Feb 25

Today’s News 25th February 2019

  • Watch Deep-Sea Iranian Sub Carry Out First Cruise Missile Test-Launch

    Yesterday, we published some commentary written by author Steven Metz where he argued that a US-orchestrated military intervention in Iran would be “one of the worst blunders in American history.”

    And while Venezuela has continued to attract most of the media attention and speculation that the US could launch a full-scale proxy civil war in that country as it seeks to oust the Maduro regime (using any tools necessary, including a false flag attack, to justify the incursion), thousands of miles away in the Persian Gulf, tensions between the US and Iran are quietly escalating.

    Ship

    As RT reported Sunday, an Iranian submarine successfully carried out its first cruise missile deep-sea launch during a naval drill in the waters south of Iran. The drill was interpreted as a warning to the US following the return of US aircraft carriers to the region after a long absence, but it also took place within the context of wider Iranian naval drills in the Gulf, Strait of Hormuz and Sea of Oman.

    Iranian Navy commander Rear Admiral Hossein Khanzadi told local media on Sunday that a Ghadir-class sub fired an anti-ship cruise missile from underwater for the first time earlier in the day.

    Clips of the launch were circulated to Iranian television.

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    The launch was part of Iran’s “Veleyat-97” naval exercises, a series of war games that are taking place in the area around the Gulf.

    Here’s more from RT:

    It happened during the ongoing large-scale naval drill, ‘Veleyat-97.’ The war games are taking place in the area from the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz to the Sea of Oman and the northern parts of the Indian Ocean. The navy fired numerous cruise missiles from ships and coastal ground-based systems during the exercise. Tehran used the drill to showcase its newest frigate, ‘Sahand,’ and its Fateh-class submarines that military officials say can also carry cruise missiles.

    The massive naval maneuvers are being staged amid heightened tensions between Iran and the US. In December, the Pentagon deployed its nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS ‘John C. Stennis’ to the Persian Gulf. It became the first American warship of its type to cross the Strait of Hormuz since US President Donald Trump unilaterally pulled the nation out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on the Iranian nuclear program last year.

    As we said on Saturday, expect tensions between the two countries to continue to escalate as the US nears a decision on whether to extend, or end, the waivers on Iranian crude sanctions.

  • How America's Dictatorship Works

    Authored by Eric Zuesse via Off-Guardian.org,

    Trump could not have become America’s President if he had not won the “vote” of his nation’s second-largest political donor in 2016, casinos-owner Sheldon Adelson.

    In publicly recorded donations, as of 25 December 2018, Adelson and his wife donated$82,522,800 to Republican candidates in 2016, and this amount doesn’t include any of the secret money. Of that sum, it’s virtually impossible to find out how much went specifically to Trump’s campaign for President, but, as of 9 May 2017, the Adelsons were publicly recorded as having donated $20.4 million to Trump’s campaign.

    Their impact on the Presidential contest was actually much bigger than that, however, because even the Adelsons’ non-Trump-campaign donations went to the Republican Party, and the rest went to Republican pro-Trump candidates, and the rest went to Republican PACS — and, so, a large percentage (if not all) of that approximately $60 million non-Trump-campaign political expenditure by the Adelsons was boosting Trump’s Presidential vote.

    The second-largest Republican donor in 2016 was the hedge fund manager Paul Singer, at $26,114,653. It was less than a third, 31.6%, as large as the Adelsons’ contribution. Singer is the libertarian who proudly invests in weak entities that have been sucked dry by the aristocracy and who almost always extracts thereby, in the courts, far larger returns-on-investment than do other investors, who have simply settled to take a haircut on their failing high-interest-rate loans to that given weak entity.

    Singer hires the rest of his family to run his asset-stripping firm, which is named after his own middle name, “Elliott Advisors,” and he despises any wealthy person who won’t (like he does) fight tooth-and-nail to extract, from any weak entity, everything that can possibly be stripped from it. His Elliott Advisors is called a “vulture fund,” but that’s an insult to vultures, who instead eat corpses. They don’t actually attack and rip apart vulnerable struggling animals, like Singer’s operation does.

    So, that’s the top two, on the Republican Party side.

    On the Democratic Party side, the largest 2016 donor was the largest of all political donors in 2016, the hedge fund manager Thomas Steyer, $91,069,795. The second-largest was hedge fund manager Donald S. Sussman, $41,841,000. Both of them supported Hillary Clinton against Bernie Sanders, and then against Donald Trump.

    As of 23 January 2019, the record shows that Trump received $46,873,083 in donations larger than $200, and $86,749,927 in donations smaller than $200. Plus, he got $144,764 in PAC contributions. Hillary Clinton received $300,111,643 in over-$200 donations, and $105,552,584 in under-$200 donations. Plus, she got $1,785,190 in PAC donations. She received 6.4 times as much in $200+ donations as Trump did. She received 1.2 times as much in under-$200 donations as he did. Clearly, billionaires strongly preferred Hillary.

    So, it’s understandable why not only America’s Democratic Party billionaires but also many of America’s Republican Party billionaires want President Trump to become replaced ASAP by his V.P., President Pence, who has a solid record of doing only whatever his big donors want him to do. For them, the wet dream would be a 2020 contest between Mike Pence or a clone, versus Hillary Clinton or a clone (such as Joe Biden or Beto O’Rourke). That would be their standard fixed game, America’s heads-I-win-tails-you-lose ‘democracy’.

    On 18 January 2018 was reported that, “Trump pulled in $107 million in individual contributions, nearly doubling President Barack Obama’s 2009 record of $53 million.”

    However, in both of those cases, the figures which were being compared were actually donations to fund the inaugural festivities, not the actual campaigns. But Adelson led there, too: “Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson was [the] most generous [donor], giving $5 million to the inaugural committee.”

    The second-biggest donor to that was Hushang Ansary of Stewart & Stevenson, at $2 million. He had previously been the CEO of the National Iranian Oil Company until the CIA-appointed dictator, the brutal and widely hated Shah, was overthrown in 1979 and replaced by Iran’s now theocratically overseen limited democracy. The US aristocracy, whose CIA had overthrown Iran’s popular and democratically elected Prime Minister in 1953, installed the Shah to replace that elected head-of-state, and they then denationalized and privatized Iran’s oil company, so as to cut America’s aristocrats in on Iran’s oil.

    Basically, America’s aristocracy stole Iran in 1953, and Iranians grabbed their country back in 1979, and US billionaires have been trying to get it back ever since. Ansary’s net worth is estimated at “over $2 billion,” and, “By the 1970s, the CIA considered Ansary to be one of seventeen members of ‘the Shah’s Inner Circle’ and he was one of the Shah’s top two choices to succeed Amir Abbas Hoveyda as Prime Minister.”

    But, that just happened to be the time when the Shah became replaced in an authentic revolution against America’s dictatorship. Iran’s revolution produced the country’s current partially democratic Government. So, this would-be US stooge Ansary fled to America, which had been Iran’s master during 1953-79, and he was welcomed with open arms by Amerca’s and allied aristocracies.

