- Escobar: The Road Toward Greater Eurasia
Escobar: The Road Toward Greater Eurasia
Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Saker blog,
Kazakhstan’s first president has road map for 21st century: global alliance of leaders for nuclear-free world…
Photo: Asia Times
The Astana Club is one of the most crucial annual meetings in Eurasia, alongside the Boao forum in China and the Valdai discussions in Russia. China, Russia and Kazakhstan are all at the forefront of Eurasia integration. No wonder, then, that the 5th meeting of the Astana Club had to focus on Greater Eurasia – synonymous, it may be hoped, with a “new architecture of global cooperation.”
Astana Club congregates a fascinating mix of Eurasia-wide notables with Europeans and Americans. Virtually all relevant shades of the geopolitical spectrum are represented. Panels are very well structured (I moderated two of them). Discussions are frank and non-denial denials are heavily discouraged. Here is just a taste of what was discussed in Nur-Sultan, under the spectacular shallow dome designed by Norman Foster.
Great stabilizer
Vladimir Yakunin, chairman of the Dialogue of Civilizations Research Institute in Moscow, bets that China is “ready to prepare Eurasia for the future” even while there’s “no hint it will be treated by the West in a positive way.” Yakunin sees the New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road Initiative, as a “civilizational dialogue basis for China” even as Russia continues to assert itself again as a global power.
Wang Huiyao, from the Center for China and Globalization and a counselor of China’s State Council, sees China as “the biggest stabilizer” in international relations and trade as “the biggest mechanism for prosperity,” as demonstrated once again at the latest Shanghai Expo.
Senior Pakistani diplomat Iftekhar Chowdury, now at the Institute of South Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore, argues that the “liberal world order is not universal”; now it all comes down to “liberal capitalism against China.” Huiyao, for his part, is not fazed: he stresses that China already sees a “Eurasia 3D” as a new negotiation platform.
Huiyao points out how the “wrong methodology” is being applied as a “stabilizer of the world economy.” He emphasizes the role of the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank and especially Belt & Road as “a new impetus for developing the world in the next decades,” drawing on “Chinese culture, tradition, values” – plus a hybrid economy not only featuring state-owned enterprises. Belt & Road, he insists, is a “real international development plan.” In contrast, the great danger is “unilateralism”: “Do we have only one form of history?”
Jacob Frenkel, Chairman of JP Morgan International, clear-headed and didactic unlike many bankers, actually quotes from a Chinese proverb:
“The honey is sweet, but the bee stings.”
He emphasizes that “words matter. When you use ‘war’ in commerce, there are consequences” – especially when there are “millions of boats” navigating “the same ocean.”
Wang lends backing to Frenkel when he underlines the unintended consequences for third countries from the US-China trade war. Frenkel sees tariffs as “the wrong instruments” and stresses that businessmen “don’t believe in IMF models.” Boris Tadic, former President of Serbia, concentrates on how “arrogant big powers are ignoring smaller countries.”
The redoubtable Li Wei, President of the Development Research Center of the State Council Chair and a sterling negotiator, stresses that under serious “anti-globalist tendencies,” the need is for “new principles of coexistence.” China and the US should “stop exchanging punches; there have been 13 meetings to discuss the trade war.” What’s needed, says Li, in a new first stage of discussion, is for Xi and Trump to sign a memorandum of understanding.
Reacting to the possibility of China and the US signing protocols, Yakunin has to come back to his main point:
“The US is not willing to see China transform itself into a great power.”
Li, unfazed, has to mention that Xi Jinping actually launched Belt & Road in Kazakhstan – at the nearby Nazarbayev University, in 2013. He’s convinced that the initiative is capable of “fully answering all challenges of the present historical moment.”
From MAD to SAD
Terje Todd-Larsen, former Under Secretary General of the UN and President of the International Peace Institute, laments that with the multilateral system weakened, and no multilateral organization encompassing the Middle East and Northern Africa, there is no table capable anywhere of congregating Arabs, Iran, Israel and Turkey. The best hope lies with Kazakhstan – and there are precedents already, with Nur-Sultan hosting the Astana process for Syria.
On the nuclear weapons front, Yakunin notes how nations that subscribe to the Non Proliferation Treaty actually now expect a “formal affirmation they won’t be threatened.” He sees “lack of trust” as the greatest threat to the NPT: “The P5 members of the NPT did not live up to their promises.”
The legendary Mohamed El Baradei, former Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency and 2005 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, lays down the choice in stark terms: It’s either “maximum pressure, regime change and sanctions” or “dialogue, equity, cooperation, respect.” He stresses that “International institutions can’t deal with the world today – it’s way beyond them.” And the elephant in the room is, of course, nuclear weapons: “We seem frozen in place.”
El Baradei refutes the notion of the nuclear club as a model: “What is the logic and moral justification? This is an unsustainable regime.” On nuclear disarmament, it’s the nuclear states that have to start a new era. For the moment, what’s left is “to salvage the remains of nuclear arms control. We’ve gone from MAD to SAD – self-assured destruction.”
Back on the ground level, Dan Smith, director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute introduces lethal autonomous weapons systems – as in robots with a very high degree of autonomy – into the conversation. Not that these entities would prevent, for instance, cyber-attacks, which “can be counter-productive and self-destructive, because there will be a counter-strike.”
Global alliance
The undisputed star of the show at the Astana Club is really Kazakh First President Nazarbayev. There’s a feeling among seasoned diplomats and analysts that when the history of Greater Eurasia is written, Nazarbayev will be on the front page. Global turmoil may not favor it too much at the moment, but as the Russians stress, the Eurasian Economic Union, for instance, is bound to survive sanctions and the trade war, and 2025 offers a tantalizing glimpse of the future via open market for gas and transportation. The EU and the EAEU have complementary economics, and Russia can play a major role.
Nazarbayev quotes from washed up theorist Francis Fukuyama to stress that “only three decades later,” his “anticipation did not come true.” He is keen to “critically reassess” the Eurasian model of security, now combining Europe and Asia, as most experts who prepared a detailed report on the Top Ten risks for Eurasia in 2020 agree.
Nazarbayev does have a road map for peace in the 21st century, via a manifesto he presented at the UN. That would be constituted as a global alliance of leaders for a nuclear-free world – complete with global summits dedicated to nuclear security. He can speak like that with the “moral right” of having closed one of the world’s major nuclear arsenals – Kazakhstan’s.
What’s key as much for Nazarbayev as for Xi and Putin is that Belt & Road, the Eurasian Economic Union, the European Union, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Association of Southeast Asian Nation – all these initiatives and institutions – should be on overdrive, together, creating multiple negotiation tracks, all geared towards Greater Eurasia. And what better platform to advance it, conceptually, than the Astana Club?
Tyler Durden
Wed, 11/27/2019 – 00:05 - Company Stock Prices Fall When Women Are Added To Boards Of Directors
Company Stock Prices Fall When Women Are Added To Boards Of Directors
Turns out that many companies who seek to embrace equality by any means could actually be doing their shareholders a disservice. But hey, we thought equality of outcome was a guaranteed fast track to utopia! What happened?
In fact, many companies experience stock price declines when women are added to the board of directors, Bloomberg points out.
An analysis of 14 years of market returns across almost 1,900 companies recently revealed that when companies appoint female directors, they experienced two years of stock declines. Companies saw their stock fall by an average of 2.3% just from adding one additional woman to their board.
Kaisa Snellman, an assistant professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD business school and a co-author of the study said: “Shareholders penalize these companies, despite the fact that increased gender diversity doesn’t have a material effect on a company’s return on assets. Nothing happens to the actual value of the companies. It’s just the perceptions that change.”
The study suggests that investor biases are to blame. The study asked senior managers with MBAs to read fictional press releases announcing new board members. The statements were identical, but for the gender of the incoming director. Participants said that men were more likely to care about profits and less about social values, while women were deemed to be “softer”.
Snellman continued: “If anyone is biased, it is the market. Investors should consider organizations that add women and other under-represented groups to their boards because there’s a good chance that company is being undervalued.”
Despite this study’s findings, other non-academic reports over the years have suggested that diverse leadership results in corporate success. A McKinsey analysis concluded that board diversity correlates with positive financial performance and a 2019 Credit Suisse report noted a “performance premium for board diversity”.
These findings have prompted investors like BlackRock to push for diversity on boards. Women now account for more than 25% of board members on the S&P 500 and 20% of boards globally.
“It has become kind of a myth. Add a woman on your board, and a company starts doing better,” Snellman continued.
Results remain mixed when looking into diversity, however. An analysis from September showed share prices rose after companies showed better than average levels of gender diversity. Another study from October found that investors punished companies without female directors after California passed a law mandating that all boards in the state must have one woman by the end of this year. The researchers suspected that the market was reacting to the lack of compliance with the new rules for many companies.
Snellman counted 140 research papers that showed no clear relationship between adding diversity and improving performance metrics.
Snellman concluded: “Just to be very clear, I’m not saying that we should not promote female leaders into senior leader positions. But is there a business case for gender diversity on boards? If you ask an academic, the answer is no.”
Tyler Durden
Tue, 11/26/2019 – 23:45 - Ukraine's IMF Gold & The Gold Carry Trade
Ukraine’s IMF Gold & The Gold Carry Trade
Authored by Steve Brown via TheDuran.com,
Let’s first consider a typical International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan to a sovereign in trouble, and then examine a typical gold carry trade transaction to support a sovereign arms deal.
The intent is to demonstrate the importance of physical sovereign gold holdings in all forms of international trade.
