Sep 23

Today’s News 23rd September 2018

  • A Path To War? China Cancels US Trade Talks As 'Skirmish' Escalates

    Following a surge in Chinese, European, and much of the US equity markets this week amid hopes that the so-called ‘trade skirmish’ was less ‘war-like’ than expected, China just dropped an early Saturday morning (local time) tape bomb that is sure to resurrect ‘trade war’ talk.

    After President Trump slapped a fresh round of tariffs on Chinese goods, targeting 10 percent duties on $200 billion of goods; the two camps were scheduled to meet in order to dial back tensions. As we noted earlier in the week, China had ‘downgraded’ the team with a mid-level delegation from China due to travel to the U.S. capital to pave the way for Vice Premier Liu’s visit.

    That was what sparked hope that this was just a trade skirmish (as Jamie Dimon attempted to play down), sending stocks soaring all week.

    However, that is all over now.

    The Journal  just reported on Friday that, according to sources, China has rescinded the proposals to send two delegations to Washington.

    Chinese officials have said such pressure tactics wouldn’t induce them to cooperate.

    By declining to participate in the talks, the people said, Beijing is following up on its pledge to avoid negotiating under threat.

    “Everything the U.S. does hasn’t given any impression of sincerity and goodwill,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said at a press briefing Friday.

    “We hope that the U.S. side will take measures to correct its mistakes.”

    *  *  *

    The timing of this news, after the exuberant equity week, is also noteworthy as it follows Ray Dalio’s, founder of Bridgewater, warnings that the current trade tensions mirror those of the 1930s:

    “I think that the 1935-40 period is most analogous to the current period and that it is worth reflecting on what happened then when thinking about US-Chinese relations now. 

    To be clear, I’m not saying that we are on a path to a shooting war, but I am saying that we have to watch what path we are on, given these cause-effect relationships that history has taught us and that are described in the template. This excerpt describes how the economic and political conditions of the late 1930s evolved into the wars that followed. “

    Read more here…

    We have discussed this case-effect relation before…

    Get ready for some Sunday night futures fun and games…

  • US Nuclear Safety: A Critical Problem That Has Largely Been Kept Out Of The Public Eye

    Authored by Peter Korzun via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    The issue of nuclear safety has been a hot topic in the second half of 2018. It has just been discussed in detail at the 62nd International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) conference in Geneva, which was held Sept. 17-21. The international conference on “The Security of Radioactive Material: The Way Forward for Prevention and Detection,” which is scheduled for Vienna, Dec. 3-7, is going to be a landmark international event that will be a focus for the media spotlight.

    It is true that poor storage conditions and low nuclear-safety standards threaten the environment and increase the possibility of nuclear materials getting into the wrong hands.

    Russia can be proud of its achievements in this area. The days of the 1990s when it needed outside help to tackle this problem are long gone. In 2013, Moscow ended the joint Russian-US Cooperative Threat Reduction program (the Nunn-Lugar program) because it is now able to manage these issues on its own. The cooperation over the secure storage of weapons-grade materials was suspended in 2014. The IAEA reports that today Russia boasts high nuclear-safety standards. Sophisticated protection equipment has been installed and all nuclear sites are jointly safeguarded by the military, ROSATOM’s security agency, and on-site security teams. The materials are properly safeguarded during transportation. A special program to upgrade the transportation infrastructure has been in place since 2010.

    The report “The Use of Highly Enriched Uranium as Fuel in Russia,” issued by the International Panel on Fissile Materials (IPFM), a group based at Princeton University, admits that the country has made great progress to ensure the safety of uranium stockpiles and transportation. It also includes criticism, the absence of which would be odd in any report prepared by a US think tank. It states that “highly enriched uranium (HEU) poses special concerns, as it can be used relatively easily in simple nuclear explosive devices by states with limited nuclear weapon expertise or even by non-state actors … [Russia] has not made highly enriched uranium minimization a priority.” The paper concludes that it is essential to secure Russia’s commitment to the development of a comprehensive, global, highly enriched uranium minimization strategy. Greenpeace has also acknowledged progress, but criticized Russia for what it sees as shortcomings. But one thing is certain – this is not a country where nuclear materials where nuclear materials go missing while being transported to or from storage sites. They are well guarded and all accounted for.

    Russia is not the only power whose contribution to a global nuclear-safety strategy is crucial. The situation in the United States offers good cause for concern. Repeated safety lapses have hobbled the Los Alamos National Laboratory. It was sheer good luck that prevented real trouble from happening to the surrounding area. According to Science, “most remarkably, Los Alamos’s managers still have not figured out a way to fully meet the most elemental nuclear safety standards.” “There’s a systemic issue here,” said Michaele Brady Raap, a former president of the American Nuclear Society and a member of the Energy Department’s elite Criticality Safety Support Group, a team of 12 government experts that analyzes and recommends ways to improve struggling federal nuclear-safety programs. “There are a lot of things there [at Los Alamos] that are examples of what not to do.”

