Today’s News 20th December 2018

• Europe Losing Appetite On Russia Sanctions As Banks Remain Skittish

  Nearly five years after the Crimean crisis and subsequent western sanctions on Russia, Europe is increasingly “losing the appetite for punishing actions against Moscow,” writes Bloomberg in a new report suggesting investors are impatiently waiting for clarity on Russia as its economy enters bunker mode. Even willing European companies are now “starved of financing” on the mere threat of more punitive measures to come. 

  However, it’s precisely the psychological uncertainty of more looming US sanctions as lawmakers make continued threats over accusations of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential elections that’s part of Washington’s arsenal. And when sanctions are handed down, it’s further the cloudy ambiguity in terms of what’s targeted when that produces a chilling effect: “The most effective sanctions are the ones that aren’t entirely clear, because the lack of clarity has a chilling effect on investment,” Frank Schauff, chief executive officer of the Association of European Businesses in Russia, told Bloomberg. He cited one sanctions law passed by Congress last year that has absurdly confusing language saying particular actions “will be in place for a long, long time.”

  

  Pavel Chinsky, head of the Franco-Russian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, noted past data on countries under US sanction shows Washington throwing its weight around is enough to keep willing companies away: “The U.S. has such a major role with the weight of the dollar and the extra-territoriality of their laws,’’ he said. For example, “French banks don’t finance Franco-Russian projects. Full stop. Not because it’s forbidden, but because they’re being ultra-cautious,” Chinsky said. “They all fear repercussions on their U.S. activities,’’ he added.

  The mere risk of new measures following last month’s Kerch Strait incident has been enough to keep foreign businesses waiting nervously on the sidelines, despite the EU showing no signs that it will penalize Moscow in the wake of the incident. During talks in Paris on Monday French Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire and his Russian counterpart Maxim Oreshkin announced plans for further cooperation in areas including energy, nuclear, space and tourism, but this is easier said that done as neither Macron nor Putin appear willing to find a way forward on contrary Ukraine stances. 

  Given that tensions are higher than ever, with Ukraine still under temporary martial law as its president hypes a “Russian invasion” threat, and with a Russian build-up of forces including S-400 air defense systems on Crimea, there’s been no offered EU track for easing the penalties. Instead it’s bunker mentality on both sides at a moment that sliding oil prices have added to Russia’s pain, though as one recent study on the sanctions impact since 2014 study found, “The underperformance has been much bigger than crude alone can explain.” 

  

  Thus even an oil price recovery likely won’t have much impact on Russia’s pummeled economy, per Bloomberg:

  With sluggish annual growth of less than 2 percent and the Russian state’s expanding role in business, even a recovery in oil prices isn’t likely to give a boost to the economy, according to Putin’s former finance minister, Alexei Kudrin, who now heads the Audit Chamber that monitors the budget.

  For now, major European companies with operations in Russia are hunkered down but are finding it hard to finance expansion because banks are wary of U.S. reprisals. German investment averaged $550 million annually since 2013 compared to $3.6 billion a year from 2007-2012. French companies invested $666 million in the first half of 2018, down from a peak of $2.6 billion in 2010.

  Last month Putin confirmed while speaking at an investor conference in Moscow that annual trade with the EU “had fallen by almost half from a peak of $450 billion to $236 billion,” according to the Bloomberg report.

  

  And one recent study claimed that US sanctions have knocked as much as a whopping 6% off Russia’s economy over the past four years when compared to expected GDP growth after 2014 without sanctions in place. 

  For a reminder of just what types of statements out of the White House and State Department have kept European banks and investors skittish, US Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Nonproliferation Christopher Ford said just over a month ago related to the Skripal case: “Under statute… there is a menu of options if you will, things that need to be considered. As part of that, we do not have an inter-agency decision answer on what those pieces are yet. It is under active consideration.” He threatened further at the time: “The second round of sanctions under the statue is a more draconian menu than the first round.”

  Projected/imagined GDP growth after 2014 without sanctions in place assuming prior patterns…

  

  Pompeo has promised over the past weeks efforts toward a further squeeze on Russian energy export efforts, saying, “We will keep working together to stop the Nord Stream 2 project that undermines Ukraine’s economic and strategic security.” Nord Stream 2 is expected to be put into operation by the end of 2019 and is seen as a vital European lifeline Russia needs to halt its economic slide, and an issue where Europe – most especially Germany – has shown itself unwilling to bow to US demands.

  It remains the “unknown” and corresponding emotional/psychological impact of US economic warfare and potential negative fallout for those third parties who “might” be caught in the cross-hairs that appears precisely a secondary effect in place by design of Washington planners.

  

• 2018: The Year Of "Putin-Nazi Paranoia"

  Authored by CJ Hopkins via The Unz Review,

  As my regular readers will probably recall, according to my personal, pseudo-Chinese zodiac, 2017 was “The Year of the Headless Liberal Chicken.” This year, having given it considerable thought, and having consulted the I Ching, and assorted other oracles, I’m designating 2018 “The Year of Putin-Nazi Paranoia.”

  

  Not that 2017 wasn’t already paranoid. It was. It was completely paranoid, and otherwise clinically batshit crazy. But 2018 has been batshit crazier.

  It started out with the Internet companies that control the flow of information that most of us now perceive as “reality” launching an all-out War on Dissent, purportedly to protect the public from “divisive” and “confusing” content, and other forms of Russian “influencing.”

  

  Twitter started sending out scary emails warning customers that there was “reason to believe” that they had “followed,” “retweeted,” or “liked the content of” accounts “connected to a propaganda effort by a Russian government-linked organization.” Facebook launched its own Ministry of Truth, manned by “a dedicated counter-terrorism team” of “former intelligence and law-enforcement officials” (also known as The Atlantic Council, NATO’s unofficial propaganda wing). Google stepped up its covert deranking of insufficiently Russia-hating and other “non-authoritative” websites.

