- Inside The Invisible Government: War, Propaganda, Clinton, & Trump
Submitted by John Pilger via Strategic-Culture.org,
The American journalist, Edward Bernays, is often described as the man who invented modern propaganda.
The nephew of Sigmund Freud, the pioneer of psycho-analysis, it was Bernays who coined the term “public relations” as a euphemism for spin and its deceptions.
In 1929, he persuaded feminists to promote cigarettes for women by smoking in the New York Easter Parade – behaviour then considered outlandish. One feminist, Ruth Booth, declared, “Women! Light another torch of freedom! Fight another sex taboo!”
Bernays’ influence extended far beyond advertising. His greatest success was his role in convincing the American public to join the slaughter of the First World War. The secret, he said, was “engineering the consent” of people in order to “control and regiment [them] according to our will without their knowing about it”.
He described this as “the true ruling power in our society” and called it an “invisible government”.
Today, the invisible government has never been more powerful and less understood. In my career as a journalist and film-maker, I have never known propaganda to insinuate our lives and as it does now and to go unchallenged.
Imagine two cities.
Both are under siege by the forces of the government of that country. Both cities are occupied by fanatics, who commit terrible atrocities, such as beheading people.
But there is a vital difference. In one siege, the government soldiers are described as liberators by Western reporters embedded with them, who enthusiastically report their battles and air strikes. There are front page pictures of these heroic soldiers giving a V-sign for victory. There is scant mention of civilian casualties.
In the second city – in another country nearby – almost exactly the same is happening. Government forces are laying siege to a city controlled by the same breed of fanatics.
The difference is that these fanatics are supported, supplied and armed by “us” – by the United States and Britain. They even have a media centre that is funded by Britain and America.
Another difference is that the government soldiers laying siege to this city are the bad guys, condemned for assaulting and bombing the city – which is exactly what the good soldiers do in the first city.
Confusing? Not really. Such is the basic double standard that is the essence of propaganda. I am referring, of course, to the current siege of the city of Mosul by the government forces of Iraq, who are backed by the United States and Britain and to the siege of Aleppo by the government forces of Syria, backed by Russia. One is good; the other is bad.
What is seldom reported is that both cities would not be occupied by fanatics and ravaged by war if Britain and the United States had not invaded Iraq in 2003. That criminal enterprise was launched on lies strikingly similar to the propaganda that now distorts our understanding of the civil war in Syria.
Without this drumbeat of propaganda dressed up as news, the monstrous ISIS and Al-Qaida and al-Nusra and the rest of the jihadist gang might not exist, and the people of Syria might not be fighting for their lives today.
Some may remember in 2003 a succession of BBC reporters turning to the camera and telling us that Blair was “vindicated” for what turned out to be the crime of the century. The US television networks produced the same validation for George W. Bush. Fox News brought on Henry Kissinger to effuse over Colin Powell’s fabrications.
The same year, soon after the invasion, I filmed an interview in Washington with Charles Lewis, the renowned American investigative journalist. I asked him, “What would have happened if the freest media in the world had seriously challenged what turned out to be crude propaganda?”
He replied that if journalists had done their job, “there is a very, very good chance we would not have gone to war in Iraq”.
It was a shocking statement, and one supported by other famous journalists to whom I put the same question — Dan Rather of CBS, David Rose of the Observer and journalists and producers in the BBC, who wished to remain anonymous.
In other words, had journalists done their job, had they challenged and investigated the propaganda instead of amplifying it, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children would be alive today, and there would be no ISIS and no siege of Aleppo or Mosul.
There would have been no atrocity on the London Underground on 7th July 2005. There would have been no flight of millions of refugees; there would be no miserable camps.
When the terrorist atrocity happened in Paris last November, President Francoise Hollande immediately sent planes to bomb Syria – and more terrorism followed, predictably, the product of Hollande’s bombast about France being “at war” and “showing no mercy”. That state violence and jihadist violence feed off each other is the truth that no national leader has the courage to speak.
“When the truth is replaced by silence,” said the Soviet dissident Yevtushenko, “the silence is a lie.”
The attack on Iraq, the attack on Libya, the attack on Syria happened because the leader in each of these countries was not a puppet of the West. The human rights record of a Saddam or a Gaddafi was irrelevant. They did not obey orders and surrender control of their country.
The same fate awaited Slobodan Milosevic once he had refused to sign an “agreement” that demanded the occupation of Serbia and its conversion to a market economy. His people were bombed, and he was prosecuted in The Hague. Independence of this kind is intolerable.
As WikLeaks has revealed, it was only when the Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad in 2009 rejected an oil pipeline, running through his country from Qatar to Europe, that he was attacked.
From that moment, the CIA planned to destroy the government of Syria with jihadist fanatics – the same fanatics currently holding the people of Mosul and eastern Aleppo hostage.
Why is this not news? The former British Foreign Office official Carne Ross, who was responsible for operating sanctions against Iraq, told me: “We would feed journalists factoids of sanitised intelligence, or we would freeze them out. That is how it worked.”
The West’s medieval client, Saudi Arabia – to which the US and Britain sell billions of dollars’ worth of arms – is at present destroying Yemen, a country so poor that in the best of times, half the children are malnourished.
Look on YouTube and you will see the kind of massive bombs – “our” bombs – that the Saudis use against dirt-poor villages, and against weddings, and funerals.
The explosions look like small atomic bombs. The bomb aimers in Saudi Arabia work side-by-side with British officers. This fact is not on the evening news.
Propaganda is most effective when our consent is engineered by those with a fine education – Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Columbia — and with careers on the BBC, the Guardian, the New York Times, theWashington Post.
These organisations are known as the liberal media. They present themselves as enlightened, progressive tribunes of the moral zeitgeist. They are anti-racist, pro-feminist and pro-LGBT.
And they love war.
While they speak up for feminism, they support rapacious wars that deny the rights of countless women, including the right to life.
In 2011, Libya, then a modern state, was destroyed on the pretext that Muammar Gaddafi was about to commit genocide on his own people. That was the incessant news; and there was no evidence. It was a lie.
In fact, Britain, Europe and the United States wanted what they like to call “regime change” in Libya, the biggest oil producer in Africa. Gaddafi’s influence in the continent and, above all, his independence were intolerable.
So he was murdered with a knife in his rear by fanatics, backed by America, Britain and France. Hillary Clinton cheered his gruesome death for the camera, declaring, “We came, we saw, he died!”
The destruction of Libya was a media triumph. As the war drums were beaten, Jonathan Freedland wrote in the Guardian: “Though the risks are very real, the case for intervention remains strong.”
Intervention — what a polite, benign, Guardian word, whose real meaning, for Libya, was death and destruction.
