Today’s News 28th December 2016

• Europe Proposes Confiscating Gold In Crackdown On "Terrorist Financing"

  Hot on the heels of China gold import restrictions, and India's demonetization and gold confiscations, The European Commission proposed tightening controls on cash and precious metals transfers from outside the EU under the guise of shutting down one route for funding of militant attacks on the continent, following the Berlin Christmas attack.

  China has already begun de facto gold import restrictions, and as Jayant Bhandari detailed previously, India is experiencing a continuation of new social engineering notifications, each sabotaging wealth-creation, confiscating people’s wealth, and tyrannizing those who refuse to be a part of the herd, in the process destroying the very backbone of the economy and civilization. There are clear signs that in a very convoluted way, possession of gold for investment purposes will be made illegal. Expect capital controls to follow.

  

  And now, as Reuters reports, it appears last Monday's attack on a Christmas market in Berlin, where 12 people were killed as a truck ploughed into a crowd, has given The European Commission just the excuse to tighten capital controls – specifically cash and precious metals – into and out of Europe.

  It is part of an EU "action plan against terrorist financing" unveiled after the bombings and shootings in Paris in November 2015.

   

  Under the new proposals, customs officials in European Union states can step up checks on cash and prepaid payment cards sent by post or in freight shipments.

   

  Authorities will also be able to seize cash or precious metals carried by suspect individuals entering the EU.

   

  People carrying more than 10,000 euros (8,413.56 pounds) in cash already have to declare this at customs when entering the EU. The new rules would allow authorities to seize money below that threshold "where there are suspicions of criminal activity," the EU executive commission said in a note.

   

  EU officials said some of the recent attacks in Europe were carried out with limited funds, sometimes sent from outside the EU by criminal networks.

  The Commission is also considering whether to set up an EU-focussed "terrorist finance tracking programme" along the lines of the U.S.-EU TFTP, which has long been opposed by EU lawmakers and privacy campaigners because it allows widespread checks on consumers' bank transfers.

  The plan complements Commission proposals after the Paris attacks to tighten controls on virtual currencies such as bitcoin, and prepaid cards, which French authorities said were used to fund the bombings.

   

  EU states backed these proposals on Tuesday. Under the deal, which still needs European Parliament approval, holders of prepaid cards would have to show some form of identity when they make payments of 150 euros or more.

  But it gets better…

  The Commission is also proposing common rules for the 28 EU countries on freezing "terrorists' financial resources" and on confiscating assets even from those thought to be connected to criminals.

  So – cash, bitcoin, precious metals, and prepaid cards over $150 are all instruments of the "terrorists" and are now open to confiscation if you are a suspicious person… which, by their rhetoric, you are if you actually hold any of these assets.

  

  

• How The Crackdown On Patriots Will Occur: "Dissent Will Become Unthinkable"

  Submitted by Mac Slavo via SHTFPlan.com,

  

  Despite the rise of populism and a resurgence of American values, it has become more dangerous than ever to speak out. A new war on patriots has begun…

  In the visible future, Americans may see real tyranny take hold at home. The deep state, which operates both inside and outside of the official channels and independently of presidents and Congress, is waging a war against the constitutional rights, financial independence and the rugged individualism that has allowed freedom to exist to a certain degree in this country.

  Speaking out as a patriot – despite the sense of victory in the people with the election of Donald Trump – has never been more dangerous.

  This is the time when people will start to disappear. But it begins digitally….

  While a major event is likely to take place in the next several years that could justify red level action on the ground to raid, round-up and re-shelter patriots and prominent voices in the alternative media may well take place in an American future – and has historically taken place in several notable regimes – it is more likely to happen online.

  The forum of social media on the internet is not only shutting down outlawed opinions, but it is also re-educating the populace about what is acceptable to think. It is doing more to reprogram the mind than TV ever could. Algorithms for censorship mean that dissent will no longer be heard by many people. Mere association with outlaws and undesirables will hurt social and credit scores, and society is likely to cluster around redundant groups of safe speech and like viewpoints reinforced by a narrow band of news coverage.

  You will see individuals in the news who are labeled as domestic terrorists; some of them will have done nothing more than spoken out against the system. The NDAA and, now, the

  BLEACHING PUBLIC OPINION

  Wash and rinse, concentrating down certain artificial attitudes, and bleaching out the undesirable ones. This has been an objective of the CIA, the State Dept., US AID and other government agencies for decades now.

  Television programming, radio broadcasts, leaf-letting and other forms of propaganda are dissemintated, both here and at home, and routinely carry pro-state messages. The coordination of public thought and discourse is alarming.

  

  Here’s a theory: Maybe the TV will only show you what you’re allowed to believe. Political pundits already have a name for this concept: the Overton window.

  A shift in the “window of discourse,” known as the Overton window determines what the public will accept. Will any political question, the two opposing viewpoints, and all the middle ground, will fall within the accepted plane of thought, no matter how vehemently there are cries of right or left, yes or no, less or more, tyranny or freedom. Wikipedia summarizes:

  The Overton window, also known as the window of discourse, is the range of ideas the public will accept. It is used by media pundits. The term is derived from its originator, Joseph P. Overton (1960–2003), a former vice president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, who in his description of his window claimed that an idea’s political viability depends mainly on whether it falls within the window, rather than on politicians’ individual preferences. According to Overton’s description, his window includes a range of policies considered politically acceptable in the current climate of public opinion, which a politician can recommend without being considered too extreme to gain or keep public office.

  Because the public perceives that it has been offered multiple choices, individual members of the public take stake in whichever view – confined within that acceptable window – best fits theirs. But they lack perception of the shifts in direction that window has taken; they have forgotten all previous attitudes – or regard them as taboo or ridiculous.

  Right now, the biggest shift in the Overton window is happening on social media. Facebook and Google are leading the charge, hiring new hit teams to flag and censor news.

  Because it all works on algorithms, the “window” effect becomes literal, rather than just figurative. News and information that falls outside of the acceptable range of view is simply not seen by the public – it is hidden from view, and omitted from search results.

  Yet increasingly, Facebook accounts, Google credentials and etc. are needed for identification, transactions, etc. Banking and commerce is leaning towards becoming completely digital. Cash controls have begun in the United States and abroad.

  This is where prepping, patriotism and independence has begun to be outlawed. Politically-correct speech is now just programmed into the system.

  Electricity and data are now intertwined. Smart meters, smart grids and smart appliances go together and make tracking built in. The concept of digital footprints expands…

  OUTLAWING DISSENT & INDEPENDENCE

  In the next two decades – independence will be ferreted out.

  While a truly free spirit can never be crushed, they are making it harder than ever to go rogue in occupied America.

  Living off the grid has been criminalized in many places, and strongly discouraged in most, with codes leading to conformity in the real world. True individuals are few and far between, but the struggle goes on.

  Pockets of resistance continue to be met with public relations problems and threats of government raids. Malheur and Bundy Ranch have offered a glimpse into what may be ahead; Waco and Ruby Ridge provide examples from the past.

  Patriots will endure… but in the coming years, they will either work inside the system – where hackers and whistle blowers have become traitors – or operate outside of its boundaries altogether. Patriots will need people on the inside and outside.

  Individuals will be rounded up through police encounters; speech will flag people as dangerous, and arrests will be made in conjunction with domestic disputes, nosy neighbors, false reports, etc. Database “pings” will pre-mark dissenters for detention or prison.

  Patriots have been marked for suspicion, and so have the symbols that express those positions. Beware in how you are seen, particularly, if there is a need to stay below the radar and avoid detection. Unless you have shielded your identity, your past actions and words could give you away.

  

  The system places patriots under suspicion, and closely monitors independent, unaccountable actions… because they are control freaks.

  A COMING CIVIL WAR

  A civil war is being created as a response from the system to maintain long-term dominance through banking and information management.

  Meanwhile, they will be coming for those who are speaking out. The only question is when.

  As Michael Snyder reported:

  According to a senior government official who served with high-level security clearances in five administrations, “There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived ‘enemies of the state’ almost instantaneously.” He and other sources tell Radar that the database is sometimes referred to by the code name Main Core. One knowledgeable source claims that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect. In the event of a national emergency, these people could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention.

  War will be asymmetrical, and physical conflict will be balanced with cyber engagement of public perception.

  As resistance continues, the liberty contingent will have to be wary of an evolving threat matrix that seeks to use technology as a means of control.