    According to the Center for Public Safety, two security experts from the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory drove to San Antonio, Texas, in March 2017 with a sensitive mission: to retrieve dangerous nuclear materials from a nonprofit research lab there and transport them safely back to their state without allowing the materials to fall into the wrong hands. The materials — plutonium and cesium — as well as equipment were stolen on that trip and have never been found. They were simply left unattended in a car! The incident was concealed from the public, but the information was obtained by the Center for Public Safety under the Freedom of Information Act. That source reports that this was just a part of a much larger quantity of plutonium that over the years has gone quietly missing from stockpiles owned by the US military.

    Madeleine Jennewein of Harvard University writes in her blog, which is published by Science in the News (SITN), that “Across the United States, nuclear waste is accumulating in poorly maintained piles. 90,000 metric tons of nuclear waste requiring disposal are currently in temporary storage. The United States, however, has yet to construct a long-term storage solution for this waste, leaving the nuclear material vulnerable to extreme weather events such as hurricanes, rising sea levels, and wildfire.”

    In 2016, seven electrical engineers who worked for the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission took the unusual step of petitioning the NRC as private citizens in hopes of forcing regulators to fix a “significant safety concern” that affects all but one of the nation’s 100 nuclear plants. Nuclear waste is also a big problem in the US. Safety concerns plague key sites that have been proposed for nuclear bomb production.

    Nuclear safety in the US is a urgent issue that deserves far greater public attention. According to reports, much information is deliberately kept out of the public eye. To be honest, today it is Russia who appears to be in a position to assist the US in its efforts to tackle the issue of nuclear safety, instead of the other way around. Busy waging trade wars with other countries and getting involved in distant conflicts, such as in Syria, that have nothing whatsoever to do with the United States, Washington is largely ignoring a real problem that is threatening the country’s national security each and every day. 

  • "Lifelong Friend" Of Kavanaugh Accuser Denies Attending Party Where Alleged Sexual Assault Occurred

    A woman believed to have been one of five people at a party some 35 years ago where Christine Blasey Ford claims she was sexually assaulted by Brett Kavanaugh has become the fourth person to deny any recollection of the event.  

    In a Saturday night email to the Senate Judiciary Committee also received by several news outlets, Leland Ingham Keyser – a “longtime friend” of Blasey Ford’s said through her attorney: 

    “Simply put, Ms. Keyser does not know Mr. Kavanaugh and she has no recollection of ever being at a party or gathering where he was present, with, or without, Dr. Ford,” said Keyser’s attorney Howard Walsh, who has been “engaged in the limited capacity” of corresponding with the committee on behalf of Keyser, according to Politico.

    Kavanaugh and Mark Judge – the other teenager allegedly in the room during the alleged sexual assault – have both stated that they have no recollection of the incident, while a third man who Ford claims was at the party – Patrick J. Smyth, also denied any recollection of the event, telling the Judiciary Committee last week in a statement: “I understand that I have been identified by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford as the person she remembers as ‘PJ’ who supposedly was present at the party she described in her statements to the Washington Post,” Smyth wrote in his statement. “I am issuing this statement today to make it clear to all involved that I have no knowledge of the party in question; nor do I have any knowledge of the allegations of improper conduct she has leveled against Brett Kavanaugh.”

    Smyth added: “Personally speaking, I have known Brett Kavanaugh since high school and I know him to be a person of great integrity, a great friend, and I have never witnessed any improper conduct by Brett Kavanaugh towards women. To safeguard my own privacy and anonymity, I respectfully request that the Committee accept this statement in response to any inquiry the Committee may have.”

    On Saturday night, a tentative deal was reached for Ford to testify publicly on Thursday, according to the New York Times. 

    After a brief call late on Saturday, the woman’s lawyers and aides to Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the Republican chairman of the Judiciary Committee, planned to talk again Sunday morning to continue the halting negotiations over the conditions of the testimony, according to three people familiar with the call. Aides to Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the committee’s top Democrat, were also involved. –NY Times

    The Times notes, however, that Leland Keyser’s statement “seemed to eliminate any chance of corroboration of Dr. Blasey’s account by anyone who attended the high school party where she says she was assaulted.” 

    If no deal is reached for Blasey Ford’s testimony next week, Sen. Grassley will be left to decide on Sunday whether or not to move ahead with a scheduled vote to confirm Kavanaugh on Monday. 

    Grassley has engaged in a back-and-forth with Ford’s legal team, allowing them to miss several deadlines to continue negotiations. While Grassley may be trying to avoid the appearance of the Judiciary Committee panel of 11 men bullying an female victim alleging sexual assault, many conservatives have expressed frustration at the Chairman’s acquiescence to virtually every demand Ford has made. 

