- Russia Exposes British Lies On Skripal, But Trail Leads To US
Authored by M.K. Bhadrakumar via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
Moscow says it has proof that the agent used in the UK attack is a chemical weapon patented in the US. So was this a covert operation aimed at ratcheting up tensions between the West and Russia?
The sensational case of the poisoning of the ex-MI6 agent and former Russian military intelligence colonel Sergei Skripal on March 4 in Salisbury, in the UK, is becoming more and more curious. Under a blinding spotlight from Moscow, the British allegation regarding a Russian hand in the poisoning of Skripal is getting exposed. An engrossing plot in big-power politics is also unfolding. There is stuff here for a Le Carre novel.
Are we witnessing a replay of the false flag Gulf of Tonkin attack of August 1964, the imaginary “incident” concocted by the US military to provide legal and political justification for deploying American forces in South Vietnam and for commencing open warfare against North Vietnam?
To recap, Britain alleged without any empirical evidence that a military grade nerve agent of a type known as Novichok was used in Salisbury, saying it was originally developed in the former Soviet Union, and therefore, Moscow’s hand – possibly, even President Vladimir Putin’s hand – was “highly likely”.
Moscow has maintained, on the other hand, that it had destroyed all its chemical weapons and an Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) investigation verified and testified to that.
The British allegation quickly morphed into a large-scale expulsion of Russian diplomats (over 100 of them) by western capitals, under heavy pressure from Washington and London. The US alone expelled 60 Russian diplomats, while Britain expelled 23.
Egg on May’s face
Britain is studiously ignoring the Russian requests for samples of the chemical agent used in the Salisbury attack and for consular access to be granted to the former spy’s daughter Yulia. Meanwhile, Britain instead approached the OPCW to investigate.
The OPCW has now responded that it cannot identify the country of origin of the chemical agent used in the Salisbury attack.
There is egg on PM Theresa May’s face.
However, Russians managed to get their hands on the report prepared for the OPCW by its reputed laboratory in Spiez, the Swiss Center for Radiology and Bacteriological Analysis. According to the Swiss lab’s report, the chemical formula used in the Salisbury attack has been in service in the US, the UK and other NATO countries. Furthermore, neither the Soviet Union nor Russia “ever developed or stockpiled similar chemical weapons.”
That’s more egg on May’s face.
Now comes the bombshell. On April 18, Moscow disclosed that it has formally handed over to the OPCW proof to the effect that the Novichok agent purportedly used in the Salisbury attack actually happens to be patented as a chemical weapon in 2015 in the US and produced in that country. (By the way, unlike Russia, the US is yet to destroy its chemical weapon stockpiles, as required under the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1997.)
Now, not only the British government but Washington too has some explaining to do.
Was Skripal attack a covert op by the West?
Simply put, the Salisbury attack might even have been an Anglo-American joint covert operation undertaken with the ulterior motive to ratchet up tensions between the West and Russia. (The Washington Post reported on Monday that the former National Security Advisor HR McMaster might have hoodwinked President Donald Trump into approving the expulsion under the wrong notion that similar numbers of expulsions by European allies was in the pipeline. In the event though, the Europeans made only token expulsions.)
Britain is steadily edging away from the Skripal case, hoping, perhaps, that the matter will die down. But will Moscow let Britain off the hook?
On their part, the Russians seem to be holding back on some explosive information pointing toward the US’s direct complicity in this affair.
Indeed, if this was McMaster’s swan song, the indefatigable Russophobe probably hoped to kill two birds with one shot – push Russia’s relations with the West to a crisis point and second, scotch the prospects of an early US-Russia presidential summit (which Trump wanted.)
McMaster reportedly tried to stop Trump from congratulating Putin on his big victory in the Russian election on March 18 in a phone conversation where they discussed a possible summit meeting in a near future.
How far all this is linked to Trump’s decision on March 22, finally, to sack McMaster as his National Security Advisor is yet another template. By the standards of military people, McMaster probably has the reputation of being an “intellectual” but the man proved to be an unvarnished Cold Warrior fit for a museum.
From all accounts, Trump never trusted McMaster and the two had an acrimonious relationship. The one-star general who was overlooked for promotion by the Pentagon was Trump’s default choice following the abrupt departure of Michael Flynn.
Michael Wolff narrates a hilarious episode in his book ‘Fire and Fury’ that during the job interview for the NSA post, McMaster tried to impress Trump when he showed up in military uniform with his silver star and launched into a wide-ranging lecture on global strategy. After, Trump reportedly remarked, “That guy bores the shit out of me.”
- Harvard Teens Raise $1M For Crypto Fund Despite "Not Knowing A Lot"
Teens are now setting up crypto hedge funds despite not having much of a clue as to what they’re doing. And they don’t seem to have trouble finding capital, either.