    Other than the Adelsons, the chief proponents of regime-change in Iran since 1979 are the US-billionaires-controlled CIA, and ‘news’-media, and Government, and the Shah’s family, and the Saud family, and Israel’s apartheid regime headed by the Adelsons’ protégé in Israel, Netanyahu. America’s billionaires want Iran back, and the CIA represents them (the Deep State) — not the American public — precisely as it did in 1953, when the CIA seized Iran for America’s billionaires.

    In the current election-cycle, 2018, the Adelsons have thus far invested $123,208,200, all in Republicans, and this tops the entire field. The second-largest political investor, for this cycle, is the former Republican Mayor of NYC, Michael Bloomberg, at $90,282,515, all to Democrats. Is he a Republican, or is he a Democrat? Does it actually make any difference? He is consistently a promoter of Wall Street. The third-largest donor now is Tom Steyer, at $70,743,864, all to Democrats. The fourth-largest is a Wisconsin libertarian-conservative billionaire, Richard Uihlein, at $39,756,996.

    Back on 19 March 2018, Politico reported that “Uihlein and his wife, Elizabeth, are currently the biggest Republican donors of the 2018 midterm elections, having given $21 million to candidates for federal office and super PACs that will support them. And that doesn’t include their funding of state candidates.” On 1 October 2016, International Business Times had listed the top ten donors to each of the two Parties, and the Uihleins at that time were #4 on the Republican side, at $21.5 million.

    Of course, all of the top donors are among the 585 US billionaires, and therefore they can afford to spend lots on the Republican and/or Democratic nominees. Open Secrets reported on 31 March 2017 that “Of the world’s 100 richest billionaires, 36 are US citizens and thus eligible to donate to candidates and other political committees here. OpenSecrets Blog found that 30 of those [36] [or five sixths of the total 36 wealthiest Americans] actually did so, contributing a total of $184.4 million — with 58 percent [of their money] going to Republican efforts.” Democratic Party nominees thus got 42%; and, though it’s not as much as Republican ones get, it’s usually enough so that if a Democrat becomes elected, that person too will be controlled by billionaires.

    For example, in the West Virginia Democratic Presidential primary in 2016, Bernie Sanders won all 55 counties in the state but that state’s delegation to the Democratic National Convention handed 19 of the state’s 37 votes at the Convention to his opponent, Hillary Clinton, who got more money from billionaires than all other US Presidential candidates combined. The millions of Democrats who voted for Hillary Clinton were voting for the billionaires’ favorite, and she and her DNC stole the Party’s nomination from Sanders, who was the nation’s most-preferred Presidential candidate in 2016; and, yet, most of those voters still happily voted, yet again, for her, in the general election — as if she hadn’t practically destroyed the Party by prostituting it to its billionaires even more than Obama had already done.

    Of course, she ran against Trump, and, for once, the billionaires were shocked to find that their enormous investment in a candidate had been for naught. That’s how incompetent she was. But they still kept control over both of the political Parties, and the Sanders choice to head the DNC (the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Party itself) lost out to the Obama-Clinton choice, so that today’s Democratic Party is still the same: winning is less important to them than serving their top donors is.

    This means that America’s winners of federal elections represent almost entirely America’s 585 billionaires, and not the 328,335,647 Americans (as of noon on 23 January 2019). Of course, there is a slight crossover of interests between those two economic classes, since 0.000002 of those 328,335,647, or 0.0002% of them, are billionaires. However, if 0.0002% of federal office-holders represent the public, and the remaining 99.9998% represent the billionaires, then is that actually a bipartisan Government? If instead 99.9998% represented 328,335,062 Americans, and 0.0002% represented the 585 billionaires; then, that, too, wouldn’t be bipartisan, but would it be a democratic (small “d”) government? So, America is not a democracy (regardless of whether it’s bipartisan); it is instead an aristocracy, just like ancient France was, and the British empire, etc. The rest of America’s population (the 328,335,062 other Americans) are mere subjects, though we are officially called ‘citizens’, of this actual aristocracy.

    The same is true in Israel, the land that the Adelsons (the individuals who largely control America) are so especially devoted to. On 8 November 2016, Israel’s pro-Hillary-Clinton and anti-Netanyahu Ha’aretz newspaper headlined “The Collapsing Political Triangle Linking Adelson, Netanyahu and Trump”, and reported that Ha’aretz’s bane and top competitor was the freely distributed daily Israeli newspaper, Israel Hayom, and:

    Israel Hayom was founded by Adelson nine years ago, in order to give Netanyahu – who has been rather harshly treated by the Israeli media throughout his political career – a friendly newspaper. Under Israeli law, the total sum an individual can donate to a politician or party is very limited, and corporate donations are not allowed.

    Israel Hayom has been a convenient loophole, allowing Adelson to invest the sort of money he normally gives American politicians on Netanyahu’s behalf. It has no business model and carries far fewer ads than most daily newspapers. While the privately owned company does not publish financial reports, industry insiders estimate that Adelson must spend around $50 million annually on the large team of journalists and the printing and distribution operations.

    Distributed for free, in hundreds of thousands of copies the length and breadth of the country, Israel Hayom … clings slavishly to the line from Netanyahu’s office – praising him and his family to the heavens while smearing his political rivals, both on the left and the right.

    A billionaire can afford to use his or her ‘news’-media in lieu of political campaign donations. Lots of billionaires do that. They don’t need to make direct political donations. And ‘making money’ by owning a ‘news’-medium can even be irrelevant, for them. Instead, owning an important ’news’-medium can be, for them, just another way, or sometimes their only way, to buy control over the government. It certainly works. It’s very effective in Israel.

    Adelson is #14 on the 2018 Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans, all having net worths of $2.1 billion or more, his being $38.4 billion, just one-third as large as that of Jeff Bezos. Bezos is the owner of around 15% of Amazon Corporation, whose profits are derived almost entirely from the Amazon Web Services that are supplied to the US Pentagon, NSA, and CIA. So, he’s basically a ‘defense’ contractor.

    Bezos’s directly owned Washington Post is one of America’s leading neoconservative and neoliberal, or pro-invasion and pro-Democratic Party, media; and, so, his personal ownership of that newspaper is much like his owning a one-person national political PAC to promote whatever national policies will increase his fortune. The more that goes to the military and the less that goes to everything else, the wealthier he will become. His newspaper pumps the ‘national security threats’ to America.

    Adelson controls Israel’s Government. Whereas he might be a major force in America’s Government, that’s actually much more controlled by the world’s wealthiest person, the only trillionaire, the King of Saudi Arabia. He has enough wealth so that he can buy almost anybody he wants — and he does, through his numerous agents. But, of course, both Israel’s Government and Saudi Arabia’s Government hate Iran’s Government at least as much as America’s Government does.

    In fact, if Russia’s Government weren’t likely to defend Iran’s Government from an invasion, then probably Iran would already have been invaded. Supporters of America’s Government are supporters of a world government by America’s billionaires, because that’s what the US Government, in all of its international functions (military, diplomatic, etc.) actually represents: it’s America’s global dictatorship.

