Apr 05

Today’s News 5th April 2017

  • Dear Statists: I Don't Care About You

    Authored by Joe Jarvis via TheDailyBell.com,

    Dear Statists,

    I don’t care about you, and would really appreciate it if you would stop “caring” about me.

    Now, you might be thinking, “Of course you don’t care about me, you’re a libertarian!” But that is not what I mean. Actually, I do tend to care about other people; I am empathetic of others and therefore advocate free markets, because the closer the globe comes to a free market, the more people are lifted out of poverty.

    But when I say I don’t care about you, what I mean is, I don’t care to force my views on you. I don’t care about you in the sense that the way you live your life doesn’t bother me as long as it doesn’t affect me. I don’t care to try to save you from yourself, and I don’t care to try to force conformity to my ideas of how a life should be lived.

    If it seems like I do care, it is only because we currently live in a society where 51% of the population decides which views will be forced on everyone.

    So I want you to stop forcing me to do things I don’t want to do, but I don’t need to convince you to join me; I don’t care what you do. You don’t have to change your ways, except by letting me change mine.

    I just want you to stop forcing me to live the way you prescribe. My views allow individuals to decide their own solutions to their own problems, so if your solution is to sell yourself into slavery, so be it. But don’t put me on the auction block as well!

    If you allowed me to live the way I want, it would not affect you negatively in the least! In fact, you probably wouldn’t even notice. I don’t need all of society to change, I just need to be freed from your societal chains.

    And no, I am not talking about America in particular, so I can’t just move to another country and live how I want to live. That would be like if you were forcing me to eat at Applebee’s, and I described in detail the unique and healthy dinner I would rather have, and you said, “if you don’t want to eat at Applebee’s, go to another restaurant!”

    The point is I don’t want to eat at any restaurant! I just want to make my own dinner, with my own ingredients that I choose to grow or buy from whomever I wish. But I won’t force you to eat my dinner; you can stay at Applebee’s for all I care! And none of this hurts you, (unless of course, your goal is to force me to fund restaurants.)

    Society will be civilized when you let me do my thing. And I won’t force you to do my thing either. I will be perfectly happy doing my own thing, and if you all still want a government for whatever reason, you can go ahead and do that. Just don’t force me into your club. Don’t initiate violence towards me for not wishing to be involved.

    And if you think this is already an option for me, you are naive and misguided; I would be arrested for committing (victimless) crimes, breaking regulations (that protect me from myself), and not paying taxes.

    You may think I should still be forced to pay taxes, because of the “benefits” I will still be getting from the government. But America doesn’t tax foreigners on vacation to pay for the roads, America is content with the money tourists will pour into the economy while here, in addition to the sales and other taxes they will pay during the visit. The same would happen if I went into your government’s territory.

    But to force me to continue paying taxes, while not using government services, would not be allowing me to go my separate way; I would still be forced to fund your government, which would place an extra burden on my own self governance, as well as force me to convert labor into fiat dollars, which I would not otherwise do. To force a man to fund something which he does not want or use is to admit that you view him as a slave.

    Any of those things would impose extra burdens on me, even if the government goods and services I pay for were forced on me. On the other hand, my opting-out of the system does not impose any extra burdens on the society I am leaving.

    So please, do not join me if you do not wish, and think me crazy and my ideas ludicrous if you must. But in doing so, please do not force me to consort with you or fund your government, and please do not initiate violence against me for doing things which do not harm anyone.

    I will be the first to admit that this agreement is null and void as soon as my activities cause harm, as would be the case with dumping chemicals in rivers, or burning toxic waste. But I think you will find my own desire for healthy living severely restricts the likelihood of that ever happening.

    I promise not to care what you do, if you promise not to care what I do.

    Sincerely,

    Joe Jarvis

    P.S. If you are a Californian statist, I fully support your state going it’s separate way! You shouldn’t be forced into the American club against your will, and should be left alone when you choose to exit. Live and let live.