If you are in the process of trying to gauge whether or not the world of crypto is achieving new highs in bubble status, then look no further than today’s perfunctory Bloomberg article on the crypto world.
Our daily dose of crypto “must have” news comes in the form of an article, published Friday, that details several Harvard undergrad students who woke up one morning and decided they wanted to start a crypto hedge fund. Bloomberg reported,
Bushra Hamid, the 19-year-old daughter of Syrian immigrants, has teamed up with three schoolmates to form Plympton Capital, a hedge fund for investing in digital currencies. Hamid says they aim to launch in six to eight weeks, starting with $1 million. Plympton, named for a street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has already raised $700,000 from friends and family.
And to give you some indication as to exactly how ready people are to throw money at crypto right now, the article states that they were able to raise $700,000 million from family and friends despite the fact that they may have no clue as to what they are doing:
“We don’t necessarily know a lot, but they have full trust in us,” Hamid said.
Friends – rather, investors – in the fund seem to be a little light on the “due diligence” angle, investing because founder Hamid had one run of success with cryptos:
The quartet began meeting to discuss cryptocurrencies last year, when they each invested in coins independently. Hamid said that last fall she started the Harvard Undergraduate Blockchain Group, in which more than 300 students have shown an interest. Hamid won’t say how much she made on crypto, but a friend was impressed enough with the returns to spur her to action.
“He was instantly, instantly intrigued,” she said. “He said, ‘Start something and I’ll invest.’
The article continues:
While many tech-savvy individual investors have long dabbled in cryptocurrencies, funds became interested in the last few years. About 226 have opened so far, most of them within the last year, managing as much as $5 billion in capital, according to Autonomous Research LLP.
Bitcoin, the bellwether for the entire market, has retreated from last year’s heights, sending the crypto fund returns down 48 percent in the first quarter, according to the Eurekahedge Crypto-Currency Hedge Fund Index.
The article states that they are banking on people their age – and as well as strategies like “technical analysis” to find the right investments:
The Plympton group is banking on the youth movement. A recent online survey of about 2,000 adults conducted by Harris Poll for Blockchain Capital showed that 4 percent of millennials — people 18 to 34 years old — have owned Bitcoin, twice the rate of the general population. And 16 percent of millennials said they plan to buy Bitcoin in the next five years.
“Some people might see our age, and see this is a new growing space that’s largely driven by the millennials,” Junaid Zubair, another Plympton founder, said. “That allows for a high sense of liability but also passion and interest. There we might have an advantage.”
Plympton’s plan is to deploy technical analysis, arbitrage opportunities, portfolio optimization, and machine learning to find the right investments, Zubair said. He declined to provide more specifics.
Good luck with that. The formation of this fund comes at the height of the crypto adoption boom and at a time where countries are the furthest along with they’ve ever been in trying to regulate cryptos and initial coin offerings.
These teenagers have anointed themselves as experts due to one of them simply buying and holding cryptos in ostensibly benefiting from one ride up. However, now that crypto adoption has reached what seems like someone of a slow down, it’s going to take more than just being lucky or buying and holding to make consistent returns in the crypto space.
We wrote yesterday about the only types of funds making money in crypto right now: market makers, volatility experts and those with net neutral exposure. Bloomberg reported on Thursday:
Funds specializing in virtual currency market making and arbitrage strategies delivered first-quarter gains even as their mostly bullish peers lost 40 percent on average. That’s a big reversal from last year, when digital assets soared and market-making funds lagged far behind their long-biased counterparts.
Pivot Digital Trading-2, managed by Hong Kong-based Amber AI Group, generated some of the biggest gains among cryptocurrency funds that avoid directional bets. It rose 4.3 percent in March to bring its first-quarter return to 30 percent, according to the firm. Market Neutral Liquidity SP-Institutional, domiciled in the Cayman Islands, earned 5.6 percent in the first quarter, said Cedric Jeanson of BitSpread Group, investment adviser to the portfolio.
The man behind the curtain continues to get his take. The increased volume that comes with crypto’s plunge may not be great for traditional “buy-and-hold“ crypto funds or retail investors who only have the means to hold long, but that did not stop market makers, net neutral funds and volatility bettors from cashing in. The article continued:
The results suggest some managers are finding ways to profit from wild swings in cryptocurrencies without having to predict whether they will rise or fall. Such tactics may appeal to investors who want exposure to cryptocurrencies without their extreme volatility.
Here’s a full list of funds that weathered the storm and the methods they used, courtesy of Bloomberg:
We’re not sure how fund managers who don’t necessarily “know a lot” will be able to engage in these types of strategies, especially if their experience is likely just buying and holding in a Coinbase account.