Semi-failed and failed states can only exist by dealing in hard assets of real intrinsic value just as Syria, Venezuela, Iran, and Ukraine have done… and the most liquid of those hard assets is their physical gold.
Central Banks always work with the Security State apparatus when dealing with failed states and recall that the US Central Intelligence Agency funded al Qaeda and funded the war in Syria for example. Just about anything can be made to happen with funding when that funding is based on real resources. One of the most important of those resources is physical gold.
IMF Cartel Example: Ukraine
The IMF’s 2014 aid to Ukraine is based on a unique history however all IMF ‘aid’ packages are in some sense unique. Since we are highlighting the largely hitherto concealed importance of real physical gold in geo-political calculations and operations, Ukraine provides a relevant and timely example of how the banking Cartel operates with gold and may highlight that importance.
According to the 2018 Independent Transparency Index, Ukraine ranks as one of the most corrupt nations in the world. Ukraine ranks 120th out of 180 countries where the 180th – Somalia – is the most corrupt. But all nations need funding whether corrupt or not, and Ukraine defaulted on its IMF debt in 2001 and then again in 2009 when distribution of an existing IMF loan to Ukraine was frozen.
So, in 2014 why would the IMF strike another “deal” with a nation as corrupt as Ukraine for a whopping $17.5 Bn USD extended funding facility, when it had already defaulted on its previous two IMF loans? The answer lies well beyond the natural gas tariffs paid by Ukraine to the European Union and is founded in gold and state resources as well as geopolitics.
Consider Yanukovych’s attempt to confront the IMF and EU on its new onerous terms to settle Ukraine’s debt to the IMF in 2013, when Yanukovych and Mykola Azarov (then-Ukrainian Prime Minister) protested the IMF’s outrageous imposition of a 40% tariff on natural gas exported from the Ukraine (via the Russian Federation) to Europe. Yanukovych’s IMF ire was all US State needed to impose its will: Ukraine must cooperate with the IMF or take the consequences. Azarov and Yanukovych did risk the consequences and the entire corrupt Ukraine apparatus came tumbling down by February of 2014.
Nevertheless, Washington is aware that replacing one corrupt regime with its own will not pay that failed state’s bills, and Washington does not provide its own funds to the failed states that it creates. After all, that’s not how the Great Game is played. This is not about largesse, it’s about Washington demanding the spoils of war.
Thus in 2014 when Russia diverted its natural gas deliveries to bypass the troubled mess that Washington invoked in Ukraine, Ukraine urgently needed an International Monetary Fund bail-out. The IMF’s “round heels” did not come into play this time however – the IMF demanded a solid ‘guarantee’* for its first installment of funding to Ukraine.
One IMF demand was for Ukraine to setup its own National Anti-Corruption Bureau as a ceremonial gesture, since Ukraine’s deep corruption is endemic, extant, and simply an accepted way of life there.
The other demand was for Ukraine to partly collateralize its IMF loan with gold reserves. We know that because the IMF tells us so: (The IMF) may accept gold in the discharge of a member country’s obligations (loan repayment) at an agreed price, based on market prices at the time of acceptance.
And we can prove the IMF-Ukraine 2014 gold transaction by simply looking at the historic fluctuation in Ukraine gold reserves. In October of 2014 – just nine months subsequent to the Maidan coup – Ukraine reduced its gold reserves by fourteen tonnes (metric = 2200 lb per tonne). Fourteen metric tonnes of Ukraine gold were flown to one of the designated IMF gold depositories: Gold depositories of the Fund shall be established in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and India as noted by the IMF itself.
But why did the IMF require just fourteen tonnes of the Ukraine’s gold as a loan guarantee? Let’s look at the figures. Fourteen tonnes of gold equates to 30,800 lbs, or 492,800 ounces. At 400 oz per bar 1,232 bars of gold were flown from the Ukraine to the IMF designated depository. At then-prevailing market price — note that the US government still values gold at only $42 per ounce! — Ukraine’s gold provided $640M US dollars’ worth of loan collateral to the IMF.
In sovereign terms, a $640 million guarantee seems trivial. But recall that most aid guarantees are fractionalized at 10%, meaning that Ukraine needed just that much in collateral to finance its first tranche loan from the IMF of $5 Bn USD as received from the IMF in 2015. Ukraine provides just one example regarding the IMF’s extortion of sovereign gold from the failed states it hopes to service.
But gold is not the only important asset a nation can trade in exchange for its debt, the IMF demands much more than a fractionalized gold pay-off as the people of Greece have discovered. Oleksiy Honcharuk the current embattled Ukraine Prime Minister, just announced that Ukraine expects to receive $500M USD from the IMF in exchange for the sale of Ukraine state-owned firms to private buyers.
The point however is that gold has always been an important asset in world trade regardless of those who claim otherwise. And it is just as important now – perhaps more so – than it has ever been; note that states like Burundi, the United Arab Emirates, and Iraq have dramatically increased their gold reserves. And at least the IMF admits to trading in sovereign gold while the US Federal Reserve only admits to trading in gold while actively denying that fact! (See link)
Gold Carry Trade Arms Deal
Note that the physical gold in this example trade does not move outside of its vault in New York, London, Paris or whichever bullion bank is holding the bars. That’s because the vaults in London, New York, or Switzerland are designated by numbered accounts and those numbered accounts (assigned to a particular vault or to particular group of bars) may alter over time by transaction, but the 400 oz gold bars are seldom transported; only the account numbers and allocated bars in the individual (and many) bullion bank vaults may change.
There are rare exceptions when the gold does move – for example when Venezuela physically repatriated its gold from New York.
The usual classic carry trade is when a sovereign or primary bank simply leases gold from a London Bullion Market Association bank, sells the gold to convert to higher yielding assets, then re-purchases the gold at the end of the lease period to satisfy the lease. The sovereign or dealer will provide security for the transaction (perhaps a percentage of its own gold reserves or other state assets) and pay what is called the Gold Forward interest rate (GOFO is usually 1%) to the bullion bank and return the carry trade gold by re-purchase at then-prevailing gold market prices at the end of the lease.
Central Banks operate the same way, utilizing the same type carry transactions but generally only to support or debase their currency or another currency. (Central Banks also hope that semi-failed states will sell their gold reserves to Central Banks at knock-down prices as Syria did in 2012!)
But the hypothetical scenario below is a different type of carry trade. The example below contests the commonly held premise that belligerents are freely ‘given’ their arms by the major powers. In very unreliable circumstances like Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, and formerly in Eretria etc – the ‘free delivery’ of weaponry by major powers for political reasons is partly true. And in Libya, the Sahel states inherited weaponry after the assassination of Qadaffi.
The idea here is to show the importance of the gold carry trade to Central Banks and their related security state in the provision of arms to failed states by way of collateral and special bank accounting. The carry trade is the financial trade of choice for Central Banks when dealing with failed or semi-failed states, because the gold carry trade provides all parties:
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Absolute Secrecy
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Zero public accountability
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Zero legislative accountability
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100% political cover
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Guaranteed profits, and perhaps even the
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Spoils of war or
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Financial collapse to profit Central Banks
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No limit on the amount of GOFO gold leased
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Zero risk based on Central Bank accounting
In this typical but hypothetical carry trade arms deal, the Central Bank (called by the fictional name “CBBI”) hopes to identify a semi-failed or failed state possessing either its own gold reserves or mining resources so that the Central Bank may gain leverage and perhaps state-owned resources too, or even intervene militarily by proxy, by way of a carry trade for arms. Mali springs to mind as one potential current example as does the pending new independent state of Bougainville.
The hypothetical carry trade scenario for our paper finds small embattled Nation ‘X’ in the Sahel with one tonne of gold reserves and X wishes to purchase $5M US dollars value of small arms from Austria for self-defense versus Nation Y. Nation X has limited foreign cash reserves on hand and its own currency is virtually worthless. Nation X cannot qualify for an IMF loan and does not seek one, nor could it. Nation X has some natural resources and does possess the aforementioned gold reserves even if it has a bad credit history. So how is Nation X to get the weaponry?
Nation X contacts the CBBI Central Bank in Europe and receives encouraging news. The CBBI says at current market price $5,000,000 USD in small arms can be traded for just 8 x 400 oz good delivery gold bars that the country already has, plus an additional 100 oz bar. Better than that, the CBBI will negotiate the entire sales deal (including the arms)!
However, Nation X is reluctant to sell its gold. The CBBI instead suggests a two-year gold carry trade lease for $50M (million) US dollars if Nation X will turn over 20% of its reserve gold bars, ie a quantity of sixteen 400 oz ‘good for delivery’ gold bars. At the end of the lease the gold will be returned, the (GOFO) interest will be paid to the CBBI, and Nation X will have found the funds for its weaponry and improve its credit as well.
In other words, Nation X will thus receive $50 million USD from the CBBI when Nation X supplies 20% in security (by supplying sixteen 400 oz gold bars worth approx. $10M) to the CBBI and by agreeing to pay the gold forward rate (usually 1%) to the bank. As a result, Nation X obtains ten times the amount of funding that it sought, far beyond the $5M in small arms needed. Then X can perhaps buy a few ex-Libyan jets and hire mercenaries to fly them all for a 1% loan!
(Note: Nation X has only loaned its gold bars as collateral since Nation X will receive them back at the end of the lease period providing X does not default to the CBBI. Also, the collateral to the bank is not always gold and may consist of state assets as well or instead.)
