Oct 31

Today’s News 31st October 2017

  • Paul Craig Roberts Goes There: "One Day, Tomorrow Won't Arrive"

    Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

    Before the idiots in Washington get us blown off of the face of the earth, the morons had better come to terms with the fact that the US military is now second class compared to the Russian military.

    For example, the US Navy has been made obsolete by Russia’s hypersonic maneuvering Zircon missile.

    For example, the speed and trajectory changes of the Russian Sarmat ICBM has nullified Washington’s ABM system. One Sarmet is sufficient to take out Great Britain, or France, or Germany, or Texas. It only takes a dozen to wipe out the United States.

    Why don’t you know this?

    For example, Washington’s enormously expensive F-35 jet fighter is no match whatsoever for Russian fighters.

    For example, US tanks are no match for Russian tanks.

    For example, Russian troops are superior in their combat readiness and training and are highly motivated and not worn out by 16 years of pointless and frustrating wars over no one knows what.

    If the US ends up in a catastrophic war with a militarily superior power, it will be the fault of Hillary Clinton, the DNC, former CIA director John Brennan and the military/security complex, the presstitute media, and the American liberal/progressive/left, which, made completely stupid by Identity Politics, has allied with neoconservative warmongers against President Trump and prevented Trump from normalizing relations with Russia.

    Without normal relations with Russia, nuclear Armageddon hangs over us like the sword of Damocles.

    Do you not agree that it is outrageous, astounding, inexcusable, inexplicable, reckless and irresponsible that the Democratic Party, the print and TV media, the military/security complex that is supposed to protect us, and the liberal/progressive/left are working hand in glove to destroy the human race?

    Why is there so much opposition to normalizing relations with a nuclear power? Why did even the Greens jump on the anti-Trump propaganda bandwagon. Don’t the Greens understand the consequences of nuclear war?

    Why is there such a crazed, insane effort to eject a president who wants to normalize relations with Russia?

    Why are these questions not part of the public discourse?

    The failure of political leadership, of media, of the intellectual class in America is total.

    The rest of the world must find some means of quarantining Washington before the evil destroys life on earth.

  • Crypto Mania – Why "It Is Currently Rational To Be Irrational"

    Following JP Morgan CEO, Jamie Dimon’s, now infamous rant about Bitcoin being a fraud, a great product for criminals and having no value, Adam Ludwin, CEO of Chain.com, wrote “A Letter to Jamie Dimon”, which received some coverage in the financial media for its balanced discussion regarding the outlook for cryptocurrencies.

    In his letter, Ludwin noted…

    In short: there’s a lot of noise. But there is also signal.

     

    To find it, we need to start by defining cryptocurrency. Without a working definition we are lost. Most people arguing about cryptocurrencies are talking past each other because they don’t stop to ask the other side what they think cryptocurrencies are for.  

     

    Here’s my definition: cryptocurrencies are a new asset class that enable decentralized applications. If this is true, your (Jamie Dimon’s) point of view on cryptocurrencies has very little to do with what you think about them in comparison to traditional currencies or securities, and everything to do with your opinion of decentralized applications and their value relative to current software models. Don’t have an opinion on decentralized applications? Then you can’t possibly have one on cryptocurrencies yet…And since this isn’t about cryptocurrencies vs. fiat currencies let’s stop using the word currency. It’s a head fake. It has way too much baggage and I notice that when you talk about Bitcoin in public you keep comparing it to the Dollar, Euro, and Yen. That comparison won’t help you understand what’s going on. In fact, it’s getting in the way.

    Back in your box, Jamie.

    As Forbes reports, Ludwin was invited to speak at a recent SEC meeting…

    The Securities and Exchange Commission Investor Advisory Committee held a public meeting regarding blockchain and distributed ledger technology earlier this month, and one of the individuals who was invited to participate in the meeting was Chain CEO Adam Ludwin. During his opening remarks, Ludwin shared his perspective on the entire blockchain ecosystem (both public and private models), but the most compelling part of his appearance may have been when he shared his views on the current price mania around cryptocurrencies and initial coin offerings (ICO).

     

    “I think you have to look at it from the perspective of the buyer and the seller mentality,” Ludwin said of the current digital asset market. “In essence, it is currently rational to be irrational as a buyer [or] a seller in this market.”

    In Ludwin’s opinion, the buyers of ICOs are either people who made tons of money in Bitcoin/Ethereum or people who missed Bitcoin/Ethereum, because they didn’t understand them, so have resorted to buying tokens they don’t understand either.