    Also potentially damaging to Blasey Ford’s claim is a theory presented Thursday by Ed Whelan,  a former clerk to USSC Justice Antonin Scalia and currently president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC), a conservative think tank. Using entirely circumstantial evidence which could certainly ruin the life of the man at the center of the new theory, Whelan suggested that Kavanaugh’s high school doppelgänger, Chris Garrett, may have in fact been responsible for Blasey Ford’s recollection of the alleged incident. 

    Brett Kavanaugh (left)

    Whelan apologized for publicly naming Kavanaugh’s look-alike hours later, perhaps to provide legal cover, however he did not retract his theory that Ford may be “misremembering” the incident. 

    Professional help

    Also casting doubt on the timing and purpose of Ford’s 11th hour claim against Kavanaugh is the Friday revalation that Ford’s current political adviser – former Obama and Clinton White House official Ricky Seidman, had allegedly been working on Ford’s situation since July – outlining a plan on a newly released audio tape to use the allegation as political fodder to derail Kavanaugh’s confirmation, and if unsuccessful, at least politically harm Republicans during midterms. 

    “While I think at the outset, looking at the numbers in the Senate, it’s not extremely likely that the nominee can be defeated,” says Seidman. “I would absolutely withhold judgement as the process goes on. I think that I would not reach any conclusion about the outcome in advance.”

    What’s more, the recording makes clear that even if Kavanaugh is confirmed, Democrats can use the doubt cast over him during midterms.

    “Over the coming days and weeks, there will be a strategy that will emerge, and I think it’s possible that that strategy might ultimately defeat the nominee… whether or not it ultimately defeats the nominee, it will help people understand why it’s so important that they vote and the deeper principles that are involved in it.“

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    Meanwhile, over 200 women have defended Kavanaugh’s moral character, including two ex-girlfriends who vouched for the Judge. 

    “He was always a perfect gentleman, and I vouch for him completely,” Maura Fitzgerald said. “Brett Kavanaugh and I have been good friends since high school. I dated him in college and he was and is nothing like the person who has been described” by Christine Blasey Ford.

    “He always conducted himself honorably with me at all times when we were together,” Fitzgerald explained.

    Another woman who dated Kavanaugh in high school, Maura Kane, agreed with Fitzgerald.

    “I’ve been friends with Brett Kavanaugh for over 35 years, and dated him during high school,” Kane explained. “In every situation where we were together he always respectful, kind and thoughtful. The accusations leveled against him in no way represent the decent young man I knew.”

    Kane concluded, “We remain good friends and I admire him as a husband, father and professional.” –PJ Media

    Meanwhile, Ford has been backed largely by people with no knowledge of the situation, such as celebrities and non-public figures who simply believe her story. 

  • Latest iPhones Greeted With Abysmal Demand In China

    Apple’s latest – and disappointing – iPhone product unveiling also revealed the two biggest headaches troubling CEO Tim Cook today: first is the lack of a new “must have” gadget (Apple watch EKG aside), with the iPhone failing to impress the faithful for the second year in a row, and prompting sellside analysts to conclude that for one more year there won’t be a “must have”  iPhone supercycle. Second is that as a result of this lack of creativity and innovation, and perhaps due to market saturation, iPhone sales have now been largely stagnant for three years, with AAPL reporting a modest decline in iPhone sales in the last quarter.

    And while we have yet to see channel check data on the latest iPhone sales in the US, anecdotal reports from China suggest that Tim Cook’s latest product offerings may be nothing short of a complete flop, as retailers and resellers in Hong Kong and mainland China reported one of their worst sale records for the latest batch of iPhones when they hit the stores on Friday.

    According to SCMP, just a handful of people had lined up outside the Apple store in Causeway Bay in Hong Kong before it opened at 8am on Friday. Some who planned to resell the phones to scalpers only offered HK$1 (US$0.13) more than the original price. Some were even offered a discount.

    Buyer Wilson Poon, 30, gave up on trying to resell his two 256GB iPhone XS Maxes to scalpers waiting outside the Causeway Bay store after he was offered less than what he had just paid.

    “The scalpers here offer HK$100 lower [than the original of price of HK$10,799, US$1,382]. Sin Tat Plaza should offer HK$300-400 [US$38-51] higher than the original price, according to my experience,” he said, referring to the shopping centre in Mong Kok where numerous phone repair and accessories shops are located.

    Ivy Wong, a 30-year-old clerk, also failed to resell her 256GB gold iPhone XS Max.

    When the stores opened around 10am, scalper demand emerged only for the high-end phone, with scalpers only interested in buying the 512GB iPhone XS Max phones at HK$300-500 higher than the original price, as models with smaller storage were ignored. Then, around noon at Sin Tat Plaza, the smaller 64GB and 256GB iPhone XS were sold to shops at the mall at HK$249 to HK$399 lower than the original price, according to a local online forum.

    While scalper demand is a subjective metric, it demonstrates the “coolness factor” of the latest Apple gadget among the more fanatical supporters. Only in this case, the word “fanatic” is used loosely, because compared to prior years the latest iPhone products simply failed to provoke any notable interest.