The CBBI reveals nothing publicly about Nation X’s intent for the funds, and the bank’s governmental Secret Service connections have politically cleared the deal. The CBBI does require Nation X to sign a gold lease document of course, stating X’s return of $50M in gold two years hence at market price, and X must also pay the 1% gold forward interest rate. The CBBI then receives Nation X’s good for delivery gold bars and the deal is done. Nation X receives the proceeds of the gold lease in the currency of its choice – say Chinese yuan – transferred to X’s national bank and all is well, while the brokered gold never left its London vault only the vault account number changed!
The CBBI is more than chuffed since the $10M USD in Nation X physical gold delivered to the CBBI allows the CBBI to leverage those gold reserves to ten times that amount – $100M USD – in leveraged ETF’s or any other debt instrument the bank cares to leverage. All that’s changed with regard to the CBBI lease is the account number on the vault where the $50M in registered gold bars are still held. So, for an outlay investment of $50M USD equivalent in China yuan – which the bank already had hedged in a CHF account! – the CBBI doubled its own investment in leveraged ETF’s at a stroke.
Now, the bank hopes that Nation X will default since the CBBI received real hard assets from Nation X that the CBBI has leveraged ten times, and the GOFO 1% rate is trivial. Unfortunately, X’s war with Y has gone badly, and after two years Nation X does indeed default on the gold lease and cannot buy the gold back to satisfy the lease. So what is the CBBI to do?
Regardless of X’s default, the Central Bank essentially leased the gold to itself when accounted for as a receivable on its books in perpetuity until satisfied. That means the ‘loss’ appears as an asset on the Central Bank’s balance sheet because the bank’s accounting allows the ‘loss’ on leased gold to appear as a receivable credit. Better yet, the bank leveraged Nation X’s gold – which it now owns – to double its investment on the ETF market. That may appear to be accounting trickery and it is. But this carry trade deal is by no means rare and is quite common even if the collateral is not always physical gold.
NB: in real terms the CBBI is still ‘minus’ the $50M in traded currency but the $50M appears as a credit receivable on the bank’s balance sheet. That’s due to an accounting trick where leased gold is always a receivable regardless of status of the lease. But this type of trade deal is most useful when coupled with political designs on the failed state in conjunction with the nation bank/state’s political goals.
When multiple state assets are involved in gold swaps for currency such transactions can be multi-layered with severe political repercussions for the failed state when things go wrong. But such negative consequences usually impact the failed state only, while aiding the political ambitions of the Central Bank in the lessor country.
Summary
We have examined two important tools used by Central Banks above: the IMF gold collateral loan and the gold carry trade, the major point being that Central Banks can and do leverage their gold in many different ways – including the Federal Reserve – in conjunction with the Deep State/Security State apparatus in regard to its political ambitions. But why then did Ukraine go the IMF loan route while ‘Nation X’ took the ‘CBBI’ carry trade deal?
In Ukraine’s case a gold carry trade for a typical lease period is impractical, when Ukraine already has a history with the IMF and is not quite a failed state. Ukraine also possesses significant physical gold reserves that it may use as 10% collateral for such an IMF loan. Whereas an $18Bn USD lease (sale) of physical holdings represents ½ of daily gold trading, where most of those trades are non-allocated (ie not real). Then, at the end of the lease, the gold market could be negatively impacted (gold price goes higher) when the gold is re-purchased to satisfy the lease.
But even if the market could sustain an $18Bn gold lease dump (to provide Ukraine’s funding) a 1% GOFO rate is still a burden, and there is absolutely zero chance that Ukraine could ever satisfy the terms of a typical gold lease. Only the IMF loan makes sense for Ukraine just as the Nation X failed state could never qualify for an IMF loan — so only a carry trade makes sense for X.
Another question is why the bank doesn’t simply front Nation X the funds for its weapons. While covert government operations frequently do that – as the Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syrian insurgencies prove – banks are in business for a profit and Washington cannot service every failed state that it creates. Thus the need for real assets like Central Bank gold in this sort of trade.
Finally, many parts of the world are flooded with weaponry. Where did those weapons come from? Were they always supplied freely by the major powers to create their failed states? From Libya and the Sahel, Middle East and Afghanistan… perhaps we can define ‘money’ as being a claim on the weaponry/ armaments provided by governments and their Central Banks to the rest of the world.
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Steve Brown is the author of “Iraq: the Road to War” (Sourcewatch) editor of “Bush Administration War Crimes in Iraq” (Sourcewatch) “Trump’s Limited Hangout” and “Federal Reserve: Out-sourcing the Monetary System to the Money Trust Oligarchs Since 1913”; Steve is an antiwar activist, a published scholar on the US monetary system, and has appeared as guest contributor to The Duran, Fort Russ News, Herland Report, Lew Rockwell Report, The Ron Paul Institute, and Strategika51
Tyler Durden
Tue, 11/26/2019 – 23:25 -
- Americans Simply Can't Afford Lawyers Anymore
Americans Simply Can’t Afford Lawyers Anymore
In America, legal counsel is not guaranteed in civil cases the way that it is in criminal cases, and with the sky high costs of lawyers across the country, it is increasingly leading to a two-tiered justice system: those who can afford counsel and those who can’t.
More and more Americans are now representing themselves, with just one in four civil defendants represented by counsel, according to Bloomberg. This is down from nearly all defendants having lawyers in 1992, according to a 2015 study. The number of litigants without lawyers has risen in the four years since the study, as well.
An opportunity for justice is the “bedrock” of the American legal system, but pro se litigants up against attorneys are unlikely to win their cases or settle on beneficial terms.
Trish McAllister, head of the Texas Access to Justice Commission said: “It’s really a crisis. People aren’t able to get into the courts and they’re not able to navigate them once they’re there.”
Money is the holdup in most cases: litigants simply can’t afford counsel and most attorneys won’t take cases where the payoffs are too small to justify the court appearance. Last year, the Trump administration effectively closed the Justice Department’s Office for Access to Justice, which was set up to provide access to lawyers for all Americans.
Most civil cases are usually about debt collection, landlord tenant disputes and home foreclosures. Lawyers will build their cases around litigants inexperience and inability to hire competent counsel.
Terry Lawson, a legal aid attorney in Missouri said: “These guys know they’re going to win. Their hope of hopes is that nobody will go get lawyers.”
And it’s not always about winning or losing in civil cases. Silvana Naguib, an attorney at Public Counsel, a California pro bono legal firm commented: “Lawyers can help negotiate better settlements. There’s a stark difference between the agreements signed by self-representing litigants versus what [I get] for clients.”
Courts have very little mercy for litigants who represent themselves. Some offer resources like volunteers and online forms, but judges are required to hold pro se litigants to the same standard as those with counsel.
Linda Leyva lost her home to foreclosure last year and said judges could be “perplexing”. In 2017, a court rejected her motion for a continuance so she could further prepare her case and, a month later, it approved the other side’s continuance motion so the lawyer could take a vacation.
There are still ongoing efforts to help litigants who can’t afford counsel, however. An organization called Civil Gideon is trying to expand the right to counsel to cover certain civil disputes. They were backed by the American Bar Association in 2006, but there remains questions on how the state would pay for the program.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 11/26/2019 – 23:05 - A $20 Trillion Problem: More Than Half Of China's Banks Fail Central Bank Stress Test
A $20 Trillion Problem: More Than Half Of China’s Banks Fail Central Bank Stress Test
In our latest look at the turmoil among China’s small and medium banks, which included not only the recent bailouts and nationalizations of Baoshang Bank , Bank of Jinzhou, China’s Heng Feng Bank, but also the two very troubling bank runs at China’s Henan Yichuan Rural Commercial Bank at the start of the month, and then more recently at Yingkou Coastal Bank.
As we further explained, the reason why so many (for now) smaller Chinese banks have found themselves either getting bailed out or hit by bank runs, is that in a time when China’s interbank/repo rates have surged amid growing counterparty concerns, increasingly more banks have been forced to rely almost entirely on deposits to fund themselves, forcing them to hike their deposit rates to keep their funding levels stable.
Meanwhile, cuts in key lending rates since August to stimulate up a slowing economy have only exacerbated net interest margin pressures on banks.
In other words, with less income from lending and without the full suite of funding options available to much larger peers, the interest rates that China’s legion of small banks may have to offer to attract deposits could further undermine their stability. The irony is that to preserve their critical deposit base, small banks have to hike deposit rates even higher to stand out, in the process sapping their own lifeblood and ensuring their self-destruction, or as we dubbed it earlier, China’s own version of Europe’s “doom loop.“
Dai Zhifeng, a banking analyst with Zhongtai Securities, told Reuters the funding difficulties risked distorting small banks’ behavior, making failure even more likely: “Lacking core competitiveness, some of them have turned to high-risk, short-sighted operations,” he said, adding that a liquidity crunch was possible at some institutions.
But for a nation with a $40 trillion financial system, double the size of US banks, and well over 4,000 small, medium and massive, state-owned banks, here please recall that the 4 largest banks in the world are now Chinese:
- ICBC: $4TN
- China Construction: $3.4TN
- Agri Bank of China: $3.3TN
- Bank of China: $3.1TN
… the question how many banks will fail in the near future, is especially relevant not only for China but for the entire world.
Luckily, we got an answer from none other than China’s central bank, which on Monday said that China’s banking sector is “showing signs of strain”, with more than 13% of 4,379 lenders now considered “high risk” by the central bank.
In other words, take the 5 banks listed above which either suffered a bank run and/or were bailed out or nationalized, and add to them over 500 which are about to suffer the same fate.