  • WSJ reports that Susan Rice Was Not Alone In "Unmasking" Team Trump

    As part of its daily wrap of the Susan Rice newsflow, which focused on her first media appearance since she was “outed” as the persona responsible for “unmasking” members of team Trump, the WSJ provides two new pieces of incremental information: i) in addition to Michael Flynn, at least one more member of the Trump transition team was “unmasked” in intelligence reports due to multiple foreign conversations that weren’t related to Russia; and ii) Rice wasn’t the administration official who instigated Mr. Flynn’s unmasking, confirming there is at least one more high-level official giving “unmasking” orders.

    But first, a brief detour.

    “Unmasking” is a term used when the identity of a U.S. citizen or lawful resident is revealed in classified intelligence reports. Normally, when government officials receive intelligence reports, the names of American citizens are redacted to protect their privacy. But officials can request that names, listed as “U.S. Person 1,” for example, be unmasked internally in order to give context about the potential value of the intelligence. Unmasking is justified for national security reasons but is governed by strict rules across the U.S. intelligence apparatus that make it illegal to pursue for political reasons or to leak classified information generated by the process.

    It is the accusation that Rice unmasked members for purely political reasons – ostensibly in coordination with president Obama – that has gotten Republican smelling blood in the water.  Republicans have for weeks signaled that they saw unmasking as the key to investigating the source of media leaks damaging to the Trump administration — such as the exposure of former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, who was forced to resign in February after media reports revealed that he misled Vice President Pence about the contents of his discussions with the Russian ambassador.

    To that end, earlier this month, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) pressed FBI Director James Comey in a public Intelligence Committee hearing: “It would be nice to know the universe of people who have the power to unmask a U.S. citizen’s name… because that might provide something of a roadmap to investigate who might’ve actually disseminated a masked U.S. citizen’s name.”

    He went on to press Comey on whether specific Obama officials, including Rice, would have had the authority to request that a name be unmasked. “Yes, in general, and any other national security adviser would, I think, as a matter of their ordinary course of their business,” Comey answered.

    Shortly thereafter, The Hill notes Nunes made his shocking announcement that he — and he alone — had viewed documents that showed inappropriate unmasking by Obama-era officials.

    Today, Susan Rice came out to defend herself and told MSNBC that “the allegation is that somehow, Obama administration officials utilized intelligence for political purposes,” Rice told Mitchell. “That’s absolutely false.”

    She added that “The notion, which some people are trying to suggest, that by asking for the identity of the American person is the same is leaking it — that’s completely false. There is no equivalence between so-called unmasking and leaking.”

    And yet, that is precisely what many republicans are suggesting because otherwise there is no explanation for how the WaPo and NYT received, on a virtual silver platter, stories about Mike Flynn’s communications with intel-level detail.

    Perhaps Rice is simply lying as she lied on March 22 when in a PBS interview she said “I know nothing” about unmasking Trump officials. Less than two weeks later, we learn that she did.

    But perhaps there is more to the story than what we know so far.

    * * *

    And this is where the WSJ comes in, with the new info that according to a Republican official familiar with deliberations by GOP lawmakers on the House Intelligence Committee said that the names of two U.S. citizens who were part of Mr. Trump’s transition team have been unmasked in intelligence reports. One is Mr. Flynn and the other hasn’t been identified. The report involving Mr. Flynn documented phone conversations he had in late December with the Russian ambassador to the U.S.

    The WSJ then reports that Rice had requested the unmasking of at least one
    transition official — not Mr. Flynn —     who was part of multiple foreign
    conversations that weren’t related to Russia.

    And the punchline: “The Republican official and others said Ms. Rice wasn’t the administration official who instigated Mr. Flynn’s unmasking.“

    In other words, the story that Susan Rice is the unmasker is incomplete as there is at least one more person exposing the identities of people in Trump’s circle, and that the NSA and other intel agencies have been surveiling, accidentally or otherwise,  at least one, so far unnamed individual, from Trump’s circle. It may well be someone that the WaPo and NYT have already published about, or it may be someone who has yet to hit the newswire, delivering the latest twist of the ongoing intelligence-fed news cycle.