    Sheung Leung from G World at Sin Tat Plaza, who sells the gadget mainly to local and mainland customers, said that profit was slashed by half compared to recent years. “Two or three years ago, Hong Kong sold the product earlier than the mainland, so many mainland customers come deliberately to buy the phones. Now, only those who happen to be travelling here would drop by to get one,” Leung said.

    Meanwhile in China, retailers found sales disappointing as well, with one Shenzhen vendor claiming that “the new iPhone was one of the worst sales situations she had encountered for many years.“

    Why the tepid demand? First and foremost the stratospheric price.

    At Huaqianbei, an electronics manufacturing hub in Shenzhen, smartphone retailer Cat Fu said she sold just two units of the iPhone XR in the morning of its debut. The two phones – one gold and one silver – were bought in Hong Kong for HK$9,499 (8,290 yuan) and sold for 9,860 yuan (HK$11,289) in mainland China. The same model on Apple’s official China website is 9,588 yuan (HK$10,977).

    “The prices of the new iPhones are crazily high and ordinary consumers could not afford them. And most of the customers say they do not see a big difference between new iPhones and the old ones,” Fu said.

    Not even Apple’s traditional gimmick of using online delivery delays to “represent” strong demand has worked this time around.

    Li Yiqiang, who bought a gold Hong Kong-version of the 64GB iPhone XR Max at the price of 9,800 yuan (HK$11,220) in Huaqiangbei, said: “If I place an order in the Apple Store, I have to wait for 10 days to get one. But now I only pay 200 yuan (HK$229) more to get one immediately. Why not?” Li said.

    And in the worst possible news for Apple which tries to capitalize on the annual upgrade cycle by offering its latest phones at prices that are sometimes orders of magnitude higher than the competition, many of the potential buyers will simply turn to older, lower priced models.

    “Now we notice a lot of consumers are considering to buy older versions like iPhone 7 and iPhone 8,” said Fu.

    “We know the current economic situation is not good and many people are strapped for cash. I could hardly become optimistic about the new iPhone sales this year.”

    In an attempt to offset the tepid – if not declining – demand for iPhones with little innovation or the elusive “must have” factor, Tim Cook has instead focused on average selling prices, which in recent years have been rising, helping overall revenues. And, as we showed last week, Apple is hoping to capitalize on more of the same this holiday season with the iPhone Xs’ sharply higher price points.

    However, in light of the abysmal reception of the new product in China, Apple’s plan to offset declining volumes with higher ASPs may have finally met a brick wall, and not just due to the higher price: the magic no longer appears to be there.

    “I do not feel excited to get the new one. The iPhone XR Max does not look very different from the older ones. I think Chinese people now are spoiled by multiple choices of mobile phones” said HK-buyer Li Yiqiang.

    If Li’s sentiment is representative of what the typical iPhone buyer thinks, the world’s most valuable company will soon have to dig very deep in its bag of “buyback tricks” to keep the the typical AAPL stock buyer happy.

  • Unipolar Moments Never Last More Than A Moment

    Authored by Martin Sieff via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    American leaders, politicians, policymakers and pundits are fond of talking about the “Unipolar Moment” and “Hyper Power” position that they imagine the United States enjoys in the world.

    Totally lacking from this fantasy are any inconvenient historical facts.

    The US Unipolar Moment (insofar as it existed at all) lasted less than a decade from the break-up of the Soviet Union at the end of December 1991 to June 15, 2001. The US “moment” barely made it into the 21st Century.

    On that epochal day of June 15, 2001, two major events happened.

    First, US President George W. Bush gave a speech in Warsaw pledging to integrate the three tiny Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania into NATO as a prime strategic goal of the United States.

    That very same day, Russia and China created with four Central Asian nations the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO): The most populous and powerful international security organization in history.

    This year, the SCO doubled in population by adding India and Pakistan at the same time – two major nuclear powers with a combined population of 1.5 billion people. That means the SCO now includes more than 3 billion people, around 40 percent of the human race.

    From the moment the SCO was created – dedicated from its inception to preserve and protect a multipolar world from the domination of any one power, the US unipolar moment was dead and gone.

    This reality was confirmed less than three months later when al-Qaeda’s terror attacks of September 11, 2001 killed almost 3,000 people. More Americans died that day than in the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

    George W. Bush should have been impeached for his gross incompetence. Instead his popularity soared. Imagining the Unipolar Moment (or Era) to be still in full flood he invaded Afghanistan later that year and Iraq less than two years later. The United States is still endlessly stuck in those unending wars.

    The patterns of history – totally ignored by the US media, pundit-ocracy and political world – in fact teach this lesson consistently. Over the past half a millennium, there have been several unipolar moments for great powers seeking to reign supreme over the world and they all collapsed after only a few years.

    When Habsburg Spain and its allies decisively defeated the huge fleet of the mighty Ottoman Empire at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, Spain’s imperial domination over Europe seemed assured. But in fact Spain was already embroiled in a Dutch revolt that started in 1568. Over the following decades, it became even more exhausting than the current US deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq.