As Bloomberg reports, in the PBOC’s its 2019 China Financial Stability Report, the high risk category contains 586 banks and financing firms, most of which are smaller rural institutions. The report also comically noted that one bank got a “D” grade this year, meaning it went bankrupt, was taken over or lost its license. No banks were named in the report.
And here is why the next global financial crisis will likely start in some backward Chinese province best known for its massively polluting coal plants, ghost cities and made up GDP data: while foreign and private banks are seen as relatively safe, more than one third of rural lenders were rated “high risk,” or those which are near failure.
Additionally, some medium- and small-sized financial institutions received poor ratings because of the slowing economy, with small lenders more sensitive to swings in the economy.
What did the PBOC do with this doomsday list? As Bloomberg reports, the central bank notified each bank of its rating, and required some to increase capital, reduce bad loans, limit dividends and even change management. In short, trillions in Chinese bank (non performing) assets are about to mysteriously disappear off the books while hundreds of local banks scramble to inject liquidity in their balance sheets, effectively removing free liquidity from the interbank market.
Separately, the PBOC also stress tested 30 medium- and large-sized banks in the first half of 2019. In the base-case scenario, assuming GDP growth dropped to 5.3% – or well above where China’s real GDP is now – nine out of 30 major banks failed and saw their capital adequacy ratio drop to 13.47% from 14.43%. In the worst-case scenario, assuming GDP growth of 4.15%, or less than 2% below the latest official GDP print, more than half of China’s banks, or 17 out of the 30 major banks failed the test. So with the entire Chinese financial system roughly $40 trillion, this suggests that China now has a rather insurmountable $20 trillion problem on its hands.
Separately, a liquidity stress test at 1,171 banks, representing nearly three-quarters of China’s banking sector by assets, showed that 90 failed in the base-case and 159 in the worst-case scenario.
* * *
According to the central bank, it made progress in containing financial risks in the past year, but warned that some potential threats require more time to eliminate. Financial risks can “occur easily” and more frequently as the economy cools and the risk of a slowdown in global growth increases, it said, clearly offering a very non-subtle hint of what is coming.
Faced with this complex situation, the central bank said that it should “stay cool-headed” to keep a balance between economic growth and risk control. It also means that the PBOC is now trapped – on one hand it can’t cut rates further as it will push even more small banks into insolvent as per the “doom loop” described earlier, on the other it can’t hike rates as then the entire economy would slow, resulting in unprecedented devastation and tens of trillions in bank assets wiped out.
Next year marks the last year in a three-year campaign by policy makers to contain financial risks. The PBOC said it will “fine-tune” its policies to fit the economic situation, ensuring that they aren’t too tight or too loose according to Bloomberg. The general direction of containing financial risks will be unchanged, in other words, despite the clear signs that things are bad and getting worse by the day – yes, there were two bank runs in the past two weeks – after years if not decades without a single bank crisis – the PBOC will do what China has been so good at doing in the past decade when it comes to addressing the unprecedented risks associated with a 320% debt/GDP and a $40 trillion financial system.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 11/26/2019 – 22:41 - Iran's Guard Tells US & Allies "We Will Destroy You" After Declaring Victory Over Protests
Iran’s Guard Tells US & Allies “We Will Destroy You” After Declaring Victory Over Protests
Iran’s top elite forces commander, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) chief Gen. Hossein Salami, issued a public threat Monday before a large crowd, vowing to destroy the US, Saudi Arabia, and Israel if they cross Tehran’s “red lines”.
“We announce to the United States, Britain, Israel, and Saudi Arabia that you experienced us in the field and received strong slaps,” said Gen. Salami, adding: “If you cross our red lines, we will destroy you.”
“We will not leave any move unanswered,” he warned, and said that if Iran decides to respond, “the enemy will not have security anywhere, our patience has a limit.” The speech is being widely viewed as Tehran’s ‘victory lap’ of sorts after anti-government protests across a hundred cities have been largely quelled.
IRGC’s top commander, Gen. Hossein Salami during Monday’s speech. Image source: AFP/Getty He was addressing a mass pro-government rally at a moment that dozens of such ‘counter-protests’ were held across the country, in answer to the anti-fuel hike and anti-government protests which have gripped the country over the past two weeks.
State media featured the large government-supportive demonstrations in multiple cities early this week, seeking to underscore the Islamic Republic’s leadership has emerged ‘victorious’ after quashing the mainstay of the prior anti-government rallies.
Footage showed protesters burning the American flag and chanting slogans which blamed the external interference of the US and Israel, and “seditious” elements for the Islamic Republic’s current unrest, which had included a week of a total internet blackout ordered by authorities in Tehran.
As of November 24, global internet monitoring group NetBlocks said that “basic connectivity is returning, but many users now face a filternet that restricts access to the outside world.”
Meanwhile, a new report by Amnesty International issued simultaneous to Gen. Salami’s fiery Monday speech counted at least 143 killed in protests since Nov. 15. Tehran has rejected those numbers while asserting that it was armed elements among demonstrators who attacked police.
The Amnesty report also claimed “clear evidence” that Iranian security forces used live ammo on unarmed civilian demonstrators. This after unverified social media videos emerged last week appearing to show live fire being used by police to disperse crowds.
Though anti-regime protests do appear to lack in size after fierce clashes with police in the past days, evidence continues to emerge that they are still ongoing in many places.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 11/26/2019 – 22:25 - Russian Arctic Pipeline Accident Shrouded In Mystery
Russian Arctic Pipeline Accident Shrouded In Mystery
Authored by Tsvetana Paraskova via OilPrice.com,
Russia’s gas giant Gazprom is rushing to hire an engineering contractor to have an underwater natural gas pipeline, which has broken off the seabed in the Arctic, fixed, Russian news agency Interfax reports.
This is the second time a pipeline on the route that crosses the Baydaratskaya Bay has come to the surface in the past two years. As Interfax notes, last year another pipeline had broken off the seabed.
It was not clear if the resurfacing of the pipelines has created major safety hazards or affected gas supply from the fields in the Yamal Peninsula, according to The Barents Observer.
A unit of Gazprom has announced a competitive tender for engineering surveys for the Bovanenkovo – Ukhta 2 line, which transports natural gas from the Bovanenkovskoye field on the Yamal Peninsula via the Baydaratskaya Bay in the Kara Sea to mainland Russia and onto Europe.
Bovanenkovskoye is currently the largest natural gas producing field on the Yamal Peninsula, according to Gazprom.
The construction of the Bovanenkovo – Ukhta 2 gas pipeline began in 2012 and the pipeline was brought on line in 2017.
Now with a second line resurfacing, Gazprom has launched a tender for repair works on 9.2 kilometers (5.7 miles) of the pipeline in the bay, Interfax reports, citing tender documents from the Gazprom unit.
Gazprom expects the work to help it have the pipeline placed in a trench of up to 5 meters (16.4 feet) below the seabed. The engineering surveys are planned to take place in 2020 and 2021, according to Interfax.
Gazprom is dominating gas supplies to many European markets, and now it also vies to meet rising Chinese natural gas demand. Russia wants a share of the huge Chinese market and the Russian gas giant looks to supply pipeline gas to China—and this will begin in weeks.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 11/26/2019 – 22:05 - Obama Admits He Would Speak Up Only To Stop Bernie Sanders Nomination
Obama Admits He Would Speak Up Only To Stop Bernie Sanders Nomination
As we noted earlier, a bombshell admission from Politico today exploring Obama’s substantial behind the scenes influence as Democratic kingmaker: included in the lengthy profile on the day-to-day of the former president’s personal office in the West End of Washington D.C. and his meeting with the field of Democratic candidates, is the following gem:
“Obama said privately that if Bernie were running away with the nomination, Obama would speak up to stop him.”
Image source: Getty And crucially, when asked about that prior statement reported in Politico, an Obama spokesperson did not deny that he said it.
The frank admission underscores what many independent analysts, not to mention prior damning WikiLeaks DNC disclosures, have pointed out for years: that the establishment controlling the Democratic party has continuously sought to rig the system against Bernie.
“Since losing 2016, Dem elites have waged a prolonged effort to stop Bernie. Bernie is the obvious answer to the neoliberal Clinton-Obama legacy voters rejected…” journalist Aaron Maté observed of the Politico quote.
Here’s the stunning and deeply revealing section in full, which began by outlining Obama’s ‘advice-giving’ throughout meetings with Democrat contenders including Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and others:
Publicly, he has been clear that he won’t intervene in the primary for or against a candidate, unless he believed there was some egregious attack. “I can’t even imagine with this field how bad it would have to be for him to say something,” said a close adviser. Instead, he sees his role as providing guardrails to keep the process from getting too ugly and to unite the party when the nominee is clear.
There is one potential exception: Back when Sanders seemed like more of a threat than he does now, Obama said privately that if Bernie were running away with the nomination, Obama would speak up to stop him. (Asked about that, a spokesperson for Obama pointed out that Obama recently said he would support and campaign for whoever the Democratic nominee is.)
And a further deeply revealing but more laughable quote comes later as follows: “Obama designed his post-presidency in 2016, at a time when he believed Hillary Clinton would win and Biden would be out of politics.”
Wow. “Obama said privately that if Bernie were running away with the nomination, Obama would speak up to stop him.”https://t.co/mBCUhb5Lol
— George Zornick (@gzornick) November 26, 2019
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
So the reality is… far from the idea that the Dem elites would back the actual nominee the party puts forward, clearly the die has already been cast against Bernie just like the last time around against Hillary in 2016.
Politico author Ryan Lizza later in the story quotes a “close family friend,” who described that Obama’s “politics are not strong left of center.”