    They throw crumbs to America’s poor so as to make it a ‘two-party’ and not merely a ‘one-party’ government and so that one of the Parties can call itself ‘the Democratic Party’, but America’s is actually a one-party government, and it represents only the very wealthiest, in both Parties. The aristocracy’s two separate party-organizations compete against each other. But their real audience is the aristocracy’s dollars, not the public’s voters. This “two-Party” dictatorship (by the aristocracy) is a different governing model than in China and some other countries.

    The great investigative journalist Wayne Madsen headlined on January 24th “Trump Recognition of Rival Venezuelan Government Will Set Off a Diplomatic Avalanche” and he reported the possibility of a war developing between the US and Russia over America’s aggression against Venezuela. US media even have pretended that the US Government isn’t the one that customarily perpetrates coups in Latin America, and pretended that Russia’s and Cuba’s Governments are simply blocking ‘democracy’ from blossoming in Venezuela.

    On January 24th, Middle East Eye reported that Morgan Stanley’s CEO James Gorman had just told the World Economic Forum, in Davos, that the torture-murder of Saudi Crown Prince Salman’s critic and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi was “unacceptable,” “But what do you do? What part do you play in the process of economic and social change?” and the report continued: “Gorman said he did not judge any country’s attempts to root out corruption,” and Gorman and a French tycoon joined in throwing their “weight behind Riyadh’s economic and social direction, by saying, ‘it is quite difficult and brave what the kingdom is doing’,” by its ‘reforms’. It was all being done to ‘root out corruption, and to spread democracy’. Sure.

    There’s “a sucker born every minute,” except now it’s every second. That seems to be the main way to win votes.

    On January 26th, Trump appointed the fascist Elliott Abrams to lead this ‘democratization of Venezuela’, by overthrowing and replacing the elected President by the second-in-line-of succession (comparable in Venezuela to removing Trump and skipping over the Vice President and appointing Nancy Pelosi as America’s President, and also violating the Venezuelan Constitution’s requirement that the Supreme Judicial Trbunal must first approve before there can be ANY change of the President without an election by the voters).

    It’s clearly another US coup that is being attempted here. Trump, by international dictat, says that this Venezuelan traitor whom the US claims to be installing is now officially recognized by the US Government to be the President of Venezuela. Bloomberg News reported that Abrams would join Trump’s neocon Secretary of State on January 26th at the UN to lobby there for the UN to authorize Trump’s intended Venezuelan coup. The EU seemed strongly inclined to follow America’s lead. On the decisive U.N. body, the Permanent Security Council, of China, France, Russia, UK, and US, the US position was backed by three: US, France, and UK. Russia and China were opposed.

    In the EU, only France, Germany, Spain, and UK, came out immediately backing the US position. On January 25th, Russia’s Tass news agency was the first to report on the delicate strategic situation inside Venezuela. It sounded like the buildup to Obama’s successful coup in Ukraine in February 2014, but in Venezuela and under Trump. In fact, at least two commentaors other than I have noted the apparent similarities: Whitney Webb at “Washington Follows Ukraine, Syria Roadmap in Push for Venezuela Regime Change” and RT at “‘Venezuela gets its Maidan’: Ukrainian minister makes connection between regime change ops”.

    Abrams’s career has been devoted to “regime-change,” and is as unapologetic about it as is John Bolton. Also like Bolton, he’s an impassioned supporter of Jewish apartheid. He wrote in his 1997 book Faith or Fear, that “Outside the land of Israel, there can be no doubt that Jews, faithful to the covenant between God and Abraham, are to stand apart from the nation in which they live. It is the very nature of being Jewish to be apart — except in Israel — from the rest of the population.”

    Israel is, in this and the view of many billionaires, the whole world’s ghetto, and ‘real’ Jews don’t belong anywhere else than there. And, according to that, nobody else does belong there, except people who accept being ruled by Jewish Law – the Torah. So, on 25 June 2001, George W. Bush, as the main representative of America’s billionaires, made Abrams the Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Democracy, Human Rights, and International Operations at the National Security Council.

    Of course, Abrams was gung-ho for Americans to conquer Iraq, because Iraqis didn’t like Israel. And the current US President hires that same agent of Israel, Abrams, now to sell internationally America’s current coup to grab Venezuela for America’s billionaires. Abrams, for years, had been courting Trump’s favor by having declined to include himself among the many Republican neoconservatives, both Jewish and non-Jewish, who endorsed Hillary Clinton for President. He thereby has now won his new job, on the real-world sequel to The Apprentice, which is known as President Trump’s Administration. Another such winner, of course, is John Bolton, who likewise had declined to endorse Hillary.

    Perhaps the US regime thinks that testing the resolve of Russia’s Government, regarding Venezuela, would be less dangerous than testing it over the issue of Iran. But Big Brother says that this imposition of America’s corruption is instead merely a part of rooting out corruption and spreading democracy and human rights, throughout the world.

    The US has managed to get Venezuela in play, to control again. Some American billionaires think it’s a big prize, which must be retaken. The largest oil-and-gas producers — and with the highest reserves of oil-and-gas in the ground — right now, happen to be Saudi Arabia, Iran, Qatar, Russia, Venezuela, and US. So, for example, Venezuela is a much bigger prize than Brazil.

    All of those countries have an interest in denying the existence of human-produced global warming, and in selling as much of their product as quickly as possible before the world turns away from fossil fuels altogether. High-tech doesn’t drive today’s big-power competition nearly so much as does the fossil-fuels competition — to sell as much of it as they can, as fast as they can. The result of this competition could turn out to be a nuclear winter that produces a lifeless planet and thus prevents the planet from becoming lifeless more slowly from global burnout — the alternative outcome, which would be produced by the burnt fossil fuels themselves. Either way, the future looks bleak, no matter what high-tech produces (unless high-tech produces quickly a total replacement of fossil fuels, and, in the process, bankrupts many of the billionaires who are so active in the current desperate and psychopathic global competition).

    This is what happens when wealth worldwide is so unequally distributed that the “World’s Richest 0.7% Own 13.67 Times as Much as World’s Poorest 68.7%”. According to economic theory (which has always been written by agents for the aristocracy), the distribution of wealth is irrelevant. This belief was formalized by a key founder of today’s mathematized economic theory, Vilfredo Pareto, who, for example, in his main work, the 1912 Trattato di Sociologia Generale, wrote (# 2135), that, though “the lover of equality will assign a high coefficient to the utility of the lower classes and get a point of equilibrium very close to the equalitarian condition, there is no criterion save sentiment for choosing between the one [such equality of wealth] and the other [a single person — whom he called “superman” — owning everything].”

    The article on Pareto in the CIA’s Wikipedia doesn’t even so much as mention this central feature of Pareto’s thinking, the feature that’s foundational in all of the theory of “welfare” in economics. Pareto was also the main theoretician of fascism, and the teacher of Mussolini. This belief is at the foundation of capitalism as we know it, and as it has been in economic theory ever since, actually, the 1760s. Pareto didn’t invent it; he merely mathematized it.

    So, we’ve long been in 1984, or at least building toward it. But US-allied billionaires wrote this particular version of it; George Orwell didn’t. And it’s not a novel. It’s the real thing. And it is now becoming increasingly desperate.