    When discussing the kinds of people who are participating in ICOs and token crowdsales during his appearance at the public meeting, Ludwin was quick to point to those who have already made large sums of cash by speculating on the prices of bitcoin and ether over the past few years. “On the buyer side, there are many, many people who invested early in bitcoin, made a tremendous amount of money and now have, effectively, a house money effect weighing on them where it’s found money — it’s a windfall — and they’re diversifying into every new project that comes along because: Why not?” explained Ludwin.

    “If you’ve made money, you might as well say, ‘I’ll keep going.’” Ludwin also pointed to those who sat on the sidelines while bitcoin and ether went up a hundredfold or more because they didn’t understand the technology as probable buyers of new digital assets.

     

    “Now, you almost have this inverted mindset where you tell yourself, ‘Alright, I have to look for things I don’t understand, and the more confusing it is, the better investment it probably is,’” said Ludwin. “It’s a very perverse mentality, obviously.”

    As for the sellers of ICOs, Ludwin explains why it’s even crazier than the dot.com boom.

    From Ludwin’s perspective, the irrational exuberance from the buy side of the market has led to the creation of many new projects willing to meet that demand. The Chain CEO shared three reasons as to why it’s extremely tempting for individuals and teams to create, issue, and sell new cryptocurrencies. “Number one, there’s no dilution (it’s not equity in the traditional sense) and there’s no debt — you don’t have to pay it back,” said Ludwin.

     

    “People are buying for the appreciation expectations. It’s really free financing; it’s a remarkable instrument. [Secondly], there’s a belief out there that, by selling tokens, you’re creating evangelists for your project and they will tell their friends [about it]. And the truth is that’s probably right. People are interested in spreading the news about a new token in order for their tokens to go up in price and the sellers do have a kind of product/market fit. Of course, the thing that people are buying is a dream of making money, not interest in the underlying service usually. Finally, there’s an ability now by issuing these tokens to actually exit before you start. Normally, when you build a company, the exit comes at the end (and that’s why it’s called the exit). Here, if you issue a token and you can clear tens of millions of dollars before your project even launches, it’s an even better deal than we had in the 90s [dotcom bubble].”

    Forbes comments on how many ICOs are merely exploiting Ethereum’s ERC-20 standard. 

    The perfect example of the inability for some companies or projects to resist the urge to do their own ICO might be messaging app Kik’s Kin token. According to CoinJournal, Kik CEO Ted Livingston admitted that they were essentially launching the token because they had no other way to compete with Facebook. Kik was able to raise nearly $100 million in their token distribution event — money that comes with all of the benefits mentioned by Ludwin. Ethereum’s ERC-20 token standard has also made it extremely easy for anyone to launch a new digital asset with the click of a button. BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen discussed the ease with which tokens can be launched on top of Ethereum at the Blockstack Summit earlier this year.

     

    “A lot of what people are doing now are these like ERC-20 tokens and stuff on Ethereum for their ICOs mostly because they don’t possess the skills to roll out an actual altcoin for the most part, which is not confidence inspiring,” said Cohen. “As a general rule, if you don’t possess the skills to roll out an altcoin, you probably shouldn’t be doing an ICO.” In the past, those who wanted to launch a new, tradeable token needed to create their own blockchain from scratch and convince exchanges to take the time to add it to their platform. The ERC-20 standard has made the process of adding a new token to an exchange much simpler because many of the new tokens follow the same general structure.

    In the opening section of his letter to Jamie Dimon, Ludwin stated….

    It’s easy to believe cryptocurrencies have no inherent value. Or that governments will crush them. It’s also becoming fashionable to believe the opposite: that they will disrupt banks, governments, and Silicon Valley giants once and for all. Neither extreme is true. The reality is nuanced and important. Which is why I’ve decided to write you this briefing note. I hope it helps you appreciate cryptocurrencies more deeply.

    Let me start by stating that I believe:

    • The market for cryptocurrencies is overheated and irrationally exuberant
    • There are a lot of poseurs creating them, and some scammers, too
    • There are a lot of conflicts of interest, self-serving hype, and obfuscation
    • Very few people in the media understand what’s going on
    • Very few people in finance understand what’s going on
    • Very few people in technology understand what’s going on
    • Very few people in academia or government understand what’s going on
    • Very few people buying cryptocurrencies understand what’s going on
    • It’s very possible I don’t understand what’s going on

    Also:

    • Banks and governments aren’t going away
    • Traditional software isn’t going away

    Ludwin argues that all asset classes exist to allocate resources to a specific form of organization.

    Despite the myopic focus on trading crypto assets recently, they don’t exist solely to be traded. That is, in principle at least, they don’t exist for their own sake. To understand what I mean, think about other asset classes and what form of organization they serve:

    • Corporate equities serve companies
    • Government bonds serve nations, states, municipalities
    • Mortgages serve property owners

    And now:

    • Crypto assets serve decentralized applications

    If you haven’t read Ludwin’s letter, you’d probably assume that he argues for the superiority of decentralized application over centralized applications, but you’d be wrong. He explains.