According to its own records, Nato launched 9,700 “strike sorties” against Libya, of which more than a third were aimed at civilian targets. They included missiles with uranium warheads. Look at the photographs of the rubble of Misurata and Sirte, and the mass graves identified by the Red Cross. The Unicef report on the children killed says, “most [of them] under the age of ten”.
As a direct consequence, Sirte became the capital of ISIS.
Ukraine is another media triumph. Respectable liberal newspapers such as the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Guardian, and mainstream broadcasters such as the BBC, NBC, CBS, CNN have played a critical role in conditioning their viewers to accept a new and dangerous cold war.
All have misrepresented events in Ukraine as a malign act by Russia when, in fact, the coup in Ukraine in 2014 was the work of the United States, aided by Germany and Nato.
This inversion of reality is so pervasive that Washington’s military intimidation of Russia is not news; it is suppressed behind a smear and scare campaign of the kind I grew up with during the first cold war. Once again, the Ruskies are coming to get us, led by another Stalin, whom The Economist depicts as the devil.
The suppression of the truth about Ukraine is one of the most complete news blackouts I can remember. The fascists who engineered the coup in Kiev are the same breed that backed the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Of all the scares about the rise of fascist anti-Semitism in Europe, no leader ever mentions the fascists in Ukraine – except Vladimir Putin, but he does not count.
Many in the Western media have worked hard to present the ethnic Russian-speaking population of Ukraine as outsiders in their own country, as agents of Moscow, almost never as Ukrainians seeking a federation within Ukraine and as Ukrainian citizens resisting a foreign-orchestrated coup against their elected government.
There is almost the joie d’esprit of a class reunion of warmongers.
The drum-beaters of the Washington Post inciting war with Russia are the very same editorial writers who published the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
To most of us, the American presidential campaign is a media freak show, in which Donald Trump is the arch villain.
But Trump is loathed by those with power in the United States for reasons that have little to do with his obnoxious behaviour and opinions. To the invisible government in Washington, the unpredictable Trump is an obstacle to America’s design for the 21stcentury.
This is to maintain the dominance of the United States and to subjugate Russia, and, if possible, China.
To the militarists in Washington, the real problem with Trump is that, in his lucid moments, he seems not to want a war with Russia; he wants to talk with the Russian president, not fight him; he says he wants to talk with the president of China.
In the first debate with Hillary Clinton, Trump promised not to be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into a conflict. He said, “I would certainly not do first strike. Once the nuclear alternative happens, it’s over.” That was not news.
Did he really mean it? Who knows? He often contradicts himself. But what is clear is that Trump is considered a serious threat to the status quo maintained by the vast national security machine that runs the United States, regardless of who is in the White House.
The CIA wants him beaten. The Pentagon wants him beaten. The media wants him beaten. Even his own party wants him beaten. He is a threat to the rulers of the world – unlike Clinton who has left no doubt she is prepared to go to war with nuclear-armed Russia and China.
Clinton has the form, as she often boasts. Indeed, her record is proven. As a senator, she backed the bloodbath in Iraq. When she ran against Obama in 2008, she threatened to “totally obliterate” Iran. As Secretary of State, she colluded in the destruction of governments in Libya and Honduras and set in train the baiting of China.
She has now pledged to support a No Fly Zone in Syria — a direct provocation for war with Russia. Clinton may well become the most dangerous president of the United States in my lifetime –a distinction for which the competition is fierce.
Without a shred of evidence, she has accused Russia of supporting Trump and hacking her emails. Released by WikiLeaks, these emails tell us that what Clinton says in private, in speeches to the rich and powerful, is the opposite of what she says in public.
That is why silencing and threatening Julian Assange is so important. As the editor of WikiLeaks, Assange knows the truth. And let me assure those who are concerned, he is well, and WikiLeaks is operating on all cylinders.
Today, the greatest build-up of American-led forces since World War Two is under way – in the Caucasus and eastern Europe, on the border with Russia, and in Asia and the Pacific, where China is the target.
Keep that in mind when the presidential election circus reaches its finale on November 8th, If the winner is Clinton, a Greek chorus of witless commentators will celebrate her coronation as a great step forward for women. None will mention Clinton’s victims: the women of Syria, the women of Iraq, the women of Libya. None will mention the civil defence drills being conducted in Russia. None will recall Edward Bernays’ “torches of freedom”.
George Bush’s press spokesman once called the media “complicit enablers”.
Coming from a senior official in an administration whose lies, enabled by the media, caused such suffering, that description is a warning from history.
In 1946, the Nuremberg Tribunal prosecutor said of the German media: “Before every major aggression, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically for the attack. In the propaganda system, it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons.”
This is adapted from an address to the Sheffield Festival of Words, Sheffield, England.
- Berkeley Professor Claims Clinton Email Investigation Nothing More Than A Sexist "Bitch Hunt"
Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,
Today’s college-related article is not about safe spaces, macro aggressions and trigger warnings. Rather, it’s about a remarkably stupid claim made by Robin Lakoff (a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley), that the entire email scandal plaguing Hillary Clinton is a nothing more than a vast patriarchal driven conspiracy manufactured by men for the sole purpose of taking down a strong and powerful woman. No, I’m not kidding.
Here are a few excerpts from the delusional Time published article, Hillary Clinton’s Emailgate Is an Attack on Women:
‘It’s not about emails; it’s about public communication by a woman’
I am mad. I am mad because I am scared. And if you are a woman, you should be, too. Emailgate is a bitch hunt, but the target is not Hillary Clinton. It’s us.
The only reason the whole email flap has legs is because the candidate is female. Can you imagine this happening to a man? Clinton is guilty of SWF (Speaking While Female), and emailgate is just a reminder to us all that she has no business doing what she’s doing and must be punished, for the sake of all decent women everywhere. There is so much of that going around.
If the candidate were male, there would be no scolding and no “scandal.” Those very ideas would be absurd. Men have a nearly absolute right to freedom of speech. In theory, so do women, but that, as the creationists like to say, is only a theory.
Clinton’s use of a personal server has not been found to be a crime. Then how is it that so many have found the charge so easy to make, and make stick? How has her use of the server made plausible all the claims that she is “deceptive” and “untrustworthy”?
It’s not about emails; it’s about public communication by a woman in general. Of course, in the year 2016, no one (probably not even The Donald) could make this argument explicitly. After all, he and his fellow Republicans are not waging a war on women. How do we know that? They have said so. And they’re men, so they must be telling the truth.
But here’s Hillary Rodham Clinton, the very public stand-in for all bossy, uppity and ambitious women. Here are her emails. And since it’s a woman, doing what decent women should never do—engaging in high-level public communication—well, there must be something wrong with that, even if we can’t quite find that something. We will invoke the terminology of criminal law to account for our feelings. She’s getting away with treason! Put her in jail! We can’t quite put our fingers on it, but the words sure do make a lot of people feel better, so they must be right.