    If, in recognizing this, you feel like a hog on a factory-farm, then you’ve got the general idea of this reality. It’s the problem that the public faces. But the publics in the US and its allied regimes are far less miserable than the publics in the countries that the US and its allied regimes are trying to take over — the targeted countries (such as Syria). To describe any realistic solution to this systematic global exploitation would require an entire book, at the very least — no mere article, such as here. The aristocracy anywhere wouldn’t publish such a book. Nobody would likely derive any significant income from writing it. That’s part of the reality, which such a book would be describing.

    However, a key part of this reality is that for the billionaires — the people who control international corporations or corporations that even are aspiring to grow beyond their national market — their nation’s international policies are even more important to them than its domestic affairs (such as the toxic water in Flint, Michigan; or single-payer health insurance — matters that are relatively unimportant to billionaires), and, therefore, the most-censored and least-honestly reported realities on the part of the aristocracy’s ‘news’-media are the international ones. And, so, this is the field where there is the most lying, such as about “Saddam’s WMD,” and about all foreign countries.

    However, when a person is in an aristocracy’s military, deception of that person is even more essential, especially in the lower ranks, the troops, because killing and dying for one’s aristocracy is far less attractive than killing or dying in order honestly to serve and protect an authentic democracy. Propagandizing for the myth that the nation is a democracy is therefore extremely important in any aristocracy.

    Perhaps this is the reason why, in the United States, the military is consistently the institution that leads above all others in the public’s respect. It’s especially necessary to do that, in the nation that President Barack Obama repeatedly said is “the one indispensable nation”. This, of course, means that every other nation is “dispensable.” Any imperial nation, at least since ancient Rome, claimed the same thing, and invaded more nations than any other in the world when it was the leading imperial nation, because this is what it means to be an empire, or even to aspire to being one: imposing that given nation’s will upon other nations — colonies, vassal states, or whatever they are called.

    When soldiers know that they are the invaders, not the actual defenders, their motivation to kill and die is enormously reduced. This is the main reason why the ‘news’-media in an imperial nation need to lie constantly to their public. If a news-reporting organization doesn’t do that, no aristocrat will even buy it. And virtually none will advertise in it or otherwise donate to it. It will be doomed to remain very small and unprofitable in every way (because the “World’s Richest 0.7% Own 13.67 Times as Much as World’s Poorest 68.7%”). Billionaires donate to ‘news’-organizations that might report accurately about domestic US problems, but not to ones that report accurately about international affairs, especially about important international affairs. Even liberal ‘news’-media are neoconservative, or favorable toward American invasions and coups. In order to be a significant player in the ‘news’-business in the United States, one has to be.

    So: this is how America’s dictatorship works. This is not America’s exceptionalism: it is America’s ordinariness. America’s Founders had wanted to produce something not just exceptional but unique in its time: a democratic republic. But what now exists here is instead a dictatorial global empire, and it constitutes the biggest threat to the very existence of the United Nations ever since that body’s founding in 1945. If that body accepts as constituting the leader of Venezuela the person that America’s President declares to be Venezuela’s leader, then the U.N. is effectively dead.

    This would be an immense breakthrough for all of the US regime’s billionaires, both domestically and throughout its allied countries (such as in France, Germany, Spain, and UK). It would be historic, if they win. It would be extremely grim, and then the U.N. would immediately need to be replaced. The US and its allies would refuse to join the replacement organization. That organization would then authorize economic sanctions against the US and its allies. These will be reciprocated. The world would break clearly into two trading-blocs. In a sense, the UN’s capitulation to the US on this matter would create another world war, WW III. It would be even worse than when Neville Chamberlain accepted Hitler’s offer regarding the Sudetenland. We’d be back to the start of WW II, with no lessons learned since then. And with nuclear weapons.

  • India-Pakistan War: Pakistan Army Prepares For Conflict, Tells Hospitals To Be Ready

    The Pakistan military is preparing to defend against future attacks by India, and would respond with “full force,” the army’s spokesman announced Friday, amid worries of retaliation from India after the Pulwama terror incident, reported Reuters. 

    “We have no intention to initiate war, but we will respond with full force to full spectrum threat, that would surprise you,” Major General Asif Ghafoor said.

    “Don’t mess with Pakistan.”

    “We do not wish to go to war. If it is imposed on us, we have the right to respond,” Major General Ghafoor told journalists during a news conference in the garrison city of Rawalpindi, one week after a Pakistani-based terror organization claimed responsibility for the Pulwama attack that killed 40 Indian policemen in the Kashmir region. 

    The Times of India has obtained new government documents, one by the Pakistani military and another from local authorities in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), which suggests the Pakistani military is preparing for an upcoming conflict on the Line of Control (LOC), a military control line between the Indian and Pakistani controlled parts of the former state of Jammu and Kashmir.

    Pakistan Army based in Headquarters Quetta Logistics Area in Quetta Cantonment sent a letter to Jilani Hospital on February 20 to prepare for medical support in the event of war. 

    “In case of emergency war on the eastern front, Quetta logistics area is expected to receive injured soldiers from civil and military hospitals of Sindh and Punjab. After initial medical treatment, these soldiers are planned to be shifted from military and civil public sector to the civil hospital in Balochistan till the period of availability of beds in CMHs (civil-military hospitals),” the letter to Jilani hospital’s Abdul Malik by one Asia Naz, force commander, HQLA, said.

    “The Logistics Area has a comprehensive medical support plan encompassing all military and civil hospitals in the province. In case of an eventuality besides bed expansion of the military hospital, civil hospitals have already been assigned the responsibility to reserve and earmark 25% of their bedding capacity for the injured soldier.”

    On Thursday, PoK authorities urged local officials in Neelum, Jehlum, Rawalkot, Haweli, Kotli and Bhimbher regions along the LoC to publish warnings for residents of an imminent attack by the Indian Army.

    The PoK also advised residents to take “safe routes whenever commuting” besides avoiding congregation. “Those residing near the LoC and (those who) do not have bunkers should get one made immediately,” it said.

    Yesterday, Pakistan PM Imran Khan authorized the military to “respond decisively and comprehensively to any aggression or misadventure” by India, reported PTI.

    Bilateral ties between both countries collapsed after the Pulwama attack. Pakistan is preparing for an imminent attack by India, as one of the most dangerous rivalries on the plant is heating up in the first half of 2019. 

  • How To Successfully Achieve Denuclearization For North Korea

    Authored by William Craddick via DisobedientMedia.com,

    The fact that American President Donald Trump was able to sit down face to face with North Korea’s Chairman Kim Jong Un in Singapore was met with amazement by many government and private parties, who have for decades been hoping to break the stagnation that has characterized attempts to reach a breakthrough in relations between United States (US) and the Koreas. The efforts of President Trump, Chairman Kim, and South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in have been truly commendable and will genuinely merit the Nobel Peace Prize should their intended plans reach fruition.

    To seal the deal and reach a conclusive agreement when Trump and Kim meet in Hanoi for a second summit on February 27th and 28th, all parties must be prepared to approach the negotiations from the perspective of the North Koreans. The United States must make an exceptional offer that will help Chairman Kim transform the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) in a process that will become a talking point for dispute resolution specialists for decades to come.