  Above all, recognize that the system will phase in their control gradually – it is this seamless shift of perception, stretched out over time, that is its greatest weapon.

  HOW TO DISAPPEAR COMPLETELY

  Identity protection will be crucial, and use of technology should reflect the state of the art of surveillance.

  If you want to get yourself totally outside of the system, and stay there, it will be increasingly difficult to do, but not impossible.

  Sargent Survival at BeSurvival.com has some very solid tips for making this a reality. Here are just a few, but read them all and be thorough about your process:

  • There are 30 million plus surveillance cameras on the US, one camera for every ten Americans.
  • The average American is in 200 databases.
  • Putting a plan in motion to keep you from being tracked is a good idea if you want to devise a new life for yourself

  • Right before you leave, change your appearance significantly
  • Before you leave, terminate all of your accounts (email, bank accounts, credit cards, etc).
  • Don’t terminate your social network sites as you can use these sites to provide disinformation.
  • Before you leave, delete all of your computer files and get rid of your computer’s hard drive  – boil; smash; run a Degausser/ electromagnetic wand
  • Get rid of all of your personal items like photos, trophies, mementos, etc. that could tie you to your old life.
  • Get rid of your cell phone or tablet as these can be easily used to track your location

  • Break your normal patterns (what you eat, where you frequent, how you shop, the kind of work you do, etc).
  • Completely change your lifestyle [and employment]
  • Pay for everything with cash.
  • Avoid frequenting your usual places
  • Ditch your car and find a substitute; get rid of the toll pass which can track your movements

  • To determine the best place to resettle, choose a mid-sized city in a not overly cold place. Big cities and small towns are not good places for anonymity because of all the cameras.
  • To change your identity … petition the court to change your name legally to a new–and common–name.
  • Apply for a driver’s license under your new name.

  • Buy a basic pre-paid cell phone (not a smart phone). Replace the pre-paid phone frequently, about every 2 weeks.
    When you are not using the cell phone, remove the battery
  • To get back online use a new laptop. Stay away from libraries!
  • Always use a hard wire to your laptop and turn off the wi-fi; reroute your ip address so your location can’t be determined
  • Be aware of the NSA spying and the ECHELON program in the US which monitors phone and computer transmissions for keywords and messages.
  • The police now consider common activities suspicious such as bird watching, sketching or painting, or taking photographs in public.
  • There are 70+ FUSION centers in the US which coordinate surveillance and other information.
  • Technology is now available to identify you by the way you walk, your facial measurements and biometrics
  • It will be 7 to 10 years before your old identity drops off of databases, if ever.
  • The less you interface with technology, the better off you will be.

  In the next few years, you must make careful decisions about when you will and will not engage the system, use technology, or participate in society.

  Freedom will not be compatible with the digital control grid; it will endure in ways that out think the constraints that have been placed on us, in whatever way it can.

  

  

• CNBC's John Harwood Blames "White Fear" For Democrat Losses Under Obama

  In the months leading up the 2016 election, daily WikiLeaks dumps repeatedly exposed CNBC’s John Harwood as nothing more than a pawn of the Hillary Clinton campaign who constantly behaved like a subservient puppy who would stop at nothing to garner his master’s love and affection (see our posts on the topic here and here).  And while the embarrassment of being exposed as a complete fraud would be sufficient motivation for most people to actually start performing their jobs with some level of integrity, John Harwood is apparently immune to the side effects of public humiliation that afflict the masses.

  As the latest testament to his extreme impartiality as CNBC’s chief Washington Correspondent, Harwood sent out the following tweet storm aimed at all of “those making [the] silly argument that Obama hurt [the] Democratic Party” to confirm, once and for all, that “white fear” (aka racism) was responsible for democratic losses in Congress under Obama’s leadership and not his failed policies. 

  for those making silly argument that Obama hurt Democratic Party: last 5 presidents have left both houses of Congress in opposition hands

  — John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) December 27, 2016

  drivers of D casualties under Obama: a) depth of financial crisis/Great Recession b) accumulated angst over 30-year income stagnation 1/2

  — John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) December 27, 2016

  drivers of D casualties under Obama: c) effective/unified R opposition, esp to ACA; d) Obama’s race amid white fear of cultural change 2/2

  — John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) December 27, 2016

  among 2-term presidents, Clinton/Bush/Obama all began w/both houses of Congress run by their party, saw both flip. Reagan had & lost Senate

  — John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) December 27, 2016

   

  If true, perhaps Mr. Harwood could explain to us why the “racist” and “angry” white people of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania voted for Obama by margins of 10-20 points in 2008 before suddenly turning on Democrats in 2016?  Did those people who voted overwhelmingly for the first black President in U.S. history in 2008 suddenly become racists over the course of 8 years?  Or, is it just maybe possible that those people were disappointed that Obama’s “Hope and Change” rhetoric turned out to be nothing more than a pretty speech by yet another superficial politician?

  

  

• India's Prime Minister Has Singlehandedly Crushed The Economy With His Reckless Cash Ban

  Submitted by Mike Krieger via Lberty Blitzkrieg blog,

  

  Today’s piece should be seen as a bit of a followup to yesterday’s post, India’s Demonetization Debacle Highlights the Dangers of Monetary Monopoly. While yesterday’s piece was more philosophical/strategic in nature, today’s zeroes in on some of the devastating real world impacts of Narendra Modi’s insane and inhumane cash ban. It’s hard to overstate the damage this policy has done to India’s economy. Modi is quickly solidifying his place as one of monetary history’s biggest idiots.

  First, let’s take a look at the destructive impact the move has had on India’s massive small businesses community. The Washington Post reports:

  NOIDA, India — Over the past two years, this suburb of New Delhi mushroomed into a flourishing enclave of small cellphone manufacturers, attracting tens of thousands of workers from the countryside. Noida, known as the “handset hub,” was touted as a showcase for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s pet “Make in India” initiative.

   

  Then on Nov. 8, Modi’s government took a step that has jolted the bustling industrial quarter. It scrapped high-denomination currency, with a view, officials said, to curbing illicit wealth and the financing of terrorism. But the cash shortage triggered by the move has also curbed legitimate small enterprises. Many of Noida’s manufacturing units have slashed production by nearly half, and more than a quarter of the workers have gone back to their villages.

   

  “It was a booming sunrise industry before November 8th. Not now,” said Vipin Malhan, president of the Noida Entrepreneurs Association, who also runs a business that makes cellphone accessories here. “Many small factories and assembling units, which used to work round-the-clock, with three shifts, have scaled down to just a single shift. We are all in shock now. One word that businesses dread is ‘uncertainty.’ The government has thrown that at us.”

   

  Several small- and medium-scale industrial clusters, employing a total of more than 80 million people across India, are reporting declining sales, production slowdowns and layoffs since bills worth 500 and 1,000 Indian rupees were invalidated (500 Indian rupees is worth about $7.40). Towns famous for weavers, lockmakers, power looms, bicycle-parts manufacturers, ready-made garments and handicrafts face rising inventories of unsold goods.

   

  Even large car manufacturers have halted production in some of their factories for several days because of a sharp dip in consumer spending. And in a reflection of the belt-tightening that has accompanied the general sense of uncertainty, credit card companies have posted a decline in the total value of transactions, even as the cash shortage is forcing people to use their cards more.

   

  “We started hearing murmurs that there were no fresh orders from the market. That our raw material was stuck because we could not pay. Stocks were piling up,” said Sudhir Ramphool Singh, 33, who lost his job at a cellphone assembly unit in Noida and returned to his Dharavu village in northern India this month. He is the sole breadwinner for his family of seven. “Production slowed. The unit was shut down for 10 days. When it reopened, many of us were asked to go.”

   

  With the large bellwether state of Uttar Pradesh slated to hold elections early next year, the business slump — and the lines at the banks — have become campaign issues.

   

  “Forget about creating new jobs. Modi’s decision is taking away people’s jobs,” the opposition Congress party leader, Rahul Gandhi, said at a public meeting this month.

   

  Modi has urged people to adopt digital payment methods and bear some pain to support the long-term goal of rooting out corruption.

   

  Mishra’s office is conducting 50 training sessions every day in small industrial hubs to help residents transition to cashless transactions. But many business owners in these clusters say it is not easy to change because daily wage laborers do not accept checks and do not have smartphones with Internet.

  Well done Modi.

  Last week, about 200 business executives in Ludhiana staged a sit-in against the cash-swap decision, calling it “ill-conceived.” They even formed a “stick brigade” and are threatening to beat tax officers who show up to “scrutinize our books needlessly and harass us.”