So that’s the take of Berkley linguistics professor Robin Lakoff. Now here’s the take from Charles S. Faddis, a former CIA operations officer with 20 years of experience in intelligence operations.
As Mr. Faddis writes in an Op-ed published at The Hill:
I have worked in national security my entire life. Most of that has been in the intelligence community surrounded by classified information. For twenty years, I worked undercover in the Central Intelligence Agency, recruiting sources, producing intelligence and running operations. I have a pretty concrete understanding of how classified information is handled and how government communications systems work.
Nobody uses a private email server for official business. Period. Full stop.
The entire notion is, to borrow a phrase from a Clinton campaign official, “insane.” That anyone would presume to be allowed to do so is mind-boggling. That government officials allowed Hillary Clinton to do so is nauseating.
Classified and unclassified information do not mix. They don’t travel in the same streams through the same pipes. They move in clearly well defined channels so that never the twain shall meet. Mixing them together is unheard of and a major criminal offense.
If you end up with classified information in an unclassified channel, you have done something very wrong and very serious.
Accidentally removing a single classified message from controlled spaces, without any evidence of intent or exposure to hostile forces, can get you fired and cost you your clearance. Repeated instances will land you in prison.
Every hostile intelligence agency on the planet targets senior American officials for collection. The Secretary of State tops the list. Almost anything the Secretary of State had to say about her official duties, her schedule, her mood, her plans for the weekend, would be prized information to adversaries.
It is very difficult, in fact, to think of much of anything that the Secretary of State could be saying in email that we would want hostile forces to know.
As we wait for more information on the latest revelations, let’s quickly note what we already know Hillary Clinton did.
While Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton exclusively used a private email address for official business. Instead of using a State Department account, she used a personal email account, housed on a private server located in her home in Chappaqua, New York. The Department of State exercised zero control or oversight in this process. No government security personnel were involved in protecting them.
When the House Select Committee on Benghazi asked to see these emails, the Department of State said they did not have them. Clinton’s lawyers then went through all the emails on her server. They turned over 30,000 emails they decided were work related and deleted all of the rest.
How they made the decision as to which emails to share and which to destroy remains unknown. Active government officials were not involved in this process.
Hillary says she did not use the account to transmit classified information. This has been proven false. The FBI found over 100 messages that contained information that was classified when sent, including numerous email chains at the level of Top Secret/Special Access Programs. They don’t get any more highly classified, it’s the virtual summit of Mt. Everest. One theme pertained to the movement of North Korean nuclear assets obtained via satellite imagery. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out this is extremely sensitive information.
The FBI found another 2,000 messages containing information that should have been classified at the time it was sent. How much more classified information may have been in the tens of thousands of emails, which Clinton’s lawyers erased, is completely unknown.
Hillary Clinton supporters like to ask rhetorically, “Well, what about Colin Powell?” Nice try, but using your own private email address which received 2 emails determined to be classified later, is nothing like deliberately operating a home brewed server, and then see it handle thousands of classified e-mails.
What happens next we do not know. What we do know already is this. While serving in one of the most senior positions in the United States Government, Hillary Clinton was at a minimum, grossly negligent in the handling of classified information and when confronted with this practice, acted immediately to destroy information and prevent a full, fair and complete investigation of any damage to national security.
Anyone else who did such things in the government would long ago have been tried, convicted and sent to jail.
You decide if you want to send her to the White House instead.
I’ll let readers decide who has a better read on the situation. In the meantime, back to your safe spaces my little snowflakes.
- Bank Of Japan Leaves Policy Unchanged; Warns Growth, Inflation Outlook Skewed To Downside
Expectations for the BoJ meeting tonight were for no change (and perhaps lowering its inflation and growth outlooks) and markets were braced for a whole lot of nothing with overnight USDJPY vol at its lowest of the year (for a BoJ meeting). Sure enough that is what they got. "No change" across anything policy but cuts to inflation expectations (as well as warnings of a downside skew for growth) left the yen slightly higher.
- Bank of Japan Keeps 10-Year JGB Yield Target About 0%
- BOJ Maintains Policy Balance Rate at -0.1%
- BOJ Board Votes 7-2 to on Neg Rate
- BOJ FY2017 Core CPI Forecast Is 1.5%; Prev. Forecast 1.7%
- "With regard to the risk balance, risks to both economic activity and prices are skewed to the downside."
- BOJ isn't seeing any near term turnaround for exports. Says sluggishness is expected to remain "for some time."
There was some chaos in Nikkei Futures ahead of The BoJ…
Since The BoJ unleashed its curve-management plan, things have been oddly stable…
While Yen has weakened around 4 handles…
Banks have gone nowehere…
As the yield curve has remained relatively flat…
And managing 10Y yields appears to be holding for now…
But while levels/prices may look stable, as Goldman notes, JGB market functionality has already deteriorated and we expect it to continue to deteriorate under the yield curve control, as long as the BOJ continues with the current monetary policy.
Bond market functionality has been deteriorating even prior to the introduction of yield curve control in late September. In the BOJ’s bond market survey, the DI for bond market functionality deteriorated to -46 in August 2016, as compared to -25 in February 2015, when the survey first started (see Exhibit 3). Deterioration in the DI was particularly noticeable after the adoption of the negative rate policy.
Exhibit 3: DI on Bond market functionality
Source: BOJWith the addition of 10-year JGB yield control on top of the negative interest rate policy, we expect long-term rates to become more “fixed” and market functionality to decline even further. Already, on October 19, an entire day went by with no transactions made in newly issued 10-year JGBs (according to the Japan Bond Trading Co.). This is the first time in 13 months, since September 24, 2015, that no transactions have been made for an entire day.
We believe that the BOJ is also concerned about impairment of JGB market functionality, in that it may potentially cause large stress in the market when the BOJ decides to raise its policy rates in the future. We see little way to get around this issue, however, as long as the BOJ maintains current monetary policy.
- 17 Shot Dead As Chicago Records Deadliest Weekend Of 2016
After a summer of extreme violence, homicides in Chicago were supposed to slow down going into the fall and winter months. But, that certainly does not appear to be happening as the city just recording its most violent weekend of the entire year with 52 people shot and 17 of them killed. This weekend’s violence brings the tally of year to date killings in Chicago to 646, an annual run-rate which implies the most violent year since the mid-90s.
According to the Chicago Tribune, of the 17 victims from this weekend’s violence, 7 of them were under the age of 20, with the youngest victim being only 14.
The weekend toll also was deadlier than the three long summer holiday weekends when violence typically spikes because of the warm weather. Six people were fatally shot over the Memorial Day weekend, five over the Fourth of July weekend and 13 people over Labor Day weekend, according to Tribune data.
This past weekend there were shootings in every area of the city but the Far North and Northwest sides, according to police. Of the 17 people who were killed, seven were younger than 20.