  This Orwellian corporate censorship campaign was enthusiastically welcomed by liberals and other Russia-and-Trump-obsessives, who by this time were already completely convinced that secret Russian Facebook agents were conspiring to transform the Western masses into zombified, Russia-loving neo-Nazis by means of some sort of irresistible Putin-Nazi hypno-technology that would melt their brains to oatmeal the second they clicked on one of those dancing cat GIFs.

  

  But the paranoia was just getting started.

  By the Spring, professional Putin-Naziologists were issuing warnings explaining that anyone using words like “globalist,” “globalism,” or “global capitalism” was an anti-Semite. There was no such thing as “globalism,” they told us. “Globalist” was just Nazi codespeak for “JEW!” Moreover, anyone criticizing “the media,” or mentioning “banks,” “Wall Street,” or “Hollywood,” or, God help you, making fun of “George Soros,” was clearly a Russia-loving, Sieg-heiling Nazi.

  Meanwhile, in London, Blairites were busy combing through six year-old Facebook posts in an effort to prove that Jeremy Corbyn had transformed the British Labour Party into his personal Putin-Nazi death cult. The Guardian published over one hundred articles smearing Corbyn as an anti-Semite and “linking” Labour to anti-Semitism. The BBC jacked up the Russia paranoia, doctoring Corbyn’s hat on TV to make it appear more insidiously Slavic. Owen Jones sprang to Corbyn’s defense, explaining that, yes, the Labour Party was a disgusting hive of anti-Semites, but they were doing their utmost to root out the Nazis, ban all criticism of the IDF, and reverse the mass exodus of Jews from London.

  All this was happening in the wake of the notorious Novichok Porridge and Perfume Attacks, allegedly perpetrated by two totally incompetent, pot-smoking, prostitute-banging “assassins” that Putin personally dispatched to Salisbury to miserably fail to take out their target and then waltz around getting photographed by every CCTV camera in Great Britain. According to the corporate media, Putin tried to cover the crimes of these Jason Bourne-like GRU assassins by ordering his network of Putin-Nazi Twitter bots to flood the Internet with disinformation. Sky News captured and mercilessly interrogated one of these alleged “Twitter bots,”who it turned out was just a feisty British pensioner by the name of Ian, or at least that’s what Putin wants us to believe!

  Back in America, millions of liberals and other Russia-and-Trump-obsessives were awaiting the Putin-Nazi Apocalypse, which despite the predictions of Resistance pundits had still, by the Summer, failed to materialize. The corporate media were speculating that Putin’s latest “secret scheme” was for Trump to destroy the Atlantic alliance by arriving late for the G7 meeting. Or maybe Putin’s secret scheme was to order Trump to sadistically lock up a bunch of migrants in metal cages, exactly as Obama had done before him … but these were special Nazi cages! And Trump was separating mothers and children, which, as General Michael Hayden reminded us, was more or less exactly the same as Auschwitz! Paul Krugman had apparently lost it, and was running around the offices of The New York Timesshrieking that “America as we know it is finished!” Soros had been smuggled back into Europe to single-handedly thwart the Putin-Nazi plot to “dominate the West,” which he planned to do by canceling the Brexit (which Putin had obviously orchestrated) and overthrowing the elected government of Italy (which, according to Soros, was a Putin-Nazi front).

  As if that wasn’t paranoia-inducing enough, suddenly, Trump flew off to Helisnki to personally meet with the Devil Himself. The neoliberal establishment went totally apeshit. A columnist for The New York Times predicted that Trump, Putin, Le Pen, the AfD, and other such Nazis were secretly forming something called “the Alliance of Authoritarian and Reactionary States,” and intended to disband the European Union, and NATO, and impose international martial law and start ethnically cleansing the West of migrants. That, or Trump and Putin were simply using the summit as cover to attend some Nazi-equestrian homosexual orgy, which The Times took pains to illustrate by creating a little animated film depicting Trump and Putin as lovers. In any event, Jonathan Chait was certain that Trump had been a “Russian intelligence asset” since at least as early as 1987, and was going to Helsinki to “meet his handler.”

  

  In the wake of the summit, the neoliberal Resistance, like some multi-headed mythical creature in the throes of acute amphetamine psychosis, started spastically jabbering about “treason” and “traitors,” and more or less demanding that Trump be tried, and taken out and shot on the White House lawn. A frenzy of neo-McCarthyism followed. Liberals started accusing people of being “traitorous agents of Trump and Moscow,” and openly calling for a CIA coup, because we were “facing a national security emergency!” A devastating Russian cyber-attack was due to begin at any moment. National Intelligence Director Dan Coats personally assured theAssociated Press that the little “Imminent Russia Attack” lights he had on his desk were “blinking red.”

  Into this maelstrom of monomania boldly slunk the Charlottesville Nazis, who had resolved to reenact their infamous national white supremacist tikki torch conclave right across the street from the White House this year. The Resistance and Antifa had been promoting this event as the long anticipated Putin-Nazi uprising, and Kristallnacht II, and other such nonsense, so it was a bit of a letdown when only twenty or thirty rather timid Nazis turned up. It felt like maybe the Great Nazi Panic of 2018 was finally over.

  

  But no, of course it wasn’t over.

  The Nazis had just gone underground. Weeks later, right there on national television, a Jewish-Mexican-American Nazi was spotted transmitting secret Nazi hand signals to her Nazi co-conspirators. One of them, a U.S. Coast Guard member, then relayed the secret Nazi signal to… well, it wasn’t entirely clear, perhaps the Underground Putin-Nazi Navy, which was steaming toward the Florida coast hidden in the eye of Hurricane Florence.

  

  By the Autumn, with the midterm elections fast approaching, the Putin-Nazi terrorists finally struck. It soon became clear that those secret hand signs were just parts of a much larger Trumpian conspiracy to “embolden” a couple of totally psychotic wackos to unleash their hatred on the public. Wacko Number One accomplished this by mailing a series of non-exploding explosive devices to various prominent members of the neoliberal Resistance. Wacko Number Two stormed into a synagogue in Pittsburgh and murdered a lot of people. While the corporate media were unable to prove that Trump, Putin, or possibly Jeremy Corbyn, had personally “emboldened” these wackos, clearly, they had been “emboldened” by somebody, and thus were definitely domestic Putin-Nazi “terrorists,” and not just mentally disturbed individuals … like all the other mentally-disturbed individuals who go around murdering people all the time.