    For now the answer is unknown, although when Rice testifies under oath before the House Intel Committee, we hope that all outstanding questions will finally get answers.

  • "We Have A Serious Problem": For Jamie Dimon, This Is The Most Troubling Chart About The US Economy

    As discussed earlier, Jamie Dimon’s annual letter this year was a departure from his usual optimistic sermons about the state of nation, dedicating an entire section in the 45 page letter to  describe that “something is wrong” with the US. And of all the items mentions, the following aspect of the US economy is what was most troubling to the JPM CEO. Not surprisingly, it deals with two of the biggest threats facing the US currently: demographics and labor, and shows the at least in one key economic metric, the US is now the worst among the entire universe of developed countries.

    This is what Dimon said:

    Labor force participation in the United States has gone from 66% to 63% between 2008 and today. Some of the reasons for this decline are understandable and aren’t too worrisome – for example, an aging  population. But if you examine the data more closely and focus just on labor force participation for one key segment; i.e., men ages 25-54, you’ll see that we have a serious problem. The chart below shows that in America, the participation rate for that cohort has gone from 96% in 1968 to a little over 88% today. This is way below labor force participation in almost every other developed nation.

     

     

    If the work participation rate for this group went back to just 93% – the current average for the other developed nations – approximately 10 million more people would be working in the United States. Some other highly disturbing facts include: Fifty-seven percent of these non-working males are on disability, and fully 71% of today’s youth (ages 17–24) are ineligible for the military due to a lack of proper education (basic reading or writing skills) or health issues (often obesity or diabetes).

    Incidentally, Dimon’s key concern was initially flagged here back in 2013 and most recently, last summer. For the remainder of the US economic problems listed by Dimon, please refer to the original article.

  • The Next Subprime Crisis Is Here: 12 Signs That The US Auto Industry's Day Of Reckoning Has Arrived

    Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

    In 2008, subprime mortgages almost single-handedly took down the entire financial system, and now a new subprime crisis is here. 

    In recent years, the auto industry has been able to boost sales by aggressively pushing people into auto loans that they cannot afford.  In particular, auto loans made to consumers with subprime credit have been accounting for an increasingly larger percentage of the market.  Unfortunately, when you make loans to people that should not be getting them, eventually a lot of those loans are going to start to go bad, and that is precisely what is happening now.  Meanwhile, automakers and dealers are starting to panic as sales have begun to fall and used car prices have started to crash.  If you work in the auto industry, you might remember how horrible the last recession was, and this new downturn could eventually turn out to be even worse.  The following are 12 signs that a day of reckoning has arrived for the U.S. auto industry…

    #1 Seven out of the eight largest automakers in the United States fell short of their sales projections in March.

    #2 Overall, U.S. auto sales so far in 2017 have been described as a “disaster” despite record spending on consumer incentives by automakers.

    #3 Dealer inventories are now at the highest level that we have seen since the last financial crisis.  Why this is so troubling is because there are a whole lot of unsold vehicles just sitting there doing nothing, and this is becoming a major financial problem for many dealers.

    #4 It now takes an average of 74 days before a dealer is able to sell a new vehicle.  This number is also the highest that it has been since the last financial crisis.

    #5 Not only is Ford projecting that sales will fall this year, they are also projecting that sales will fall in 2018 as well.

    #6 Used vehicle prices are already starting to decline dramatically…

    The used-vehicle price index from the National Automobile Dealers Association posted a 3.8% decline in February compared to the prior month. NADA also said wholesale prices fell 1.6%.

    #7 As I discussed yesterday, Morgan Stanley is projecting that used car prices “could crash by up to 50%” over the next four or five years.

    #8 Right now, more than a million Americans are behind on their payments on their auto loans.  This is something that has not happened since the last financial crisis.