   

  In the country’s largest textile town, Bhiwandi, in western India, more than 2 million power looms used to operate round-the-clock. Countless machines are silent now.

   

  “The cash shortage has come as the latest blow to the industry that was already hit by global competition. Fifty to 60 percent of power looms have shut down, and more than 150,000 workers have gone back to their villages,” said Rashid Tahir Momin, whose family owns about 400 power looms.

  Naturally, this is just the tip of the iceberg. The Indian diamond market has also been thrown into total chaos.

  As Reuters reports:

  The global diamond industry is facing disruption that could stretch through the first few months of next year, including Valentine’s Day in February, as a result of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s radical move to abolish most of the nation’s cash overnight.

   

  In the western Indian city of Surat craftsmen usually spend 10-12 hours a day in small mills or grimy sheds cutting and polishing 80 percent of the world’s diamonds but the business is based on cash and the demonetization of the high-value banknotes from Nov. 8 has prevented many from operating. Thousands of diamond brokers in the area’s narrow lanes are also doing little business.

   

  In India, jewelry demand typically climbs in the winter months’ wedding season. But this year sales are plunging as nearly two-thirds of jewelry is usually purchased with cash, which is in short-supply.

   

  Ishu Datwani, owner of Mumbai-based Anmol Jewellers, says his sales are down nearly 70 percent since the government scrapped the high-value notes.

   

  The demand is unlikely to revive any time soon as India struggles to dispense enough new notes, industry officials say.

  Let this be a lesson to all of us regarding the dangers of centralized power. There’s no reason we should ever allow ourselves to be in a position where the foolish, capricious actions of one man can have such a devastating impact on an economy of more than one billion. This is precisely why we need to move toward a more decentralized way of living and discard many of the archaic, unnecessary and harmful institutions of the past.

  

  

• Post-Christmas Chaos Strikes America's Malls: SWAT, Gunfire, & Mass Brawls From Texas To New Jersey

  Two days ago, we reported that heading into Christmas, countless “mall brawls” had broken out across America’s as last minute holiday shoppers were filmed fighting with each other in shopping malls in New Jersey, Alabama, Georgia and other states for those last minute “holiday cheer” purchases. The videos made for for a very Unmerry Christmas.

  Now, in the spirit of holiday symmetry, following the one day lull on Christmas Day, the brawls returned on the day after Christmas, with fights, disturbances and false reports of gunfire causing chaotic scenes and shutting down several malls across the United States on Monday, as shoppers scrambled for the best deals in the typically busy post-Christmas shopping day.

  The first calls from the The Mills at Jersey Gardens came in just after nightfall Monday. Witnesses said they thought they had heard shots fired. That, along with a fight, led to what Elizabeth police Officer Greg Jones described as a “chaotic panic and everybody running all at once.”  Eight to 10 people suffered minor injuries during a melee in the food court at the Jersey Gardens malls the mayor there said on Twitter.

  Panic followed when someone shouted “gun,” after a chair hit the ground, causing a loud noise in the mall’s food court, Elizabeth Mayor Chris Bollwage tweeted.

  

  The incident led to a SWAT team with riot shields and body armor raiding the mall, while shoppers either ran or hid in stores. No weapons were found and no-one was arrested.

  Photos and video clips posted on social media showed heavily armed police officers responding to the incident as shoppers raced to exits and alarms rang out inside the mall.

  Similar disturbances unfolded across the United States on Monday at malls that were packed with shoppers returning gifts, using gift cards they received over the holiday weekend or simply searching for clearance deals. Many involved calls of shots being fired and youths fighting. It was unclear if the incidents were connected.

  As Reuters reports, a large fight between teenagers broke out in the food court at the Cross Creek Mall in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Police fielded several unconfirmed reports of shots fired, said a Facebook post by the Fayetteville Police Department, which also said the mall was evacuated.

  
  The Cross Creek Mall in Fayetteville, North Carolina, was evacuated as police arrived
  to break up the fight. Claims were made that shots were fired.

  “Once people start running in that area or chairs are getting knocked over, tables, that sort of thing, that echoes and it could resemble the sound of a gunshot to a lot of people,” he said.

  Ref Cross Creek Mall. Reported shots fired. Unconfirmed. No shooting victims or property damage. Mall made the decision to evacuate, not PD

  — Fayetteville Police (@FayettevillePD) December 26, 2016

  The Hulen Mall in Fort Worth, Texas, was on lockdown, Fort Worth police said on Twitter. The CBS website there reported that police said officers responded to reports of gunshots but arrived to find that several fights had broken out involving 100-150 people. There were no injuries, police said.  Fort Worth Police spokeswoman Tamara Velle said officers initially responded to reported gunfire inside the mall. After breaking up the fights, officers stopped by each store to let people leave while the lockdown remained in effect, KTVT reported.

  hulen mall wild for this one lmao pic.twitter.com/4rD4ZO5h1H

  — cyn ???? (@CyNinja) December 27, 2016

  At least one fight shut down the Fox Valley Mall in Aurora, Illinois, late on Monday, and police were called to quell the disturbance, the Chicago Daily Herald reported, citing managers of businesses in the building.

  Online videos showed uniformed personnel directing mall patrons out of the building and customers fleeing down an escalator. Police and mall management could not be reached for comment.

  
  Hundreds of people (left) were in the vicinity of a food court brawl (right) in the
  Fox Valley Mall in Aurora, Illinois. Seven juveniles were arrested in the fight

  In Memphis, Tennessee, seven people were arrested after incidents at two malls, CNN affiliate WMCA reported. Police said a group started a disturbance in the Wolfchase Galleria food court and started running, which prompted some customers to call 911, according to Fox 13.

  
  Cops at Wolfchase Mall in Memphis removed both adults and juveniles.

  
  An officer leaves Oak Court Mall in Memphis, Tennesse where police were called
  after a fight broke out and reports were made of shots being fired.

  Then a crowd gathered outside Oak Court Mall, about 10 miles west, and
  started a disturbance, WMCA said. Both malls were cleared and closed
  early for the night.

  
  Visitors to Oak Creek Mall linger in the parking lot outside as police patrol the area

  The Town Center Aurora in Aurora, Colorado, was also closed early after multiple skirmishes were reported inside the mall, the Aurora Police Department said on Twitter.

  
  Teens were tackled by cops at the Aurora Mall in Colorado. There were several
  large fights ‘involving juveniles’, cops said

  Aurora PD spokesman Sgt. Chris Amsler said about 100 people had gathered in the food court before the brawls broke out — prompting the Colorado mall to close early on Monday afternoon. “(It) kind of morphed into this large disturbance,” Amsler said.

  When off-duty police officers working as security guards tried to break up a fight, people circled the officers, who called for backup, Amsler said. As police officers on duty arrived, fights broke out throughout the mall, at a movie theater and at a nearby park-and-ride lot, he said. He estimated 500 people were involved. Authorities arrested five people, all juveniles, and recovered no weapons, he said. One person assaulted at the park-and-ride lot suffered “significant” injuries and was taken to a hospital, Amsler said.

  The mall is closing early this evening due to a disturbance. No immediate threats exist. We will open tomorrow at 10 a.m.

  — Town Center Aurora (@TCAurora) December 27, 2016

  In Monroeville, Pennsylvania, seven people were arrested after incidents at two malls, CNN affiliate WMCA reported. Police said a group started a disturbance in the Wolfchase Galleria food court and started running, which prompted some customers to call 911, WMCA said. Then a crowd gathered outside Oak Court Mall, about 10 miles west, and started a disturbance, WMCA said. Both malls were cleared and closed early for the night.

  Shots were reported in both incidents, but police said they found no evidence of gunfire, WMCA said. No injuries were reported, CNN affiliate WATN said.

  Police put the Arizona Mills mall in Tempe, Arizona, on lockdown after reports of shots fired inside the shopping center. Two people, including a juvenile, were arrested after two fights broke out at the mall, an ABC affiliate reported.

  In Beechwood, Ohio, a juvenile was arrested for hitting a police officer after police used pepper spray to break up a fight that started about 6:30pm near a food court. Crowds were seen falling over themselves in a stampede towards the exits at the Beechwood Place mall, which went into lockdown as police investigated. Officers initially responded to the scene for a report of shots fired. Police later confirmed that there were no gunshots.