  In November, at last, the tide began to turn. Despite the relentless “chaos campaign to undermine faith in American democracy” that the Russian bots and Nazis were waging, the Democrats managed to win back the House and rescue America from “the brink of fascism.”

  Apparently, the War on Dissent was working, because the millions of Black people that the Russians had brainwashed into not voting for Clinton in 2016 with those Jesus-doesn’t-like-masturbation memes had all miraculously been deprogrammed.

  Liberals celebrated by singing hymns to Special Prosecutor Robert Muellerand compiling lists of people to subpoena to testify before congressional committees in what will someday be known as “the Hitlergate Hearings.” The New York Timeseven published a “roadmap” that Mueller and his team can follow to “send incriminating evidence directly to Congress,” thus protecting this “evidence” from the Justice Department, which is totally infested with Russians and Nazis!

  But it’s not quite time for liberals to break out the vuvuzelas and Trump effigies yet … or to let up on the paranoia. The Putin-Nazi menace is still out there! The Internet is still literally crawling with all sorts of deviant, division sowing content! And now the Russian bots have brainwashed the French into staging these unruly Yellow Vest protests, and the Putin-Nazis have “weaponized” humor, and the economy, and religion, and Brexit, and Wikileaks, and pretty much everything else you can imagine. So this is no time to switch off the television, and log off the Internet, and start thinking critically … or to forget for one moment that THE NAZIS ARE COMING, and that A DEVASTATING RUSSIAN ATTACK IS IMMINENT!

  So here’s wishing my Russia-and-Trump-obsessed readers a merry, teeth-clenching, anus-puckering Christmas and a somewhat mentally-healthier New Year! Me, I’m looking forward to discovering how batshit crazy things can get… I have a feeling we ain’t seen nothing yet.

  

• "They're Hungry And Humble" – Thanks To Tight Labor Market, Employers Are Hiring Felons In Droves

  Looking past anxieties about job-killing automation replacing human workers with robots, the supremely tight US job market is creating job opportunities for Americans who had been considered virtually unemployable in the very recent past. We’re talking about people with criminal convictions for violent crimes – murders, armed robbers and others. Some industries – like long-haul trucking, for example – have reached a crisis point, where employers are eager to hire anybody with a pulse, a will and a drivers’ license.

  And as President Trump’s criminal justice reform law is set to release more low-risk offenders on to the streets while simultaneously offering them more opportunities to secure job training and employment, the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday published a long-form feature chronicling the paper’s attempt to follow three ex-cons as they searched for employment over the course of a year.

  

  Barry Green

  The story showed that, even though at least one of the convicts had only recently been released after spending more than two decades in prison for murder, all three of them managed to find satisfying work. The three men benefited from living in New York State, which recently passed a law making it more difficult for employers to turn away job applicants with criminal records, while also offering tax credits to employers who hire felons.

  

  But if anything, the stories of these three men show just how much work is available in the contemporary economy, even as the work-force participation rate remains mired near all-time lows and average hourly wages have risen only modestly since the recovery from the financial crisis began.

  

  Tony Ramos

  Barry Green, a Brooklyn-born parolee who works on a construction site, told WSJ that he came clean with his boss about the length of his incarceration and the severity of his crimes after a few months on the job.

  Shortly after Barry Green got a job manning a gate at a Brooklyn construction site, he started pitching in on other duties. He cleaned the construction site, helped move tools and filled leaking holes. About a month later, Mr. Green felt he had proved his worth, enough to open up about his past.

  Mr. Green confided to his boss in April that he had served 24 years in prison for murder and had been paroled five months earlier. He said the admission briefly surprised his supervisor, but then he sent Mr. Green back to work.

  “I’m employable,” said Mr. Green, 41 years old. “That’s why I felt comfortable going forward.”

  Despite never having held a job, not having an ID and never having used social media (something that, we imagine, many employers might consider a plus) Green has managed to find and keep a job thanks to his work ethic, he said.

  Leaving Sullivan Correctional Facility last year, he didn’t have an ID, physician or bank account, and had never had a full-time job. Technology had changed so much that he felt like he was “traveling to the future.”

  He’s still working on convincing his family that he is a changed man.

  His mother, Lynnette Green, 62, said she tried her best to keep her son out of trouble. “He was hardheaded, and he didn’t listen,” she said.

  Mr. Green, who dropped out of school in the fourth grade, said he regrets the mistakes he made when he was young. But the man who came out of prison is much different, he said.

  “The 40-year-old guy who she got to get to know, I ain’t lazy,” he said. “I’m a worker.”

  While more employers are becoming open to the idea of hiring people with criminal records, some companies – like Koch Industries – have been doing it for decades. Koch recently removed the question on its applications asking about criminal records. Any candidates who do have a criminal record are asked to explain what they have learned from the experience.

  Koch Industries, one of the country’s largest private corporations, has been hiring applicants with criminal histories for decades. “They’re hungry, humble and they want a second chance,” said Mark Holden, senior vice president of the Wichita, Kan.-based company.

  Koch Industries removed the felony checkbox from its job applications in 2015. If someone with a criminal record applies for a position, the company instructs interviewers to ask what they learned from the experience and how they’ve changed.

  The current labor market provides a unique opportunity, Mr. Holden said. “There’s such a lack of skilled labor,” he said, “so that’s opened the door for a lot of people with criminal records.”

  Still, security for other employees and customers – as well as the all-important question of legal liability – remain concerns.

  Katherine Wylde, chief executive of the Partnership for New York, a business coalition, said security and liability for employees and customers remains a concern. “When you get into violent crime, it gets tricky,” she said.