“I mean it’s left, but he’s nowhere near where some of the candidates are currently sitting, at least when he got himself elected,” the source claimed.
This means in the mind of Obama and other top party influencers and kingmakers, Bernie and other popular outliers like Tulsi Gabbard have already long been sidelined. Tulsi, it should also be noted, is one of the couple of candidates who did not bother to stop by Obama’s D.C. office for a ‘blessing’ and advice.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 11/26/2019 – 21:45 - US Police Have Quietly Brought A "Terrifying" Robot Dog Into Their Ranks
US Police Have Quietly Brought A “Terrifying” Robot Dog Into Their Ranks
Authored by Elias Marat via TheMindUnleashed.com,
Police in the United States have quietly begun integrating advanced robots into officers’ ranks, raising alarm among civil liberties advocates and police watchdogs in the country.
Video of Boston Dynamics robots climbing stairs, carrying boxes, and doing basic parkour have long circulated around the internet, creeping out viewers with the lifelike motion of its humanoid robot model and it’s semi-autonomous four-legged robot “Spot”—a customizable bot which resembles a metal dog without a head that, understandably, some people call “terrifying.”
And now, radio station WBUR and the ACLU have discovered that the Massachusetts State Police have been leasing one of the Boston Dynamics’ robot dogs for use in its bomb squad.
Spot’s integration into the state police, which began in August, marks the very first time that such advanced robotics have been deployed within a civilian police force.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts has been seeking official public records on the use of Spot in the police arsenal. The group believes that the robotic dogs, which can carry out such tasks like opening doors and clearing obstacles in high-risk environments, have already been put to use in live incidents.
However, many fear that the secretive introduction of such technology into police arsenals, along with their deadly potential in police encounters, can open the door to future abuses.
Kade Crockford, the director of the technology for liberty program at the ACLU of Massachusetts, told WBUR:
“We just really don’t know enough about how the state police are using this.
And the technology that can be used in concert with a robotic system like this is almost limitless in terms of what kinds of surveillance and potentially even weaponization operations may be allowed.”
Police, however, have defended the use of Spot. Under their lease agreement with Boston Dynamics, the robot can’t be used to “physically harm or intimidate people.”
State police spokesman David Procopio said:
“Robot technology is a valuable tool for law enforcement because of its ability to provide situational awareness of potentially dangerous environments.”
Boston Dynamics is a U.S.-based company that is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Japanese investment conglomerate SoftBank Group Corp.
Earlier this year, Boston Dynamics announced that it would begin selling the so-called “nimble robot” Spot, which is depicted in promotional materials as serving a number of roles in varied environments, including on construction sites or as remote security guards.
Boston Dynamics vice president for business development Michael Perry said that Spot is mainly being used in situations that would pose a danger to human personnel. Perry explained:
“Right now, our primary interest is sending the robot into situations where you want to collect information in an environment where it’s too dangerous to send a person, but not actually physically interacting with the space.”
However, the ACLU is primarily worried not so much about Spot itself, but about a general absence of transparency—especially regarding the law enforcement agencies’ rules and policies surrounding the use of robots.
In a separate statement provided to TechCrunch, the ACLU said:
“There is a lot we do not know about how and where these robotics systems are currently deployed in Massachusetts.
All too often, the deployment of these technologies happens faster than our social, political, or legal systems react.
We urgently need more transparency from government agencies, who should be upfront with the public about their plans to test and deploy new technologies.
We also need statewide regulations to protect civil liberties, civil rights, and racial justice in the age of artificial intelligence.”
Tyler Durden
Tue, 11/26/2019 – 21:25 - Chinese Industrial Profits Collapse By Most On Record
Chinese Industrial Profits Collapse By Most On Record
China Industrial Enterprises total profits collapsed in October to CNY427.5bn from CNY575.6bn in September – a 9.9% YoY plunge, the biggest drop on record.
In fact, China’s Industrial sector has seen annual declines in its profits for 4 of the last 5 months.
Source: Bloomberg
What is perhaps even more disturbing is that seasonally, this is a period where profits typically begin to accelerate. This year, they are collapsing to the lowest since July 2013 (and lowest for an October on record)…
Source: Bloomberg
“Extended deflation in producer prices is likely to keep downward pressure on profits,” Bloomberg Economist David Qu said in a note before the data.
“Looking ahead, the low base will continue to support the year-on-year comparisons.”
Additionally, Industrial firms’ liabilities increased 4.9% from a year earlier to 66.74 trillion yuan at end-October, compared with a 5.4% increase at end-September.
And if you’re banking on more stimulus and credit to fix this – forget it!!!
Source: Bloomberg
Is Trump winning?
Tyler Durden
Tue, 11/26/2019 – 20:56 - Iran To Have Nuclear Bomb In A Few Months?
Iran To Have Nuclear Bomb In A Few Months?
Authored by Majid Rafizadeh via The Gatestone Institute,
The Iranian government is shortening its nuclear breakout time — the amount of time required to produce enough weapons-grade uranium for a single nuclear weapon. Tehran has accomplished this through several steps in the last few months.
Iran’s government first increased its enriched uranium stockpile beyond the 300 kilogram limit; it enriched uranium to levels beyond the cap of 3.67 percent, and then activated 20 IR-4 and 20 IR-6 advanced centrifuges. The Iranian leaders even boasted that their government is now exploring new uranium enrichment programs and producing centrifuges.
Most recently, the head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, Ali Akbar Salehi, declared that Iran has an adequate supply of 20% enriched uranium., “Right now we have enough 20% uranium,” he told the Iranian Students News Agency, ISNA, “but we can produce more as needed”. He added that the country is resuming uranium enrichment at a far higher level at the Fordow nuclear facility — an underground uranium enrichment facility which is reportedly located on one of bases of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) — injecting uranium gas into centrifuges, and operating 60 IR-6 advanced centrifuges.
This marks a dangerous phase in Iran’s nuclear defiance. Tehran is now using a kind of prototype centrifuge that enriches uranium almost 50 times faster.
Iran’s nuclear breakout time in 2015 was estimated at less than one year. Tehran has advanced its nuclear program since then. In an interview with Iran’s state-owned Channel 2, Salehi admitted that the “nuclear deal” initiated by then-US President Barack Obama not only failed to restrict Iran’s nuclear program; it actually helped Iran to advance its nuclear program through the flow of funds thanks to the lifting of sanctions. “If we have to go back and withdraw from the nuclear deal,” he stated, “we certainly do not go back to where we were before … We will be standing in a much, much higher position.”
Although Iran is a party to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), it refuses to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to inspect its sites. The IAEA is also not allowed to inspect or monitor Iran’s military sites, where nuclear activities are most likely being carried out.
Among the many concessions that the Obama administration granted to the Iranian government, one was accepting the Iranian leaders’ demand that military sites would be out of the IAEA’s reach. Because of this surrender, at various high-profile sites such as the Parchin military complex, located southeast of Tehran, the regime has been free to engage in nuclear activities without the risk of inspection.
The Iranian leaders keep claiming that their nuclear activities are solely for peaceful purposes. This claim is bogus. If the Islamic Republic is advancing its nuclear program for peaceful purposes, why has Tehran repeatedly failed to report its nuclear facilities, including those at Natanz and Arak, to the IAEA?
Also, why does the Iranian government keep refusing to answer the IAEA’s questions regarding a secret nuclear facility, reportedly located in the suburbs of Tehran? Two nonpartisan organizations based in Washington — the Institute for Science and International Security and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies — last year released a detailed report on Iran’s clandestine nuclear activities at this site.
In addition, why did the Iranian government place an S-300 anti-aircraft missile system at the Fordow underground nuclear site after the 2015 nuclear agreement? Finally, why does the Iranian regime never adequately address reports about its efforts to obtain illegal nuclear technology and equipment? Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, revealed in its annual report for 2016 that the Iranian government had pursued a “clandestine” path to obtain illicit nuclear technology and equipment from German companies “at what is, even by international standards, a quantitatively high level.”
The truth is that, from the perspective of the ruling clerics of Iran, obtaining nuclear weapons is a must to help Tehran advance its hegemonic ambitions to dominate the region. Also, by having nuclear weapons, the Iranian government can more powerfully support terror groups and proxies to destabilize the region without being concerned that the West might strike Iranian military targets.
Most of all, in the view of the ruling clerics, having nuclear weapons can ensure the survival of their theocratic, anti-American and anti-Semitic establishment.
That is why, before it is too late, which it is fast becoming, it is incumbent on the US and the international community to take seriously Iran’s nuclear advances and urgently address its rush to obtain nuclear weapons.
* * *
Dr. Majid Rafizadeh is a business strategist and advisor, Harvard-educated scholar, political scientist, board member of Harvard International Review, and president of the International American Council on the Middle East. He has authored several books on Islam and US foreign policy. He can be reached at Dr.Rafizadeh@Post.Harvard.Edu
Tyler Durden
Tue, 11/26/2019 – 20:45 - Bill Gross' Ominous Outlook For 2020 Comes As Stimulus Loses Its "Oomph"
Bill Gross’ Ominous Outlook For 2020 Comes As Stimulus Loses Its “Oomph”
Bill Gross spoke with Financial Times US markets editor Jennifer Ablan. Gross laid it all out for her, warning that 2020 could be a sluggish year for financial assets as fiscal and monetary stimulus becomes ineffective, or as he put it: the stimulus is losing its “oomph.”
Gross is echoing what central bankers and government officials in many G7 countries are warning about at the moment: the stimulus isn’t working as a synchronized global slowdown continues to gain momentum.