    King Philip II of Spain’s dream of domination was totally buried only 17 years after Lepanto with the destruction of his giant Armada fleet to conquer England in 1588.

    France rose next. Its domination over Europe appeared to be sealed with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. But by the mid-1660s, glory-crazed Louis XIV, the so-called “Sun King” had already repeated the Spanish mistake and bogged his country down in half a century of endless wars in what is now Belgium, the Netherlands and southern Germany. France’s unipolar moment lasted less than 20 years.

    The British came next. Even after winning the Napoleonic Wars against France, they knew they could not rule the world alone and were forced to share it with the far more conservative major monarchies of Europe – Russia, Austria-Hungary and Prussia.

    Finally in 1848, the kings of France, Austria-Hungary and Prussia were all rocked or topped by liberal popular revolutions. The British thought then, as the Americans did in 1989-91, that their Unipolar Moment had finally come and would last for eternity. The whole world would look to London for guidance and wisdom.

    It didn’t: By 1871, Prussia under its Iron Chancellor Otto von Bismarck had united Germany, smashed France, by then Britain’s ally and humiliatingly swept the British out of any continental pretensions of power and influence.

    When asked what he would do if the tiny British Army ever invaded North Germany, Bismarck replied that he would send the police to arrest it.

    After the defeat of Imperial Germany in World War I, Britain seemed to enjoy another hyper-power moment. The isolationist United States and the Soviet Union both temporarily withdrew from the world stage.

    However, that British fantasy did not even last until the rise of Hitler in 1933. Two years earlier in 1931, Imperial Japan had occupied Manchuria – a huge chunk of Northeastern China: British military leaders were forced to admit to Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald there was nothing they could do about it. Britain’s unipolar moment had lasted only 12 years – from 1919 to 1931.

    Once these historical facts are understood, it is easy to see why the US Unipolar Moment only lasted even less time than Britain’s 20th century one had – less than a decade.

    Since 2001, the United States has bankrupted and exhausted itself, just as Habsburg Spain, Bourbon France and post-Victorian Britain did before it in futile, doomed and ludicrous attempts to deny and roll back the inevitable tides of history.

    That should come as no surprise: As Friedrich Hegel warned us, “The only thing that we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.”

  • Gowdy: No National Security Risk In Classified Russia Docs; DOJ Stonewalling Over Brennan, FBI Embarassment

    Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) said in a Thursday interview that the information contained in the Russia documents withheld by the Department of Justice (DOJ) pose no risk to national security, and would be embarrassing to former CIA Director John Brennan, the DOJ and the FBI. 

    “I’ve read it. Some of it’s embarrassing for the Department of Justice — some of it’s embarrassing for the FBI. Embarrassment is not a reason to classify something,” said Gowdy. “A lot of it should be embarrassing to John Brennan, and maybe therein lies why he is so adamant that this information not be released.”

    “I don’t think it’s going to change anyone’s mind, but I’ve seen nothing in it that is going to jeopardize the national security interest of this country,” Gowdy added. “Other than one document related to George Papadopoulos, I don’t think people are going to be that interested in it. And I don’t think any mind’s are going to be changed.”

    Watch:

    Brennan, meanwhile, suggested in a Tuesday MSNBC interview that government officials should resign rather than comply with President Trump’s order to release the records. 

    Brennan, who now serves as an MSNBC contributor, has been a vocal critic of Trump’s over the past year. Trump recently responded by ordering Brennan’s security clearance revoked. Gowdy criticized Brennan, saying the Obama appointee is “part of the reason we are in this historic conundrum.” He did not describe what information in the classified documents will embarrass Brennan and other government officials. But as CIA director, Brennan was directly involved in gathering and sharing intelligence used to investigate whether members of the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government.

    The documents in question are related to Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants obtained against former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page as well as FBI notes of interviews used to obtain the warrants. –Daily Caller

    According to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA), Trump’s order to declassify a broad swath of DOJ/FBI documents related to the Russia investigation will also expose the infamous “insurance policy” referred to in an August 15, 2016 text between former FBI employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. 

    Speaking with Fox News‘s Laura Ingraham last week, Nunes said that declassification will provide exculpatory evidence, including a dozen or so 302 witness interview forms from DOJ official Bruce Ohr which may shed light on his significant relationship with former MI6 spy Christopher Steele and “many other rotten apples.” 

    “A lot of people think that the insurance policy was getting the FISA warrant on [former Trump campaign aide] Carter Page,” Nunes told Ingraham, adding “We actually believe it was more explicit than that.”

    Trump also ordered the DOJ to release text messages from several key players in the Trump-Russia investigation, “without redaction,” of former FBI Director James Comey, his deputy Andrew McCabe, now-fired special agent Peter Strzok, former FBI attorney Lisa Page and twice-demoted DOJ official Bruce Ohr. 