    #9 In 2017, U.S. consumers are more “underwater” on their auto loans than they have ever been before.

    #10 Subprime auto loan losses have soared to their highest level since the last financial crisis, and the delinquency rate on those loans has risen to the highest level that we have seen since the last financial crisis.  By now, I am sure that you are starting to notice a pattern in these data points.

    #11 At this moment, approximately $200,000,000,000 has been loaned out by auto lenders to consumers with subprime credit.

    #12 Just like with subprime mortgages in the run up to the last financial crisis, subprime auto loans have been bundled together and sold as “securities” to investors.  And just like last time around, this has turned out to be a recipe for disaster…

    Many auto loans, including those considered subprime, are securitized and sold to investors. But Morgan Stanley recently reported that the share of auto securities tied to “deep subprime” loans – those given to borrowers with a FICO credit score below 550 — has risen from 5.1 percent in 2010 to 32.5 percent today. It said defaults on those bonds have risen significantly in the past five years.

     

    Almost a quarter of the more than $1.1 trillion in U.S. auto loan debt is owed by subprime borrowers, and delinquency rates have hit their highest point in seven years.

    In the old days, you could always count on the U.S. auto industry to bounce back eventually because of the economic strength of average U.S. consumers.

    Unfortunately, the middle class in America is being systematically hollowed out by long-term economic trends that our leaders in Washington D.C. have consistently ignored.

    We have become a nation of economic extremes.  There are more millionaires in this country than ever before, but meanwhile poverty is exploding in communities all over the country.

    If you live in a prosperous area, things may be going great where you live for the moment.  But as Gallup has discovered, an all-time record high percentage of Americans are worrying “a great deal” about hunger and homelessness these days…

    Over the past two years, an average of 67% of lower-income U.S. adults, up from 51% from 2010-2011, have worried “a great deal” about the problem of hunger and homelessness in the country. Concern has also increased among middle- and upper-income Americans, but they still worry far less than do lower-income Americans.

    You may have plenty of money in your bank account, and so for you hunger and homelessness are not very big issues.  But for those that are just scraping by from month to month, having enough food and a place to sleep at night are top priorities.  Here is more from Gallup…

    Americans at all income levels are expressing greater concern about hunger and homelessness, and it is the top worry among lower-income Americans, who are most likely to struggle to pay for adequate food and housing.

    In addition to the woes of the auto industry, the retail industry is going through the worst wave of store closings in modern American history, pension funds are melting down all over the nation, and stocks are primed for a crash of epic proportions.  Things are lining up just right for the kind of scenario that I laid out in The Beginning Of The End, but unfortunately most people are not listening to the warnings.

    The same thing happened just before the great financial crisis of 2008.  All of the warning signs were there well in advance, and many of the experts were warning about what was coming as early as 2005.  But because it did not happen immediately, a lot of people greatly mocked the warnings.

    But then the fall of 2008 arrived and all of the mockers suddenly went silent.

    As you can see from the numbers that I shared above, a new crisis has already arrived.

    The only question now is how bad it will ultimately turn out to be.

    As always, let us hope for the best, but let us also get prepared for the worst.

  • When Government Evil Triumphs, Freedom Falls

    Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

    “Government is said to be a necessary evil. The saying appears to be without merit. For can anything be at once necessary and evil? True, all governments have had a history of evil-doing, more or less. However, it does not follow from this experience that their good is indistinguishable from their evil. Governments—assuming a proper limitation of their activities—are necessary and not evil. Their evil begins when they step out of bounds.”—Economist Leonard Read

    It is often said that if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.

    Unfortunately, the American government has been the opposite of good for too long now.

    In fact, the American government has been very, very, very bad: so bad, in fact, as to be almost indistinguishable at times from the evil it claims to be fighting, whether that evil takes the form of terrorism, torture, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, murder, violence, theft, pornography, scientific experimentations or some other diabolical means of inflicting pain, suffering and servitude on humanity.