He said gains in stocks and bonds could be depressed next year as central banks have figured out that ultra-low interest rates aren’t the prescription to fixing structural issues.
Fed funds futures aren’t pricing in interest rate cuts until next summer. The most recent FOMC minutes show the Federal Reserve is likely on-hold with already three rate cuts since July. Gross said the Fed isn’t expected to use negative interest rates when the next recession strikes.
Gross said US stocks would be “flat to down 10%” in 2020, while the UST10Y would end the year around 1.75% level.
He also said stimulus from the 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs Act (TCJA) has already worked through the system and has now become a fiscal drag. “To retain the 1% boost that it provided to the economy . . . the deficit needs to expand by another $1tn or else the economy expands by 1% less,” he said.
Gross touched on politics with Ablan. He said the 2020 political environment would produce volatility for financial markets.
He added that President Trump’s “schizophrenic day-to-day” tweeting and the “Democrats waver between centrist and ultra-liberal candidates” are leading to uncertainty in the economy and markets.
With GDPNoW estimates crashing towards zero for Q4, Gross understands that a recession could be on the horizon.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 11/26/2019 – 20:25 - "Washington, The Cesspool Of The World, Will Never Rat On Itself…"
“Washington, The Cesspool Of The World, Will Never Rat On Itself…”
Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,
Former US Attorney Joe diGenova predicts that US Justice (sic) Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report on the Obama regime’s FISA court violations and US Attorney John Durham’s criminal investigation of the Russiagate hoax perpetrated by the CIA, FBI, Democratic National Committee, and presstitute media will be “very bad for people in the Obama administration. . . . it’s going to be devastating . . . it’s going to ruin careers.”
For the sake of accountable government, I hope that Mr. diGenova is right. But I have my doubts. Cabinet departments and government agencies are not very good at investigating themselves. Attorney General Barr’s job is to protect his department. He knows, and will be often told, that to bring indictments against Justice Department officials would discredit the Justice Department in the public’s mind. It would affect the attitude of juries toward DOJ prosecutions. John Durham knows the same thing. He also knows that he will create a hostile environment for himself if he indicts DOJ officials and that when he joins a law firm to capitalize on his experience as a US Attorney, he will not receive the usual favors when he represents clients against DOJ charges. Horowitz knows that his job is to coverup or minimize any illegalities in order to protect the Department of Justice from scandals.
In Washington coverups are the rule, and the DOJ coverup might already have begun. One sign of a coverup is to announce a future release date of the report. This has now occurred with Horowitz’s report on the FISA violations. The purpose of such announcements is to allow the report to be discredited in advance and to be old news by the time it appears.
Another sign of a coverup is the use of leaks to shift the focus from high level officials to lowly underlings, and this has happened with the Horowitz report, which has leaked that a low level FBI attorney is under criminal investigation for allegedly falsifying a document related to the surveillance of former Trump campaign official Carter Page in 2016. According to the leak, the FBI attorney has acknowledged that he did alter the document.
In other words, it seems we are being prepared for a false story that the plot against Trump originated in lower levels and not with CIA Director John Brennan, FBI Director James Comey, FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, and the rest.
This is the way the coverups of the US torture prison, Abu Ghraib, in Afghanistan was handled and the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. Only the underlings take the hit as if they were in charge acting on their own, independently of their superiors.
Another sign that a coverup is in place is Attorney General Barr’s assurance that Jeffrey Epstein killed himself and that evidence to the contrary is just a series of coincidences that, misunderstood, resulted in a conspiracy theory. Caitlin Johnstone gives this short shrift.
Barr claims to have personally reviewed security footage that no one entered the area where Epstein was imprisoned. Previously we were told that the security cameras were not turned on, so what security footage did Barr review? Can the rest of us see the “evidence”?
Barr also in his pronouncement evaded the remarks of the Chief Medical Examiner, who stated clearly that the damage to Epstein’s neck is not consistent with suicide but is associated with strangulation.
There was no reason whatsoever for Epstein to kill himself. He had so much dirt on the Western political elite that he could not be given his day in open court. So he was murdered. The question is, why was he picked up and murdered? Was he using the pedophile information to exact blackmail payments from those he had provided with underage sex? Is it possible for an elite society to be more corrupt than the Western elite society is? How can the West survive when its elites are corrupt beyond comprehension?
That Epstein did not kill himself is completely obvious, so when AG William Barr covers up Epstein’s murder, this is an indication that he will cover up the military/security complex/DNC/presstitute coup against President Trump.
From what I know of Washington, I am certain that Washington, the cesspool of the world, will never rat on itself.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 11/26/2019 – 20:05 - Last 30 'Radicals' In Hiding At HK's Polytechnic Campus As Humanitarian Teams Enter
Last 30 ‘Radicals’ In Hiding At HK’s Polytechnic Campus As Humanitarian Teams Enter
Hong Kong police are reportedly attempting to bring the over week-long dramatic events at Polytechnic University to a peaceful end after prior apocalyptic fire-engulfed scenes grabbed the world’s attention. “Independent” humanitarian teams are now going door to door throughout campus buildings attempting to contact the ‘radical’ holdouts.
Police have had the campus surrounded for days, and the prior 100 final holdout protesters of a week ago have now dwindled to some 30 student occupiers believed still in hiding on campus. Despite a potential 10-year prison sentence (laws against rioting, which are being applied to the protesters, carry heavy penalties), some 1,000 protesters have already walked off campus into the waiting arms of police.
However, police announced Monday those requiring medical treatment and who leave willingly would not be immediately arrested, though the official statement said authorities reserved the right to do so later.
Via SCMP: A masked radical speaks to the media at the PolyU campus at about 4.10am on Tuesday. Teams of psychologists, social workers, Red Cross medics, and trained negotiators are now going building to building, floor to floor, attempting to convince the final small group to exit of their own accord.
“A 50-strong group made up of PolyU management, security guards, councilors and Red Cross doctors divided into six teams and entered the campus at 9.30am to look for anyone who might still be in hiding,” the South China Morning Post reported Tuesday.
“We will only enter the campus in an appropriate time, hoping not to provoke people inside,” HK Chief Executive Carrie Lam said of the continuing crisis.
“I hope the group doesn’t need to be deployed, if PolyU’s working team can successfully persuade people to leave the campus safely. The mission is still about persuading them to come out,” she added.
Red Cross members entering campus amid petrol bombs and damage, via SCMP. It remains a tense situation given the humanitarian search teams want to be seen as separate from police so as not to betray the students’ trust.
However, those going in are reportedly worried about explosive items and even the potential for booby traps.
According to the SCMP:
PolyU said in its latest statement that its six teams had searched four buildings by 1pm on Tuesday, but did not find any protesters. They found that many parts of the buildings had been vandalized and destroyed, and different kinds of dangerous items and petrol bombs had also been discovered inside.
There also reports that some among the estimated 30 protesters still scattered inside the buildings are suicidal and/or plan to resist to the very end.
HK leader Lam said in a radio broadcast she believes those still inside are “afraid of police” but that the mediation team will hopefully establish positive contact, leading to a peaceful removal of the final occupiers.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 11/26/2019 – 19:45 - 'Joe Biden Doesn't Have It': Obama Tells It Straight As 2020 Candidates Seek Wisdom
‘Joe Biden Doesn’t Have It’: Obama Tells It Straight As 2020 Candidates Seek Wisdom
Barack Obama has been frustrating the Democratic establishment of late. By refusing to endorse his former VP Joe Biden – who is barely clinging to his lead as the 2020 frontrunner, while at the same time panning progressive candidates such as Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, the former president appears to be tacitly admitting that the current pool of Democratic candidates – and Biden in particular, is not worth risking his reputation over.
Politico‘s Ryan Lizza sat down with several people in Obama’s orbit, including former Attorney General Eric Holder – who wanted to run for President in 2020 but couldn’t because of Biden.
Last year, Obama let it be widely known that he would not make his preference known or, in the phrase that his close advisers frequently use, “put his thumb on the scale.” It wasn’t just Biden who was disappointed. Holder was particularly wounded that his close friend wasn’t more encouraging of his own ambitions. ”He’s still pretty sensitive about it,” said someone close to Holder. “He was really frustrated about having arrived at the decision not to run. Holder couldn’t get in because Biden and Holder have the same set of people. Once Biden was getting in then Eric couldn’t get in. So that frustrated Holder. It blocked him. And Biden has turned out the way they all feared, and that’s really frustrating to Eric.” –Politico
The seemingly obvious answer as to why Obama won’t endorse Biden is simple; they worked together for eight years, providing ample insight into Biden’s gaffe-prone mental faculties and tone-deaf opinions – not to mention the whole Ukraine thing. Both Biden and Obama have stated that Biden asked Obama not to endorse him until he’d ‘earned’ it.
Instead, the former president has been dispensing advice to all 2020 candidates who seek it, and “sees his role as providing guardrails to keep the process from getting too ugly and to unite the party when the nominee is clear,” according to the report.