    The North Korean Perspective On Nuclear Weapons

    North Korea’s incentive to develop nuclear capabilities was borne from a latent fear that without them they would be invaded by the United States. In practice, North Korea’s nuclear arsenal has placed it in the middle of a very tricky situation between the United States and China, both of whom are also armed with nuclear weapons.

    The Korean War serves as a stark reminder that due to understandings in place between various nations in the region, any conflict between North Korea and the United States would lead to the direct military involvement of China. Studies of American nuclear policy during the Korean War show that a current confrontation involving North Korea would almost certainly lead to not only the destruction of the entire Peninsula but also Japan due to factors such as diplomatic agreements and the position of military assets.

    The prioritization of the pursuit of nuclear weapons has involved considerable sacrifices by North Korea. This has created a sunk-cost dilemma that actually places the DPRK in a worse position geo-strategically. An outbreak of war will inevitably cause them to deploy nuclear arms and trigger in-kind responses from the US and China. It seems that Chairman Kim is aware of this predicament based on comments he was purported to have made to US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo during a diplomatic visit in April 2018.

    The United States’ Offer

    The historic diplomatic approach of China, Russia, South Korea, Japan, and the United States has been to surround the DPRK with troops in an effort to hedge them in. The new approach must be to inundate the DPRK with opportunities for economic growth to the point that continued possession of nuclear weapons is no longer an attractive option. These efforts could involve not only the Six Party nations but others throughout Asia and the wider region as well.

    Basic elements of the American offer must include:

    • North Korea to become a signatory to a denuclearization agreement that includes any necessary outside assistance with the process.

    • An Armistice between North and South Korea to formally end the Korean War.

    • Guarantees from the United States that they will not attack or invade North Korea after denuclearization along with tangible promises to assist with economic development.

    The time to reach an agreement is now. A suitable offer from the US should have the intended effect of causing the North Koreans to feel that an agreement will help maximize their potential as a nation in a way that the possession of nuclear weapons never can.

    Follow Up From The International Community

    Although the process so far has been due largely to the commendable collaboration of Chairman Kim, President Trump and President Moon, the long term integration of North Korea after years of hermit-like isolation will require the full efforts of the international community. This will include not only practical advice from relevant nations but also participation from all over the region to show North Korea that they have a role to play should they choose to follow the path of peace.

    Leaders with experience in transforming a state from a decrepit, communist style system to an economically stable power can explain to Chairman Kim how the process will work and give invaluable counsel that will inform efforts in North Korea. There is no one better suited for this role than Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, who has taken Russia from the chaos of the 1990’s to its current position today.

    The DPRK will also need assistance with learning to conduct diplomacy both regionally and internationally with players that previously were hostile to North Korea. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would be one such figure who has extensive experience working in a nation that has prospered beyond expectations and successfully cultivated relationships both internationally and with its neighbors. Lastly, Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzō Abe could provide valuable insight into the ways in which his country has become an international player despite the lack of either overwhelming military clout or nuclear weapons.

    States from all over Asia and the South Pacific should be prepared to make North Korea feel welcomed and supported on the world stage in the aftermath of an agreement to denuclearize. The ideal approach to dealing with the DPRK is to treat them as one individual would another – with encouragement for the strides they are taking to secure a bright future. Emphasize the positive in contrast to the negative of a past that will now be left behind.

    Conclusion: Strike While The Iron Is Hot

    Within the period of just a few years, North Korea has gone from being a nation whose moves others watched with trepidation to a party that other countries would be ready to greet with open arms and a handshake. The astounding success of the peace process has already shocked observers from all over the world. The rapport between Trump and Kim has truly caused North Korea prove pundits and experts of every color wrong. There has never been a better moment to make such a significant change.

    It is time for North Korea to shed the past and move into a new era. Kim Jong Un is young and has an unprecedented opportunity to bring his country, his people and his family into a golden age and secure a legacy built on accomplishments that outshine all of his predecessors. With empathy that allows all parties to understand each other’s perspectives, a generous and fair offer from the United States at the negotiation table and proper assistance from the international community this vision for North Korea does not need to remain a conceptual dream.

  • Army Signs $174 Million Deal For Smart Artillery Shells

    Alliant Techsystems Operations LLC., known as ATK, was awarded a $174 million contract to turn existing artillery shells into smart weapons.

    A statement from the US Department of Defense (DoD) indicates the contract will be fulfilled at ATK’s manufacturing facilities in Plymouth, Minnesota, with an estimated completion date of November 2022.

    The M1156 Precision Guidance Kit (PGK), formerly XM1156, is a US Army-designed precision guidance system that turns conventional unguided M549A1 155 mm artillery shells into precision-guided munition.

    The PGK guidance kit screws onto the back of a 155 mm artillery shell, can be fired from M109A6 Paladin and M777A2 Howitzer artillery systems. Miniature aerodynamic fins allow the GPS to steer the shell to within 160 feet of the target, compared to a conventional unguided shell that has a circular error probability of 876 feet. A protective function in the PGK will decide if it will strike the target five seconds after launch, if the shell thinks its circular error probability is wider than 490 feet, it will not explode on impact.

    The PGK turns the Army’s current stockpile of conventional 155 mm artillery shells into precision projectiles while simultaneously decreasing the potential for collateral damage to friendly troops and non-combatants on the modern battlefield.

    In June 2015, the PGK passed acceptance testing and was approved for low-rate production. The test showed 41 out of 42 PGK shells fired from an M109A6 Paladin performed reliably, a 97% success rate.

    By mid-2016, 4,779 PGK guidance kits had been produced under low-rate production, with full-rate production expected to commence this year.

    With the Army’s acquisition of this technology, the smart shells will be proven, cost-effective, and a low-risk solution in America’s future conflicts.

  • Pepe Escobar: Putin Rattles Sabre As Nuclear Pact Collapses

    Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Asia Times,

    Russian President warns West that deploying missile launchers in Europe could ignite ‘tit for tat’ response…

    President Putin’s state of the nation address to the Federal Assembly in Moscow this week was an extraordinary affair. While heavily focused on domestic social and economic development, Putin noted, predictably, the US decision to pull out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty and clearly outlined the red lines in regard to possible consequences of the move.

    It would be naïve to believe that there would not be a serious counterpunch to the possibility of the US deploying launchers “suitable for using Tomahawk missiles” in Poland and Romania, only a 12-minute flight away from Russian territory.

    Putin cut to the chase:

    “This is a very serious threat to us. In this case, we will be forced – I want to emphasize this – forced to take tit-for-tat steps.”

    Later that night, many hours after his address, Putin detailed what was construed in the US, once again, as a threat.

    “Is there some hard ideological confrontation now similar to what was [going on] during the Cold War? There is none. We surely have mutual complaints, conflicting approaches to some issues, but that is no reason to escalate things to a stand-off on the level of the Caribbean crisis of the early 1960s”.

    This was a direct reference to the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 when President Kennedy confronted USSR’s Nikita Khrushchev over missiles deployed off the US mainland.

    The Russian Defense Ministry, meanwhile, has discreetly assured that conference calls with the Pentagon are proceeding as scheduled, every week, and that this bilateral dialogue is “working”.