  Tony Ramos, who served two months for a misdemeanor assault conviction, said he thought he was “done for” after Yelp rejected the Temple graduate for a job that he was qualified for, citing his criminal record.

  “I was devastated,” said Mr. Ramos, who graduated from Temple University in 2010 with a bachelor’s degree in business administration. “I have the credentials, and you guys denied me because of an isolated incident? It’s like, what the heck?”

  But Ramos eventually found work as a program director at a community center in the Bronx, a job he says he really enjoys. His boss said that, if the center passed over those with criminal records, they would miss out on “a lot of amazing talent.”

  Mr. Ramos eventually landed a job as a program director at the Children Arts and Science Workshops Inc., a community center in a Bronx public housing development. The hiring process included a background check and a hearing to discuss his misdemeanor.

  “Everyone has a past,” said Hanan Al-Bilal, Mr. Ramos’s supervisor. “If I were not to engage any candidates who had contact with the police, I would lose a lot of amazing talent.”

  Motivated by his experience, Mr. Ramos plans to run for Congress in 2020. “I’m fortunate enough that I have the education and experience that I still landed this job with my record,” he said. “But there’s other people not that fortunate.”

  Randy Rosa, a career criminal who now works at a nonprofit in the South Bronx, said that after a stint or two in prison, convicts start building what he called a “negative resume.”

  “As you get denied for stuff because of your record, you just get further and further into what you know best, which would be hustling, robbing or stealing,” Mr. Rosa said. “And all you’re doing is building a negative résumé.”

  While recent legislative efforts are designed to curtail recidivism, many ex-convicts end up back behind bars. About four in nine prisoners released in 2005 in 30 states were arrested at least once in the year following their release, according to a 2018 Justice Department report. Even more—83%—were arrested at least once during the nine years following their release.

  Baz Dreisinger, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said felons have few options after leaving prison because of the stigma attached to their convictions.

  After their release, “it’s almost like people go through a honeymoon period because you feel like ‘I’m free,'” said Ms. Dreisinger, who also teaches inmates. “Then you realize the world has put me in a second-class citizen place.”

  More so than any government program or criminal justice reform package, nothing prevents recidivism better than finding ex-cons a fulfilling, well-paying job.

  Antonio Hendrickson, Mr. Rosa’s boss at the mentorship organization, said many people with backgrounds similar to Mr. Rosa’s want to have steady jobs. “But when you ain’t got no money and nobody’s hiring you…your survival instinct kicks in,” he said.

  Last November, Mr. Hendrickson was doing outreach at a probation hearing and overheard Mr. Rosa complaining that a parking garage had rejected him for a position. He hired Mr. Rosa as a mentor.

  “Just the everyday getting a job is still difficult for guys and women with felonies,” Mr. Hendrickson said. “Something gotta give.”

  In that sense, Trump has already implemented one of the biggest criminal-reform efforts in recent memory thanks to the Trump economy.

  

• Don't Hold Your Breath On US Troop Withdrawal From Syria

  Authored by Patrick Lawrence via ConsortiumNews.com,

  The announcement on Wednesday that the U.S. will withdraw all remaining troops from Syria within the next month looked at first like a rare victory for Donald Trump in his admittedly erratic opposition to senseless wars of adventure.

  “We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there,” the president tweeted with an unmistakable air of triumph.

  After historic victories against ISIS, it’s time to bring our great young people home! pic.twitter.com/xoNjFzQFTp

  — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 19, 2018

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  Don’t get your hopes up. Just about everything in these initial reports is either wrong or misleading.

  • One, the U.S. did not defeat the Islamic State: The Syrian Arab Army, aided by Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah militias did.

  • Two, hardly was ISIS the only reason the U.S. has maintained a presence in Syria. The intent for years was to support a coup against the Assad government in Damascus—in part by training and equipping jihadists often allied with ISIS. For at least the past six months, the U.S. military’s intent in Syria has been to counter Iranian influence.

  • Last and hardly least, the U.S. is not closing down its military presence in Syria. It is digging in for an indefinite period, making Raqqa the equivalent of the Green Zone in Baghdad. By the official count, there are 503 U.S. troops stationed in the Islamic State’s former capital. Unofficially, according to The Washington Post and other press reports, the figure is closer to 4,000—twice the number that is supposed to represent a “full withdrawal” from Syrian soil.

  It would be nice to think Washington has at last accepted defeat in Syria, given it is preposterous to pretend otherwise any longer. Damascus is now well into its consolidation phase. Russia, Iran, and Turkey are currently working with Staffan de Mistura, the UN’s special envoy for Syria, to form a committee in January to begin drafting a new Syrian constitution.

  

  U.S. forces conducted a precision airstrike near Sarmada in northwest Syria Nov. 18 that Pentagon says killed a senior al-Qaida leader. (Army photo by 1st Lt. Daniel Johnson)

  It would also be nice to think the president and commander-in-chief has the final say in his administration’s policies overseas, given the constitution by which we are supposed to be governed. But the misleading announcement on the withdrawal of troops, followed by Trump’s boastful tweet, suggest something close to exactly the opposite.

  As Trump finishes his second year in office, the pattern is plain:

  This president can have all the foreign policy ideas he wants, but the Pentagon, State, the intelligence apparatus, and the rest of what some call “the deep state” will either reverse, delay, or never implement any policy not to its liking.

  Blocking Few Good Ideas

  Syria is a case in point, but one among many. Trump announced in March that he would withdraw American troops as soon as the fight against ISIS was finished. By September the Pentagon was saying no, U.S. forces had to stay until Damascus and its political opponents achieved a full settlement. From the new HQ in Raqqa, The Washington Post tells us, U.S. forces will extend “overall control, perhaps indefinitely, of an area comprising nearly a third of Syria.”

  This is how 2018 has gone for Trump. This president has very few good ideas, but we can count on his foreign policy minders to block those he does have if they fail to conform to the orthodox playbook—the foreign policy “blob,” as Barack Obama famously called it.