The youngest was 14-year-old Demarco Webster Jr., described by his grade school principal as one of her best students. Demarco had planned to run for student council and try out for basketball, and he was being recruited for an NAACP leadership program.
A little more than 24 hours later, 17-year-old twins Edward and Edwin Bryant were killed in an apparent drive-by shooting in Old Town. Police responding to calls about gunfire found one of the boys lying on the sidewalk in the 400 block of West Evergreen Avenue and another around the corner in the 1300 block of North Hudson Avenue.
“The two brothers, as far as we can tell, they didn’t have any documented gang affiliation,” said Johnson, who noted police recovered video of the shooting. “But the individuals they were with did.”
While journalists suggested that the police department was caught off guard by gang violence linked to large crowds around Wrigley Field, police Superintendent Eddie Johnson insists that extra resources were deployed to the most dangerous neighborhoods around Chicago.
“It was a tough weekend, but that just goes back to what I’ve been saying all the time,” he told reporters. “Listen, until we start holding repeat gun offenders accountable for these crimes, we’re going to keep seeing cycles of gun violence like this.”
Johnson denied that the department was caught off guard by the mostly gang violence on the South and West sides while deploying hundreds of extra officers for crowd control outside Wrigley Field for the Cubs’ three World Series games over the weekend.
“We had canceled days off as well as (required) 12-hour shifts over the entire weekend, so I’m confident that we had the resources out there” in the most dangerous neighborhoods, he said.
According to HeyJackass!, killings from this weekend bring YTD Chicago homicides up to 646, a 51% increase versus last year.
Meanwhile, YTD killings imply a run-rate of 775 homicides for the year which would be the highest since the mid-90s.
And, of course, the majority of the violent crime continues to occur in the gang-ridden South and West side neighborhoods.
Finally, roughly 95% of the violent crime committed so far in 2016 has been against minority citizens with nearly 80% of the shootings going unsolved.
- Janet Tavakoli: Life And Death On Wall Street
Submitted by Adam Taggart via PeakProsperity.com,
Financial markets and derivatives authority Janet Tavakoli returns to the podcast to discuss a number of the themes contained in her new book Decisions: Life And Death On Wall Street.
She paints a particularly informative timeline of the greed and rot that has come to dominate the modern financial system, and how its tentacles have fully penetrated and subjugated the halls of power in Washington DC.
We're in precarious times for sure. What we have done is unprecedented in the history of the United States. We got rid of the benchmark, the gold standard. We don’t have any any stable benchmark anymore. Instead, we have currencies that are being benchmarked off of each other.
If you're measuring your weight you want a scale, right? You want an actual measurement of weight, not a relative one. You don’t want to be comparing yourself a bunch of obese guys in the gym. You need a standard benchmark. So once you get rid of the benchmark, then you can eat whatever you want and exercise as little as you choose that's okay. Well it is not okay. We all know that. But that's exactly what we've done in finance. We're printing money like mad. We've created a huge distortion where, for years, savers have gotten negative real interest rates. Negative real interest rates in the United States for a long, long period of time, and in Europe we now have sovereigns of course who are paying both negative nominal and negative real interest rates.
This is unprecedented in the history of finance. I talked to a retired head of the Chicago Fed (so I've probably narrowed the field because I don’t know how many of them are still living) and he said None of us knows what is going on. We've never done anything like this before. They don’t know what the end game is. They're totally at sea and it's their own fault because they got rid of our scale. They got rid of our own benchmarks, and they're trying to muddle through without having any way of measuring what we are doing.
But not all of her message is gloom. She explains how the battle between corruption and fairness is cyclical; and that history has plenty of examples where a just band of concerned agents can (over time) "kick the bums out":
Henry Kluz was somebody who saw communists in his time try the same kind of ideological subversion that we are seeing right now in the United States and they failed because there were a lot of people to push back. But he also saw people try to crash the markets when Grant was running against Horace Greeley. And he formed a group of 70 men that he got together to oppose Tammany Hall. Tammany Hall controlled New York. They – they were very corrupt. They had a lock on it. They paid off hired sons, daughters, relative of other politicians. They were getting the votes. And Henry Kluz was a financier. He was born in Britain. And he observed these people and he said, you know, none of these people really like each other. They're not bound together by blood. They're not bound together by friendship or even by a common ideology. All these people care about is making money and paying off their friends in power. That's all. Other than that, none of these people had each other’s back. And he said We can defeat them. And so his group of 70 overthrew the Tweed Ring. One by one, they knocked the pillars out from under these guys. It took a while, but they did it.
It was just people who were fed up with the corruption. Kluz did it in his time. It can be done. It's not easy, but people who really have an idea of what the country should look like can defeat people who have inveigled themselves into the system and corrupted it. Now we see the same thing in finance. I have a group of friends who are appalled at what has happened in the financial system. But their voices have been pretty well silenced. They didn’t use garrotes or daggers to the throat or shoot them in the chest (at least not in most cases), but they have silenced them by squelching them from the public view – at least for now.
So I do encourage people to read the histories of finance and to see that nothing has really changed. But things can change and this isn’t the first time we've had to fight this battle.
Click the play button below to listen to Chris' interview with Janet Tavakoli (72m:22s).
- FBI Finds No Links Between Trump And Russia, Probing Manafort Instead
With the FBI accused of pushing the Clinton campaign, which as recently as a week ago was seen as invincible as it stormed toward the November 8 presidential election, over the proverbial cliff, it was perhaps inevitable that in order to preserve the appearance of impartiality the Bureau would proceed with a probe of Trump’s own campaign. And, according to NBC which cited law enforcement and intelligence sources, it has done so by focusing on Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort, and specifically his foreign business connections.
The news of the inquiry, which has not blossomed into a full-blown criminal investigation, emerges just days after FBI Director James Comey’s disclosure that his agency is examining a new batch of emails connected to an aide to Hillary Clinton. It also comes a day after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid criticized Comey’s revelation and asserted that Comey possesses “explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors, and the Russian government.”
As a reminder, Manafort, who resigned as Donald Trump’s campaign manager in August, was previously an international political consultant. He became a liability for the Trump campaign amid reports of his involvement with a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine. One damaging New York Times story earlier this year alleged the party had earmarked more than $12 million in under-the-table cash payments, raising questions about whether Manafort had run afoul of U.S. lobbying laws that would he require he register as “foreign agent” with the Justice Department.
Manafort’s name in an alleged payment ledgerWhat received far less focus at the time of Manafort resignation, is that as part of the probe, the FBI was also looking into the PR firm of John Podesta’s brother, the Podesta Group founded by prominent democrat Tony Podesta.