Whether or not these Harvard students understand that the only people making money in cryptos right now are those with net neutral exposure where those making a market remains to be seen. But, the fact that there are four partners here, combined with the timing with which they decided to start this fund, has us believing this might be not only the first, but also the last time, we hear about them.
- Crimes Of A Monster: Your Tax Dollars At Work
Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
Let us not mince words.
We are living in an age of war profiteers.
We are living in an age of scoundrels, liars, brutes and thugs. Many of them work for the U.S. government.
We are living in an age of monsters.
Ask Donald Trump. He knows all about monsters.
Any government that leaves “mothers and fathers, infants and children, thrashing in pain and gasping for air” is evil and despicable, said President Trump, justifying his blatantly unconstitutional decision(in the absence of congressional approval or a declaration of war) to launch airstrikes against Syria based on dubious allegationsthat it had carried out chemical weapons attacks on its own people. “They are crimes of a monster.”
If the Syrian government is a monster for killing innocent civilians, including women and children, the U.S. government must be a monster, too.
In Afghanistan, ten civilians were killed—including three children, one an infant in his mother’s arms—when U.S. warplanes targeted a truck in broad daylight on an open road with women and children riding in the exposed truck bed.
In Syria, at least 80 civilians, including 30 children, were killed when U.S.-led air strikes bombed a school and a packed marketplace.
Then there was a Doctors without Borders hospital in Kunduz that had 12 of its medical staff and 10 of its patients, including three children, killed when a U.S. AC-130 gunship fired on it repeatedly. Some of the patients were burned alivein their hospital beds.
Yes, on this point, President Trump is exactly right: these are, indeed, the crimes of a monster.
Unfortunately, this monster—this hundred-headed gorgon that is the U.S. government and its long line of political puppets (Donald Trump and before him Obama, Bush, Clinton, etc.), who dance to the tune of the military industrial complex—is being funded by you and me.
It is our tax dollars at work here, after all.
Unfortunately, we have no real say in how the government runs, or how our taxpayer funds are used.
We have no real say, but we’re being forced to pay through the nose, anyhow, for endless wars that do more to fund the military industrial complex than protect us, pork barrel projects that produce little to nothing, and a police state that serves only to imprison us within its walls.
Consider: we get taxed on how much we earn, taxed on what we eat, taxed on what we buy, taxed on where we go, taxed on what we drive, and taxed on how much is left of our assets when we die.
Indeed, if there is an absolute maxim by which the federal government seems to operate, it is that the American taxpayer always gets ripped off.
This is true whether you’re talking about taxpayers being forced to fund high-priced weaponrythat will be used against us, endless warsthat do little for our safety or our freedoms, or bloated government agencies such as the National Security Agencywith its secret budgets, covert agendas and clandestine activities. Rubbing salt in the wound, even monetary awards in lawsuits against government officials who are found guilty of wrongdoing are paid by the taxpayer.
Not only are American taxpayers forced to “spend more on state, municipal, and federal taxes than the annual financial burdens of food, clothing, and housing combined,” but we’re also being played as easy marks by hustlers bearing the imprimatur of the government.
With every new tax, fine, fee and law adopted by our so-called representatives, the yoke around the neck of the average American seems to tighten just a little bit more.
Everywhere you go, everything you do, and every which way you look, we’re getting swindled, cheated, conned, robbed, raided, pickpocketed, mugged, deceived, defrauded, double-crossed and fleeced by governmental and corporate shareholders of the American police state out to make a profit at taxpayer expense.
Yet as Ron Paul observed, “The Founding Fathers never intended a nation where citizens would pay nearly half of everything they earn to the government.”
We are now ruled by a government consumed with squeezing every last penny out of the population and seemingly unconcerned if essential freedoms are trampled in the process.
If you have no choice, no voice, and no real options when it comes to the government’s claims on your property and your money, you’re not free.
You’re not free if the government can seize your home and your car (which you’ve bought and paid for) over nonpayment of taxes.
You’re not free if government agents can freeze and seize your bank accounts and other valuables if they merely “suspect” wrongdoing.
And you’re certainly not free if the IRS gets the first cut of your salary to pay for government programs over which you have no say.
Somewhere over the course of the past 240-plus years, democracy has given way to kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves), and representative government has been rejected in favor of a kakistocracy (a government run by the most unprincipled citizens that panders to the worst vices in our nature: greed, violence, hatred, prejudice and war) ruled by career politicians, corporations and thieves—individuals and entities with little regard for the rights of American citizens.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the American kleptocracy continues to suck the American people down a rabbit hole into a parallel universe in which the Constitution is meaningless, the government is all-powerful, and the citizenry is powerless to defend itself against government agents who steal, spy, lie, plunder, kill, abuse and generally inflict mayhem and sow madness on everyone and everything in their sphere.
But what if we didn’t just pull out our pocketbooks and pony up to the federal government’s outrageous demands for more money?