  Reversal on Military Budget

  Earlier this month Trump complained about the Pentagon’s out-of-control budget and pledged to cut it, if marginally, from its current $716 billion to $700 billion in the 2020 fiscal year. “I am certain that, at some time in the future,” he said in one of his inevitable tweets, “President Xi and I, together with President Putin of Russia, will start talking about a meaningful halt to what has become a major and uncontrollable Arms Race. The U.S. spent 716 Billion Dollars this year. Crazy!”

  

  Raqqa Internal Security Force Training Class receive their initial issue of equipment after training in Ayn Issa, Syria, July 31 2017.(U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Mitchell Ryan)

  Days later the president had a meeting with Defense Secretary James Mattis and the chairmen of the House and Senate Armed Services Committee. The White House announced immediately afterward that the three had agreed on a 2020 defense budget of $750 billion: from a 2 percent cut to an increase of nearly 5 percent in the course of one meeting.

  Trump’s idea of improving relations with Russia has faced a wall of opposition from the first, needless to say. His summit with President Putin in Helsinki last July ignited a fresh uproar – and his suggestion that Putin come to Washington in the autumn still another. With Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats in the lead, that invitation was mocked to death within days. A New Year’s prediction: There will be no second summit with Putin, probably for the duration of Trump’s term in office.

  Among the biggest disappointments of the year has been the administration’s failure to build on Trump’s effort to advance a settlement with North Korea after seven decades of tension in Northeast Asia. The Trump–Kim summit in Singapore last May did what initial encounters between heads of state are supposed to do: It established a working rapport. By that measure, any detached judgment of the meeting would have to count it a success.

  But the U.S. press uniformly criticized Trump nonetheless for not coming home with the full details of the North’s nuclear disarmament. These same media have since treated us to the usual stories, sourced from the intelligence agencies, that the North is misleading us once again. Result: A second summit appears to have fallen off the White House’s agenda despite Trump’s statement at the UN last autumn that the two leaders would meet again “quite soon.”

  One does not have to entertain any liking for Donald Trump to find this pattern disturbing. It suggests that our foreign policy cliques, wedded to an orthodoxy devoted more or less entirely to U.S. primacy, have positioned themselves—over the course of many administrations—to dictate America’s conduct abroad even to our presidents. There is danger in this, no matter who the occupant of the White House happens to be.

  *  *  *

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• Orlando Home Sales Tank And Inventory Floods Market: Markings Of A Housing Slowdown

  A new housing report from the Orlando Regional Realtor Association published Monday shows November home sales have declined and inventory is building as interest rates have quickly cooled the real estate market.

  Home sales plunged 6.9% last month to 2,575 while the number of homes for sale jumped to a 3.3-month supply, the largest inventory build in more than one year.

  Real estate agents have told the Orlando Sentinel that interest rate increases have completely removed buyers from the market.

  “There has been a shock in how quickly interest rates have gone up,” said Eric Soto, a real estate agent and co-owner of TC Orlando Homes based in Altamonte Springs.

  

  What is happening in Orlando mirrors trends nationally: Existing home sales have peaked, reflecting declining affordability, greater price reductions, and deteriorating housing sentiment. 

  As we have mentioned before, real estate markets across the country are at turning points, where housing prices have not just plateaued, but could soon experience a noticeable drop in 2019. 

  In Greater Orlando, November single-family home prices stalled from the month before.

  

  “But though there are more homes available, it’s still far from a buyers market,” Soto said.

  “There may be more homes than there were a few months ago but only a few hundred,” he added.

  Jeff Tucker, a Zillow economist, said inventory is steadily building in many markets across the country. However, he did not call it a huge increase, yet.

  “This is certainly not looking like an inventory spike,” he said. “It’s just coming up from really low levels.”

  In other words, the real supply is still to come, which could trigger when homeowners realize that prices are trending lower as the economy starts to slow.

  “A five- or six- month supply of homes is a good equilibrium between buyers and sellers,” Tucker said. “Even at a 3.3-month supply, sellers still have control over the market,” he said.

  “It’s a bit of a breather for buyers, though,” Tucker said. “But there is a downside with interest rates rising.”

  Tucker warned rising interest rates might remove buyers from the market because of affordability factors.

  Alex Vastardis, a Dr. Phillips area real estate agent with Coldwell Banker, said the slowdown in November was largely seen in homes for less than $300,000.

  Despite the slowdown, Vastardis said he still has some customers coming into his office looking for new homes. “December is usually a pretty positive month because people want to sell their homes or get into a new one before the end of the year.”

  No one knows how far and how fast real estate markets could drop in 2019. It certainly seems that interest rate rises in Greater Orlando have entirely shut off demand for less than $300,000 homes.

  

• California's Next Calamity: Storms Compounded By High Tides

  Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

  The wildfires that have taken their toll on California could be just the beginning of the state’s calamities. Now, the high tides of winter are coming and if those tides are worsened by an incoming storm, they could devastate entire cities on the coasts.

  

  On December 10, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released a report stating there is an 80 percent chance of an El Niño event this winter. Such events are associated with wetter and more intense winter storms. However, NOAA does caution that its data are from September through November and the intensity of the El Niño will not be known for quite some time still.

  Tides are determined by the sun and moon’s gravitational pull on the oceans. This warning from NOAA comes as heavy storms bear down on California’s Pacific Northwest.   In central and northern California on Monday,  waves were as high as 30 feet, with 40- to 50-foot breaks. Coastal flooding and erosion were reported. And sn even-more-powerful storm smacked the region yesterday, prompting flood watches, high-wind alerts, and winter storm warnings across nine states.

  According to ABC News, holiday travelers along I-5, which runs north to south through Washington, Oregon, and California, can expect to be drenched with heavy rains. Although that storm has mostly passed and is headed to the Rocky Mountains, California is not out of the woods just yet. High surf warnings were issued by the National Weather Service from Point Conception, California, north of the Los Angeles  Basin, to the coast of southwestern Washington, highlighting an especially heightened threat to life and property within the surf zone, reported Weather.com.