    In parallel, tests of state-of-the-art Russian weaponry such as the Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile and the hypersonic Khinzal also proceed, alongside mass production of the hypersonic Avangard. The first regiment of the Russian Strategic Missile Forces will get the Avangard before the end of this year.

    And then there’s the Tsircon, a hypersonic missile capable of reaching US command centers in a mere five minutes – leaving the whole range of NATO military assets exposed.

    What Putin meant in his address about Russia targeting “centers for decision-making” was fundamentally related to NATO, not the American mainland.

    And once again, it’s crucial to underline that none of these disturbing developments mean that Russia would engage in a pre-emptive strike against the deployment of US missiles in Eastern Europe. Putin was adamant that there’s no need for it. Moreover, Russian nuclear doctrine forbids any sort of pre-emptive strikes, not to mention a nuclear first strike.

    House of the Rising (Nuclear) Sun

    To allow this new paradigm to sink in, I went on a long walk across Zamoskvorechye – “behind the Moskva river” – stopping on the way back in front of the Biblioteka Lenina to pay my respects to the Grandmaster Dostoevsky. And then it hit me; this was entirely connected to what had happened the day before.

    The day before Putin’s state of the union address I went to visit Alexander Dugin at his office in the deliciously Soviet, art nouveau building of the former Central Post Office. Dugin, a political analyst and strategist with a refined philosophical mind, is vilified in Washington as Putin’s ideologue. He has also been targeted by US sanctions.

    I was greeted in the lobby by his multi-talented daughter Daria – active in everything from philosophy and music to geopolitics. Dugin was being interviewed by RAI correspondent Sergio Paini. After the wrap-up, the three of us immediately engaged in a discussion on populism, Salvini, the Italian politician, and the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests in France), in Italian. (Dugin is fluent in many languages).

    Then we picked up on what we had left behind, when I was in Moscow last December and talked extensively with Daria. Dugin was in Shanghai teaching an international relations course at Fudan University (see here and here), and gave lectures at Tsinghua and Peking University. He returned quite impressed by Chinese academia’s interest in populism, plus German philosopher Martin Heidegger and the Gilets Jaunes, as well as the evolving paths of Russia and China’s strategic partnership.

    Eurasia debate

    So inevitably we delved into Eurasianism – and strategies towards Eurasian integration. Dugin sees China applying a sort of remixed Spykman outlook to the “Road” component of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which is maritime, along the rimland. He privileges the “Belt” component, which is overland, with one of the main corridors going through Russia via the upgraded Trans-Siberian railway. I tend to view it as a mix of Halford Mackinder, the famed English academic, and the influential American political scientist Nicholas Spykman; China advancing on the West, simultaneously in the heartland and the rimland.

    Dugin’s office has the atmosphere of a revolving think tank. I was trying to inform him on how Brazil – under the ‘leadership’ of Steve Bannon, who walks and talks like he runs the Bolsonaro presidential clan – has been dragged to the frontline in the US in contrast to the Eurasian integration chessboard. Suddenly, none other than Alastair Crooke drops in. Serendipity or synchronicity? 

    Alastair, with his consummate diplomatic flair, is, of course, one of the world’s foremost experts in the Middle East and Europe – and much else. He’s in Moscow as a guest for one of the Valdai Club’s famed discussions, on the Middle East, along with key figures from Syria and Iran.

    Soon the three of us are engaged in an absorbing conversation on the soul of Islam, the purity of Sufism, the Muslim Brotherhood (those fabled friends of the Clinton machine), what President Erdogan and the Qataris are really up to, and the sterility – intellectual and spiritual – of the Wahhabi House of Saud and the Emirates.

    We tend to agree that discussions like this, going on in Moscow – and in Tehran, Istanbul, Shanghai – would greatly profit from the presence of a progressive Steve Bannon, capable of organizing and promoting a running, non-ideological debate on multipolarity.

    A day before Putin’s stark reminder against any slip towards nuclear Armageddon, we were also discussing the post-INF world, but with emphasis on post-Mackinder (and post-Brzezinski) Eurasian integration. And that includes Russian and Chinese intellectual elites acutely aware that they can’t afford to be isolated by American hyperpower.

    I walked Alastair to his hotel, past a gloriously illuminated Bolshoi. I kept going, and as Lubyanka disappeared from view, a sidewalk busker was playing ‘House of the Rising Sun’, the Animals version. In Russian.

    Hopefully, it will not feature a rising nuclear sun.

  • Albert Edwards: "I Was Quite Shocked By My Last Visit To San Francisco"

    When it comes to foreigners visiting the US, while the general reaction is overall favorable, it appears that one city tends to draw a reaction of sheer shock if not disgust: San Francisco.

    Recall two weeks ago, when discussing his latest “luxury ski trip”, the UK’s Bill Blain said that he hopes his American hosts will forgive him for raising this, “but the squalor we saw in The City was frightful. San Francisco has always been one of favourite US cities, but the degree of homelessness, mental illness and drug abuse we saw on this trip was truly shocking. Walking round SF on a Sunday Morning and we saw sights we couldn’t believe. This must be one of the richest cities in the world – home to 4 of the 10 richest people on the planet according to Wiki. I asked friends about it, and they shrugged it off.. “The City has always attracted the homeless because of the mild weather,”.. “It’s a drug thing”.. “its too difficult”… “you get used to it..” Well, I didn’t.”

    Now, it is the turn of another prominent financial strategist to lament the increasingly sordid reality of everyday life in the liberal capital of the West.

    In his latest note to client, “Stoned on free money”, SocGen’s Albert Edwards picks up where Blain left off, and writes the he too “was really quite shocked by my visit last year to San Francisco by the sheer quantities of men (yes it is virtually 100% men) who were clearly off their heads on drugs (and drink) and putting both themselves and other road users at risk.” Edwards continues his lurid recollection of his trip to this liberal utopia overrun by homeless people and junkies:

    I have been a regular visitor to San Francisco for 30 years and maybe it is because I only visit once every couple of years that I notice the change.

    Most surprising was the pungent smell of cannabis skunk that pervaded the streets almost everywhere – something that isn’t the case in somewhere like Amsterdam where legal consumption of marijuana is mainly confined to designated cafes. But the smell doesn’t seem to bother everyone. In a startling admission, the UK’s most senior police officer and head of London’s Metropolitan Police, Cressida Dick, admitted she could not smell the pungent aroma of skunk – link. Like San Francisco, the area of London I live in, Bethnal Green, also has a heavy smell of skunk as drugs are sold and consumed openly on the streets, despite residents’ best efforts to shame the authorities into action.