What if we didn’t just dutifully line up to drop our hard-earned dollars into the collection bucket, no questions asked about how it will be spent?
What if, instead of quietly sending in our checks, hoping vainly for some meager return, we did a little calculating of our own and started deducting from our taxes those programs that we refuse to support?
If we don’t have the right to decide what happens to our hard-earned cash, then we don’t have very many rights at all.
If the government can just take from you what they want, when they want, and then use it however they want, you can’t claim to be anything more than a serf in a land they think of as theirs.
- Visualizing The Multi-Billion Dollar Industry That Makes Its Living From Your Data
In the ocean ecosystem, plankton is the raw material that fuels an entire food chain. These tiny organisms on their own aren’t that remarkable, but en masse, they have a huge impact on the world.
Here on dry land, Visual Capitalist’s Nick Routley notes that the massive volume of content and meta data we produce fuels a marketing research industry that is worth nearly $50 billion.
Every instant message, page click, and step you take now produces a data point that can be used to build a detailed profile of who you are.
Courtesy of: Visual Capitalist
EVERY BREATH YOU TAKE, EVERY MOVE YOU MAKE
The coarse-grained demographics and contact information of yesteryear seems quaint compared to today’s sophisticated data collection battleground. In the past, marketers would make judgement calls on your likely income and family structure based on where you lived, and you’d receive “targeted” mail and calls from telemarketers. Loyalty programs and the emergence of web analytics pushed things a little further.
Today, the steady march of technological advancement has created a vast data collection empire that measures every aspect of your digital life and, increasingly, your offline life as well. Facebook alone uses nearly one hundred data points to target ads to you – everything from your marital status to whether you’ve been on vacation lately or not. Telecoms have access to extremely detailed information on your location. Apple has biometric data.
Also watching your every move are web trackers. “Cookie-syncing” is one of the sneaky ways advertisers can follow you around the internet. Basically, cookie-syncing allows third parties to share browsing information at such a large scale that even the NSA “piggybacks” off them for surveillance purposes.
The recent sales growth of smart speakers will only increase the breadth of data companies collect and analyze. Amazon and Google have both filed patents for technology that would essentially allow them to mine audio recordings for keywords. Advertisers could potentially target you with diapers before your family and friends even know you’re expecting a baby.
FOLLOWING THE ONES AND ZEROS
While web trackers and companies like Apple and Google are collecting a lot of personal and behavioral data, it’s the whales of the data ecosystem – data brokers – who are creating increasingly detailed profiles on almost everyone.
Data brokers trade on the privacy of consumers and operate in the shadows.
– Senator Al Franken (D-Minn)
The goal of data brokers, such as Experian or Acxiom, is to siphon up as much personal data as possible and apply it to profiles. This data comes from a wide variety of sources. Your purchases, financial history, internet activity, and even psychographic attributes are mixed with information from public records to create a robust dossier. Digital profiles are then sorted into one of thousands of categories to help optimize advertising efforts.
FEAR THE SHADOW PROFILE?
According to Pew Research, 91% of Americans “agree” or “strongly agree” that people have lost control over how personal information is collected and used.
Though optimizing clickthroughs is a big business, companies are increasingly moving beyond advertising to extract value from their growing data pipeline. Amalgamated data is increasingly being viewed as a clever way to assess risk in the decision-making process (e.g. hiring, insurance, loan or housing applications), and the stakes for consumers are going up in the process.
For example, a man may feel comfortable sharing their HIV status on Grindr (for practical reasons), but may not want that information going to a third party. (Unfortunately, that really happened.)
In 2015, Facebook filed a patent for a service that would help insurance companies vet people based on the credit ratings of their social network.
THE MORE YOU KNOW
Below the surface of our screens, our digital profiles continue to take shape.
Measures like adjusting website privacy controls and clearing cookies are a good start, but that’s only a fraction of the data companies are collecting. Not only do data brokers make it hard to officially opt out, their partnerships with corporations and advanced data collection methods cast such a wide net, that it’s almost impossible to exclude individual people.
Data brokers have operated with very little scrutiny or oversight, but that may be changing. Under intense public and governmental pressure, Facebook recently cut ties with data brokers. For a company that has bullishly pursued monetization of user data at every turn, the move is a sign that the public sentiment is changing.
- The Road To 2025 (Part 3) – USD-Dominated Financial System Will Fall Apart
Authored by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,
It’s our currency, but it’s your problem.
– U.S. Treasury Secretary John Connelly to European Finance Ministers, 1971
Today’s post will cover a topic that consumed my thoughts for many years, but one I haven’t discussed much lately. Namely, the terminal nature of a global financial system being propped up artificially by central bank shenanigans.