  This is what Noyo looked like this afternoon. pic.twitter.com/dre839M6J2

  — U. S. Elaine™️ 🍳 (@USelaine) December 17, 2018

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  This new storm system comes just a week after a surfer was killed by big swells at San Francisco’s Ocean Beach. The waves that killed the surfer were only 10 feet high.  Should the tides interact with a storm of that magnitude, devastation on the West Coast would be imminent.

  

• McCain Was Responsible For Steele Dossier Leak

  A longtime associate of late Arizona Senator John McCain leaked a copy of the infamous Steele Dossier to BuzzFeed News, according to a Wednesday court filing, according to the Daily Caller‘s Chuck Ross. 

  

  McCain dispatched former State Department official David Kramer to London on November 28, 2016 where Dossier author Christopher Steele reportedly allowed Kramer to see it, while a copy was later provided to McCain through Kramer. McCain then provided a copy of the document to former FBI Director James Comey during a December 9 meeting, according to an October 2017 Daily Caller report.

  On Wednesday, thanks to a filing by US District Court Ursula Ungaro as part of a final report ahead of her ruling in BuzzFeed‘s favor in a defamation lawsuit, we learn that Kramer provided BuzzFeed a copy of the dossier during a December 29, 2016 meeting. As the Caller notes, it is unclear whether Kramer actually gave BuzzFeed‘s Ken Bensinger a copy, or if Bensinger took photos of the document – or both. 

  

  “Kramer testified that Bensinger took photos of the Dossier when Kramer was out of the room, even though he asked Bensinger not to,” wrote Ungaro, who added that “in a later declaration, Kramer stated that he had no objection to Bensinger taking a hard copy and had provided hard copies to other journalists.”

  “The parties dispute whether Kramer gave Bensinger a copy or whether Bensinger took photos of the Dossier when Kramer was not looking,” reads a footnote in the ruling. 

  Kramer met Nov. 30, 2016, with McCain and McCain’s chief of staff, Christopher Brose, to review Steele’s reports.

  “Kramer advised McCain to share the reports with the FBI and the CIA,” according to Ungaro.

  Days later, Kramer met at McCain’s behest with Victoria Nuland, who served then as assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasian affairs and the State Department, and Celeste Wallender, the top Russian affairs official at the National Security Council.

  Nuland and Wallender were aware of the dossier and Steele, according to Ungaro. –Daily Caller

  According to the filing, “Kramer reviewed with Bensinger what he knew about the Dossier and explained that he took the allegations seriously.”

  

• Senate Passes Stopgap Funding Bill To Avert Government Shutdown

  The Senate passed a seven-week, stopgap funding bill on Wednesday, preventing a partial government shutdown that was expected to begin at midnight on Friday. Senators passed the legislation by voice vote, which represented the final item on the Senate’s to-do list as they wrap up their work for the year this week; the bill will now go to the House, and be signed by President Trump.

  Republican senators say that while they believe Trump is unhappy with Congress passing a short-term fix, they believe he will sign it because they were able to keep other controversial policy riders off of it.

  

  More importantly, the stop-gap bill, puts off the fight over Trump’s fight with Pelosi, Schumer and the Democrats over the president’s demand for $5 billion for the border wall.

  “I think the message is don’t add anything else to it,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), the No. 2 Senate Republican. “He’s not happy about that [a continuing resolution] but he understands the reality.”

  The bill, which will fund roughly 25% of the government, pushed back the funding deadline from Dec. 21 to Feb. 8, and avoids dragging a partial shutdown fight into the Christmas holiday. A vote on the bill was temporarily held up Wednesday over a fight on whether or not to include a land and water measure, which has been stalled amid negotiations for months.

  Senators held out hope as recently as Tuesday that they would be able to scramble together a deal to fund the remaining seven out of the 12 appropriations bills through Sept. 30, the end of the 2019 fiscal year. But both sides remained far apart on funding for the U.S.–Mexico border wall. Trump and House Republicans want $5 billion for the wall. Democrats, meanwhile, dug in at $1.3 billion as their cap and that it would go toward fencing not a physical concrete wall.

  Hopes for a long-term deal seesawed throughout the week amid a shuffle of meetings and competing theories from lawmakers about what they would be able to agree to. However, hope was quickly dashed when House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi told reporters that Democrats couldn’t accept the deal offered by Republicans.

  “Senator Schumer — Leader Schumer and I have said that we cannot accept the offer they made of a billion dollar slush fund for the President to implement his very wrong immigration policies, so that won’t happen,” Pelosi said on Tuesday.

  Republicans acknowledged that the Democratic rejection of their offer made punting the funding fight all but inevitable.

  Meanwhile, conservative lawmakers and pundits are blasting GOP leaders and Trump over the stopgap spending measure. Rep. Jim Jordan questioned rhetorically in a tweet: “Let me get this straight… our chances of getting the Wall will be better in February when Nancy Pelosi is Speaker than now when we have the majority?” But the White House appeared increasingly resolved to a continuing resolution as the week stretched on, the deadline looming and no long-term deal in sight.

  White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Tuesday that “at the end of the day, we don’t want to shut down the government.”

  Unwilling to accept defeat, Trump remained defiant saying in a tweet Wednesday that “one way or the other, we will win on the Wall!”

  “In our Country, so much money has been poured down the drain, for so many years, but when it comes to Border Security and the Military, the Democrats fight to the death,” he tweeted on Wednesday. “We won on the Military, which is being completely rebuilt. One way or the other, we will win on the Wall!”

   

   

  

• Venezuela’s Gold In Limbo Amid Tug-Of-War At The Bank Of England

  Submitted by Ronan Manly of BullionStar.com

  In early November news was placed into the British media (Reuters and The Times) revealing that the Bank of England in London, one of the world’s largest custodians of gold bars on behalf of other central banks, was refusing to allow the withdrawal and repatriation of 14 tonnes of gold belonging to Venezuela’s central bank, the Banco Central de Venezuela (BCV).