    Philosopher Susan Neiman suggests that referring to something as “evil is a way of marking the fact that it shatters our trust in the world.”

    It’s an apt description for a government that keeps violating the sacred trust of its citizenry.

    “We the people” should have learned early on that a government that repeatedly lies, cheats, steals, spies, kills, maims, enslaves, breaks the laws, overreaches its authority, and abuses its power at almost every turn can’t be trusted.

    We haven’t learned.

    We didn’t learn this lesson under George W. Bush. We didn’t learn it under Barack Obama. Although it has become fashionable among the media elite to blame the Trump Administration for all that is wrong with the country, where Americans go wrong is in becoming so fixated on a particular politician that they fail to understand that the fault rests with the Government: the permanent, entrenched Deep State that continues to call the shots in the halls of power.

    Indeed, the evils perpetrated by the U.S. government have been going on for some time now.

    Consider just a few of the ways in which the government—in a misguided, ill-conceived, flawed, bureaucratic and downright Orwellian attempt to fight evil with evil—continues to inflict evil on the citizenry.

    Peddling child pornography to catch child porn consumers: As part of an effort to crack down on child porn consumers and traffickers, for two weeks in 2015, the FBI secretly hijacked a child porn website, improved the technical functionality of the site, and uploaded tens of thousands of images of child pornography to the site. In doing so, the government not only became the largest distributor of child pornography, but it also became the largest exploiter of children. All told, the FBI was accused of hosting an estimated 22,000 images, videos and links of child pornography that more than 100,000 people accessed.

    This is what Douglas Anderson, chair of the University of North Texas' philosophy and religion department, refers to as a cost-benefit analysis. In this instance, the government weighed the cost of inflicting damage on innocent children who were being victimized and preyed upon against the benefits of catching people who download child porn. “It’s a moral conundrum for anyone who takes the view that we are committed to protecting them in all ways,” Anderson said in an interview with the Dallas Morning News. “They're weighing it against these kids’ lives. World opinion says we have a basic duty to protect children. You’d have to have something pretty overwhelming to offset damaging more people. It would have to be awfully extreme to allow even one child to be harmed.”

    Incredibly, after going to such morally questionable depths to catch child porn consumers, the government chose to drop its case rather than be forced to reveal the surveillance and hacking tools it used to set its trap.

    Trafficking weapons to catch drug traffickers. They referred to it as Operation Fast and Furious: a 15-month sting operation carried out by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives aimed at dismantling Mexican drug cartels and disrupting drug trafficking routes within the United States. Only it didn’t quite work out that way. As the National Review reports, “Under ‘Operation Fast & Furious,’ the U.S. government became a de facto arms dealer to Mexican drug cartels and Islamist criminals.”

    The concept was straight-forward enough: the U.S. government allowed gun sellers and informants to sell approximately 2,000 weapons to gun traffickers in the hopes that the weapons would be tracked to the drug cartels, which would then be targeted and disrupted. Although it appears that the weapons did make it into the hands of the drug cartels, government agents lost track of an estimated 1,400 weapons, many of which were linked to crimes, including the fatal shooting of a Border Patrol agent in 2010.

    Dealing drugs to catch drug dealers. Taking advantage of federal and state asset forfeiture laws that allow police to seize and keep money if they suspect it may be related to criminal activities, law enforcement agencies have been raking in millions of dollars in entrapment schemes in which they sell cocaine to drug users and then bust them for buying it, or lure big-city drug dealers to suburban towns with promises of big sales and then bust them in the act.