    Having bashed San Francisco and its generous drug culture, Edwards then turns to a totally different topic: surging pedestrian fatalities and the “epidemic” of marijuana use that is allegedly behind them: “I was shocked to see the latest data showing US pedestrian fatalities have soared some 25% since 2012! Very few stats surprise me, but this is one of them (see chart below, H/T to Nick Glydon at Redburn)…

    “But why has this happened?” Edwards ponders, and then provides the following answer:

    The annual Spotlight on Pedestrian Traffic Fatalities, explores potential reasons for the surge in fatalities, considering factors including the dramatic growth in smartphone use and state legalization of recreational marijuana. The report notes, ““The seven states (Alaska, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Nevada, Oregon, Washington) and DC that legalized recreational use of marijuana between since 2012 reported a collective 16.4% yoy rise in pedestrian fatalities, whereas all other states reported a collective 5.8% yoy decrease in pedestrian fatalities.”” It appears the US is gripped by an epidemic of stoned pedestrians stepping into traffic. The same might be said for investors befuddled by QE, for the risk is they are about to step off the sidewalk in front of a rapidly deteriorating economic cycle.

    The surprised Edwards then goes on to add that he also found the report “quite shocking” most especially “because of the very clear evidence that the surge in fatalities is primarily due to the legalisation of marijuana in some states.”

    Because most pedestrian fatalities occur in urban areas, the study also examined changes in the number of pedestrian fatalities for the 10 most populous U.S. cities. In the largest city, New York, deaths were unchanged yoy. But in the US’s second biggest city, Los Angeles, deaths rose 50%, while they fell 10% in the third largest city, Chicago. There is a clear causal relationship between surging fatalities of pedestrians and legalising marijuana.

    Of course, there is a word for the pedestrians’ state of mind (right before they are mowed down by an income vehicle): comfortably numb. And we were hardly surprised to learn that the skeptical SocGen strategist is hardly a fan of “altered” mind states. As he admits “as a former part-time magistrate and member of a mental health appeals panel (for compulsory detained patients), I have strong views on the legalisation of drugs – but those views are not for these pages. Clients though will know I will opine on most topics in face-to-face meetings. I do though find this article an interesting contribution from the perspective of a former UK undercover drugs cop, who became disillusioned with the ‘war on drugs.“

    So what is the common theme behind Edwards’ highlighting of exploding drug use in San Francisco and high pedestrians getting killed in increasing numbers?  According to the SocGen strategist, the point is that “investors, like marijuana users, are high once again on the promise of renewed monetary injections. But with their senses now numb to the reality around them, investors could miss the fact that the economic cycle is deteriorating sufficiently rapidly that it is about to crush their equity portfolios.”

    Edwards then concludes by pointing out the current “goldilocks” state of the economy where on one hand the Fed recently capitulated on its tightening bias, while at the same time the US economy appears to be slowing – with inflation once again rolling over – but not slowing enough to prompt fears of an imminent recession. Or maybe not: remember that as we noted a few weeks ago, “the last three recessions all took place with 3 months of the first rate cut after a hiking cycle.” The SocGen strategist echoes this observation and adds that “the end of the Fed tightening cycle is more often than not, a prelude to recession.”

    Meanwhile, always one to highlight the risks of a growing economic slowdown, Edwards is hardly on the “no recession in 2019” bandwagon, noting that “where investors could easily be caught out is in dismissing recent weak US economic data as due to one-off factors such as the very cold weather or the government shutdown.” To substantiate his point that a recession may be inevitable, he adds that “what seems to better predict recessions is when the separate Household Survey measure of employment begins to stall. In contrast to the strong 304,000 rise in the Establishment Survey of payroll employment, the Household Survey showed both a weak employment in January and an uptick in the unemployment rate. It is this latter event in particular, that traditionally precedes recessions (see chart below).”

    Edwards also is quick to note that it is not payrolls that are part of the official US Leading Indicator, but Initial Unemployment
    Claims:

    “these too have been creeping up in recent weeks and are a clear recession warning. Dismissing these trends as due to the US government shutdown reminds me of the one-off factors that were supposed to account for the slowdown in the German economic data over the autumn, only for the economy to subsequently splutter to a total halt in Q4. The excellent David Rosenberg of Gluskin Sheff notes that in addition to rising initial unemployment claims, December’s shocking 1.2% mom decline in retail sales is another recessionary straw in the wind (see chart below).

    David believes that weak retail sales are not an aberration as they tie in with the recent drop in retail hours worked from the employment report. He calculates that large declines in retail sales of this magnitude are associated with recessions 80% of the time.

    Tying it all together – San Francisco hobos, stoned people getting peeled off the sidewalks, and the US economy – Albert has some advice for his readers: “Free money may have numbed our senses, but at this very late stage of the economic cycle, think very hard before stepping off the sidewalk.”

    He may be right eventually, but for now the market is once again happy to reward “traders” such as the one pictured below.

  • Trump Delays March 1 China Tariff Deadline

    After a long week of optimistic, market-pumping trade-deal headlines, updates over the weekend didn’t offer any of the specifics that analysts are so desperate to hear (so long as they affirm the narrative that talks are going – as President Trump put it – “very, very well”). To wit, little detail has been provided regarding last week’s big “breakthrough” (Beijing ceding to US demands to “stabilize” the yuan), and it’s still unclear how such an arrangement would be enforced.

    And the information that has dribbled out – including a report about a growing rift between Trump and Trade Czar Robert Lighthizer – suggests that maybe the market’s euphoric reaction to Trump’s not-at-all-consistent performance on Friday was somewhat premature.

    However, before the market even had a chance to reassess the implications of Friday’s exasperating public spat between Trump and Lighthizer with this newfound context, Trump announced Sunday night (just 20 minutes before futures opened) that he would be delaying the March 1 tariff deadline following “substantial progress” in the weekend talks, and would plan a summit with president Xi at Mar-a-Lago to conclude an agreement – news that should help pump the S&P 500 back over 2,800 as algos first buy the rumor, and then – just to be safe- buy the news too.

    While the market rejoiced at the delay, one twitter wit offered this troubling analogy:

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

    While many were initially puzzled by the brief argument over relying on MoUs in the negotiations (it was later revealed by WSJ that Trump was simply parroting an argument by Fox News host Lou Dobbs that an MoU “isn’t worth the paper it’s written on”), Bloomberg published an anonymously sourced report on Sunday revealing that the rift between Trump and Lighthizer has been growing for some time.

    Trump

    And that Lighthizer’s display of impertinence on Friday might have been the last straw for Trump.

    President Donald Trump and his top trade negotiator, Robert Lighthizer, have grown increasingly frustrated with each other as a China trade deal stays elusive with a key deadline less than a week away, said people inside and close to the administration.

    After Friday’s exchange, said two people familiar with the events, the president complained that Lighthizer had embarrassed him by publicly correcting him in front of the Chinese delegation and the press. The president also expressed frustration that Lighthizer hadn’t yet stitched up a deal that Trump views as increasingly important.

    Talks between Lighthizer and other senior U.S. officials and Xi’s special envoy, Liu He, continued on Saturday and were due to resume on Sunday. In a post on Twitter, the president said Sunday that the weekend talks have been “very productive.”

    Friday’s public disagreement wasn’t the first indication that Trump and Lighthizer might not be on the same page. Earlier this month, reports surfaced suggesting that Lighthizer – who had insisted that the March 1 tariff deadline was a “hard deadline” – had opposed extending the trade deadline (though that’s out the window now).

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

    The reason Lighthizer and other China hawks in the administration are putting so much pressure on Trump to stick to his guns when it comes to structural reforms and IP theft is that they’re afraid he might squander the leverage he has built up with his tariffs, which have had an asymmetric impact on China’s economy.