    In fact, on almost every dimension, decentralized services are worse than their centralized counterparts:

    • They are slower
    • They are more expensive
    • They are less scalable
    • They have worse user experiences
    • They have volatile and uncertain governance

    And no, this isn’t just because they are new. This won’t fundamentally change with bigger blocks, lightning networks, sharding, forks, self-amending ledgers, or any other technical solutions. That’s because there are structural trade-offs that result directly from the primary design goal of these services, beneath which all other goals must be subordinated in order for them to be relevant: decentralization.

    Here’s the important bit about crypto assets for Ludwin.

    Thus, bitcoin, for example, isn’t best described as “Decentralized PayPal.” It’s more honest to say it’s an extremely inefficient electronic payments network, but in exchange we get decentralization. Bottom line: centralized applications beat the pants off decentralized applications on virtually every dimension. EXCEPT FOR ONE DIMENSION. And not only are decentralized applications better at this one thing, they are the only way we can achieve it. What am I referring to? Censorship resistance. This is where we come to the elusive signal in the noise. Censorship resistance means that access to decentralized applications is open and unfettered. Transactions on these services are unstoppable. More concretely, nothing can stop me from sending Bitcoin to anyone I please. Nothing can stop me from executing code on Ethereum. Nothing can stop me from storing files on Filecoin. As long as I have an internet connection and pay the network’s transaction fee, denominated in its crypto asset, I am free to do what I want. (If Bitcoin is capitalism distilled, it’s also a kind of freedom distilled. Which is why libertarians can get a bit obsessed.)

    Here are his “big picture” thoughts from the letter on the challenge for cryptos.

    Given how different they are from the app models we know and love, will anyone ever really use decentralized applications? Will they become a critical part of the economy? It’s hard to predict because it depends in part on the technology’s evolution but far more on society’s reaction to it. For example: until relatively recently, encrypted messaging was only used by hackers, spies, and paranoids. That didn’t seem to be changing. Until it did. Post-Snowden and post-Trump, everyone from Silicon Valley to the Acela corridor seems to be on either Signal or Telegram. WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted. The press solicit tips through SecureDrop. Yes, the technology got a little better and easier to use. But it is mainly changes in society that are driving adoption. In other words, we grew up in the rainforest, but sometimes things change and it helps to know how to adapt to other environments. And this is the basic argument that the smart money is making on crypto assets and decentralized applications: that it’s simply too early to say anything. That it is a profound change. That, should one or more of these decentralized applications actually become an integral part of the world, their underlying crypto assets will be extremely valuable.

    Despite his use of words like “irrational” and “perverse”, Forbes notes that Ludwin’s view on the outlook for cryptocurrency prices is positive.

    Although Ludwin took part of his time to address the obvious (some would call) bubble in the cryptocurrency market, he still sees a bright future for this new asset class. “Despite what probably sounds like a bit of cynicism here on cryptocurrencies and the fact that it’s obvious, I think, to every fair observer that we’re witnessing a mania that will have a correction . . . you should not bet against cryptocurrencies in their long term sustainability or viability and the reality that they are a new asset class, that they’re enabling a fundamentally new and important segment, and I think [they] will only increase globally in value over time,” said Ludwin.

     

  • Chinese Police Foil Plot To Assassinate Kim Jong Un's Nephew

    As the two women who fatally poisoned Kim Jong Nam with a toxic nerve agent face the gallows in a Malaysian murder trial, Bloomberg is reporting that Chinese police have broken up a plot purportedly masterminded in North Korea whereby a group of men were dispatched to Beijing to murder Jong Nam’s son, 22-year-old Kim Han Sol, who is also the nephew of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

    Since taking the reins of the North Korean state following the death of his father in 2011, Jong Un has readily murdered members of his family to eliminate any potential challenges to his rule. Chinese police arrested two of seven North Korean agents suspected of involvement with the plot.

    Jong Un executed his uncle Jang Song Thaek in 2013 on charges of graft and factionalism. Earlier this month, the leader promoted his 28-year-old sister to the ruling party’s political wing, bringing her closer to the center of power, Bloomberg reported.

    Kim Han Sol

    Some agents are being interrogated in special facilities on the outskirts of Beijing, a South Korean newspaper reported without elaborating on whether the other five were arrested. China’s foreign ministry didn’t immediately respond to a faxed request for comment.

    Kim Han Sol identified himself as the son of Kim Jong Nam – who was poisoned in February during a brazen attack at Kuala Lumpur airport – in a YouTube video released earlier this year. Kim Jong Nam was the eldest son of late North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

    South Korean government officials have speculated that Kim Jong Un was behind the murder of his half-brother, a critic of his leadership who had lived outside the country for years. The Associated Press reported that attorneys in the trial of Jong Nam’s suspected assassins have sought to pin the blame for the assassination on four shadowy North Korean figures believed to have masterminded the murder plot.