    As the Sun Sentinel reports:

    Police in this suburban town best known for its sprawling outlet mall have hit upon a surefire way to make millions. They sell cocaine. Undercover detectives and their army of informants lure big-money drug buyers into the city from across the United States, and from as far north as Canada and as far south as Peru. They negotiate the sale of kilos of cocaine in popular family restaurants, then bust the buyers and seize their cash and cars. Police confiscate millions from these deals, money that fuels huge overtime payments for the undercover officers who conduct the drug stings and cash rewards for the confidential informants who help detectives entice faraway buyers… Undercover officers tempt these distant buyers with special discounts, even offering cocaine on consignment and the keys to cars with hidden compartments for easy transport. In some deals, they’ve provided rides and directions to these strangers… Many of the drug negotiations and busts have taken place at restaurants around the city’s main attraction, Sawgrass Mills mall, including such everyday dining spots as TGI Fridays, Panera Bread and the Don Pan International Bakery.

    Fighting wars abroad by fueling wars abroad. The United States, the world’s largest exporter of arms, has been selling violence to the world for too long now. Controlling more than 50 percent of the global weaponry market, the U.S. has sold or donated weapons to at least 96 countries in the past five years, including the Middle East.

    Some of these weapons inevitably end up in our enemies’ hands, as well as those of terrorists. For instance, the Pentagon’s efforts to train Syrian fighters ended with most of the infantrymen voluntarily surrendering their U.S.-provided equipment to extremist groups. These weapons—precision guided weapons or smart bombs, cluster bombs, and depleted uranium shells, among others—are also responsible for the deaths of innocent civilians in Yemen, Syria and elsewhere.

    As Mother Jones reports:

    Arms deals are a way of life in Washington. From the president on down, significant parts of the government are intent on ensuring that American arms will flood the global market and companies like Lockheed and Boeing will live the good life. From the president on his trips abroad to visit allied world leaders to the secretaries of state and defense to the staffs of US embassies, American officials regularly act as salespeople for the arms firms. And the Pentagon is their enabler. From brokering, facilitating, and literally banking the money from arms deals to transferring weapons to favored allies on the taxpayers' dime, it is in essence the world's largest arms dealer.

    Creating terrorists in order to snare terrorists. The FBI has a long, sordid history of inventing crimes, breeding criminals and helping to hatch and then foil terrorist plots in order to advance its own sordid agenda: namely, amassing greater powers under the guise of fighting the war on terrorism.

    Investigative journalist Trevor Aaronson argues convincingly that “the FBI is much better at creating terrorists than it is at catching terrorists.” According to Aaronson’s calculations, the FBI is responsible for more terrorism plots in the United States than al Qaeda, al Shabaab and the Islamic State combined.

    One of the government’s tactics involves radicalizing impressionable young men in order to create and then “catch” terrorists. Under the guise of rooting out terrorists before they strike, the FBI targets mentally ill or impressionable individuals (many of whom are young and have no prior connection to terrorism), indoctrinates them with anti-American propaganda, pays criminals $100,000 per case to act as informants and help these would-be terrorists formulate terror plots against American targets, provides them with weapons and training, and then arrests them for being would-be terrorists. This is entrapment, plain and simple, or what former FBI director Robert Mueller referred to as a policy of “forward leaning – preventative – prosecutions.”

    Spreading disease in order to cure disease. For years, the American government conducted secret experiments on an unsuspecting populace—citizens and noncitizens alike—making healthy people sick by spraying them with chemicals, injecting them with infectious diseases and exposing them to airborne toxins. The government reasoned that it was legitimate to experiment on people who did not have full rights in society such as prisoners, mental patients, and poor blacks.

    The mindset driving these programs has, appropriately, been likened to the unethical experiments carried out by Nazi doctors. In Alabama, for example, 600 black men with syphilis were allowed to suffer without proper medical treatment in order to study the natural progression of untreated syphilis. In Connecticut, mental patients were injected with hepatitis. In Maryland, sleeping prisoners had a pandemic flu virus sprayed up their noses. In Georgia, two dozen “volunteering” prison inmates had gonorrhea bacteria pumped directly into their urinary tracts through the penis. In Michigan, male patients at an insane asylum were exposed to the flu after first being injected with an experimental flu vaccine. In Minnesota, 11 public service employee “volunteers” were injected with malaria, then starved for five days. In New York, dying patients had cancer cells introduced into their systems. And in Staten Island, children with mental retardation were given hepatitis orally and by injection to see if they could then be cured.