But back to Manafort, and the NBC story, which in retrospect is merely a regurgitation of a CNN report from August 19, which reported the exact same thing over two months ago: the FBI did not comment. Manafort told NBC News “none of it is true … There’s no investigation going on by the FBI that I’m aware of.” He said he had never had ties to Russian president Vladimir Putin, or had dealings with Putin and his government. He said any suggestion of such ties was “Democratic propaganda.”
“This is all political propaganda, meant to deflect,” he said.
Furthermore, it appears that the latest news is actually a step down from the origianl CNN report: sources told NBC that the FBI review is not a full-blown criminal investigation, but rather an initial inquiry.
NBC News reported in August that Manafort was a key player in multi-million-dollar business propositions with Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs — one of them a close Putin ally with alleged ties to organized crime — which foreign policy experts said raised questions about the pro-Russian bent of the Trump candidacy. A few days later, amid other reporting on Manafort’s Ukraine ties, Manafort was ousted from the campaign.
Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, regularly receives sensitive briefings. Schiff said he could not discuss Reid’s assertions, but he said, “Americans have every right to be concerned about what they see in terms of Trump advisors and their closeness with the Kremlin, Trump’s policies vis-a-vis Russia, Trump’s potential financial interest, all of those things ought to be of deep concern to voters.”
He added, “Whether an investigation is appropriate depends on whether there’s evidence of criminal connections. Of course the intelligence community wants to know what foreign influence Russia may be looking to exert in the United States.”
Manafort was paid millions of dollars — $12.7 million in cash, according to The New York Times—representing a pro-Russian politician in the Ukraine.
Meanwhile, Democrats have used this renewed opportunity of ties between a former Trump staffer and Russia, or rather Ukraine, to pitch the worn out propaganda line that Trump is nothing more than a KGB plant.
Trump has taken a series of pro-Russian positions that experts from both parties say are far outside the mainstream, and inexplicable from a political viewpoint. He continues to cast doubt on Russian involvement in election hacking, for example, despite the intelligence community’s public assessment.
“The relationships that Trump’s advisors have had with pro-Russian forces are deeply disturbing,” David Kramer, a former senior State Department official in the George W. Bush administration and a former adviser to Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign, told NBC News in August. “Trump’s attitude on Russia is not in line with most Republican foreign-policy thinking. Trump has staked out views that are really on the fringe.”
Yes, heaven forbid someone step out of line with most Republican foreign-policy thinking, which incidentally, is a carbon copy of most Democrat foreign-policy thinking these days: shoot first, bomb second, and only ask questions if you are subpoenaed by Congress.
* * *
Meanwhile, not content with letting the Russian “angle” drop, on Monday evening, the master of propaganda, John Podesta himself, whose brother would be in the same trouble as Manafort if not more if the FBI were truly probing pro-Russian/Ukrainian lobbying connections, tweeted that “Donald Trump has a secret email server set up to communicate privately with the Russian Alfa Bank.”
Donald Trump has a secret email server set up to communicate privately with the Russian Alfa Bank. https://t.co/7b3E8VbT6c
— John Podesta (@johnpodesta) October 31, 2016
Which is wonderful (granted he may be borrowing a little too heavily from the Hillary Clinton script), the only problem is that at almost exactly the same time, the NYT reported that U.S. Officials Doubt Donald Trump Has Direct Link to Russia.
For much of the summer, the F.B.I. pursued a widening investigation into a Russian role in the American presidential campaign. Agents scrutinized advisers close to Donald J. Trump, looked for financial connections with Russian financial figures, searched for those involved in hacking the computers of Democrats, and even chased a lead — which they ultimately came to doubt — about a possible secret channel of email communication from the Trump Organization to a Russian bank.
Law enforcement officials say that none of the investigations so far have found any link between Mr. Trump and the Russian government. And even the hacking into Democratic emails, F.B.I. and intelligence officials now believe, was aimed at disrupting the presidential election rather than electing Mr. Trump.
In other words, the FBI itself is telling the Democrat establishment to move on and find a different attack on Putin because the “Putin agent” is getting old. Alas, that means either more tax stories or more allegations of rape, both of which the public appears to no longer care as much about.
- The secret explosive connection between TRUMP and RUSSIA exposed
The last few days have certainly been historic for American politics! Contrary to what the Mainstream Media, Democrat controlled White House, Senate, and other powerful groups are saying – this election is a unique, unprecedented, history making, game changing, paradigm shifting, superbowl of superbowls. As we explain in our best selling book Splitting Pennies, and as eloquently described today by Peter Thiel – the main reason for problems in America is simple; hyperinflation. If you haven’t yet watched, this groundbreaking public speech supporting a renegade non-Elite candidate by an Elite himself (although, controversial) check it out here on Zero Hedge or here on Bloomberg, and in summary:
AMERICA’S OVERPRICED HEALTH CARE SYSTEM MIGHT HELP SUBSIDIZE THE REST OF THE WORLD, BUT THAT DOES NOT HELP AMERICANS WHO CANNOT AFFORD IT AND THEY HAVE STARTED TO NOTICE. OUR YOUNGEST CITIZENS MAY NOT HAVE MEDICAL BILLS, BUT THEIR COLLEGE TUITION KEEPS ON INCREASING FASTER THAN THE RATE OF INFLATION, ADDING MORE EVERY YEAR TO OUR $1.3 TRILLION MOUNTAIN OF STUDENT DEBT. AMERICA HAS BECOME THE ONLY COUNTRY WHERE STUDENTS TAKE ON LOANS THEY CAN NEVER ESCAPE, NOT EVEN BY DECLARING BANKRUPTCY. STUCK IN THIS BROKEN SYSTEM, MILLENNIALS ARE THE FIRST GENERATION THAT EXPECT THEIR OWN LIVES TO BE WORSE THAN THE LIVES OF THEIR PARENTS. WHILE AMERICAN FAMILY EXPENSES HAVE BEEN INCREASING RELENTLESSLY, THEIR INCOMES HAVE BEEN STAGNANT. IN REAL DOLLARS, IMMEDIATE HOUSEHOLD MAKES LESS MONEY TODAY THAT MADE 17 YEARS AGO. NEARLY HALF OF AMERICANS WOULD NOT BE ABLE TO COME UP WITH $400 IF THEY NEEDED IT FOR AN EMERGENCY. YET, WHILE HOUSEHOLDS STRUGGLED TO KEEP UP WITH THE CHALLENGES OF EVERYDAY LIFE, THE GOVERNMENT IS WASTING TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS ON TAXPAYER MONEY ON FARAWAY WARS. RIGHT NOW, WE’RE FIGHTING FIVE OF THEM. IN IRAQ, SYRIA, LIBYA, AND SOMALIA.