    A spokesman from the Justice Department told Fox News that the DOJ and FBI “are already working with the Director of National Intelligence to comply with the President’s order,” while ODNI spokesperson Kellie Wade told the network: “As requested by the White House, the ODNI is working expeditiously with our interagency partners to conduct a declassification review of the documents the President has identified for declassification.“

    Meanwhile, Trump agreed to delay the release on Friday – allowing the DOJ’s Inspector General to review the documents prior to declassification. 

    In Friday morning Tweets, Trump said: “I met with the DOJ concerning the declassification of various UNREDACTED documents. They agreed to release them but stated that so doing may have a perceived negative impact on the Russia probe. Also, key Allies’ called to ask not to release. Therefore, the Inspector General has been asked to review these documents on an expedited basis. I believe he will move quickly on this (and hopefully other things which he is looking at). In the end I can always declassify if it proves necessary. Speed is very important to me – and everyone!”

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     So it looks like Brennan’s embarrassment has been delayed…

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  • Saturday Satire: Down With The Working Classes!

    Authored by CJ Hopkins via Unz.com,

    If the Left is ever going to come together to save the world from Donald Trump and his legions of fascistic Putin-Nazis, we’re going to need to confront our primary enemy… the international working classes.

    Yes, my comrades, I’m afraid it’s time to face the facts, depressing as they are. The working classes are not our friends. Just look at how they’ve been betraying us… and after all we’ve done for them all these years!

    This cannot be allowed to continue, not if we are going to rescue democracy from Trump, Putin, Assad, the Iranians, and Palestinian kids with terrorist kites, and eventually stem the blood-dimmed tide of neo-fascist anti-Globalism!

    Now, OK, I know you’re probably asking, “how can the international working classes possibly be the enemy of the Left?” and “wouldn’t that render the whole concept of the Left completely absurd and essentially meaningless?” and other pertinent questions like that. And that’s totally fine, you’re allowed to ask that. Questioning aspects of the official narrative the ruling classes are forcing everyone to conform to like members of a worldwide cult doesn’t make you a Nazi or anything. It’s perfectly OK to ask such questions, as long as you don’t continue to ask them, over and over, and over again, after the facts have been explained to you. Here are those facts, one more time.

    The international working classes are racists. They are misogynists. Xenophobic transphobes. They do not think the way we want them to. Some of them actually still believe in God. They are white supremacists. Anti-Semites. Gun-toting, Confederate-flag-flying rednecks. Most of them have never even heard of terms like “intersectionality,” “TERF,” and so on. They do not respect the corporate media. They think that news sources like the Washington Post, The New York Times, The Guardian, CNN, MSNBC, BBC, and so on, are basically propaganda outlets for the global corporations and oligarchs who own them, and thus are essentially no different from FOX, whose pundits they believe every word of. Their minds are so twisted by racism and xenophobia that they can’t understand how global capitalism, the graduated phase-out of national sovereignty, the privatization of virtually everything, the debt-enslavement of nearly everyone, and the replacement of their so-called “cultures” with an ubiquitous, smiley-faced, gender-neutral, non-oppressive, corporate-friendly, Disney simulation of culture are actually wonderfully progressive steps forward on the road to a more peaceful, less offensive world.

    Now this has been proved in numerous studies with all kinds of charts and graphs and so on. And not only by the corporate statisticians, and the corporate media, and liberal think tanks. Why, just this week, Mehdi Hasan, in an exasperated jeremiad in the pages of The Intercept, that bastion of fearless, adversarial journalism owned by billionaire Pierre Omidyar, proved, once again, that Donald Trump was elected because PEOPLE ARE GODDAMN RACISTS!

    Apparently, Hasan has just about had it with these Putin-loving Trump-apologists proposing that general dissatisfaction with global capitalism, neoliberalism, and identity politics could have had anything to do with Americans electing a bombastic ass clown with absolutely no political experience to the highest office in the land. Hasan cites a number of expert studies, among them one by the Democracy Fund, which just happens to be another Omidyar outfit. But let’s not get all paranoid or anything. There are literally hundreds of such studies at this point, each and every one of which has been cited by the mainstream media, the alternative media, the far-alternative media, and virtually every Trump-obsessed loon with a blog or a Facebook or Twitter account.

    Look, I realize the truth is painful, but the science of statistics leaves no room for doubt. As much as some of us may want to deny it, the fact is, the country that elected Barack Obama (who is Black) president, twice, has been transformed by Putin’s brainwashing agents into a cesspool of xenophobia and racism, and it is up to us lefties to set things right!

    Now, to do this, we need to unite the Left, and get everyone marching in lockstep, and so on. Which means that we need to identify and weed out all the fake leftists among us. Then, and only then (i.e., after we’ve tracked down, sanctimoniously denounced, and exiled any and all neo-Stasserist “alt-Right” infiltrators, Sputnik leftists, and Assad-apologists), can we turn our attention to meeting face-to-face with the international working classes and sanctimoniously denouncing them as a bunch of filthy racists.