    These incidents are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the atrocities the government has inflicted on an unsuspecting populace in the name of secret experimentation. For instance, there was the U.S. military’s secret race-based testing of mustard gas on more than 60,000 enlisted men. And then there was the CIA’s MKULTRA program in which hundreds of unsuspecting American civilians and military personnel were dosed with LSD, some having the hallucinogenic drug slipped into their drinks at the beach, in city bars, at restaurants.

    Are you starting to notice a pattern here?

    For too long now, the American people have been persuaded to barter their freedoms for phantom promises of security and, in the process, have rationalized turning a blind eye to all manner of government wrongdoing—asset forfeiture schemes, corruption, surveillance, endless wars, SWAT team raids, militarized police, profit-driven private prisons, and so on—because they were the so-called lesser of two evils.

    No matter how you rationalize it, the lesser of two evils is still evil.

    There’s a scene in The Third Man, Carol Reed’s influential 1949 film starring Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles in which a rogue war profiteer (Harry Lime) views human carnage with a callous indifference, unconcerned that the diluted penicillin he’s been trafficking underground has resulted in the tortured deaths of young children.

    Challenged by his old friend Holly Martins to consider the consequences of his actions, Lime responds, “In these days, old man, nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don’t, so why should we?”

    “Have you ever seen any of your victims?” asks Martins.

    “Victims?” responds Lime, as he looks down from the top of a Ferris wheel onto a populace reduced to mere dots on the ground. “Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?”

    Lime’s callous indifference is no different from the U.S. government’s calculating cost-benefit analyses. After all, to the government, “we the people” are little more than faceless numbers, statistics and economic units to be bought, sold, bartered, traded, tracked, tortured, spied upon, caged like animals, treated like slaves, experimented upon, and then discarded and left to suffer from the after-effects.

    As John Lennon summed it up, “We’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends.”

    Is the government evil? You tell me.

    The same government that laced the fog over San Francisco with bioweapons, sprayed bacteria from Navy ships off the coast of Norfolk and San Francisco, exposing all of the city’s 800,000 residents, and staged “mock” anthrax attacks covering territory as wide-ranging as Ohio to Texas and Michigan to Kansas has also taken every bit of technology sold to us as being in our best interests—GPS devices, surveillance, nonlethal weapons, behavioral methods, etc.—and used it against us, to track, control and trap us.

    The same government that propelled us into endless oil-fueled wars and military occupations in the Middle East that wreaked havoc on our economy, stretched thin our military resources and subjected us to horrific blowback has also turned America into a battlefield, transforming law enforcement agencies into extensions of the military, conducting military drills on domestic soil, distributing “free” military equipment and weaponry to local police, and desensitizing Americans to the menace of the police state with active shooter drills, color-coded terror alerts, and randomly conducted security checkpoints at “soft” targets such as shopping malls and sports arenas.

    Likewise, the same government that—as part of its so-called “war on terror”—passed laws subjecting us to all manner of invasive searches and surveillance, censoring our speech and stifling our expression, rendering us anti-government extremists for daring to disagree with its dictates, locking us up for criticizing government policies on social media, encouraging Americans to spy and snitch on their fellow citizens, and allowing government agents to grope, strip, search, taser, shoot and kill us has also—in a so-called effort to keep the schools safe— locked down the schools by installing metal detectors and surveillance cameras, adopting zero tolerance policies that punish childish behavior as harshly as criminal actions, and teaching our young people that they have no rights, that being force-fed facts is education rather than indoctrination, that they are not to question governmental authority, that they must meekly accept a life of censorship, round-the-clock surveillance, roadside blood draws, SWAT team raids and other indignities.

    How can you ever trust the government again?