Studies have been done – the real cause of social revolution, the ‘let them eat cake’ syndrome, is not anything other than simple hyperinflation. When the cost of staple foods, and basic life, are more than a certain percentage of average income, people riot. One interesting example are the Onion riots of India – a staple in Indian cuisine. This was the cause of the American Revolution, the British wanted to tax Americans into poverty. The financial controls were so severe, the idea of “America” was more about having our own currency than our own country. But a country is a currency, and tax is connected to the ‘functional currency’ which again, is attached to the collecting organization (government) and the amount of guns they have to collect taxes.
Thiel may be a closet Genius hitting the nail right on the head with this short characterization of the current situation, at possible risk to his own business and peers. Bravo! To paraphrase the point, the ‘system’ – which means the government and the financial system, which have become like one, have become disfunctional. The fact that Clinton is a criminal is really a side issue, there are thousands of corrupt criminal politicians keeping the dead system afloat for a few more years, taking bribes and looking the other way. As proven by QE, the Fed can’t print our way out of this one.
So what is the connection between TRUMP and RUSSIA?
The breakdown in the system, the reason TRUMP has so much support, is because he is an anti-establishment candidate. For better or worse, he’s just NOT a politician. He is a vote against the last 30 years of Elite dominated foreign policy, monetary policy, wars, social degradation, and general decline.
Trump represents the ‘truther’ movement. For 30 or arguably 60 years, the Elite have used a tool of complex social engineering, call it programming, call it brainwashing, call it propoganda, call it what you will. Through simple TV advertising, movies, music, events like the Shell Air & Sea show, Burning Man, Lollapalooza, Facebook, and other means – the Elite have manipulated the greater masses of the population (probably, about 95%) with little ease. Pull a lever here, false flag there – boom. Another puppet in office (Obama). Another bubble created. Another opportunity to fleece the growing upper class of their easy bubble gotten gains. Another opportunity for BIG money to strike it REALLY BIG. This is nothing new, this has gone on for 200 years in the west. Well, the Bolshevik’s tried to stop the Oligarchs, and had the Soviet Union, which was a unique country ruled by party hardliners. Only comparable to the NAZIs and a few other autocratic regimes, the Soviet Union, anyone would agree, was NOT dominated by foreign power, foreign influence, AT ALL. The United States, has been a foreigner free for all. Proponents of the melting-pot model, the multi-ethnic, multi-gender, trans-gender-ethnic-soup model – will say that this is a good thing. Maybe it is philosophically. But practically, when 70% of the CIA is OUTSOURCED it is a security risk. When ISRAELI companies provide secure encrypted recording of police communications and other national sensitive functions, there exists something we like to call CONFLICT OF INTEREST. How nice, their company is even called “NICE.” So, are we also to outsource the software used for nuclear launch codes? I mean how far does it go, when it becomes ridiculous?
The point is that, the system has evolved to be based on corruption, conflict of interest, waste, irrationality – and it cannot last. It’s a big bubble – a multi-epoch super bubble. Does it mean end of the world? Of course not. Does it mean the end for business as usual? Yes, for sure.
To understand the secret connection between Trump and Russia first understand the ‘conspiracy’ that exists between the current donor class, the .01 percent, Illuminati, Soros, Rockefeller, Grace, Rothschilds, Cargill-MacMillan, Kochs, British Royals, Hottingers, .. etc. There are about 10,000 of them. To put it in writing, THERE IS NO CONSPIRACY. New World Order is a wet dream, they have delusions of grandeur. It certainly would be convenient for them. Like George Bush said, his job would be ‘so much easier if he was a dictator.’ You have to understand what ties all these families together. Yes, some of them are friends, they go skiing together, but mostly, they don’t even speak to each other. They have simply something called COMMON INTEREST. Their interest is simple, make interest on their interest in their bank account, maintain the status quo, and ensure their multi-generational survival at the top. They don’t need to meet in dark rooms and plot and plan or send secret messages between each other – it’s known in their conscious minds. They know, for example, what a TRUMP in the White House means for them.
But is TRUMP really an existential threat to the Elite? Certainly not. If you look at the period of medieval to pre-industrial Europe, there was an anti-feudal social movement that led to the Renaissance, Capitalism (call it ‘mercantilism’), and finally the Industrial Revolution. They evolved – but – the Elite still maintained power. Although, not as direct feudal kings, they now allowed the house of commons to ‘decide’ about issues such as how many parking spaces should be in front of Buckingham palace. But they still owned all the land. Slavery became virtual – chains were exchanged for a control of the money supply, financial tactics were used instead of physical tactics. It was a ‘banks not tanks’ method, and it’s still in use today. In fact, if you look back 300 or 500 years, most of the Elite of that time, are still around with their trust funds. But due to imbreeding, laziness, and just an addiction to ‘rich life’ – few of these families do anything substantial. They rely on new blood, like Bill Gates, to bring innovation to the Illuminati. As long as they are not threatened, and allowed to ‘own’ the new player, you can sit at the table.
Trump represents truth, not in that he is an honest person, but in that, he doesn’t use deceit, manipulation, propoganda, and common social programming techniques to gain power. He’s an honest guy, generally. The fact that he’s a womanizing jerk, a real a-hole, is even a testament to his honesty. Voters for Trump, don’t necessarily like Trump like an individual, they like what he represents. And that is what politics is SUPPOSED to be about. He called out that the elections are rigged. Many have known that for YEARS. I can tell you (author speaking) seeing this first hand in 2000 in Palm Beach County, the voting system is completely rigged. Anyway the point is that Trump represents a silent growing majority of ‘truthers’ who simply want and end to the current lies and tricks and foolish deceptions that can easily be disproved with the internet.
Democrats accuse FBI of hiding ‘explosive truth’ about Trump-Russia ties
What’s different about this election is WIKILEAKS. It was WIKILEAKS that made this election a game changer, not Russia. The Elite used Russia as a poor excuse for ‘truth’ movement, of which WIKILEAKS is a major component. Many people have been part of a growing truth movement since the questionable official explanation of 911. Well, in the year 2001, Wikileaks didn’t exist. This is a good resource for those who aren’t familiar, that you can forward to your friends who aren’t ‘in the know’:
The Top 100 Most Damaging WikiLeaks
So, why is all this a game changer? Because it’s all out in public. We knew politicians were corrupt, but now we have it in writing, IN THEIR OWN WORDS. Why did Clinton say ‘they’ll send us to the gallows’ because Wikileaks exposed their private communications, their own stupidity and sloth, their unprofessional behavior, and in general a disfunctional system.