  According to these media reports, the delays / refusals by the Bank of England to allow the Venezuelan gold repatriation ranged from excuses about the prohibitive cost of transport insurance to concerns about future money laundering. In all cases, these excuses were bogus, as I explained in the article “Bank of England refuses to return 14 tonnes of gold to Venezuela” on the BullionStar website, dated 15 November, and that the real reasons for the Bank of England’s refusal were political. As I stated at the time in my conclusion:

  “The reasons put forward by official sources in the Reuters and Times articles for why Venezuela can’t withdraw its gold from the Bank of England are clearly bogus. The more logical and likely explanation is that the US, through the White House, US Treasury and State Department have been liaising with the British Foreign office, HM Treasury to put pressure on the Bank of England to delay and push back on Venezuela’s gold withdrawal request.”

  According to the Reuters report dated 5 November, the Venezuelan central bank gold withdrawal plan had “been held up for nearly two months”, which would put the original withdrawal request by the BCV to the Bank of England at a date in at least September and probably earlier. So the BCV had been looking for its gold back for sometime, and the Bank of England was stalling. One reason the Bank might have been stalling was to wait for the introduction of US Executive Order 13850 which was signed on 1 November, imposing US economic sanctions on anyone doing business with the Venezuelan gold sector.

  As far as the BCV’s gold withdrawal request and the Bank of England’s refusal, nothing much happened in the public domain until early December when there came a flurry of news and activity showing that the Venezuelan custodied gold matter at the Bank of England was far from resolved, and indeed that the heat had been turned up a few notches by both sides.

  

   

  Borges and Vecchio appeal to Mark Carney

  First up was a letter to the Bank of England Governor Mark Carney, dated 30 November, from two dissident figures of the Venezuelan political opposition, Julio Borges and Carlos Vecchio. Borges is a former Venezuelan national assembly (legislature) president and also founder of Venezuelan political party Primero Justicia (Justice First). Vecchio is co-founder of and coordinator for another Venezuelan political party Voluntad Popular (Popular Will).

  A summary of this letter and its background can be read in a 3 December Univision News article by David Adams in a link here. The actual letter in pdf format can be read here at this link -> Borges-Vecchio-Letter-to-the-BoE.

  

  “In 2012, Chavez withdrew 40% of this gold, leaving 50 tonnes there by 2015“. Not fully accurate. The Venezuelan gold repatriation operation started on 25 November 2011 and ended on 30 January 2012. In August 2011, the BCV had 16,908 Good Delivery gold bars held abroad (including gold deposits that were claims on bullion banks). The BCV then repatriated 12,819 Good Delivery bars to Caracas in Venezuela, leaving 4,089 Good Delivery gold bars in the Bank of England’s vaults (about 50.8 tonnes). I would therefore say that the BCV repatriated 50% of its gold held at the Bank of England, not 40%, and that the operation was completed by January 2012. Why Borges/Vecchio say 40% is not clear. Maybe the Bank of England used some gold swaps with another central bank such as the Banque de France as part of the gold transfers repatriated to Venezuela over late 2011 / early 2012 (note: there is some evidence that some of Venezuela’s repatriated gold came from Paris).

  “Since 2015, Venezuela lost most of this 50 tonnes of gold as collateral in gold swap transactions, leaving 14 tonnes at the Bank of England.” Highly likely, and probably true, but the exact numbers for gold swaps are not known since the details of central bank gold swap transactions with bullion banks are highly secretive and protected by the Bank of England / IMF / LBMA.

  The BCV did enter various gold swaps in recent years, such as with Deutsche Bank, Citibank and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). Gold swap transactions most commonly occur for gold held at the Bank of England. In 2017, the BCV let a gold swap with Deutsche Bank lapse which was using $1.7 billion of the BCV’s gold as collateral. Deutsche Bank then kept the gold that was put up as collateral. This would have been between 30 – 40 tonnes of gold.x

  

  Then in April 2018, the BCV paid Citibank $172 million to recover some of the gold that had been collateral in another gold swap with Citi. Rolling up a haircut on the amount the BCV paid Citi, this would be about 5 tonnes of gold returned by Citi to the BCV. So the figure of 14 tonnes remaining after the bullion banks had got their hands on most of the 50 tonnes of Venezuela’s gold at the Bank of England (which appears to have been about 36 tonnes) seems plausible. After the Citi swap was wound up in April, maybe this was when the BCV began asking for its gold back. If this was the case, then the BCV withdrawal request to the Bank of England has been pending for some time now, and all through the summer.

  

  Doing a rough calculation of how many Good Delivery gold bars the remaining 14 tonnes of Venezuela’s gold at the Bank of England now represents, an estimate would be in the region of about 1125 gold bars (or 27% of the original 4,089 gold bars). This is the gold now being frozen by the Bank of England, about 1125 gold bars. If this gold is in custody, it will be set-aside or allocated and the BCV will know the individual serial numbers of every bar. As I wrote previously, the BCV should at the very least publish for everybody to see, the weight list / serial number list of all of these gold bars so that they cannot be confiscated / used by the Bank of England or bullion banks for other purposes, such as being sold to other central bank customers or sold to gold-backed ETFs.

  As for the actual letter by Borges and Vecchio, not surprisingly since they oppose Venezuela’s Maduro-led government, the letter uses a series of arguments about Venezuela’s Maduro ‘regime’ to try to convince the Bank of England not to release the gold. These arguments include references to the threat of ‘future crime’ money laundering even before it may exist, human rights violation allegations, allegations about the lack of independence of the BCV, as well as Trump’s Executive Order from 1 November, etc.

  Readers can read the full letter for themselves at the above link (3 pages and signature page) to get a sense of the Borges / Vecchio arguments.