    OK, that sounds a little harsh, and possibly totally idiotic, but what other choice do we really have? If we’re going to defeat these Putin-Nazis, a few eggs are going to have to get broken. This is not the time to abandon our commitment to imposing our identity-based ideology on every last person on the planet Earth, or to indulge in that ugly kind of old-fashioned leftism that is based on what the working classes want. Who gives a damn what the working classes want? What’s important is what we want them to want. This isn’t the 1990s, after all. All that nonsense about globalization, and supranational entities like the WTO, and the World Bank, not to mention “American jobs” … only fascists talk like that these days!

    But, seriously … if you’ve made it this far in my essay, and you consider yourself a leftist of some sort, you’re probably extremely frustrated with what passes for the Left these days, and with how the working classes are flocking to the Right, both in the United States and all over the world. If I’ve got that right, you might want to read this essay by Diana Johnstone (which we lefties are technically not allowed to read, because it’s posted in The Unz Review, where a lot of “alt-Right” pieces are also posted … and you don’t want to get any of that stuff on you!)

    What she is writing about is the ongoing “populist” insurgency against globalized capitalism, which is what I’ve also been writing about for the better part of the last two years. This is the historical moment we are experiencing, a clumsy, sloppy, partly fascistic, partly non-fascistic democratic uprising against the continuing spread of global capitalism, the erosion of what is left of national sovereignty, and … yes, people’s cultures and values.

    The international working classes understand this. The neo-nationalist Right understands this. The majority of the Left does not understand this, and is refusing to admit that it’s happening, and so is standing around on the sidelines calling everybody “racists” and “fascists” while the global capitalist ruling classes and the neo-nationalists sort things out.

    Which is exactly what the ruling classes want, and what the official Putin-Nazi narrative was designed to achieve from the very beginning. The “Overton Window” (i.e., the range of ideas tolerated in public discourse) works best when divided into two clean halves. During the so-called “War on Terror,” it was Democracy versus the Islamic Terrorists. Now, it’s Democracy versus the Putin-Nazis. Both of which narratives are fairy tales, of course, the reality, as ever, being rather more messy.

    If what is left of the Left expects to play any meaningful part in our historical moment (other than sanctimoniously cheerleading for the global capitalist ruling classes), it is going to need to get its hand a littler dirtier, mingle a bit more with all those working class “populists,” talk to them, and, I don’t know, maybe even listen to them.

    Or maybe I’m completely out of my mind…

    I mean, actually listening to the working classes? Some of them are sure to say racist things, and anti-Semitic and transphobic things, which we cannot ignore for even one second, or rationally discuss and disagree with, because that would mean giving their racism a platform. Yeah, screw it, I don’t know what I was thinking … forget all that stuff I just made you read. Down with the fascist working classes!

  • Libya Urges United Nations To Take "Concrete Action" To Halt Chaos In Tripoli

    More than seven years after NATO launched a regime change war in Libya on the side of anti-Gaddafi rebels, the West is again being asked to intervene as the country further descends into civil war. 

    Except this time it’s the internationally recognized government since installed in Tripoli that is at war with itself, and the death toll from inter-factional fighting since August has now reached over 100 and is growing as street battles in Tripoli suburbs rage, causing leaders to urge the United Nations to act. 

    Tripoli street scene in early September. Via Libya Observer 

    The UN-backed Government of National Accord (GNA) issued a statement late Friday calling on the U.N. to take “concrete and effective” action to protect civilians and halt fighting near the capital. The GNA urged the UN mission to “present the Security Council with the reality of the bloody events in Libya so that it can… protect the lives and property of civilians”.

    On Friday alone clashes in Tripoli left 15 dead and dozens more wounded, according to official health ministry statements. 

    Since fresh fighting again erupted in Tripoli on August 26 (there’s been internecine battles in the capital for years), whole sections of the city have been shut down, especially the southern suburbs where initial street battles began, which has witnessed  the shelling of residential areas, street-to-street fighting, and tanks in the streets — all reminiscent of the 2011 war which eventually led to a NATO air campaign and forcible removal and assassination of Libya’s longtime leader Muammar Gaddafi.

    According to international reports, some of the feuding militias have come mostly from Libya’s third city Misrata and the town of Tarhouna southeast of the capital; however, the early weeks of fighting were driven mostly by rival factions within the GNA itself. 

    On Friday UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres issued a statement through his spokesman, saying he is “alarmed by the increasing number of violations of the ceasefire agreement.” Guterres called on the warring militias to respect a prior truce and to “refrain from any actions that would increase the suffering of the civilian population”. 

    He said groups responsible for “the violation of international humanitarian law and international human rights law must be held responsible,” according to the statement. 

    Previously the UN Support Mission in Libya voiced concerns over “the use of indiscriminate fire and heavy weapons in densely populated residential areas.”