  
  Shoppers rush into a wild stampede at the Beechwood Place Mall after a fight broke
  out and someone shouted – incorrectly, police said – that a gun had been drawn

  Fire officials say a man and a police officer were exposed to the pepper spray and received medical treatment. No one else was injured. John Boyd, the 19-year-old who was hit with pepper spray, described the sensation to Cleveland.com.  ‘My face burned… it went into my skin,’ Boyd said. ‘My whole body burned.’ It wasn’t clear what caused the fight, but police told USA Today that the incident had apparently been ‘loosely organized on social media’.

  Finally, a fight at The Shoppes at Buckland Hills mall in Manchester, Connecticut, led to the mall being evacuated around 5:30pm, according to police. Video shows boys throwing swift jabs at one another while other youths crowd around to watch.

  ‘Up to ten’ teenagers were involved in the fights, according to police. One police officer was assaulted while trying to break up one of the first fights, authorities said, but didn’t seek medical attention.

  
  Crowds peered through glass as boys threw punches at one another in The Shoppes
  at Buckland Hills mall in Manchester, CT. Several boys were arrested

  There were several hundred teens in the mall when the fights broke out, and several were arrested, Manchester police Captain Chris Davis said on Twitter. There were no weapons involved and no sign that the fight was gang related, police said.  It’s not known whether the rash of incidents across the country were coordinated in any way, or were just coincidental.

  

  

• Things That Make You Go Hmm… Like The Death Of The Petrodollar, And What Comes After

  Excerpted from “Get It. Got It. Good” by Grant Williams, author of “Things That Make You Go Hmm…”

  

  The story begins in the 1970s when Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon struck a deal with the House of Saud — a deal which gave birth to the petrodollar system.

  The terms were simple The Saudis agreed to ONLY accept U.S. Dollars in return for their oil and that they would reinvest their surplus dollars into U.S. treasuries.

  In return, the U.S. would provide arms and a security guarantee to the Saudis who, it has to be said, were living in a pretty rough neighbourhood. As you can see, things went swimmingly (chart below)

  

  Saudi purchases of treasuries grew along with the oil price and everyone was happy.  (We’ll come back to that blue box on the right shortly)

  The inverse correlation between the dollar and crude is just about as perfect as one could expect (until recently that is… but again, we’ll be back to that).

  

  And, as you can see here, beginning when Nixon slammed the gold window shut on French fingers and picking up speed once the petrodollar system was ensconced, foreign buyers of U.S. debt grew  exponentially.

  Having the world’s most vital commodity exclusively priced in U.S. dollars meant everybody needed to hold large dollar reserves to pay for it and that meant a yuuuge bid for treasuries. It’s good to be the king.

  

  By 2015, as the chart on the next page shows quite clearly, there were treasuries to the value of around 6 years of total global oil supply in the hands of foreigners (if we assume a constant 97 million bpd supply which I think is a pretty reasonable estimate).

  Now… with that brief background on the petrodollar system, here’s where I need you to stick with me. I promise you it’ll be worth the mental effort

  Ready? Here we go.

  Now, back in 2010, then-World Bank President Robert Zoellick caused something of a commotion when he suggested that an entirely new global monetary system maybe wasn’t such a bad idea.

  The system he had in mind involved a freely-convertible Yuan and, controversially was constructed around gold as its central reference point:

  (Robert Zoellick, November 8, 2010): …the G20 should complement this growth recovery programme with a plan to build a co-operative monetary system that reflects emerging economic conditions. This new system is likely to need to involve the dollar, the euro, the yen, the pound and a renminbi that moves towards internationalisation and then an open capital account.

   

  The system should also consider employing gold as an international reference point of market expectations about inflation, deflation and future currency values. Although textbooks may view gold as the old  money, markets are using gold as an alternative monetary asset today.

  In seemingly unrelated news, two years later, Iran began accepting Yuan in payment for its oil amid US sanctions. The transactions were conducted through Russian banks:

  (Financial Times, May 2012): Iran is accepting renminbi for some of the crude oil it supplies to China…

   

  …Tehran is spending the currency, which is not freely convertible, on goods and services imported from China…

   

  The trade is worth as much as $20bn-$30bn annually according to industry estimates…

   

  The renminbi purchases began some months ago…much of the money is transferred to Tehran through Russian banks, which take large commissions on the transactions…

   

  Beijing has been trying to get its trading partners to use the renminbi, in effect transferring the exchange rate risk to its counterparties, since the price of crude is set in US dollars. It also frees Beijing of the need to hold as many dollars in its reserves.

  The crucial part of this deal was that, by diversifying their purchases in this way, the Chinese had found a path towards not only needing to hold fewer U.S. dollar reserves, but to circumventing the petrodollar system altogether.

  By 2013, the penny had clearly dropped at the PBoC who declared an end to the era of their accumulation of U.S. treasuries:

  (Bloomberg, November 2013): The People’s Bank of China said the country does not benefit any more from increases in its foreign-currency holdings, adding to signs policy makers will rein in dollar purchases that limit the yuan’s appreciation.

   

  “It’s no longer in China’s favor to accumulate foreign-exchange reserves,” Yi Gang, a deputy governor at the central bank, said in a speech organized by China Economists 50 Forum at Tsinghua University yesterday. The monetary authority will “basically” end normal intervention in the currency market and broaden the yuan’s daily trading range

  Yes, it was, apparently “no longer in China’s interest” to accumulate foreign exchange reserves.

  Sure enough, in 2014, global FX reserves began to decline at the fastest rate in 80 years as you can see from this chart:

  

  That same year, another piece of the puzzle was laid in place when Xu Luode, the Chairman of the newly-founded Shanghai Gold Exchange, explained that gold would be priced and sold in Yuan as a step towards what he called the “internationalization of the renminbi” (for those of you confused by Yuan and Renminbi, just think of them as the Chinese equivalent of ‘Pound’ and ‘Sterling’):

  (Xu Luode, Speech to LBMA, May 2014): Foreign investors can directly use offshore yuan to trade gold on the SGE international board, which is promoting the internationalization of the renminbi…

   

  Shanghai Gold will change the current gold market “consumption in the East priced in the West” situation.

   

  When China will have a right to speak in the international gold market, pricing will get revealed…

   

  Interestingly, Luode acknowledged what he accurately described as the “consumption in the East, priced in the West” situation and assured the world that the ‘real’ price of gold would become apparent once China took its rightful place at the centre of the gold market.

  We can but hope he is correct. When that day comes, the change on the world’s gold markets will be unprecedented.

  In 2015, another announcement slipped by the world when it was revealed that Russia’s Gazprom would also begin selling oil to the Chinese in exchange for yuan and that they were negotiating further agreements to use rubles and yuan to settle natural gas trading directly, without the need for dollars:

  (Moscow Times, June 2015): “Two state energy companies, gas producer Gazprom and its oil arm Gazprom Neft, said they would use more Chinese currency in trade, while Russia’s largest bank, Sberbank, has also promoted the use of the yuan…

   

  Gazprom Neft announced that it began settling shipments of oil to China in yuan. And previously, the head of Gazprom, Alexey Miller, said in a TV interview that the company was negotiating with China to use yuan and rubles for gas deliveries via a planned pipeline in Western Siberia.

  OK… hands up if you’re still with me… great!

  Oh… you’re reading this so I can’t see you but hopefully you’re following the dots…

  For those of you who aren’t, here’s a little recap of where we are so far to help you get things into the right order before we push on to the end:

  

  Get it? Got it? Good.

  So… here we are, in 2016 and, as it turned out, April was a hell of a month if you were paying attention.

  Firstly, the Saudis threatened to sell almost a trillion dollars of U.S. assets—including over $300 billion of treasury bonds—should a bill be passed by the congress allowing the Saudis to be held responsible for the 9/11 attacks:

  NY Times, April 16, 2016): Saudi Arabia has told the Obama administration and members of Congress that it will sell off hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of American assets held by the kingdom if Congress passes a bill that would allow the Saudi government to be held responsible in American courts for any role in the 9/11 attacks.

   

  Adel al-Jubeir, the Saudi foreign minister, delivered the kingdom’s message personally last month during a trip to Washington, telling lawmakers that Saudi would be forced to sell up to $750B in treasury  securities & other assets in the US before they could be in danger of being frozen by American courts.

  In a rare show of bipartisanship, the bill was subsequently passed before being vetoed by President Obama who then had to watch in ignominy as he suffered the first veto override of his presidency.