First, it’s crucial to understand that at the very core of our global economy is a financial system dominated by the U.S. dollar. The USD is a fiat currency directly backed by nothing, the supply of which can be arbitrarily altered and manipulated by a group of unelected bureaucrats in charge of the Federal Reserve. This money system represents the most powerful tool of centralized power on planet earth.
The USD is unique in that it grants the U.S. the “exorbitant privilege”of having a national currency which at the same time serves as the global reserve currency. This was solidified toward the end of World War 2 with the Bretton Woods agreement, and was accepted because the U.S. agreed to offer sovereign nations holding dollars a right to exchange these dollars for gold at a fixed price. This fell apart in 1971, but was shortly replaced with an unofficial “petrodollar” system, which allowed the USD to remain the world reserve currency despite no longer being redeemable in gold.
Before moving on, I want to share a few excerpts from an article I read yesterday titled, The De-Dollarization in China:
Petrodollars emerged when Henry Kissinger dealt with King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, after “Black September” in Jordan.
The agreement was simple. Saudi Arabia had to accept only dollars as payments for the oil it sold, but was forced to invest that huge amount of US currency only in the US financial channels while, in return, the United States placed Saudi Arabia and the other OPEC neighbouring countries under its own military protection.
Hence the turning of the dollar into a world currency, considering the importance and extent of the oil market. Not to mention that this large amount of dollars circulating in the world definitely marginalized gold and later convinced the FED that the demand for dollars in the world washuge and unstoppable.
An unlimited amount of liquidity that kept various US industrial sectors alive but, above all, guaranteed huge financial markets such as the derivatives – markets based on the structural surplus of US liquidity.
Pricing key commodities such as oil, which everyone in the world needs, in USD creates a massive structural support for the dollar versus other government fiat currencies. If other nations constantly have to convert to USD before purchasing commodities, there’s a constant underlying global demand to buy USD on a daily basis. No other country has this sort of structural support for its currency, and it allows the U.S. to be far more fiscally irresponsible than other countries without suffering devastating currency devaluations on the global market.
Despite the tremendous advantage such a system offers the U.S. on the world stage, there haven’t been any rival countries that could realistically challenge it given American economic dominance. This is no longer the case.
As also noted in the article highlighted earlier:
Still today, the US GDP accounts for 22% of world’s GDP, while 80% of international payments are made in dollars.
Hence the United States receives goods from abroad always at comparatively very low prices, while the massive demand for dollars from the rest of the world allows to refinance the US public debt at very low costs.
This is the economic and political core of the issue…
Therefore the United States is about to be ousted as world’s currency due to its continuous series of wars and military failures (former President Cossiga always told me: “The United States is always on the warpath and up in arms, but then it is not able to get out of it”) and, like everyone else, it shall pay for its public debt, which is huge and will be ever more its problem, not ours.
This is absolutely key.
There’s now a huge mismatch between the use of USD in the global financial system and the U.S. share of the world economy. China and Russia are acutely aware of this and have been taking major steps to transition to a more multi-polar currency world. There can be no multi-polar geopolitical world without a multi-polar currency world, which is why they’re working toward dethroning the USD. I believe they will succeed.
Specifically, I think by 2025 the world will have a completely different global financial system from the one chaotically birthed in the 1970s. The USD will lose its total dominance on the world stage, resulting in major implications geopolitically as well as at home. Though plenty of people see this coming, everybody has their own opinion on what comes next. While it can be fun to engage in speculation, nobody really knows what the world financial system will look like in ten or twenty years. Plenty of bureaucrats have their well-oiled plans, and plenty of bloggers are convinced they know, but I promise you, nobody really knows.
Cryptocurrencies have expanded the possibilities greatly. Thanks to Bitcoin, we now have a decentralized, voluntary, open source, free-market global currency. This is one of the most extraordinary creations in human history, and opens up possibilities for our species that never existed before. Sure, nation-states won’t just roll over and give up their money creation addiction any time soon, but the point is we finally have other options and can choose to opt out while still conducting global transactions. In summary, the next few years will be characterized by currency wars, not just between rival nation-states, but also between paranoid and authoritarian nation-states and new free market currencies.
Readers know what I want to see. I will never get excited about transitioning away from the USD just to be under the thumb of another oppressive nation-state currency from Russia or China.
If we want to evolve, explore the limits of human potential and usher in a world of monetary freedom, it’s important to support the key principles represented by Bitcoin. Don’t say “I like the idea, but it’ll be shut-down.” That’s giving up the battle without a fight. I genuinely think we can create a new paradigm for humankind. We have the tools, we just need the will.
You don’t have to have faith in Bitcoin, that’s the beauty of it.
