly burdens or discriminates against other states and interstate commerce.
- Hobby Lobby v. Sebelius: He distrusts efforts to remove religious expression from public spaces generally, but watch out for cases citing RFRA and RLUIPA — he ruled in Hobby Lobby v. Sebelius that the contraception mandate in Obamacare placed an undue burden on the company’s religious exercise and violated RFRA.
- Capital punishment: Gorsuch is not friendly to requests for relief from death sentences through federal habeas corpus.
- Criminal law: Gorsuch believes there is an overwhelming amount of legislation about criminal law, and believes that cases can be interpreted in favor of defendants even if it hurts the government. On mens rea — which means “guilty mind,” or essentially the intent to commit a crime — Gorsuch is willing to read narrowly even if it means it doesn’t favor the prosecution.
- Checks and balances: Gorsuch does not like deferring to federal agencies when they interpret laws, so watch out for use of the Chevron rule, which allows federal agents to enforce laws in any way that is not expressly prohibited. Gorsuch may push back.
As a side note, per the The Denver Post, Gorsuch comes from a well known Republican family whose mother served in the Reagan Administration before being forced to resign in 1983, facing a criminal investigation and a House contempt of Congress citation over records related to alleged political favoritism in toxic-waste cleanups.
Gorsuch comes from a well-known Colorado Republican family. His mother, the late Anne Gorsuch Burford, was Environmental Protection Agency director for the Reagan administration for 22 months. She slashed the agency’s budget and resigned under fire in 1983 during a scandal over mismanagement of a $1.6 billion program to clean up hazardous waste dumps.
With that, let the Senate confirmation theatrics commence.
Under current Senate rules, which require 60 votes for a supreme court confirmation, Gorsuch would need to win the support of multiple Democrats, who count 48 Senate caucus members to the Republicans’ 52.
If the Democrats follow through with a filibuster, however, those rules could change. The previous Democratic leadership of the Senate changed the rules to require fewer votes for the confirmation of most executive nominees, and the current Republican leadership could make an additional change to the rules. McConnell earlier had vowed to confirm Trump’s nominee. White House press secretary Sean Spicer downplayed the looming threat of an all-consuming political brawl over Trump’s nominee, telling reporters on Tuesday that he believed the Senate would reach the 60-vote threshold required to confirm supreme court appointees.
Interest groups across the political spectrum will spend millions on a public campaign to legitimize or tear down a supreme court nominee. Already, conservative groups are running ads to pressure Senate Democrats in red states into siding with Republicans over the nominee.
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