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    Since the NATO-backed overthrow of Gaddafi in 2011, Libya has remained split between rival parliaments and governments in the east and west, with militias and tribes lining up behind each, resulting in fierce periodic clashes. 

    In March 2011 the UN passed Resolution 1973 which authorized the imposition of a No Fly Zone over Libya, ostensibly to protect civilians from pro-Gaddafi forces. The US, UK, France, and other NATO and Gulf allies bombed the country while claiming to act in the name of democracy and human rights. 

    Though the recently “liberated” Libya has remained conflict-prone after NATO and US forces promised an “Arab Spring”-style “blossoming of democracy” — things have clearly only gone from worse to worse as the capital now again slides toward full blown civil war. Welcome to the “new” Libya.

  • The "Resistance" Supports Trump's 'Evil Agendas' While Attacking Fake Nonsense

    Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

    A new article from the Wall Street Journal reports that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo lied to congress about the measures Saudi Arabia is taking to minimize the civilian casualties in its catastrophic war on Yemen, and that he did so in order to secure two billion dollars for war profiteers.

    This is about as depraved as anything you could possibly imagine. US-made bombs have been conclusively tied to civilian deaths in a war which has caused the single worst humanitarian crisis on earth, a crisis which sees scores of Yemeni children dying every single day and has placed five million children at risk of death by starvation in a nation where families are now eating leaves to survive. CIA veteran Bruce Riedel once said that “if the United States of America and the United Kingdom tonight told King Salman that this war has to end, it would end tomorrow, because the Royal Saudi Airforce cannot operate without American and British support.” Nobody other than war plutocrats benefits from the US assisting Saudi Arabia in its monstrous crimes against humanity, and yet Pompeo chose to override his own expert advisors on the matter for fear of hurting the income of those very war plutocrats.

    If the so-called “Resistance” to Trump was ever actually interested in opposing this administration in any meaningful way, this would be the top trending news story in America for days, like how “bombshell” revelations pertaining to the made-up Russiagate narrative trend for days. Spoiler alert: it isn’t, and it won’t be.

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    It would be so very, very easy for Democratic party leaders and Democrat-aligned media to hurt this administration at the highest level and cause irreparable political damage based on this story. All they’d have to do is give it the same blanket coverage they’ve given the stories about Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos and Paul Manafort which end up leading nowhere remotely near impeachment or proof of collusion with the Russian government. The footage of the starving children is right there, ready to be aired to pluck at the heart strings of rank-and-file Americans day after day until Republicans have lost all hope of victory in the midterms and in 2020; all they’d have to do is use it. But they don’t. And they won’t.

    The US Senate has just passed Trump’s mammoth military spending increase by a landslide 92–8 vote. The eight senators who voted “nay”? Seven Republicans, and Independent Bernie Sanders. Every single Democrat supported the most bloated war budget since the height of the Iraq war. Rather than doing everything they can to weaken the potential damage that can be done by a president they’ve been assuring us is a dangerous hybrid of equal parts Benedict Arnold and Adolf Hitler, they’ve been actively increasing his power as Commander-in-Chief of the most powerful military force the world has ever seen.

    The reason for this is very simple: President Trump’s ostensible political opposition does not oppose President Trump. They’re on the same team, wearing different uniforms. This is the reason they attack him on Russian collusion accusations which the brighter bulbs among them know full well will never be proven and have no basis in reality. They don’t stand up to Trump because, as Julian Assange once said, they are Trump.

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    In John Steinbeck’s The Pearl, there are jewelry buyers set up around a fishing community which are all owned by the same plutocrat, but they all pretend to be in competition with one another. When the story’s protagonist discovers an enormous and valuable pearl and goes to sell it, they all gather round and individually bid far less than it is worth in order to trick him into giving it away for almost nothing. US politics is pretty much the same; two mainstream parties owned by the same political class, engaged in a staged bidding war for votes to give the illusion of competition.

    In reality, the US political system is like the unplugged video game remote that kids give their baby brother so he stops whining that he wants a turn to play. No matter who they vote for they get an Orwellian warmongering government which exists solely to advance the agendas of a plutocratic class which has no loyalties to any nation; the only difference is sometimes that government is pretending to care about women and minorities and sometimes it’s pretending to care about white men. In reality, all the jewelers work for the same plutocrat, and that video game remote won’t impact the outcome of the game no matter how many buttons you push.

    The only way to effect real change is to stop playing along with the rigged system and start waking people up to the lies. As long as Americans believe that the mass media are telling them the truth about their country and their partisan votes are going somewhere useful, the populace whose numbers should give it immense influence is nullified and sedated into a passive ride toward war, ecocide and oppression. If enough of us keep throwing sand in the gears of the lie factory, we can wake the masses up from the oligarchic lullaby they’re being sung. And then maybe we’ll be big enough to have a shot at grabbing one of the real video game controllers.

    *  *  *

    Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My articles are entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, checking out mypodcast, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, buying my new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone, or my previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.

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