Just use it, support it, fight for it and let the chips fall where they may. https://t.co/MFagmESuMa— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) April 19, 2018
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Part 1: The Road to 2025 – Prepare for a Multi-Polar World
Part 2: The Road to 2025 (Part 2) – Russia and China Have Had Enough
* * *
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- Turkey Will Repatriate All Gold From The US In Attempt To Ditch The Dollar
After Venezuela, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands prudently repatriated a substantial portion (if not all) of their physical gold held at the NY Fed or other western central banks in recent years, this morning Turkey also announced that it has decided to repatriate all its gold stored in the US Federal Reserve and deliver it to the Istanbul Stock Exchange, according to reports in Turkey’s Yeni Safak. It won’t be the first time Turkey has asked the NY Fed to ship the country’s gold back: in recent years, Turkey repatriated 220 tons of gold from abroad, of which 28.7 tons was brought back from the US last year.
According to the latest IMF data, Turkey’s gold reserves are estimated at 591 tons, worth just over $23 billion. This makes Ankara the 11th largest gold holder, behind the Netherlands and ahead of India.
Turkey’s gold repatriation come at a sensitive time for Turkey’s currency, the lira, which has been pounded, and plunged to all time lows against both the dollar and the euro despite runaway, double-digit inflation in Turkey, as the central bank is seemingly afraid of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and refuses to raise rates.
Meanwhile, Erdogan has taken a tough stance against the US currency, criticized dollar loans and saying that international loans should be given in gold instead.
“Why do we make all loans in dollars? Let’s use another currency. I suggest that the loans should be made based on gold,” Erdoğan said during a speech at the Global Entrepreneurship Congress in Istanbul on April 16, according to Hurriyet.
In what some saw an appeal for a gold standard by the Turkish president, Erdogan added that “with the dollar the world is always under exchange rate pressure. We should save states and nations from this exchange rate pressure. Gold has never been a tool of oppression throughout history.”
Well, now that Turkey will soon have all of its gold on the ground, Erdogan will be able to launch a gold-backed currency if he so desires. Unfortunately, all signs point to the gold being repatriated only so it can be raided, pillaged and promptly deposited in offshore vaults by members of the ruling oligarchy.
As noted above, Turkey has been one of several countries which have moved their gold from the world’s biggest, and most secure gold vault, that located 95 feet below sea level at 33 Liberty Street in Manhattan, also known as the New York Fed.
The repatriation wave began in 2012, when Venezuela announced it was withdrawing all of its 160 tons of gold at the NY Fed, valued at around $9 billion. Germany’s Bundesbank then demanded 300 tons be returned, with the Fed saying it would take seven years to do so; a scrambling Germany was able to complete the process 3 years ahead of schedule. The Netherlands has also repatriated 122.5 tons of gold.
As a result, according to the latest Fed data, the amount of physical gold stored at the NY Fed has dropped to the lowest on record, or 7.819 thousand tons, following a withdrawal scramble that started in 2014 and continued until the end of 2016. After a 15 month hiatus, withdrawals resumed in 2018, with 15.5 tons of gold repatriated in January and February.
“The central banks started the repatriation already a few years ago, meaning before we had Brexit, Catalonia, Trump, AFD or the rising tensions between the Politburo in Brussels and the nations of Eastern Europe,” said Claudio Grass of Precious Metal Advisory in Switzerland.
According to him, the world is becoming less centralized. “If we follow this trend, it should be obvious that the next step should be an even bigger break up into smaller units than the nation state. With such geopolitical fragmentation comes also the decentralization of power.”
- US Sorghum "Armada" Turns Away From China After Tariffs
China’s nearly 200% tariff on imports of US sorghum is already having a profound impact on the global grain trade. And in the latest evidence of how quickly the tariffs have been felt by US producers, Reuters is reporting that an “armada” of cargo ships carrying $216 million of sorghum from the US to China has changed course since Beijing imposed the tariff last week, as grain exporters are suddenly worried about taking a sizable loss on the loads.
Since the tariff was imposed, the five shipments, which were all destined for China when they were loaded at Texas Gulf Coast export terminals owned by grain merchants Cargill Inc and Archer Daniels Midland Co, are now liable for a hefty deposit to be paid based on the value of the goods. The payment would likely make the shipments unprofitable, according to Reuters.
Beijing announced on Tuesday that it would impose the 178.6% tariff following a brief investigation. That followed the imposition of tariffs as high as 25% on range of products produced in America. In the world of US agricultural products, China has also imposed sanctions on US soybeans – a decision that is expected to create major disruptions for US farmers.
Cargill declined to tell Reuters where the ships that it loaded are heading now that they’ve been redirected away from China.
The Panamanian-flagged ship called the N Bonanza, was churning its way northeast across the Indian Ocean earlier this week, carrying more than 67,000 tonnes of sorghum from ADM’s elevator in Corpus Christi, Texas, according to Reuters shipping data.
Eleven hours after the anti-dumping deposits were announced, the ship stopped and then slowly tracked northwest.