  Just days later, the Saudis were the cause of a seemingly surprise failure by OPEC to agree a production cut as the oil price languished in the low-$30s:

  (Wall Street Journal, April 17, 2016): DOHA, Qatar—Oil producers that supply almost half the world’s crude failed Sunday to negotiate a production freeze intended to strengthen prices.

   

  The talks collapsed after Saudi Arabia surprised the group by reasserting a demand that Iran also agree to cap its oil production.

   

  Oil prices had rallied in recent weeks on speculation that Saudi Arabia might successfully lead an initiative between members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and Russia, which joined the talks. 

   

  A deal would have marked a new level of cooperation between non-OPEC countries and OPEC members that producers hoped would keep prices above January lows of $26 a barrel.

  Just 48 hours after that surprise, the Chinese finally launched their twice daily gold fixing, setting the price at 256.92 yuan per gram:

  (Bloomberg, April 19, 2016): China, the world’s biggest producer and consumer of gold, started a twice-daily price fixing on Tuesday in an attempt to establish a regional benchmark and bolster its influence in the global market.

   

  The Shanghai Gold Exchange set the price at 256.92 yuan a gram ($1,233.85 an ounce) at the 10:30 a.m. session after members of the exchange submitted buy and sell orders for metal of 99.99 percent purity.

   

  “This is a very important development and will obviously be very

   

  closely watched,” said Robin Bhar, an analyst at Societe Generale SA in London. “But as long as it exists inside a closed monetary system it will have limited global repercussions. It could be a very important development if the new benchmark is a precursor to greater use of gold in the Chinese monetary system, Kenneth Hoffman…said by e-mail on Monday. It may also boost interest in the Shanghai free-trade zone, he said.

  As Soc Gen’s Robin Bhar correctly identified, if the ability to trade gold for yuan exists within a closed monetary system, its importance will be limited BUT, as Bloomberg’s Ken Hoffman also correctly pointed out, if this was the thin end of the wedge, things could get very interesting indeed. Now, this chart shows the oil price going back to before the U.S. Civil War:

  

  Between 1865 and 1973, the price of oil was incredibly stable against a backdrop of perhaps the greatest simultaneous economic, demographic and technological expansion in human history.

  How was that possible?

  Well simply put, because oil was effectively priced in gold.

  However…

  Once the gold window closed and the petrodollar system was implemented, the price of oil soared 50-fold in just 35 years.

  The move on the right? With the question mark against it? We’re getting there, I promise.

  Now, you remember this next chart and the yuuuuuge supply of treasuries which exists compared to oil now? Well, when we add in the roughly $100 trillion in boomer entitlements that will need to be paid for by issuing—you guessed it, more treasuries—the chart changes somewhat:

  That red circle down at the bottom of the second chart is the spike you see on the first chart.

  

  Ruh-roh!

  It’s safe to say that, relative to even oil, and without any infrastructure spending by Donald Trump, treasuries are going to be…. abundant in the coming years.

  Conversely, if we look at the value of gold relative to foreign-held treasuries, we see an altogether different story unfold.

  During Reagan’s presidency, US treasuries were backed 132% by the market value of the country’s gold reserves.

  Today, that number has fallen to just 4.7%

  If we do the same thing and account for the $100 trillion in entitlement promises, as you can see from the chart on the next page, the number falls to 0.3% in 2025.

  So the second chart (below, right) should come as no surprise to anybody.

  

  Yes, the Chinese have started to do what they promised to start doing, when they promised to start doing it.

  Now, this next part of the presentation was a rattle through a whole bunch of charts showing the recent activity in the U.S. treasury, corporate bond, agency bond and securities markets so you’ll have to brace yourself.

  The charts will appear on the next page.

  Chinese sales of US treasuries (1) have been consistent for the last three years…

  …as have their sales of US securities (2) since 2015 after plateauing in 2013 when treasury divestiture began Concurrently, Chinese sales of corporate bonds (3) have accelerated over the same period…

  …though agency sales (4)—despite a few periods of consistent selling—have yet to follow suit.

  But now, as tensions rise and the cross-currents get harder to discern, guess who else has showed up as a seller?

  That’s right, the Saudis are now steady sellers of US treasuries (5)…

  …and even more aggressive sellers of U.S. securities (6)…

  Meanwhile, taking a broader view, net foreign purchases of treasuries, according to the TIC data, have been in a clear downtrend since 2009 (7) and have been largely outflows for the last three years.

  If we look at the 12-month sum of sales (8), we see an even sharper decline…

  

  …and if we take the trailing net official demand chart for treasuries back to 1979, the scale and extent of the change is evident—as are the catalysts for the acceleration (and we’re back on this page once  again):

  

  Take a long, hard look at that last chart folks—particularly within the context of the bond bull market and the ‘bid’ for treasuries we’ve seen throughout 2015 and 2016…

  Meanwhile, the Russians—who, as we’ve seen are now selling oil for yuan to the Chinese, remember?— have been picking up the pace of their accumulation of gold reserves yet again, with the most recent monthly data setting yet another record…

  …and the pick up in pace is evident when we look at average monthly purchases prior to 2013 and post the agreements put in place around that time between the various parties. Now, the next chart (top of the following page) is crucial to understand because a look at the market value of Russia’s gold reserves shows just how crucial their ongoing accumulation of bullion has been for the country’s finances over the last two years…

  …and that increase in value has cushioned the effects of, amongst other things, the bailing out of the ruble.

  

  As you can see from the green line, Russia’s gold reserves in Ruble terms have soared as the country’s currency has weakened—something which confounded all the doommongers who called Game Over for Russia amidst sharply declining oil revenues:

  (Bloomberg, April3, 2015): Here’s why Governor Elvira Nabiullina is in no haste to resume foreign-currency purchases after an eight-month pause: gold’s biggest quarterly surge since 1986 has all but erased losses the Bank of Russia suffered by mounting a rescue of the ruble more than a year ago.

   

  While the ruble’s 9 percent rally this year has raised the prospects that the central bank will start buying currency again, policy makers have instead used 13 months of gold purchases to take reserves over $380 billion for the first time since January 2015.

  Hmmm…

  Now, crucially, being given the ability to sell oil to the Chinese for yuan and buy gold with that same yuan directly through the Shanghai Exchange has completely changed the game for the Russians and those changes are being reflected where they matter most—in the energy markets, the supply/ demand dynamics of which are quietly morphing in plain sight.

  By August of this year, Russia had overtaken Saudi Arabia as the largest exporter of oil into China…:

  (Al Awsat, August 3, 2016): During the first seven months of this year, China imported about 30.5 million metric tons of Saudi oil, a 0.4% decrease than that of last year. Whereas, China imported about 29.5 million metric tons of Russian oil with 27% increase than last year.

  …and that wasn’t something the Saudis could take lying down:

  Amid this fierce competition, it is important for Saudi Arabia to fortify its oil position in China with more political and strategic support

  On the contrary, they rededicated their efforts to increase what they call “political and strategic support” for China.

  Now, I hope you’re all still with me because here’s where we get to the final piece of this glorious puzzle—the piece that ties all these seemingly unrelated threads together: China’s own crude oil futures contract, to be priced in Yuan and traded at the Shanghai International Energy Exchange—a yuan contract which will be made fully-convertible:

  (Bloomberg, November 5, 2015): By the end of 2015, China, the world’s No. 1 oil importer as of April, may start its own crude futures contract.

   

  The idea is to establish a Chinese rival to the world’s two most traded oil contracts: West Texas Intermediate, housed on the New York Mercantile Exchange, and Brent Crude Futures, owned by ICE Futures Europe in London.

   

  The yuan-based contract will trade on the Shanghai International Energy Exchange and will be among the first Chinese commodity contracts available to foreign investors as China promotes global use of its currency…

   

  Participation will be open to all foreign investors and the yuan will be fully convertible under the contract, according to Song Anping, the chairman of the Shanghai Futures Exchange.

  As you can see from the date of the article, this contract has been postponed several times— ostensibly for reasons such as stock market volatility in China, but perhaps there is more going on behind the scenes that is causing the delay because, once this contract is in place, things change.

  Dramatically.

  In the interim, China has supplanted the U.S to become the world’s biggest importer of oil, which serves to increase both its importance in the oil markets and the likelihood of it launching its own yuan-denominated contract at some point in time:

  (Bloomberg, October 13, 2016): China is now the world’s biggest oil importer, unseating the U.S. The country’s crude imports climbed to a record 8.08 million barrels a day in September, a year-on-year increase of 18 percent, customs data released Thursday showed.