    Authorities in Malaysia said the two women charged with Kim Jong Nam’s murder used the chemical weapon VX in the attack, claiming they were trained to swipe the poison on the victim’s face and knew the substance was toxic. The pair have pleaded not guilty.

  • Visualizing America's Most Polarizing Brands

    Due to some players kneeling during the national anthem to protest police brutality against black people in the United States and the subsequent hostile response from the president, the NFL has been dominating headlines recently. The issue is highly politicized, with opinions largely split down party lines. In fact, as a survey by Morning Consult shows, it has become one of the most polarizing brands in the country.

    As Statista's Martin Armstroing points out, when looking at favorability, the NFL enjoys a net score of 38 percent among Clinton voters. When subtracting the share of Trump voters giving a negative rating from those giving a favorable one, the result is a score of -24 percent. For Republican voters, this makes it one of the least popular brands, with only CNN and the New York Times receiving a lower score in this list -28 percent and -25 percent, respectively. 

    Infographic: America's Most Polarizing Brands | Statista

    You will find more statistics at Statista

    Unsurprisingly, the most polarizing brand is Trump Hotels. With a 99 percentage point difference, Trump voters recorded a net favorability of 48 percent, while the hotels count as one of the least-liked brands among Democrats with a net score of -52 percent.

  • Chris Hedges: Our Ever-Deadlier Police State

    Authored by Chris Hedges via TruthDig.com,

    None of the reforms, increased training, diversity programs, community outreach and gimmicks such as body cameras have blunted America’s deadly police assault, especially against poor people of color. Police forces in the United States – which, according to The Washington Post, have fatally shot 782 people this year – are unaccountable, militarized monstrosities that spread fear and terror in poor communities.

    By comparison, police in England and Wales killed 62 people in the 27 years between the start of 1990 and the end of 2016.

    Police officers have become rogue predators in impoverished communities. Under U.S. forfeiture laws, police indiscriminately seize money, real estate, automobiles and other assets. In many cities, traffic, parking and other fines are little more than legalized extortion that funds local government and turns jails into debtor prisons.

    Because of a failed court system, millions of young men and women are railroaded into prison, many for nonviolent offenses. SWAT teams with military weapons burst into homes often under warrants for nonviolent offenses, sometimes shooting those inside. Trigger-happy cops pump multiple rounds into the backs of unarmed men and women and are rarely charged with murder. And for poor Americans, basic constitutional rights, including due process, were effectively abolished decades ago.

    Jonathan Simon’s “Governing Through Crime” and Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow” point out that what is defined and targeted as criminal activity by the police and the courts is largely determined by racial inequality and class, and most importantly by the potential of targeted groups to cause social and political unrest. Criminal policy, as sociologist Alex S. Vitale writes in his new book, “The End of Policing,” “is structured around the use of punishment to manage the ‘dangerous classes,’ masquerading as a system of justice.”

    The criminal justice system, at the same time, refuses to hold Wall Street banks, corporations and oligarchs accountable for crimes that have caused incalculable damage to the global economy and the ecosystem. None of the bankers who committed massive acts of fraud and were responsible for the financial collapse in 2008 have gone to prison even though their crimes resulted in widespread unemployment, millions of evictions and foreclosures, homelessness, bankruptcies and the looting of the U.S. Treasury to bail out financial speculators at taxpayer expense. We live in a two-tiered legal system, one in which poor people are harassed, arrested and jailed for absurd infractions, such as selling loose cigarettes—which led to Eric Garner being choked to death by a New York City policeman in 2014—while crimes of appalling magnitude that wiped out 40 percent of the world’s wealth are dealt with through tepid administrative controls, symbolic fines and civil enforcement.

    The grotesque distortions of the judicial system and the aggressive war on the poor by the police will get worse under President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions. There has been a rollback of President Barack Obama’s 2015 restrictions on the 1033 Program, a 1989 congressional action that allows the transfer of military weaponry, including grenade launchers, armored personnel carriers and .50-caliber machine guns, from the federal government to local police forces. Since 1997, the Department of Defense has turned over a staggering $5.1 billion in military hardware to police departments.

    The Trump administration also is resurrecting private prisons in the federal prison system, accelerating the so-called war on drugs, stacking the courts with right-wing “law and order” judges and preaching the divisive politics of punishment and retribution. Police unions enthusiastically embrace these actions, seeing in them a return to the Wild West mentality that characterized the brutality of police departments in the 1960s and 1970s, when radicals, especially black radicals, were murdered with impunity at the hands of law enforcement. The Praetorian Guard of the elites, as in all totalitarian systems, will soon be beyond the reach of the law. As Vitale writes in his book, “Our entire criminal justice system has become a gigantic revenge factory.”