The RB Eden, a vessel carrying 70,223 tonnes of sorghum loaded at the same ADM terminal, was headed east-northeast through the Indian Ocean off the coast of South Africa. It turned around.
Hours later, the Stamford Eagle – hauling sorghum from Cargill’s elevator in Houston – turned around off the western coast of Mexico.
At least two other vessels have also suddenly changed course: the Ocean Belt and Xing Xi Hai, both loaded at Cargill’s terminal.
It is unclear where the vessels are now heading.
But US exporters aren’t the only ones feeling the pain from the tariffs: Suppliers of sorghum on the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic oceans are all hurting
Sorghum is a niche animal feed and a tiny slice of the billions of dollars in exports at stake in the trade dispute between the world’s two largest economies, which threatens to disrupt the flow of everything from steel to electronics.
As of now, the tariffs won’t have a significant impact on Archer Daniels or Cargill – two of the world’s largest grain merchants. But it is a warning that China won’t hesitate to effectiv
“For their overall trade businesses, this is not that substantial. But it’s a warning. If China really does start slapping tariffs on everything, like soybeans and corn, things could get really ugly, really fast,” said Bill Densmore, senior director of corporate ratings at Fitch Ratings.
But shipping companies may be forced to discount their cargoes to sell them.
“They’re not in a strong bargaining position considering they’ve got shipments from across the ocean that they have to sell and get the boats cleared out,” said economist Daniel O’Brien of Kansas State University in the top U.S. sorghum-producing state.
And falling sorghum prices in Texas have already rattled farmers.
“This tit for tat has to stop, and talks to find reasonable and lasting solutions must begin, for the good of U.S. agriculture and the customers we have spent decades working to win as loyal buyers,” said Tom Sleight, president and CEO of the US Grains Council.
But the real reason US producers should worry about an escalating trade war can be found in the backlash to the US’s decision to ban sales of semiconductors to China’s ZTE, a Chinese smartphone manufacturer.
Across China, citizens rallied in support of ZTE – and condemned the US measures as an attack on China. Restaurants offered ZTE employees free meals. They even “thanked” the US for helping force China to become more self-reliant.
Meanwhile in the US, Trump’s aggressive rhetoric has been met with unease and criticism from the business community.
Given that, it’s not difficult to imagine which side will be able to hold out longer while striking back with increasingly dramatic penalties.
- Hayward Bay Fault Line More Dangerous Than San Andreas: It's A "Ticking Time Bomb"
Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,
Scientists are now saying that the “Big One” in California may not be caused by the San Andreas fault line, but by the Hayward Bay fault line. It is now thought to be the “ticking time bomb” fault line and more dangerous than the San Andreas.
The scariest scenario for the next major earthquake may not be from the San Andreas Fault (though that one still threatens), but from the Hayward Fault that runs along the east side of the San Francisco Bay. In fact, many say that the next earthquake on the Hayward Bay fault line would be “disastrous.” According to KTUV, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake along the Hayward Fault could kill as many as 800 people and injure 18,000, according to results of a new research released Wednesday.
The U.S. Geological Survey, citing findings from a simulated tremor with an epicenter in Oakland, said the disaster would cause 400 fires that could destroy 50,000 homes. Nearly half a million people would be displaced, authorities said.
The simulated quake in the video above, known as the “HayWired scenario,” was modeled to occur at 4:18 p.m. on April 18 (yesterday). It replicates a rupture along the fault’s entire 52-mile length, from San Pablo Bay in the north to just east of San Jose in the south. According to this model, the violent shaking from the earthquake could cause the two sides of the fault to split six feet apart in some places. Some of the aftershocks would continue for several months as well. Cities in the East Bay would be hit hard, including Berkeley, Oakland, San Leandro, and Hayward.
If a 7.0 magnitude quake occurred like the one simulated, researchers say that the East Bay residents could be without water from anywhere between six weeks to six months. Electricity could be out for up to four weeks in some locations.
According to Business Insider, the statistical chances of this type of an earthquake occurring are not very comforting either. There’s about a 76% chance that the San Francisco Bay Area could experience a 7.2 magnitude earthquake within the next 30 years, according to some recent reports.
The San Andreas Fault under San Francisco rumbled apart about 112 years ago, causing the devastating 1906 earthquake that swallowed city blocks, broke water mains, and triggered massive fires that burned for days. However, the threat of another major quake for the Bay Area is “real and could happen at any time,” according to researchers for the US Geological Survey.
The Hayward Fault is a “tectonic time bomb, due any time for another magnitude 6.8 to 7.0 earthquake,” according to a 2008 USGS report. Since then, research has indicated that the likelihood of a Hayward quake is greater and more threatening to the 7 million Bay Area residents than a San Andreas quake would be.