1. Trump and Russia are pro-business
The connection between TRUMP and RUSSIA is they have a pro-business COMMON INTEREST. Trump certainly doesn’t speak Russian and 100% for sure there is no communication between camp Trump and the Kremlin, this is tantamount to cold war delusions that Russians were hiding nuclear missiles on the dark side of the moon. People who are pro-Trump are really not ‘pro-Trump’ as much as they are ‘pro-Fact’ – and this is how Russian politics works. Simply put, Putin cleaned house years ago and it’s an ongoing effort, see an example of one of the most recent stings against a local corrupt mayor:
Governor of Kirov Region detained while receiving €400k bribe
The governor of the Kirov Region has been caught “red-handed” while receiving a bribe of €400,000 ($446,000). According to investigators, he was getting the money from a company associated with the criminal case of anti-corruption activist Aleksey Navalny. The head of the region in Central Russia Nikita Belykh has been detained and a criminal case launched, spokesman of Russia’s Investigative Committee Vladimir Markin announced on Friday. Belykh was caught red-handed while receiving the money in euro currency at a Moscow restaurant, he added, saying that investigators will seek the governor’s arrest.
Russian politics is certainly a lot different, any country must be looked at through it’s own cultural lenses. This is not a sanitization of Putin – he’s built his own $1 Billion dollar palace on the Black Sea and certainly enjoys the benefits of his position. Well, maybe it’s not for ‘him’ it’s for “Russia” but someone needs to use this place, right?
2. The Elite hate Russia and Trump
Read our recent article for a detailed analysis Why the Elite hate Russia. Why the Elite hate Russia
Why do the Elite hate Trump? Simple – 1) they don’t control him explicitly and 2) Trump poses a threat to them, unlike other wanna be Elites who will just do what they say. For example, if elected would Trump enforce various laws that current politicians have blatantly broken? As the commander in chief, Trump wouldn’t be so easy to control, assassinate, or subvert.
3. Trump and Russia are powerful by themselves
Trump is a billionaire. How many times over? Who cares – he lives the life. He has wealth. So he bankrupted himself a few times – it’s a smart business move. There’s even university classes “Strategic Bankruptcy” that means they teach this in school! Clinton, Obama, the Bush Family, they didn’t build their own empires the hard way, they did things for Elite’s and they were rewarded. Trump may have inherited an Empire from his father, but so what – he turned it into an even bigger one. How many trust fund babies do you know that work (most of them, skiing and in and out of rehab, visiting the administrator monthly to get their check).
Russia – has tried hard to rebuild their economy. The fact that they have been villanized, well – it’s offensive. Why? Because they are doing what the Americans suggested to them! They ‘broke down that wall’ as we told them, they are building free markets, a commodity and stock exchange, growing their middle class, and much more. It’s all commendable, and they are following the CIAs playbook that was given to them in 1991. Ask any Russian, even the oligarchs – it’s not easy. They are fighting a huge demographic problem, declining population, drug problems, health issues, and most importantly – a cultural mentality that still thinks that people who make money that we call ‘entrepreneurs’ are ‘criminals’ they called “Speculant” or “Speculators” during the Soviet times. Imagine what leaders like Putin face every day, explaining to a population that has been taught that it’s illegal to ‘profit’ because it’s ‘dishonest’ to go out and invest and start a business. If anyone can understand this what they face, what they have acheived, it is really commendable. They still have a long way to go, but this Soviet mentality has been deep rooted into their culture not only by Soviet propoganda, but Stalin killed millions who weren’t like this. So it’s a LOT deeper than we can even begin to imagine. And here the Elite are using them as a scapegoat. How dare they? They should be ashamed of themselves!
4. Russia and Trump have common enemies
Whether ISIS is a machination of the CIA at this point is irrelevant, radical Islam is a global problem that threatens the very existence of western culture. As long as there’s a guy willing to strap a bomb to his chest and blow himself up on a bus, the West is threatened. It’s only a matter of time before they evolve and crawl out of their caves and start doing real damage. The Elite in the west really isn’t equipped to deal with a REAL threat, as they’ve been dealing with artificial threats that they create for the last 60 years. It’s easy to deal with an enemy like Iraq, when you know all their chemical weapons because you sold them to him.
ISIS went a little too far. They wanted an enemy ‘without borders’ that it would be impossible to disprove a negative (there can be terrorists anywhere) – the problem is, the methodology created by the CIA planners was so convincing, it now is a self-feeding mechanism and radical ISLAM is a fast growing popular movement in the world. The West isn’t likely going to make the Middle East glass anytime soon, especially with our friends “Israel” right in the middle of it – so this is a REAL PROBLEM that the current Elite really cannot solve. Terrorists cannot be killed with tanks and ICBMs or B2 bombers. Because, how do you know who is a Terrorist? How do we not know that right now, there aren’t terrorists applying for jobs in DHS, the FBI, CIA, wherever – the world isn’t flat anymore. The problems created in the last generation cannot be solved by those from the last generation or those who think like this ‘industrial’ model created after WW2.
Probably, speaking as a technologist, the only group that can really solve this problem are scientists or Silicon Valley.
5. Trump and Russia are both in circumstances where they are forced to be practical
Critisize Putin for this and that, Russia has led itself in a great direction – and is probably one of the top 5 optimized nation-states in the world. We don’t need to do studies to see that countries like Switzerland, New Zealand, Singapore, Sweden, and others are the most efficient and economically optimized countries in the world. They also enjoy the longest human life spans, best health care (on a results basis) and are the most wealthy. We have to in this light add Russia to this list of WELL RUN countries. It is certainly not the most wealthy, poverty in Russia however is less and less – Russia has vast economic problems it faces. However the difference between Russia and Switzerland is that Russia is HUGE. The advantages of Malta, Switzerland, and others is that they are tiny micro-countries. But Russia actually is too – Basically Russia is Moscow, with a big backyard, and St. Petersburg. However you look at it, Russia has been in a situation last 20 years that it really needed to use every dollar in the best possible way, not because they are honest people, or because they like to save money, but for SURVIVAL. The only reason Russia is a functioning super power, is because they make very good use of their resources. As the engineer anecdote goes:
“Did you know NASA invented a pen that can write on the Space Station? It only cost $20 Million in R&D! The Russians, used an old pencil.”
Simply put, Russia didn’t have the opportunity to create QE, spend Trillions on wars, borrow their way into a debt hole, and so on. They needed to make good use of their resources and they do. They are growing.
Trump, call him what you want, he’s in the private sector. Unlike government officials, i.e. Clinton, Bush, whatever- when you are in private business, you are only as good as your last trade. That means, you are always one step away from bankruptcy, from disaster. Uncle Sam doesn’t bail out failed businesses. But if you are in the government, it works the opposite (at least in the US government). If a guy does a bad job, ‘promote him’ so goes the saying. That means, Trump has constantly had to reinvent himself, to overcome the countless failures and exist in business, for his own SURVIVAL. Trump doesn’t have a government fund paying his bills. He depends on his own business to maintain his life. Many in his situation have folded, and are living under a bridge, or worse.
These are all common interests, that make it seem as if there is a ‘conspiracy’ between Russia and Trump. But just like there’s no ‘conspiracy’ between Reid and Rothschilds, they just have common interest. And for a strange time in American politics, that didn’t happen for at least 50 years, there’s a candidate (Trump) that’s in common interest with the majority of voters.