    The arguments—including the racist one about “superpredators“—used to justify the expansion of police power have no credibility, as the gun violence in south Chicago, abject failure of the war on drugs and vast expansion of the prison system over the last 40 years illustrate. The problem is not ultimately in policing techniques and procedures; it is in the increasing reliance on the police as a form of social control to buttress a system of corporate capitalism that has turned the working poor into modern-day serfs and abandoned whole segments of the society. Government no longer makes any attempt to ameliorate racial and economic inequality. Instead, it criminalizes poverty. It has turned the poor into one more cash crop for the rich.

    “By conceptualizing the problem of policing as one of inadequate training and professionalization, reformers fail to directly address how the very nature of policing and the legal system served to maintain and exacerbate racial inequality,” Vitale writes.

     

    “By calling for colorblind ‘law and order’ they strengthen a system that puts people of color at a structural disadvantage. At the root, they fail to appreciate that the basic nature of the police, since its earliest origins, is to be a tool for managing inequality and maintaining the status quo. Police reforms that fail to directly address this reality are doomed to reproduce it. …Well-trained police following proper procedures are still going to be arresting people for mostly low-level offenses, and the burden of that will continue to fall primarily on communities of color because that is how the system is designed to operate—not because of the biases or misunderstandings of officers.”

    In a recent interview, Vitale told me, “We’ve been waging a war on drugs for 40 years by putting people in prison for ever longer sentences. Yet drugs are cheaper, easier to get, and at a higher quality than they’ve ever been. Any high school student in America can get any kind of drugs they want. Yet we persist in this idea that the way to respond to the problem of drugs, and many other social problems, is through arrest, courts, punishments, prisons. This is what Trump is playing to. This idea that the only appropriate role for the state is one of coercion and threats—whether it’s in the foreign policy sphere or in the domestic sphere.”

    Police forces, as Vitale writes in his book, were not formed to ensure public safety or prevent crime. They were created by the property classes to maintain economic and political dominance and exert control over slaves, the poor, dissidents and labor unions that challenged the wealthy’s hold on power and ability to amass personal fortunes. Many of America’s policing techniques, including widespread surveillance, were pioneered and perfected in colonies of the U.S. and then brought back to police departments in the homeland. Blacks in the South had to be controlled, and labor unions and radical socialists in the industrial Northeast and Midwest had to be broken.

    The fundamental role of the police has never changed. Paul Butler in his book “Chokehold: Policing Black Men” and James Forman Jr. in his book “Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America” echo Vitale’s point that the war on drugs “has never been about public health or public safety. It’s been about providing a cover for aggressive and invasive policing that targets almost exclusively people of color.”

    “People often point to the London Metropolitan Police, who were formed in the 1820s by Sir Robert Peel,” Vitale said. “They are held up as this liberal ideal of a dispassionate, politically neutral police with the support of the citizenry. But this really misreads the history. Peel is sent to manage the British occupation of Ireland. He’s confronted with a dilemma. Historically, peasant uprisings, rural outrages were dealt with by either the local militia or the British military. In the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, in the need for soldiers in other parts of the British Empire, he is having more and more difficulty managing these disorders. In addition, when he does call out the militia, they often open fire on the crowd and kill lots of people, creating martyrs and inflaming further unrest. He said, ‘I need a force that can manage these outrages without inflaming passions further.’ He developed the Peace Preservation Force, which was the first attempt to create a hybrid military-civilian force that can try to win over the population by embedding itself in the local communities, taking on some crime control functions, but its primary purpose was always to manage the occupation. He then exports that model to London as the industrial working classes are flooding the city, dealing with poverty, cycles of boom and bust in the economy, and that becomes their primary mission.”

    “The creation of the very first state police force in the United States was the Pennsylvania State Police in 1905,” Vitale said. “For the same reasons. It was modeled similarly on U.S. occupation forces in the Philippines. There was a back and forth with personnel and ideas. What happened was local police were unable to manage the coal strikes and iron strikes. … They needed a force that was more adherent to the interest of capital. … Interestingly, for these small-town police forces in a coal mining town there was sometimes sympathy. They wouldn’t open fire on the strikers. So, the state police force was created to be that strong arm for the law. Again, the direct connection between colonialism and the domestic management of workers. … It’s a two-way exchange. As we’re developing ideas throughout our own colonial undertakings, bringing those ideas home, and then refining them and shipping them back to our partners around the world who are often despotic regimes with close economic relationships to the United States. There’s a very sad history here of the U.S. exporting basically models of policing that morphs into death squads and horrible human rights abuses.”