  So, the world’s largest exporter of oil is now dealing with the largest importer directly in yuan and it has the ability to convert those yuan proceeds into physical gold through the Shanghai exchange— which the data suggest it is doing as fast as possible.

  Currently, the bilateral oil for gold trade is only available to what the U.S. would no doubt consider a ‘basket of deplorables’ in Iran and Russia…but just think what happens once that fully convertible oil contract is up and running…?

  Suddenly, the availability to price oil in gold is available to everybody and, given rising Saudi/U.S. tensions and the Middle East nation’s recent rededication to providing “political and strategic support” to China it’s easy to see why this would be attractive to the Saudis, for example.

  

  Whatever happens, opening that contract creates a market-wide arbitrage opportunity which affords anybody with oil to sell the ability to exchange said oil for gold and anybody wanting oil to acquire it cheaply by buying cheap gold in the West and shipping it to Shanghai or HK where it can be sold for yuan.

  Already, places like Tokyo, Seoul and Dubai are opening physical gold markets and discussing linking their nascent markets for bullion to the Shanghai exchange which has rapidly become the largest physical delivery market in the world.

  Now, were this arbitrage to begin happening in any meaningful size, with the market for oil far bigger than that for gold, it would immediately be evident in the ratio between the two commodities…

  …which, interestingly, is precisely what has happened since the peak of global reserves in 2014 and the Sino-Russian agreement to essentially transact oil for gold. With those conditions in place, the gold/oil ratio has broken out to its highest level in 80 years (chart, next page):

  …which brings us right back to the question mark on the second chart which we left hanging like a matzah ball earlier in this presentation

  

  The recent move in the oil price looks to me suspiciously like a sign that a move has started to return to pricing oil in gold.

  That move, if indeed it is happening beneath the surface, allied with the endless possibilities enabled by the potential full convertibility of the yuan under the Shanghai-based oil contract leaves oil producing nations with a rather obvious choice for the first time in almost half a century—a choice made perfectly clear by the two charts on the next page:

  If you are an oil producing country, do you…:

  MINIMIZE your production in order to MAXIMIZE your holdings of one of the most abundant and easily-produced commodities in the world—U.S. treasuries—as has been the case for the last 40 years… knowing full well that, with the level of entitlements due in the next decade, more will need to be printed like crazy?

  

  Or……

  Do you MAXIMIZE production in order to gain the largest possible market share in the biggest oil market in the world and, through the ability to buy gold for yuan, thereby maximize your reserves of a scarce, physical commodity which is impossible to produce from thin air and which happens to be not only the most undervalued asset on the planet, but is trading at its most undervalued relative to U.S. treasuries in living memory?

  

  With an annual production of $170bn, gold is by far the largest metal market by value.

  However, that figure is dwarfed by the oil market which is 10x the size of the gold market on an annual production basis.

  

  If we throw in the average annual foreign holdings of U.S. treasuries over the last 2 years, we see that the ‘other’ commodity is at a different magnitude altogether.

  So, which one of these commodities has any scarcity value? Given the choice, which one would you seek to maximize your holdings of?

  U.S. treasuries which can be conjured out of thin air by the U.S. government and which, are described thus by The Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association:

  Because these debt obligations are backed by the “full faith and credit” of the government, and thus by its ability to raise tax revenues and print currency, U.S. Treasury securities – or “Treasuries” – are generally considered the safest of all investments. They are viewed in the market as having virtually no “credit risk,” meaning that it is highly probable your interest and principal will be paid fully and on time.

  Or how about oil? Which the Saudis, for example, can simply print pull out of the ground at will at a cost of a little under $10/barrel?

  

  Or gold? A commodity which is limited in availability, trading at its all-time low relative to U.S. treasury supply and is not only getting harder and more expensive to produce, but which is also catching the eye not only of the central banks of the world’s two largest producers, but of the largest importer and largest exporter of oil?

  * * *

  Much more in the full PDF below

  

  

• Here's Who Democrats Say Are The Top 15 Presidential Candidates For 2020

  As Democrats continue to slowly come to terms with their stunning defeat on November 8th, one coping mechanism that has helped them to deal with the grief is getting a head start on a list of most likely new saviors who can defeat the evil Donald Trump in 2020 and restore “Hope” to America.  As such, Niall Stanage of The Hill has compiled a list of the 15 most likely challengers.  Most of the list is not terribly surprising and includes a number of establishment politicians which, given how the 2016 election cycle evolved, would almost certainly result in another Trump victory.

  Among the “establishment” names on the list, both Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine were noted as 2020 hopefuls despite their epic defeat in 2016.  Vice President Joe Biden eked out a top-10 place after having been defeated twice before in 1998 and 2008.  Meanwhile, despite repeated denials, First Lady Michelle Obama came in at a respectable 6th place.

  Potential political newbies that could vie for the presidency in 2020 included Cory Booker, a senator of New Jersey, and Senator-elect Kamala Harris of California.  While The Hill notes that Harris could face criticism for her lack of “political experience,” Trump’s victory would seems to suggest that to be a positive rather than a negative attribute and ironically, she would have the same level of “political experience” in 2020 as Obama had when he ran in 2008.

  Finally, in the “outlier” category, The Hill rounded out their Top 15 with Oprah Winfrey who, for the most part, stayed out of politics until going all-in for Barack Obama in 2008.

  Of course, the only prominent contender for 2020 that didn’t seem to make The Hill’s list was Kanye West.  We assume this was a simple mistake and look forward to the prompt correction.

  

   

  With that, here is The Hill’s official list of the 15 democratic hopefuls for 2020:

  1. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.)

   How would the 2016 election have panned out had Warren challenged Clinton in the primary? That’s one of the great unknowables of Democratic politics. But now, there is little doubt that the Massachusetts senator is the leading contender for the 2020 nomination.

   

  Warren, a former Harvard Law School professor, has been beloved by the left throughout her late-blooming political career, largely because of her no-punches-pulled attacks on banks and the financial industry. She got under Trump’s skin via Twitter during the 2016 campaign too.

   

  The recent news that Warren will join the Senate Armed Services Committee in January has stoked speculation that she is looking to bolster her foreign policy and national security credentials in advance of a presidential run. Warren would be 71 by the time of the next election, but she is three years younger than Trump.

   

  2. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)

   Sanders came from semi-obscurity in the Senate to give Clinton a serious run for her money in the battle for the Democratic nomination this year.

   

  He won 23 contests and amassed more than 13 million votes. He also fired the enthusiasm of young voters and progressives, two pillars of the Democratic base that Clinton struggled to charm.

   

  The Vermonter’s focus on income inequality and his broader point that the system is rigged against working Americans resonated. Sanders’s main problem when it comes to a 2020 run could be his age. He will be 79 next Election Day. Still, Sanders might well be tempted to try one more time — especially if Warren stood aside.

   

  3. Sen. Cory Booker (N.J.)

   Booker raised eyebrows earlier this month when it emerged that he would join the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when the new Congress convenes. As with Warren and the Armed Services panel, his decision was interpreted as an effort to burnish his resume for a potential presidential run.

   

  Booker is just 47, and he is one of only two African-Americans in the Senate for now. (That number will rise to three in January when California’s Kamala Harris will be sworn in.)

   

  He is also one of the most media-savvy members in the upper chamber — a trait that has been apparent since the start of his career, when his first, failed bid to become mayor of Newark was captured in a sympathetic documentary, “Street Fight.”

   

  Booker is far from the most liberal member of the caucus. During the 2012 presidential campaign, he criticized an Obama campaign ad that hit Mitt Romney’s business record, insisting on NBC’s “Meet the Press”, “I’m not about to sit here and indict private equity.”

   

  An optimistic view is that he could bridge the gap between the progressive and center-left strands of the party. Skeptics will question whether he is a little too corporate-friendly for the tastes of Democratic primary voters.

   

  4. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.)

  Klobuchar has already appeared on several shortlists of likely contenders for the nomination, and it’s not hard to see why.

   

  The New Yorker called her, “popular, practical, appealing [and] progressive.” She is from a state where the currents of labor and progressivism run strong. But the no-nonsense, affable Klobuchar could also plausibly appeal to Rust Belt voters whom her party needs to win over.

   

  One issue for Klobuchar right now is that she does not have a high profile outside of her native state and the Beltway. There is plenty of time to change that if she wants to run and win in 2020. But she could be eclipsed by higher-wattage candidates.