  

  A Visit to Threadneedle Street: Calixto Ortega and Simón Zerpa

  Less than a week after the Borges / Vecchio letter to the Bank of England became public knowledge, the Venezuelan central bank and government raised the stakes in the tug of war, with news that “two high-ranking Venezuelan officials” were flying over to London to have a meeting at the Bank of England in an attempt to retrieve Venezuela’s 14 tonnes of gold. This meeting was scheduled for Friday 7 December. The two high-ranking officials in question were Venezuelan central bank (BCV) president Calixto Ortega Sánchez, and Venezuelan finance minister Simón Zerpa Delgado.

  

  While Reuters was the only media source initially revealing the news that Ortega and Zerpa were coming to visit the Bank, the planned visit was also confirmed by a letter from British MP, Andrew Lewer, who on 6 December also wrote to Bank of England governor Mark Carney (cc’ing the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Anthony at HM Treasury), asking that any meeting request by Ortega and Zerpa be rejected and any request to transfer the 14 tonnes of gold to Venezuela be declined. Lewer’s full letter in pdf can be read here -> Andrew Lewer letter to Mark Carney.

  

  Quite why Andrew Lewer, a backbench Tory MP who was only elected to the UK Parliament for the first time last year, should take it upon himself to write to the Bank of England to try to scupper the Venezuelan meeting with the Bank seems odd. Has he been put up to it? Lewer claims to be vice-chairman of a grouping in Westminster’s parliament called the Venezuela All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) but strangely his name does not appear on the latest list of officers of this Venezuela APPG dated 21 November 2018, who are Graham Jones, Mike gapes, Mark Menzies and Viscount Waverley.

  

  In his letter to the Bank of England’s Carney, which reads like a schoolboy letter to the BBC’s Newsround, backbencher Lewer makes reference to the fact that Simón Zerpa was put on a US Treasury list of sanctioned Venezuelan government officials in June 2017 for a previous role he held at state-owned oil company PDVSA. Zerpa was only on this list as it was part of a recommendation made by a US congressional commission on Venezuela which deemed PDVSA to be a corrupt government entity. Interestingly, last April US headquartered Citibank didn’t have a problem returning gold to the BCV at the Bank of England when it unwound the Citi – BCV gold swap, and didn’t have an issue about sanctions since Zerpa was also Venezuelan minister of finance at that time, so obviously this argument from Lewer is as it appears, bogus.

  In the case of Ortega who was appointed as BCV president in June 2018, Lewer says that Ortega’s appointment was not ratified properly by the Venezuelan National Assembly. Lewer includes a link to a statement on a website of Venezuelan opposition political coalition website “Mesa de la Unidad Democrática” (Unidad) (Democratic Unity Roundtable in English), to back up his claim. While its true that the National Assembly is now heavily Maduro dominated, this is primarily because the Unidad coalition boycotted the National Assembly election in 2017 and vacated its ability to contribute to the Assembly..

  Lewer signs off saying that he thinks ‘any transfer to the regime would be quite wrong’ and ‘urges’ a rejection of the meeting between the Bank of England and the BCV’s Ortega and the Venezuelan minister for finance Zerpa. As a supposedly independent central bank, the question must also be asked, what business does a British Member of Parliament have interfering in the operations  of the Bank of England and in its gold storage agreements with its international central bank customers?

  

  Meeting or No Meeting?

  So did the meeting between the Bank of England’s Carney (or his lieutenants) and Venezuela’s Ortega and Zerpa actually take place, either on Friday 7 December or any date after that? The simple answer is no one knows. Since the reporting of the intended meeting on 6 December, there has been zero new media coverage of this topic. A report by London financial district newspaper City AM on 6 December said that Bank of England “deputy governor Sir David Ramsden will attend the meeting. It is unclear whether Carney will be present.”

  So did Sir Ramsden attend the meeting? Did HM Treasury officials such as the Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond, attend the meeting? Was there even a meeting and did Ortega and Zerpa fly into London or not? The answer a the time of writing is no one seems to know?

  As well as the public interest and general media interest, many central banks from around the world (more than 70) store their gold in the vaults of the Bank of England under gold storage agreements, so presumably these central banks will be very interested in knowing the outcome of this bizarre saga of 14 tonnes of gold in limbo in London. If the Bank of England was to take the take Borges / Vecchio / Lewer / US Treasury concerns on board and continue to freeze the Venezuelan gold, then surely it should apply a consistent yardstick, and examine some of the other less salubrious central bank and government customers from aroudn the world that it stores gold bars on behalf of. Should it not?

  David Adams in his 3 December article raises the interesting point that on 10 January Maduro begins a new term in office, and that by delaying the gold transfer until after that, it would be easier for the Bank of England to keep the 14 tonnes of gold on the basis of ‘government illegitimacy’.

  

   

  Whatever happens next, this Venezuelan gold bar drama at the Bank of England is far from over, and the gold could still become a symbol in the battlefront that appears to be forming among the world’s influential powers, with the US and UK on one side, and the gold hoarding nations of China, Russia and Turkey on the other. City AM reports that “Carney discussed the [Venezuelan] gold transfer during a meeting at the G20 summit in Argentina“.

  

  After the same G20 summit, Turkey’s president Erdogan visited Venezuala’s capital Caracas, and ‘slammed Venezuela sanctions’ according to Reuters, saying that “Political problems cannot be resolved by punishing an entire nation…we do not approve of these measures that ignore the rules of global trade.”

  Recently, China agreed to lend Venezuela $5 billion during a visit by Venezuela’s Maduro to Beijing in September. And following a Maduro visit to Moscow earlier this month where Russia agreed $6 billion in investment deals with Caracas , Russia has now sent military bomber aircraft to Venezuela in another show of support for Maduro.

  With the Bank of England staff now in party mode and many about to leave on their Christmas and New Year breaks, it looks like Venezuela’s 14 tonnes of gold will sit quietly in London until at least January, if not indefinitely. But if the Bank of England governor Mark Carney has sleepless nights, that its a fair bet to suggest that Venezuela’s gold is one of the topics that is keeping him awake at night.

  This article was originally published on the BullionStar.com website under the same title “Venezuela’s gold in limbo amid tug-of-war at the Bank of England“.

  

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