    The almost exclusive alliance on militarized police to deal with profound inequality and social problems is turning poor neighborhoods in cities such as Chicago into miniature failed states, ones where destitute young men and women join a gang for security and income and engage in battles with other gangs and the police. The “broken windows” policy shifts the burden for poverty onto the poor. It criminalizes minor infractions, arguing that disorder produces crime and upending decades of research about the causes of crime.

    “As poverty deepens and housing prices rise, government support for affordable housing has evaporated, leaving in its wake a combination of homeless shelters and aggressive broken-windows-oriented policing,” Vitale writes. “As mental health facilities close, police become the first responders to calls for assistance with mental health crises. As youth are left without adequate schools, jobs, or recreational facilities, they form gangs for mutual protection or participate in the black markets of stolen goods, drugs, and sex to survive and are ruthlessly criminalized. Modern policing is largely a war on the poor that does little to make people safer or communities stronger, and even when it does, this is accomplished through the most coercive forms of state power that destroy the lives of millions.”

    The accelerated assault on the poor and the growing omnipotence of the police signal our transformation into an authoritarian state in which the rich and the powerful are not subject to the rule of law. The Trump administration will promote none of the conditions that could ameliorate this crisis—affordable housing; well-paying jobs; safe and nurturing schools that do not charge tuition; better mental health facilities; efficient public transportation; the rebuilding of the nation’s infrastructure; demilitarized police forces in which most officers do not carry weapons; universal, government-funded health care; an end to the predatory loans and unethical practices of big banks; and reparations to African-Americans and an end to racial segregation. Trump and most of those he has appointed to positions of power disdain the poor as a dead weight on society. They blame stricken populations for their own misery. They seek to subjugate the poor, especially those of color, through police violence, ever harsher forms of punishment and an expansion of the prison system.

    “We need an effective system of crime prevention and control in our communities, but that is not what the current system is,” Alexander writes in “The New Jim Crow.” “The system is better designed to create crime, and a perpetual class of people labeled criminal. … Saying mass incarceration is an abysmal failure makes sense, though only if one assumes that the criminal justice system is designed to prevent and control crime. But if mass incarceration is understood as a system of social control—specifically, racial control—then the system is a fantastic success.”

  • Nevada Rancher Cliven Bundy Goes On Trial For 2014 Armed Standoff With Federal Agents

    Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy is officially set to go on trial this week for his role in leading a 2014 armed standoff against federal agents that became a rallying point for militia groups challenging U.S. government authority in the American West.  As Reuters notes, jury selection is slated to start later this morning in a U.S. District Court in Las Vegas after being postponed due to the mass shooting on October 1st that claimed 58 lives.

    Jury selection in the latest trial was slated to begin on Monday morning in U.S. District Court in Las Vegas. The proceedings were postponed for three weeks after an unrelated mass shooting in Las Vegas on Oct. 1 in which 58 people were killed.

     

    Standing trial with Cliven Bundy, 71, are the two sons, Ammon and Ryan Bundy, who led last year’s Oregon occupation, and a third co-defendant, Ryan Payne, a Montana resident linked by prosecutors to a militia group called Operation Mutual Aid.

     

    A fourth co-defendant, internet blogger and radio host Peter Santilli, pleaded guilty on Oct. 6 to conspiracy and faces a possible six-year prison term.

    Six lesser-known participants in the Nevada ranch showdown went on trial as a group earlier this year with two men found guilty.  One of the two men was sentenced to 68 years in prison and the other is still awaiting sentencing.  Two of the four remaining defendants were retried and acquitted, and two others pleaded guilty last week to obstructing a court order. Those two each face up to a year in prison when sentenced.

    Bundy

    As you may recall, Bundy’s Nevada revolt was sparked by a court-ordered roundup of his cattle by government agents over his refusal to pay fees required to graze the herd on federal land.  Hundreds of supporters, many heavily armed, rallied to Bundy’s cause demanding that his livestock be returned. Outnumbered law enforcement officers ultimately retreated rather than risk bloodshed. No shots were ever fired.

    The face-off marked a flashpoint in long-simmering tensions over federal control of public lands in the West and was a precursor to Bundy’s two sons leading an armed six-week occupation of a federal wildlife center in Oregon two years later, in 2016 (see: “Now Is The Time To Stand Up”: Armed Activists, Militiamen Seize Federal Wildlife Refuge Office In Oregon).  Here’s a recap of the events leading up the Oregon standoff:

    On Saturday, militants seized a remote government outpost following a protest by hundreds of angry citizens.

     

    It all started back in 2001 when Dwight Hammond and his son Steven set fire to leased government land in what they said was an effort to beat back invasive plant species and – ironically – prevent wildfires. They set more fires in 2006 and were later convicted of arson.