See previous articles on this topic for your reference:
Secret TRUTH about Russia EXPOSED – Why the Elite hate Russia – Russia key player US Democrat War on Intelligence for Election
Whatever happens on November 8th, the truth will win. Thank you, Donald Trump!
For a detailed lesson on how the financial markets work, checkout Fortress Capital Trading Academy
- Over Half A Trillion In M&A: October Mergers Smash All Records With $500.1 Billion In Deals
Last week David Rosenberg pointed out that mega Merger Manias like the one we are experiencing “invariably takes place at or near cycle peaks, as companies realize that they can no longer grow their earnings organically. We have just witnessed five multi-billion dollar deals this past week alone — $207 billion globally (AT&T/Time Warner; TD Ameritrade/Scottrade) in what has been the most active announcement list since 1999 … what do you know, near the tail end of that tech bull market too.”
And now that October is officially over, we can close the books on what has been an unprecedented month for M&A. According to Bloomberg, in the month when a chill was sent through the spines of corporate CFOs and their investment bankers over fears that rates are about to rise and thus make debt-funded deals more expensive, the scramble to acquire competitors went off the charts, leading to an all time high in global M&A with almost half a trillion dollars of mergers and acquisitions announced globally.
CenturyLink Inc.’s $34 billion acquisition of Level 3 Communications Inc., as well as General Electric Co.’s deal to combine its oil and gas division with Baker Hughes Inc., pushed October’s deal volumes to about $489 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That’s the highest amount for at least 12 years, topping the previous record of $471 billion in April 2007, the data show.
Deallogic had a slightly different higher October deal total, calculating that the value for mergers and acquisitions for October actually surpassed the half a trillion mark, hitting $500.1B, but the idea is the same and adds that global deal volume has only been higher during five other months in records going back to 1995. More than half of the deals have been based in the US, where M&A volume has already hit a monthly record of $321.2 billion. That’s about a third higher than the next biggest month on record, according to Dealogic.
Cited by Bloomberg TV, Bob Profusek, partner and chair of the global M&A practice at law firm Jones Day said that “every weekend recently has been busy.”
According to the Jones Day lawyer “the fundamental drivers are still there,” Profusek said. “Low growth — which is bad for most things, but it’s good for M&A because that’s how you get growth — and very accommodating capital markets.” More important, however, are concerns that the period of low interest rates is coming to an end, prompting corporations to scramble and issue debt now while it is still cheap.
Profusek worked for Potash Corp. on its merger with Agrium Inc., and is advising Reynolds American Inc. on British American Tobacco Plc’s $47 billion bid for the rest of the company.
The mega deals dominated October, with just eight transactions accounting for more than $300 billion of the October total. The biggest deal of the year, AT&T Inc.’s $85.4 billion bid for Time Warner Inc., was revealed on Oct. 22 in a rare Saturday deal announcement. So far this year, 32 deals valued at more than $10 billion have been struck. That puts 2016 on track to beat every year since 2007 except for last year, when a bumper 52 transactions of that size or more were announced.
“Size matters,” said Profusek, “particularly because we’re in a very challenging regulatory environment right now.”
The massive size of M&A also means that the market is skeptical many of them will close, or will ultimately find financing should rates spike higher prior to closing. Almost 30 deals announced since the start of 2015 have not yet closed, including Dow Chemical Co.’s $59 billion merger with DuPont Co., which was pushed back until next year. The two health insurance megadeals – Anthem Inc.’s bid for Cigna Corp. and Aetna Inc.’s offer for Humana Inc. – are also still pending. Both those deals are currently trading with at least $40 gaps between the offer price and the target’s current share price, indicating investors are pessimistic they will close.
As Bloomberh observes, “despite currency and equity markets reacting skittishly to poll results and news sentiment in the final days before the U.S. presidential election, M&A activity is forging ahead.”
“I don’t hear boards or management really putting the election high on their list of concerns,” Frank Aquila, partner at law firm Sullivan & Cromwell LLP, said in a telephone interview. “Unless there is some sort of regulatory deadline or tax deadline that people are working to, deals get there when they get there.”
And yet, according to companies, the biggest reason why consumer spending is weak and deteriorating is precisely due to the election. Almost as if someone is lying…
- 48% Of Russians Fear Syrian Conflict Will Lead To World War III
A recent Russian polls revealed something disturbing: according to almost half of the respondents, the deteriorating relations between Russia and the West caused by the ongoing crisis in Syria could develop into a global military conflict. As RT reports, the share of those who see the probability of World War III in the near future as high or very high is now at 48% and those who appraise it as low or very low comprise 42% of Russian society, according to the privately-owned public opinion research center Levada. The remaining 10% of respondents said they couldn’t give a simple answer to the question.
Another question revealed that Russians are skeptical there will be a peaceful solution to the Syrian crisis, with a greater number seeing a non-violent outcome as more likely than not: when poll respondents were asked if they considered it possible that Russia and the West would eventually find a mutually acceptable solution to the crisis, 35% answered that this scenario was likely or very likely. Thirty-nine percent evaluate the probability of such an outcome as low or very low and 26 percent said that they couldn’t answer the question.
Perhaps indicative of Russia’s clinical nationalism, just over half, or 52%, of Russians said they approve of their country’s involvement in the Syrian conflict while 26% said they had a negative or sharply negative attitude to this. Just under a quarter – 23 percent – couldn’t answer the question about their personal view on the subject. Those who thought that Russia should continue the operation and those who thought that airstrikes should be stopped were divided 49 percent against 28 percent respectively, with 24 percent finding the question too difficult to answer.
A similar poll conducted a year ago by the Levada Center showed that over 70% of Russian citizens supported the air operations against IS terrorists in Syria, and almost a half of them agreed that it was right for Russia to support the government of Syria’s democratically-elected President Bashar Assad.
A different poll conducted earlier this month by the state-run research center VTSIOM showed that 73% of Russians believed that Western criticism of the air force’s counter-terrorism operation in Aleppo, Syria, was ungrounded and prejudiced. Only 6 percent said the allegations of wrongdoing on the part of the Russian military have some basis in reality.
Perhaps Russians don’t watch CNN?
The poll also found that the level of awareness about the situation in Syria and the Russian Air Force operation against ISIS terrorists there remained fairly high. Russia first deployed an air force contingent in Syria in 2015, after receiving a request for military help from the Syrian government, which is currently battling Islamic State and affiliated groups. Russian war planes began launching airstrikes on ISIS targets in Syria on September 30, 2015.
Eighteen percent said they were very closely following developments in Syria and 64 percent revealed partial familiarity with the issue. Just under a fifth – 17%– said that they were not interested in news about Syria.
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