   

  5. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y)

   Gillibrand followed in Clinton’s footsteps when she replaced her as a New York senator in 2009. Could she do the same at the presidential level — but actually win the White House?

   

  It’s certainly possible. Gillibrand’s profile has risen in tandem with her making the prevention of sexual assaults in the military a signature issue. Representing New York, she has easy access to the national media and to powerful Democratic fundraising networks.

   

  But Gillibrand’s similarities with Clinton, superficial though they may be, could go against her. It’s just not clear Democrats would roll the dice again, as soon as 2020, on another prominent female nominee from New York.

  Critics also charge that Gillibrand emphasized more centrist positions as a congresswoman from a somewhat conservative district than she does as a senator from a liberal state.

   

  6. First lady Michelle Obama

   If the first lady exhibited even a slight inclination to run, she would be ranked near the top of this list.

   

  There is no figure in public life, with the possible exception of her husband, who has so strong a hold on liberal hearts and minds.

   

  Obama has become more comfortable with her public role over the years. Her two major speeches during the 2016 campaign — one at the Democratic convention, another excoriating Trump for “hurtful, hateful language about women” — were among the most powerful delivered during the cycle.

   

  The first lady insists that she won’t run, citing the effect such an effort would have on her two daughters among other factors. But Malia and Sasha Obama will be 22 and 19, respectively, by the time of the next election. When it comes to the first lady’s future plans, many Democrats still cling to the audacity of hope.

   

  7. Gov. John Hickenlooper (Colo.)

   Hickenlooper presides over a state that is considered a key battleground, even though it has become more solidly Democratic in recent years. Colorado has gone for the Democratic nominee in the past three presidential elections and Clinton won the state by five points.

   

  Hickenlooper, who has a politically effective down-to-earth persona, could potentially boost the party’s appeal in the heartlands. He has enjoyed solid approval ratings during his time in office.

   

  One problem? While his chances are talked up among Beltway pundits, he is almost unknown in the nation at large.

   

  8. Sen. Chris Murphy (Conn.)

   Murphy has come to the fore on the issue of gun control. He can speak with moral authority on the issue: In his state, a gunman killed 20 young children, as well as six adults, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2012. President Obama has called that moment the worst day of his presidency.

   

  Politically speaking, Murphy would need to display more policy breadth and heighten his national profile if he is to be a genuine contender. For the moment, he’s one to watch.

   

  9. Vice President Joe Biden

  The vice president could have definitively ruled himself out of the running, but hasn’t. He joked with reporters about the possibility earlier this month, and then sought to clarify by saying he had “no intention” of running.

   

  Biden would clearly have loved to run in 2016, were it not for the fact that he was still grieving the loss of his son, Beau. Biden’s age is a real issue, however. He would be 77 by next Election Day. If he won, he would turn 78 before being inaugurated.

   

  For all his political skills, his two previous runs for the presidency, in 1988 and 2008, ended in failure.

   

  10. Gov. Andrew Cuomo (N.Y.)

   On paper, Cuomo looks like a strong candidate. He is the governor of a huge, liberal state and hails from a well-established political family. Cuomo’s late father, Mario, served as governor of the Empire State for three terms.

   

  No one doubts the younger Cuomo’s ambition, but whether he is the right fit for the times is a tougher question. In a party where the left is ascendant, he has positioned himself as a centrist foil to New York City’s liberal mayor, Bill de Blasio. It’s not clear what Cuomo’s power base would be for a primary fight.

   

  11. Sen.-elect Kamala Harris (Calif.)

   Harris is one of the bright spots for Democrats who are dismayed by their failure to retake the Senate. She will succeed the retiring Sen. Barbara Boxer in January.

   

  Harris has been seen as a rising star in the party for some time, her fans including President Obama, who once praised her in imprudent terms.

   

  Harris, a leading lawyer before shifting into politics, is the daughter of an Indian-American mother and a Jamaican-American father. It’s not clear she has any presidential ambitions and, if she ran in 2020, she would face criticism about her relative lack of political experience. But she would be as experienced as then-Sen. Obama was when he began his 2008 White House run.

   

  12. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton

   Could she run again? It’s possible. Many people thought Clinton’s electoral ambitions had ended in 2008, with her devastating loss to Obama in the Democratic primary. That turned out not to be the case.

   

  There is still a large, wealthy circle of Clinton loyalists, who would back any future run. But, even if she had the appetite for a 2020 bid, she would have enormous hurdles to overcome.

   

  One of the biggest would be the question of how she lost the presidency to Donald Trump. Beyond the hardline Clintonistas, there aren’t many Democratic insiders who were wowed by her campaign. In a USA Today/Suffolk University poll released earlier this month, 62 percent of Democrats and independents said Clinton should not run again.

   

  13. Former Gov. Deval Patrick (Mass.)

   Patrick has considerable political skills and was once talked up as a potential inheritor of President Obama’s mantle. David Axelrod, one of the aides closest to Obama, worked with Patrick as well, and both Patrick and Obama adopted “Yes We Can!” as a campaign slogan.

   

  But Patrick left office in 2015, and it’s just not clear whether he could — or would want to — come off the sidelines for 2020. He also joined Bain Capital, which is hardly the ideal launching pad for a quest to win over liberal activists.

   

  14. Sen. Tim Kaine (Va.)

   Kaine achieved a new national prominence when Clinton named him as her 2016 running mate. But his performance was a mixed bag.

   

  The Virginia senator gave some energetic speeches on the campaign trail, defying his reputation for dullness. On the other hand, his showing in his sole debate with his counterpart, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, was uneven at best.

   

  15. Oprah Winfrey

   Trump proved how powerful a currency celebrity can be — and there may be no more trusted celebrity in America than Oprah. Having steered largely clear of partisan politics for most of her career, Winfrey became an enthusiastic backer of Obama when he looked a long shot to beat Hillary Clinton to the 2008 nomination.

   

  Winfrey has said she “couldn’t breathe” after Trump won in November. She softened her stance later, but could she be tempted into a race to defeat the president-elect?

  

  

• The Great "Fake News" Scare Of 1530

  Submitted by Rick Falkvinge via PrivateInternetAccess.com,

  Fake news has always been around for humor purposes, but the real “fake news” scares happen when the establishment is so used to getting away with lying, that any alternate narrative is demonized as factually false, irresponsible, and dangerous.

  “The Onion” was next to “The Economist” in the newspaper stands for almost two decades. “Weekly World News”, which one-ups most British tabloids with regular Elvis sightings and vivid descriptions of two-mile fish orbiting in the rings of Jupiter, is still next to “Foreign Policy” in the same newspaper stands. This was never considered problematic in the slightest. Why, then, is a unified establishment screaming bloody murder about “fake news” all of a sudden?

  To see the pattern here, it helps to know a little history – let’s look at the great “Fake News” scare of 1530. It has a lot of elements similar to ours today.

  After the Black Death hit Europe hard around 1350, the monasteries were chronically short on manpower. The families that had used to send a child or two to become monks or nuns simply needed all their kids to work in the fields, to ensure food production, before such luxuries as manning the monasteries could even be considered. Therefore, any work that required involving monasteries became increasingly steep or scarce for the coming century.

  This is relevant as those monasteries were the only places that produced books, all of which were in Latin, and all of which were in complete synchronization with the messages of the Catholic Church, the owner of the monasteries and therefore the owner of all mass media at the time. To compound the situation, the same owner also employed all the news anchors – the village preachers, who were the ones who read the books (in Latin) and translated them to the common tongue in villages.

  A book was hideously expensive to produce. Not only was each page copied by hand, but the pages were made from animal hides: it was estimated that a single book may require the hides of as much as 300 calves. We don’t have a lot of comparative numbers from Europe of the time, but we do have them from elsewhere: a fine book in the Islamic world of the time could cost 100 dinars, with the annual paycheck required to support a middle-class family being about 25 dinars. Put differently, the prospect of buying one single book would consume an entire family income for four years – or in the $500k to $1M range in today’s value.

  To the day, almost a century later, Johannes Gutenberg combined the four inventions of the squeeze press, oil-based inks, metal movable type, and cheap rag-based pages to produce the first printing press. All of a sudden, books could be mass produced cheaply, and there was an enormous profit motive to be made in producing books for the common people. You could accurately and shamelessly call it an undercutting of the monastery business. (“How will the monks get paid if we allow cheap copying technologies?”)