     

     

    Both men served time in prison but a judge eventually determined that their sentences were too light and ordered them back to jail.

     

    “After the peaceful rally was completed today, a group of outside militants drove to the Malheur Wildlife Refuge, where they seized and occupied the refuge headquarters. A collective effort from multiple agencies is currently working on a solution. For the time being please stay away from that area. More information will be provided as it becomes available. Please maintain a peaceful and united front and allow us to work through this situation,” Harney County Sheriff Dave Ward said, in a statement. The elder Bundy weighed in as well, noting that the occuption isn’t “exactly what [he] thought should happen.” “But I didn’t know what to do,” he added. “You know, if the Hammonds wouldn’t stand, if the sheriff didn’t stand, then, you know, the people had to do something. And I guess this is what they did decide to do. I wasn’t in on that.”

    Ammon and Ryan Bundy, along with five other people, were previously charged with criminal conspiracy in the takeover of the Wildlife Refuge though that trial ended with the acquittal last year of all seven.

  • Japanese Stocks, USDJPY Rise After BoJ Leaves Policy Unchanged

    With the Nikkei 225 having only suffered one down day (so far) in the whole month of October (a record), The BoJ decided it's better not to rock the boat and left monetary policy unchanged, as expected.

     

    With new members at The BoJ, there was perhaps some uncertainty about Kuroda's decision today…

     

    Boradly speaking Japanese economic data has been supportive but in recent days, disappointment has begun to set in once again…

     

    But, as expected, The BoJ, hot on the heels of Abe's snap-election victory, left policy unchanged…

    • BOJ Board Votes 8-1 to Keep Policy Unchanged
    • Kataoka Dissents, Says BOJ Should Target 15 Yr JGB Yield
    • BOJ trims next year's inflation forecast as anticipated, 1.4% vs 1.5% last time.
    • BOJ statement keeps reference to 80 trillion yen bond buying target as well as 6 trillion yen ETF target.
    • Hedging their bets, the BOJ says "upside and downside risks to economic activity are generally balanced."

    So, no major surprise in those headlines but the inflation downgrade indicates challenges still ahead… and provide an 'out' for easing firther if the stock market ever drops.

    And the reaction…

    *  *  *

    October will be the best month for Japanese stocks in 2 years and given today's weakness so far, there were only two down days in the whole month…

     

    JGB yields remain rangebound and 'under control' for now…

    BOJ bought 7.74 trillion yen of JGBs in October in its market operations, little changed from about 7.7 trillion yen purchased in September.  It has bought about 57 trillion yen so far this fiscal year, after taking into account around 40 trillion yen of notes that are due for redemption in the period. That's well below the BOJ's 80 trillion yen target, but the bank has succeeded in its stealth tapering and keep yields generally pinned near zero.

    and it appears 114.00 is the limit for USDJPY for now…

     

    Here's something odd, as Bloomberg's Min Jeong Lee notes, BoJ bought 94.9 billion yen worth of ETFs in October, compared with an average monthly purchase of 505 billion yen in 2017. Here's a chart that shows the BOJ's ETF buying so far this year…

    So who was buying in October?

  • Tony Podesta Threatens Tucker Carlson After Bombshell Report On Russian Influence Peddling

    Content originally published at iBankCoin.com

    Tony Podesta sent a Cease and Decist letter to “Tucker Carlson Tonight” hours after resigning from his role at the Podesta Group – a D.C. lobbying firm accused by a former executive of pedaling Russian influence along with fellow lobbyist and short-lived Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort.

    Watch: 

    Manfort was indicted over the weekend on 12 counts ranging from tax fraud, money laundering and giving false statements between 2006 and 2015, and is currently under house arrest after turning himself over to the FBI Monday morning – fueling speculation as to whether Tony Podesta’s sudden departure from his firm is connected.

    Of note, Monday’s indictment lists “Company A” and “Company B” as firms involved in the investigation – which NBC reports are the Podesta Group and DC public relations firm Mercury Public Affairs.

    Last week Carlson reported that Tony Podesta is a central figure in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. Directly after his report, Carlson’s show was contacted by a former long-time executive of the Podesta Group with “direct personal knowledge” of Tony Podesta’s questionable activities, which Carlson divulged the next evening.

    While the nature of Podesta’s threat has not been made public, Carlson later tweeted “We’re confident the Mueller probe will reveal a lot more about Tony Podesta’s lobbying practices in the near future.”

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    To review:

     After meeting with the former Podesta Group executive who has been “extensively” interviewed by Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel, Tucker Carlson Tonight relayed several highly troubling aspects of the Tony Podesta’s relationship with business associate and fellow lobbyist, Paul Manafort.