    The way they see it, Trump has China on the ropes. Now is not the time to start pulling punches. But they fear that Trump’s fear of upsetting the market would be massive tactical mistake in the long term.

    Other China hawks in the administration and in Congress, however, have been more open about their frustration.

    They worry that, having built up considerable leverage through his tariffs, Trump has become too focused on cutting a deal to calm financial markets, and that any agreement may fail to address core issues such as intellectual property theft. The concern is that a deal could end up seeing only a short-term increase in Chinese purchases of U.S. agricultural and energy products.

    “No matter how many tons of soybeans they buy if China gets to keep cheating & stealing trade secrets it won’t be a good deal for America, our workers or our national security,” Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida tweeted on Friday after Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said China offered to buy 10 million tons of soybeans as talks continued.

    Citing an anonymous source with close ties to the administration, BBG revealed some new details about the genesis of the conflict between Trump and Lighthizer that are extremely germane to what’s happening today. During the days after Trump’s landmark meeting with President Xi in Buenos Aires – where the two leaders first agreed on the trade truce – Trump tasked Lighthizer with managing the talks. At first, Lighthizer rejected the assignment, telling the president he didn’t think the Chinese were ready.

    Trump promptly ignored Lighthizer’s objections, and insisted that a deal had to be made. 

    On the flight back from the leaders’ Dec. 1 dinner in Argentina, at which a 90-day truce was agreed, the president tasked Lighthizer with getting a China deal. When Lighthizer told him that he believed Beijing wasn’t ready to make meaningful concessions, Trump insisted a resolution had to be found, according to one person briefed on the exchange.

    Mnuchin and National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow have been making the case to the president that investors expect a deal, and not getting one would cause U.S. stock markets, which have started the year strongly on trade optimism, to stumble again, according to people familiar with internal deliberations.

    They’ve also advised Trump to hold off on issuing an executive order that would ban Huawei Technologies Co. and other Chinese telecoms equipment from U.S. networks for fear taking action against Chinese companies would undermine the trade negotiations.

    Assuming the report is accurate and that conversation really did happen, it’s unlikely that Trump has changed his mind over the past two months. Because that conversation took place before the explosion of cross-asset volatility that made 2018 the worst year for financial markets since the crisis. And during the weeks that have followed, Mnuchin and Kudlow have had plenty of time to scare Trump into hardening his position, by warning that failure to secure a deal would be disastrous for the stock market, which Trump sees as a gauge of his performance.

    In summary, as the divide between Lighthizer (who wants the best deal or no deal) and Trump (who would be willing to accept any deal that would allow him to save face) widens, and Trump grows increasingly frustrated with his trade rep’s perceived overzealousness, a serious conflict is inevitable.

    But regardless of what comes next, it’s still worth considering:  How would markets react if Trump relegates Lighthizer to a secondary role in managing the talks, and elevates Mnuchin or Kudlow in his stead? Or better yet, if Trump fires Lighthizer in a fit of pique? While an initial bout of panic would be understandable given the market’s sensitivity to anything that seriously challenges its preferred narrative of optimism, would traders quickly come around to the notion that, by removing Lighthizer, Trump has removed the biggest obstacle to deal?

  • 5 Ways To Make Money With Your Body (Legally)

    Authored by Nilus Mattive via The Daily Reckoning,

    Could you use some extra cash? Donating body materials can be akin to a part-time job. And the pay is often better than driving for a ride-sharing company or working as a retail clerk. 

    We’ll start with the easiest way to earn money with your body and work our way to the more complex.

    1. Hair – up to $1,500… or more!

    Buyers want healthy, attractive hair for wigs, extensions, and art projects. Hair that has never been dyed is the most popular. The longer the better — at least 15-35 inches. 
    Color is also important. Redheads fetch the biggest bucks followed by natural blondes and brunettes. Not much demand for gray.

    You can get an idea on how much your hair is worth here. Once you have that, there are online markets such as HAIRSELLON.com and BuyAndSellHair.com where you can post your locks for sale. 

    2. Blood plasma – up to $400 per month

    Plasma is the light-yellow liquid portion of blood that remains after it is separated by a machine. 

    Donating is like giving blood, and you can do it up to two times a week. 

    Plasma therapies help people with genetic, chronic conditions such as hemophilia and Kawasaki disease lead healthier and more productive lives.

    And patients need a lot of it … 

    For instance, it takes more than 1,200 plasma donations to treat one hemophilia patient.  

    Red Cross and similar organizations won’t pay for your plasma. But pharmaceutical companies will. 

    There are licensed and International Quality Plasma Program (IQPP) certified plasma collection centers throughout the U.S. You can search for one in your area by clicking here. 

    3. Sperm – $500 to $2,000 per month 

    Guys, this isn’t as simple as going to a clinic and handing over a mason jar containing your sperm. 

    The qualifications are tough because sperm seekers are paying big bucks. And they want the perfect specimen …

    They’re looking for men who are healthy, well-educated, and maybe even a minimum height. 

    Once you pass the initial screening, you’ll have to provide your family’s medical history, undergo STD testing, submit a sample to measure the quality, and undergo genetic testing.

    A longer-term consideration is that with the rise of more DNA testing services, the offspring you helped create could one day look you up.

    Click here to find a sperm bank directory in your area. And if you’re married, I suggest you check with your wife first. 

    4. Eggs – $6,000 to $8,000 or more

    Egg donation is a complex process in which an egg is surgically removed from a fertile woman and donated to another woman in order to help her conceive.

    A series of screenings, tests for diseases, counseling, and genetic tests are required and take about two months.

    This isn’t for everyone … generally fertility centers are looking for healthy donors age 21 to 35. Potential participants who smoke, use drugs, have a high body mass index, or have mental health issues aren’t eligible.  

    Another thought to keep in mind …

    While some donors might get satisfaction knowing they’ve created a new life, others may find that giving up a child is psychologically troubling. And like sperm donors, there’s the possibility that the children you helped create may someday try to contact you.

    If this is of interest, fertility centers are in almost every community. You could also check with your gynecologist. 

    5. Surrogate – $35,000 to $53,000 or more 

    Carrying a couple’s sperm and egg until a child is born is a long-term commitment … 15 to 18 months.

    Also, the screening process is much more intense. It can include medical and psychological evaluations, criminal background check, home visits, and even financial status. 

    You may also be required to follow a certain diet and lifestyle. 

    For instance, Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, paid a surrogate $45,000 to carry their third child. 

    They stipulated that their surrogate could not smoke, drink, or do drugs during the pregnancy and had to refrain from going in hot tubs, handling cat litter, and applying hair dye. Nor could she eat raw fish or drink more than one caffeinated beverage a day. 

    The legality can be an issue since some states ban surrogacy contracts. So you might want to obtain legal representation beforehand. 

    Bottom Line

    A final point when making the decision to sell your body’s materials…

    It’s not only about the extra cash you’ll receive, there’s the altruistic point…

    You might make a chemo patient feel better about herself, create a life when helping a childless-couple become parents, or save a life when your donation is for the research needed to treat a rare disease.

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