That said, while Obama has been incredibly careful not to speak ill of Biden – he did take a jab at his former VP, suggesting that when it comes to having an ‘intimate bond with the electorate’ (especially in Iowa), Biden ‘really doesn’t have it.’:
With several lesser-known candidates, according to people who have talked to him or been briefed on his meetings, he was blunt about the challenges of breaking out of a large field. His advice is not always heeded. He told Patrick earlier this year that it was likely “too late” for him to secure “money and talent” if he jumped in the race. Occasionally, he can be cutting. With one candidate, he pointed out that during his own 2008 campaign, he had an intimate bond with the electorate, especially in Iowa, that he no longer has. Then he added, “And you know who really doesn’t have it? Joe Biden.” –Politico
More takeaways from Politico:
- Biden’s camp has been frustrated with Obama’s silence over Ukraine
One person who is very close to both Obama and Biden said the only time the Biden campaign has been disappointed in Obama is over Trump’s Ukraine scandal. “I don’t think anybody in the Biden world challenges Obama’s affection for Biden, or challenges his strategy of not weighing in for anybody,” this person said. ”I do think there’s frustration when Joe Biden and Hunter Biden get attacked by Republicans on the Ukrainian thing and they say, ’Obama and his administration looked the other way back when this was happening,’ and Obama doesn’t say anything. The Biden people ask, ‘Why won’t Obama say something?’”
- If Obama saw Bernie Sanders as a serious threat, he would actively campaign against him.
Obama said privately that if Bernie were running away with the nomination, Obama would speak up to stop him. (Asked about that, a spokesperson for Obama pointed out that Obama recently said he would support and campaign for whoever the Democratic nominee is.)
- Obama offers candidates three big points: “Don’t run if you don’t think you are the best person to be president; make sure you understand the toll a campaign will take on your family; and ask yourself, “Can you win?””
As he put it recently at a donor event in Washington, “Not are you guaranteed a win, but do you have a theory, a pathway whereby you win not just a primary but you also win a general election, because there is not an empty exercise if you, in fact, get in. Your goal should be to actually ultimately become the president and then be able to lead the country and the world in a serious way.”
- Obama planned to focus on setting up his foundation, writing a memoir and dealing with global issues, but feels dragged back in by Trump’s 2016 win.
But the original plan of a relaxed post-presidency of writing and thinking and mentoring, one that was relatively unencumbered by partisan politics, was blown up by the twin surprises of Trump’s victory and Biden’s decision to challenge him in 2020. Instead of remaining above the fray, Obama was forced back into the center of politics by Trump and Biden, who, for opposite reasons, talk about him and his legacy at every opportunity.
“In a perfect world, he would have retreated to a greater degree from public life than he has, much in the same way that I think George W. Bush did in his post-presidency,” Holder told me. “He would have liked to have been, though he’s too young, an elder statesman.”
Tyler Durden
Tue, 11/26/2019 – 19:35 - Second Amendment Sanctuaries: Rhetoric Vs. Reality
Second Amendment Sanctuaries: Rhetoric Vs. Reality
Authored by Michael Boldin via The Mises Institute,
Politicians in a growing number of local governments are claiming to have created “2nd Amendment Sanctuaries.” But, so far they’ve missed the mark by a wide margin.
Contrary to the rhetoric being spread in support of these efforts, virtually none of these jurisdictions have passed laws equivalent to even the most modest immigration “sanctuary city” policy. In fact, most of them aren’t passing laws at all.
While there is no concrete, legal definition of a sanctuary city, when it comes to immigration, the generally-accepted view is that the local government refuses to participate in the enforcement of a narrow to wide range of federal immigration laws.
San Francisco might be the most prominent of these. The “City and County of Refuge” Ordinance, also known as the Sanctuary Ordinance, was first passed there in 1989 and was amended as recently as 2013.
According to the city government website, it “generally prohibits City employees from using City funds or resources to assist Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the enforcement of federal immigration law unless such assistance is required by federal or state law.”
On the narrower end of the spectrum, a number of counties in Iowa have found themselves on lists of sanctuaries because county sheriffs decided that without first getting a warrant or court order, they would not honor detainer requests from ICE and hold individuals suspected of being in the country illegally.
In reviewing recently-passed “2nd Amendment Sanctuary” measures in Texas, Illinois, Oregon, Florida, Arizona and elsewhere, none of them prohibit any local government employees from using funds or resources to assist in the enforcement of federal or even state gun laws or regulations. And other than a few outliers, almost none of them have passed any laws at all, despite making public claims to have created a “sanctuary” for gun owners.
In Hood County, Texas, for example, Sheriff Roger Deeds has been outspoken in recent months about his desire for a sanctuary there, and the Commissioners Court obliged by unanimously passing a resolution sponsored by Commissioner James Deaver.
It specifically declares Hood to be a “Second Amendment Sanctuary County,” and states that it will not “appropriate government funds, resources, employees, agencies, contractors, building, detention centers or offices for the purpose of enforcing a law that unconstitutionally infringes on the right of people to keep and bear arms.”
The problem with this effort, and for those claiming to have created a sanctuary for gun owners, is the fact that Hood County passed a resolution – not an ordinance.
According to the Texas Municipal Courts Education Center (TMCEC), local governing bodies make law by passing an ordinance. A resolution “does not have the force of law” and is used as “an expression of an opinion of the legislative body.”
Despite Hood County’s claim to be a “Second Amendment Sanctuary County,” its resolution doesn’t stop the enforcement of any gun measure. It is merely the opinion of those who voted to pass it — and nothing more.
This problem isn’t exclusive to Hood County.
At the time of this writing, at least a dozen other Texas counties have also claimed “Second Amendment Sanctuary” status. All of them have passed non-binding resolutions that don’t prohibit the enforcement of anything.
The same has happened in dozens of counties in Illinois, along with Lake County, Florida, Mohave County, Arizona, and elsewhere.
This doesn’t mean that resolutions don’t have a place in a strategy to defend the right to keep and bear arms. Thomas Jefferson famously drafted resolutions in response to the Alien and Sedition Acts, and the Kentucky legislature passed them in November, 1798. But supporters there didn’t claim they nullified the hated federal acts, even though they called on all states to do just that.
In Oregon, where voters last November passed eight county-level “Second Amendment Preservation Ordinances” rather than mere resolutions, the laws only prohibit the use of local resources for the enforcement of gun laws or regulations if it’s first determined that they are unconstitutional.
In other words, enforcement assistance continues until a law or regulation is struck down.
That approach is the exact opposite of what’s happening in San Francisco and other immigration sanctuaries around the country.
While those cities have drawn a growing ire from many conservatives and republicans, it’s almost certain these self-styled Second Amendment Sanctuaries won’t get the same treatment from their ideological opponents unless they dramatically change their strategy and pass laws that actually do something.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 11/26/2019 – 19:25 - Global Recovery Derailed As World Trade Plunges Again, Recovery Hopes Fade For 2020
Global Recovery Derailed As World Trade Plunges Again, Recovery Hopes Fade For 2020
The Trump administration has pumped out a record amount of trade headlines since last summer to boost “trade optimism” and push stocks to new highs, distracting everyone from macroeconomic headwinds that continue to develop and slow global growth.
New data via the CPB World Trade Monitor suggests the world is in a deflationary mess where global trade is decelerating, and there’s nothing, at the moment, that global central banks can do as their printing presses are powerless.
Global trade volumes fell 1.3% in September MoM, after a .50% expansion in August, indicating that the global economy continues to decelerate into the late year.
The data implies that even though “trade optimism” and record central bank money printing has boosted risk assets, the real economies around the world continue to deteriorate.
“While news about the negotiations between the US and China is mixed at best, trade remains subdued,” said Timme Spakman, an economist at ING, who spoke with the Financial Times.
Global trade on a YoY basis contracted by 1.1% in September, marking the fourth consecutive YoY declines and the most extended period of subdued trade since the financial crisis in 2009.
The CPB said supply chain disruptions between the US and China, due mostly to the trade war, were the most significant drag on international trade volumes. US volumes fell 2.1% in September MoM. Though in China, imports plunged 6.9% MoM.
Bilateral trade between both countries has also plummeted over the last 15 months of the trade war.
“Due to regional and global value chains, the fall in Chinese imports also resulted in a significant decline in import demand among other Asian countries,” said Spakman
He predicted that weakness in global trade would continue through 2020.
Trade tensions have slammed the brakes on global trade growth this year, and as we’ve said on several occasions, the synchronized decline started several quarters before the trade war.
While global trade volumes have plunged in the last several months, the Federal Reserve launched ‘Not QE’ and has also been another catalyst in ramping stocks to new highs, besides the Trump administration pumping out trade headlines daily.
We’ve also outlined how China’s credit growth and economy continue to wane, and without China, the world can’t have a meaningful recovery.
So what does this all mean? Well, there’s a massive gap between global macro data and financial asset prices.
Teddy Vallee, CIO of Pervalle Global, explained this situation in a new report titled “A Once In A Decade Divergence.”
Morgan Stanley also outlines how the global economy continues to falter, but stocks are relentless in pricing in a massive rebound.
As for the trigger that shocks investors back into macro, that still remains yet to be seen.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 11/26/2019 – 19:05 - A New Pipeline Could Undo America's Influence In Asia
A New Pipeline Could Undo America’s Influence In Asia
Authored by Simon Watkins via OilPrice.com,
From the moment that the U.S. re-imposed sanctions in earnest on Iran late last year, Pakistan has been looking at ways to resuscitate a deal that had been agreed in principle before the U.S. unilaterally withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) last May.
This deal involved moving as much gas as Pakistan needs from Iran’s Asalouyeh into Pakistan’s Gwadar and then on to Nawabshah for further transit if required. At the same time, China has been in long-running discussions with Pakistan over the specific projects that Beijing wanted to place in Pakistan as part of its ‘One Belt, One Road’ (OBOR) programme. All the while, the U.S. has been trying to stymie any such arrangement but OilPrice.com understands that the Iran-China-Pakistan deal is now back on, and with a vengeance.