  Gutenberg was convinced his invention would strengthen the Church, as the ability to mass produce books from a single original would eliminate all the small copying errors invariably introduced in the manual book production process. The result was the exact opposite, through mechanisms Gutenberg did not foresee.

  It’s important to remember here, that through the media cartel of the medieval ages (where the Catholic Church produced all news and reported all news), that there was an absolute gatekeeper position over the narrative. The Church could essentially claim that something was true, and everybody would believe it. This is a very powerful position, being the gatekeeper of true and false – one that is prone to abuse without any opposition, or competition, in reporting. As it turned out, the Catholic Church would indeed come to abuse this power quite egregiously, and paid the price for it.

  In the late 1400s, the Catholic Church needed to raise money, and came up with the idea of selling forgiveness for sins, the basic idea being that you didn’t need to be a good person to gain the favor of the Church (and divine beings), you only needed to be Rich. A priest, monk, and theologist named Martin Luther took particular exception to this message, seeing how it stood in complete opposition to everything the Church was supposed to be about, and nailed his 95 theses to the church door in 1517.

  These 95 theses outlined how the entire practice of selling divine forgiveness was based on falsehoods, fabrications, and fiction. However, it’s important to look at the bigger picture here: what Martin Luther protested was only superficially the selling of salvation to raise funds. More fundamentally, he was objecting to abuse of the gatekeeper position over truth and lie to twist the narrative for the gatekeeper’s material benefit.

  This is where the story should start to feel familiar with modern day conflicts over the Power of Narrative.

  Luther was excommunicated – banished, exiled – in 1521. This was one of the graver punishments administered, short of the death penalty, and the only thing remaining for somebody thus punished was normally to leave for foreign lands. However, in Luther’s case, he was given refuge in lands siding with him instead of the Catholic regime, ultimately setting off a century of civil war over the Power of Narrative.

  The final death knell came when Luther published bibles in German and French using the new printing press, the so-called Luther Bibles, first published in 1522. These set off shockwaves, as they were 1) distributed by the cartload in the streets of Paris and France, 2) were readable by the common people without translation by the clergy, and 3) didn’t cost the equivalent of a million dollars each.

  The Church immediately went into a panic, as they had instantly lost their gatekeeper position. No longer were they able to stand unchallenged when they were reading from the Bible in Latin, as people could – and would – verify the claims made, using their own direct sources. And as it turned out, a lot of the things that had been claimed – selling salvation among them – had been baloney of the highest order with no support in the Christian Bible as claimed.

  The Catholic church went on a rampage and a crusade against this new spread of ideas that would challenge its narrative, and in particular, against the technology which enabled people to challenge its narrative. Copying books cheaply and efficiently instead of paying four annual salaries for a single book – the audacity, the outrageous heresy! How dared people copy books themselves without respecting the Church? Obviously, books could only be properly copied in monasteries, to ensure proper quality.

  (“How will the monks copying books get paid otherwise?” was as much a smokescreen then as it is today.)

  The church kept up the pressure against the printing press, as it saw all the resulting non-sanctioned news channels as completely fake, not just being wrong, but being dangerous. They were irresponsible. They were deliberately spreading misinformation – at least the Church saw it that way, a Church which was institutionally incapable of unlearning that it was no longer the single source of information and would no longer have whatever outlandish claim accepted without question.

  However, the nobility and royalty of the time were certainly paying attention to the Church. After all, the Archbishop installed Kings, so there was a mutual dependence for power between the clergy and royalty at the time. Therefore, when the Church exclaimed the sky is falling (“there is fake news everywhere! We must do something!!!!!!!”), the royalty tended to listen.

  As a result, on January 13, 1535, the French King Francis I signed into law the death penalty by hanging for using a printing press at all. Yes, you read that right: there was a death penalty for making unauthorized copies. The justification for the law, as still readable in the preserved logs from 1535, was to “prevent the spread of misinformation and false news”.

  So the gatekeepers of knowledge and culture in 1530, on losing their gatekeeper position over the narrative, didn’t counter with higher-quality reporting, but instead attacked the technology enabling competition, calling it out as spreading misinformation and irresponsible fake reports. Does any of this seem… familiar?

  The law was a complete fiasco. Once people had learned to read competing reporting, there was no unlearning it. The law was repealed shortly thereafter. England went another route to prevent the success of the printing press by establishing a censorship regime with printing monopolies, known as copyright, but that’s a story for another day.

  As a final touch, let’s consider the words of Paul Graham, in his excellent essay “what you can’t say”:

  “No one gets in trouble for saying that 2 + 2 is 5, or that people in Pittsburgh are ten feet tall. Such obviously false statements might be treated as jokes, or at worst as evidence of insanity, but they are not likely to make anyone mad. The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true. […] If Galileo had said that people in Padua were ten feet tall, he would have been regarded as a harmless eccentric. Saying the earth orbited the sun was another matter. The church knew this would set people thinking.”

  Privacy and narrative remain your own responsibility.

  

  

• Obama Set To Announce Economic Sanctions And "Covert Cyber Ops" Against Russia For "Election Hacking"

  Just a week after Obama held a press conference announcing that he sent a stern warning to Vladamir Putin regarding his alleged “election hacking” efforts (see “Obama Told Putin To “Cut It Out” On Hacking“), the Washington Post is reporting that the Obama administration is close to announcing a series of economic sanctions and other measures to punish Russia for its “interference” in the 2016 presidential election.  Quoting “U.S. officials,” WaPo said that an announcement from the Obama administration could come as early as this week and would likely include “covert cyber operations.”

  According to WaPo’s “sources”, the delay in sanctions against Russia have come from Obama’s inability to take unilateral actions under current laws.  While Obama previously signed an executive order that would allow him to freeze the assets in the United States of people overseas who have engaged in cyber acts, it only applies to actions that have threatened U.S. national security or financial stability.  Further, per a “senior administration official,” use of the existing law would require (1) actual election infrastructure to be designated as ‘critical infrastructure’ and (2) the administration to prove that such infrastructure was actually “harmed,” conditions which the National Security Council say have not been met. 

  The White House is still finalizing the details of the sanctions package. Holding up the announcement is an internal debate over how best to adapt a 2015 executive order that gave the president the authority to levy sanctions against foreign actors who carry out cyberattacks against the United States.

   

  The order was used as the “stick” in negotiations over a highly-publicized 2015 agreement with China that neither nation would hack the other for economic gain.

   

  But officials concluded this fall that the order does not cover the kind of covert influence operation that the Intelligence Community believes Russia carried out during the election — hacking political organizations and leaking stolen emails with the goal of influencing the outcome.

   

  The April 2015 order allows the Treasury Department to freeze the assets of individuals or entities who used digital means to damage U.S. critical infrastructure or engage in economic espionage.

   

  The National Security Council concluded that it would not be able to use the authority against Russian hackers because their malicious activity did not clearly fit under its terms, which require harm to critical infrastructure or the theft of commercial secrets.

   

  “You would (a) have to be able to say that the actual electoral infrastructure, such as state databases, was critical infrastructure, and (b) that what the Russians did actually harmed it,” a senior administration official told The Post. “Those are two high bars.”

  

   

  Of course, laws are merely suggestions for an Obama administration that has grown quite comfortable legislating through executive action from the White House.  As Zachary Goldman, a sanctions and national security expert at New York University School of Law, points out the current laws simply require the Obama administration to “engage in some legal acrobatics to fit the DNC hack into an existing authority, or they need to write a new authority.”

  “Fundamentally, it was a low-tech, high-impact event,” said Zachary Goldman, a sanctions and national security expert at New York University School of Law. And the 2015 executive order was not crafted to target hackers who steal emails and dump them on WikiLeaks or seek to disrupt an election. “It was an authority published at a particular time to address a particular set of problems,” he said.

   

  So officials “need to engage in some legal acrobatics to fit the DNC hack into an existing authority, or they need to write a new authority,” Goldman said.

   

  Administration officials would like Obama to use the power before leaving office to demonstrate its utility.

  And, not surprisingly, another administration official points out that “part of the goal here is to make sure that we have as much of the record public or communicated to Congress in a form that would be difficult to simply walk back.”  Yes, that is the problem with legislating through executive action rather than acknowledging the will of the American people and trying to work with Congress.

  And while Obama and Democrats continue their crusade to deligitamize the Trump administration, we would point out once again that, despite all the rhetoric, not a single person has gone on the record and/or presented a single shred of tangible evidence to confirm Russian involvement in the DNC and/or John Podesta email hacks. 

  

  

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