    According to the former Podesta Group executive, Manafort and Tony Podesta were running a Russian influence-peddling racket up and down Washington D.C., bringing a “parade” of Russian oligarchs to congress for meetings. Podesta was also “Basically part of the Clinton Foundation,” meeting regularly to discuss the now-infamous Uranium One deal.

    Highlights, as previously reported (video below):

    • Lobbyist and temporary Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort is at the center of the Russia probe – however the scope of the investigation has broadened to include his activities prior to the 2016 election.
    • Manafort worked with the Podesta Group since at least 2011 on behalf of Russian interests, and was at the Podesta Group offices “all the time, at least once a month,” peddling Russian influence through a shell group called the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine (ECMU).
    • Manafort brought a “parade” of Russian oligarchs to congress for meetings with members and their staffs, however, the Russia’s “central effort” was the Obama Administration.
    • In 2013, John Podesta recommended that Tony hire David Adams, Hillary Clinton’s chief adviser at the State Department, giving them a “direct liaison” between the group’s Russian clients and Hillary Clinton’s State Department.
    • In late 2013 or early 2014, Tony Podesta and a representative for the Clinton Foundation met to discuss how to help Uranium One – the Russian owned company that controls 20 percent of American Uranium Production – and whose board members gave over $100 million to the Clinton Foundation.
    • “Tony Podesta was basically part of the Clinton Foundation.”
    • Believing she would win the 2016 election, Russia considered the Podesta Group’s connection to Hillary highly valuable.
    • Podesta Group is a nebulous organization with no board oversight and all financial decisions made by Tony Podesta. Carlson’s source said payments and kickbacks could be hard for investigators to trace, describing it as a “highly secret treasure trove.” One employee’s only official job was to manage Tony Podesta’s art collection, which could be used to conceal financial transactions.

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    Full monologue below:  

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  • Neocons Hijack Trump's Syria Policy – Ron Paul Asks "Haven't We Done Enough Damage?"

    Authored by Ron Paul via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,

    Does anyone in the Trump Administration have a clue about our Syria policy?

    In March, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson appeared to be finally pulling back from President Obama’s disastrous “Assad must go” position that has done nothing but prolong the misery in Syria. At the time, Tillerson said, the "longer-term status of President Assad will be decided by the Syrian people."

    Those of us who believe in national sovereignty would say that is pointing out the obvious.

    Nevertheless it was a good sign that US involvement in Syria – illegal as it is – would no longer seek regime change but would stick to fighting ISIS.

    Then out of the blue this past week, Tillerson did another 180 degree policy turn, telling a UN audience in Geneva that, “[t]he reign of the Assad family is coming to an end. The only issue is how that should that be brought about.”

    The obvious question is why is it any of our business who runs Syria, but perhaps that’s too obvious. Washington’s interventionists have long believed that they have the unilateral right to determine who is allowed to head up foreign countries. Their track record in placing “our guy” in power overseas is abysmal, but that doesn’t seem to stop them. We were promised that getting rid of people like Saddam Hussein and Gaddafi would light the fire of freedom and democracy in the Middle East. Instead it has produced nothing but death and misery – and spectacular profits for the weapons manufacturers who fund neocon think tanks.

    In Syria, Assad has been seen as a protector of Christians and other minorities against the onslaught of in many cases US-backed jihadists seeking his overthrow. While the Syrian system is obviously not a Switzerland-like democracy, unlike our great “ally” Saudi Arabia they do at least have elections contested by different political parties, and religious and other minorities are fully integrated into society.

    Why has the Trump Administration shifted back to “Assad must go”? One reason may be that, one-by-one, the neocons who opposed Trump most vociferously during the campaign have found themselves and their friends in positions of power in his Administration. The neocons are great at winning while losing.

    The real story behind Washington’s ongoing determination to overthrow the Syrian government is even more disturbing. In a bombshell interview last week, a former Qatari Prime Minister confessed that his country, along with Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the United States, began shipping weapons to jihadists from the very moment Syrian unrest began in 2011. The well-connected Qatari former minister was trying to point out that his country was not alone in backing al-Qaeda and even ISIS in Syria. In the course of defending his country against terrorism charges leveled by Saudi Arabia he has spilled the beans about US involvement with the very groups claimed to be our arch-enemies. As they did in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the CIA supported radical Islamic terrorism in Syria.

    Haven’t we done enough damage in Syria? Do we really need to go back to 2011 and destroy the country all over again?

    The neocons never admit a mistake and never change course, but I do not believe that the majority of Americans support their hijacking of President Trump’s Syria policy. It is long past time for the US to leave Syria alone. No bases, no special forces, no CIA assassination teams, no manipulating their electoral system. We need to just come home.

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