China’s covert strategic deals are virtually always buried in interminably long anodyne statements that belie the true laser-focused intentions of Beijing and this time is no different. Joint statements just over a week ago from both Pakistan and China sides laid out four projects that are part of a ‘broader co-operation’ between China and Pakistan. They all sound relatively run-of-the-mill affairs, although still major undertakings, and are: the upgrading of the Pakistan Refinery Karachi, the building out of a coal to liquid engineering plant based on Thar coal at Thar Sindh, the utilisation of Thar Block VI for coal gasification and fertiliser projects, and the finalisation of the feasibility study on South-North Gas Pipeline Project that traverses Pakistan.
The fact that they are much more significant to the global geopolitical balance was evidenced by the U.S.’s furious warnings to Pakistan, based on the fact that all of these projects are in reality a key part of Beijing’s planned China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which, in turn, is a cornerstone of the OBOR initiative. Even as it was, U.S. South Asia diplomat, Alice Wells, warned that CPEC – which, vitally, includes heavy financing from Beijing and, therefore, a massive debt obligation to China by the host country over time – will only profit Beijing. As it stands, the cost of just the first round of CPEC projects has risen from an initial costing of US$48 billion to at least US$62 billion right now. “It’s clear, or it needs to be clear, that CPEC is not about aid,” said Wells. “[The CPEC] corridor is going to take a growing toll on the Pakistan economy, especially when the bulk of payments start to come due in the next four to six years,” she added. “Even if loan payments are deferred, they are going to continue to hang over Pakistan’s economic development potential, hamstringing Prime Minister [Imran] Khan’s reform agenda,” she underlined.
The U.S.’s fury would have been much worse if it knew that, in fact, the ‘finalisation of the feasibility study on South-North Gas Pipeline Project’ whilst true, is just proverbially the tip of the iceberg.
“The actual plan is to resuscitate the Iran-Pakistan oil and gas pipelines over time, beginning with the gas pipeline, moving unlimited amounts of Iranian gas to Pakistan, and then into China and the rest of Asia should it be needed,” a senior source who works closely with Iran’s Petroleum Ministry told OilPrice.com last week.
“It is being done in conjunction with Russia, with the twin aims of firstly ensuring that China’s ‘One Belt, one Road’ initiative continues to run smoothly from the East through Pakistan and then Westwards into Iran and onwards into Europe,” he said.
“And, secondly, to ensure for Russia that Iran’s gas does not start flowing freely into Europe as and when the U.S. sanctions are lifted, as this would undermine Russia’s power over Europe, which is founded on supplying over a third of Europe’s gas,” he added.
For China, the new pipeline – integral to its plan of making Iran and Pakistan its client states over time – has the added benefit of putting the U.S. on the backfoot in the ongoing trade war. For Iran, the incentives of closer ties with China and Russia are principally financial but also relate to China being just one of five Permanent Members on the U.N. Security Council (the others being Russia, the U.S., the U.K., and France). For Pakistan as well there is the added incentive that it is tired of being lambasted by the U.S. for its duplicity in dealing with international terrorism. Not that long ago, the U.S. accused Pakistan of supporting the Taliban (correct but it was catalysed by the U.S.’s key Middle Eastern ‘ally’, Saudi Arabia), Al Qaeda (correct but catalysed, funded and logistically supported by the Saudis), the Haqqani network (correct but also funded and logistically supported by the Saudis), and Islamic State (sort of correct but that was also mainly, of course, the Saudis) against U.S. forces, despite taking hundreds of billions of dollars in aid payments.
Islamabad has also been an outspoken critic of renewed U.S. sanctions against Iran. Just after the first wave of the new sanctions were rolled out on 7 August last year, Pakistan’s Foreign Office spokesman Muhammad Faisal said that: “We are examining the implications of the U.S.’s re-imposed sanctions on Iran, however, Pakistan, being a sovereign state, reserves the right to pursue legitimate economic and commercial interests while respecting the international legal regime.” Later, in his inaugural speech as Pakistan’s then-new Prime Minister, Imran Khan, called for improving ties with the country’s immediate neighbours, including Iran, from whose President, Hassan Rouhani, he also accepted an invitation for an early state visit to Tehran. Bubbling back at that time to the top of the list of practical initiatives that could be advanced quickly was the Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline (IPP), which, according to the Iran source: “[Imran] Khan personally backs and has made a priority project.”
In practical terms, Pakistan certainly needs all the sustainable energy sources it can get. As it stands, the country has seen domestic natural gas production stagnate at around 4 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) against demand of more than 6 Bcf/d, which has led to repeated load shedding in many major cities of up to 15 hours a day. Moreover, the supply and demand disparity is set to become even worse very soon, as industry estimates project that Pakistan’s domestic gas production is set to fall to nearer 2 Bcf/d by 2020, due to aging infrastructure, whilst demand will rise to around 8 Bcf/d by the same time, driven by rising demand from the power, industry, and domestic sectors as the economy continues to grow by around 5% per year. According to Pakistan’s Ministry of Energy (MoE), the planned 0.75 Bcf/d of gas (for five years, in the first instance) that would flow from Iran’s supergiant South Pars natural gas field would add around 4,000 megawatts (MW) of electricity into the Pakistan grid, via a direct Iran-Pakistan pipeline.
The original agreement for the IPP, signed between Iran and Pakistan in 1995, was predicated on the pipeline running from Iran’s supergiant South Pars non-associated natural gas field into Karachi but the most recent iteration of the route involves the gas running from Iran’s Asalouyeh and into Pakistan’s Gwadar and then on to Nawabshah. The latest projection of the cost of the pipeline is around US$3.5 billion, according to industry sources, although US$2.5 billion of this has already been invested in the 900 kilometre stretch on Iran’s side that has already been completed. Pakistan’s 780 kilometre stretch has yet to be started.
Given the geopolitical importance of both Iran and Pakistan to Russia and China, though, as analysed in greater depth in my new book on the global oil markets, finding the money for the remainder of the project will not be a problem at all For China, there is a threefold motivation.
First, its plans to integrate the IPP into the CPEC project means that Gwadar is earmarked to be a key logistical node in China’s ‘One Belt, One Road’ initiative.
Second, it wants to keep Iran as one of its key suppliers of oil and gas in the future.
And third, it regards supporting those who the U.S. opposes as being a central plank of its foreign policy, even over and above the short-term tactic of wrong-footing the U.S. in the ongoing trade war.
“One immediate reaction [of China to the burgeoning trade war with the US], will be to seek to expand and broaden economic links by offering improved market access to non-U.S. companies, by strengthening supply chain links and by replacing American commodities with imports from emerging market nations,” according to Jonathan Fenby, China research chairman at TS Lombard, in London.
“There is a tectonic shift going on that goes well beyond the tariff war, as China seeks to assert itself regionally and tries to establish a wider global role for itself while the U.S. moves from the ‘constructive engagement’ of the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations to regarding China as a ‘strategic competitor’,” he added.
The U.S. clearly sees it the same way, not just based on the latest comments by Wells but also on the fact that as long ago as January 2010, the U.S. formally requested that Pakistan abandon the project in return for which it would receive assistance from Washington for the construction of a liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal and for the importing of electricity from Tajikistan through Afghanistan’s Wakhan Corridor.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 11/26/2019 – 18:45 - Russian Trolls Have Virtually No Effect On US Twitter Users: Duke University
Russian Trolls Have Virtually No Effect On US Twitter Users: Duke University
A recent study from Duke University appears to support former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s February 2018 announcement that Russian internet trolls did not affect the outcome of the 2016 US election – a campaign which the New York Times described as “the Pearl Harbor of the social media age.”
Researchers analyzed the “6 distinctive measures of political attitudes and behaviors” of 1,239 Republican and Democratic Twitter users from late 2017 over a one-month period.
Lead researcher Chris Bail notes that while “many studies have analyzed the content and strategy of these campaigns,” hardly anyone has looked at their actual impact.
By combining a massive data set released by Twitter in the wake of the 2016 US election with their own data from a late-2017 study, the team found that Russian efforts had “no significant effects,” and that people who interacted with troll accounts were “primarily those who are already highly polarized.”
7. Though our analysis has important limitations (see below), we found no significant effects of interacting with trolls for any of our outcomes. We also found that the people who are mostly likely to interact with trolls are primarily those who are already highly polarized.
— Chris Bail (@chris_bail) November 25, 2019
Offering suggestions as to why this is the case, Bail says their finding is consistent with the theory of “minimal effects” in political communication research, which is that “people who are most likely to engage with political messaging are the least likely to be influenced by it.”
Another thought is that “interactions with trolls were relatively rare and usually very brief/sporadic.”
10. It is also possible we found no effects simply because interactions with trolls were relatively rare and usually very brief/sporadic. Things might have been different if interaction was more widespread and extended over protracted time periods.
— Chris Bail (@chris_bail) November 25, 2019
That said, the Bail admits the study has Limitations.
For example, they only studied Twitter and were unable to analyze “whether troll interaction shapes perceptions of trust, voting behavior, and other more indirect forms of influence.” They also were unable to determine whether trolls had more influence during the 2016 US election, or whether their influence “has evolved to become more impactful in the U.S. (or elsewhere)” since 2017.
15. For now though, we think our finding is an important reminder that the American public is not tabula rosa and may be more difficult to manipulate than many people think.
— Chris Bail (@chris_bail) November 25, 2019
Perhaps in addition to forcing Hillary Clinton to abandon the rust belt, Vladimir Putin has infiltrated Duke University?
Tyler Durden
Tue, 11/26/2019 – 18:25
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