“It’s just waiting to go off,” USGS earthquake geologist emeritus David Schwartz warned when speaking to the Los Angeles Times.
- Trump To "Counter" DNC Lawsuit; Seeks Servers, Clinton Emails And "Pakistani Mystery Man"
President Trump is eager to go head-to-head with the DNC which filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit on Friday against several parties, including the Russian government, the Trump campaign and the WikiLeaks organization – alleging a “far-reaching conspiracy to disrupt the 2016 campaign and tilt the election to Donald Trump.”
Hours after the Washington Post broke the news of the lawsuit, Trump tweeted “Just heard the Campaign was sued by the Obstructionist Democrats. This can be good news in that we will now counter for the DNC server that they refused to give to the FBI,” referring to the DNC email breach. Trump also mentioned “the Debbie Wasserman Schultz Servers and Documents held by the Pakistani mystery man and Clinton Emails.”
Just heard the Campaign was sued by the Obstructionist Democrats. This can be good news in that we will now counter for the DNC Server that they refused to give to the FBI, the Debbie Wasserman Schultz Servers and Documents held by the Pakistani mystery man and Clinton Emails.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 20, 2018
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The “Pakistani mystery man” is a clear reference to former DNC CHair Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s longtime IT employee and personal friend, Imran Awan – whose father, claims a Daily Caller source, transferred a USB drive to the former head of a Pakistani intelligence agency – Rehman Malik. Malik denies the charge.
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Of note, the DNC would not allow the FBI to inspect their servers which were supposedly hacked by the Russians – instead relying on private security firm Crowdstrike.
Meanwhile, the “Wasserman Schultz Servers” Trump mentions is likely in reference to the stolen House Democratic Caucus server – which Imran Awan had been funneling information onto when it disappeared shortly after the House Inspector General concluded that the server may have been “used for nefarious purposes.”
The server may have been “used for nefarious purposes and elevated the risk that individuals could be reading and/or removing information,” an IG presentation said. The Awans logged into it 27 times a day, far more than any other computer they administered.
Imran’s most forceful advocate and longtime employer is Florida Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who led the DNC until she resigned following a hack that exposed committee emails. Wikileaks published those emails, and they show that DNC staff summoned Imran when they needed her password. –DCNF
Imran Awan, his wife Hina Alvi and several other associates ran IT operations for at least 60 Congressional Democrats over the past decade, along with the House Democratic Caucus – giving them access to emails and computer data from around 800 lawmakers and staffers – including the highly classified materials reviewed by the House Intelligence Committee.
Napolitano: He was arrested for some financial crime – that’s the tip of the iceberg. The real allegation against him is that he had access to the emails of every member of congress and he sold what he found in there. What did he sell, and to whom did he sell it? That’s what the FBI wants to know. This may be a very, very serious national security situation.
Last July, Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer claimed to Laura Ingraham that the Awan IT staffers were sending sensitive information with the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Awans notably worked for rep Andre Carson (D-IN) – the first Muslim on the House Intel Committee, who has several ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Among those with whom Rep. Carson has been involved as a guest speaker, panelist, fundraiser, recipient of funds, etc., are: the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and a number of its chapters across the country; the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA); the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA); the Muslim American Society (MAS); and the Brotherhood’s new proto-political party, the U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO). –Center for Security Policy
The DNC lawsuit, filed on Friday, asserts that the Russian hacking campaign – combined with Trump associates’ contacts with Russia and the campaign’s public cheerleading of the hacks – amounted to an illegal conspiracy to interfere in the election that caused serious damage to the Democratic Party.
DNC Chairman Tom Perez said in a statement…
“During the 2016 presidential campaign, Russia launched an all-out assault on our democracy, and it found a willing and active partner in Donald Trump’s campaign,”
“This constituted an act of unprecedented treachery: the campaign of a nominee for President of the United States in league with a hostile foreign power to bolster its own chance to win the presidency,”
Unfortunately for the DNC, which has now exposed itself to an aggressive discovery phase, their case holds no water according to Law And Crime;
Here’s the problem: several pages of quotes and factual allegations in the beginning of the document are wholly uncited, at least in that section of the document.
Another section of the document, “general allegations,” does cite information through footnotes — some 107 of them. However, the records cited are almost exclusively news reports from sources such as the New Republic, the New York Times, ABC, CNN, Politico, the Washington Post, Fox News, Business Insider, Slate, and other media outlets. Ferretting out exactly what was reported by those outlets is not difficult.
The DNC’s lawsuit shoves what ultimately is fourth-hand information to a federal judge to be taken as fact in support of this conclusion:
Through these communications, the Trump Campaign, Trump’s closest advisors, and Russian agents formed an agreement to promote Donald Trump’s candidacy through illegal means.
Has the DNC just created all the rope it needs to hang itself?
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