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, you shouldn’t have trusted the government in the first place. It was Thomas Jefferson who warned, “In questions of power then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”

    Unfortunately, as Carl Sagan recognized, “If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”

    How do you fight evil? Start by recognizing it. Talk about it. Refuse to play politics with your principles. Don’t settle for the lesser of two evils. Stop being apathetic.

    As British statesman Edmund Burke warned, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men [and women] to do nothing.”

  • Visualizing How Much State Debt Rests On Your Shoulders?

    How much state debt is there per person, and, as Visual Capitalist's Jeff Desjardins asks, why is there such a wide discrepancy between states like Massachusetts ($11,000 per person) and Nebraska ($1,000 per person)?

    THE SNOWBALL OF STATE DEBT

    Today’s infographic from HowMuch.net, a cost information site, organizes states by debt per capita using a snowball-like effect.

    Courtesy of: Visual Capitalist

     

    The five states at the center of the snowball with the highest debt per capita are Massachusetts ($11,000), Connecticut ($9,200), Rhode Island ($8,900), Alaska ($8,200), and New Jersey ($7,400).

    On the other end of the spectrum are the five states with the lowest state debt per capita: Tennessee ($900), Nebraska ($1,000), Nevada ($1,200), Georgia ($1,300), and Arkansas ($1,500).

    While it is reasonable to expect big differences in debt per capita between countries, seeing an interstate difference of up to 10x per person seems a bit perplexing at face value. Let’s see if we can dig a little deeper on what accounts for these differences.

    THE CURIOUS CASE OF MASSACHUSETTS

    Currently, Massachusetts holds the title of the highest state debt per capita, as well as ranking #2 in terms of state debt as a percentage of GDP (14.0%). It’s also worth noting that debt analysts at S&P have recently lowered the outlook on state bonds from stable to negative.

    Meanwhile, The Mercatus Center ranked Massachusetts in 49th place in their 2016 State Fiscal Rankings. (The only state to fare worse was Connecticut.)

    Mercatus snapshot for Massachusetts

    Like other old and urban states, Massachusetts requires significant investments to repair aging roads, schools, and other infrastructure. For many fiscal analysts, however, it is the gap in unfunded liabilities that is the long-term concern.

    Forbes notes that unfunded liabilities from public pensions are probably the biggest fiscal problem facing state governments today, and Massachusetts is no exception. Unfunded liabilities in the state are pegged at $94.45 billion with other postemployment benefits (OPEB) at $15.38 billion, and eventually these are issues that will have to be dealt with.

    HEALTHIER BUDGETS

    What does a healthier state budget look like? The best examples can be found in the Midwest.

    Here’s Nebraska, which has about $1,000 of debt per person:

    Mercatus snapshot for Nebraska

    Nebraska exhibits strong fiscal health across all categories. On a cash basis, Nebraska has between 3.81 and 5.02 times the cash needed to cover short-term liabilities. Revenues exceed expenses by 7 percent, producing a surplus of $294 per capita.

     

    – Mercatus Center at George Mason University

     

  • House Intel Panel Wants Susan Rice To Testify

    If former National Security Advisor Susan Rice though she could get away from the current furore over the Trump “unmasking” scandal with just one MSNBC interview in which Andrea Mitchell did not even ask her why she lied two weeks ago to PBS, she will be disappointed because the House Intelligence Committee has officially asked Susan Rice to testify, supposedly under oath.

    As the WSJ reports, citing two officials familiar with the matter, Rice who served as national security adviser under former President Barack Obama, is on a list of witnesses drawn up by the committee as part of its probe. House Republicans and Democrats have agreed upon a preliminary list of about 30 witnesses that officials say will be expanded as needed. Formal requests to testify haven’t been sent yet by the committee to the witnesses.

    As everyone knows by now, the White House and Rep. Devin Nunes (R., Calif.), the House panel’s chairman, have charged the Obama administration improperly used surveillance information that included “unmasking” the names of Trump transition team members for political gain ahead of handing over the White House.

    Earlier on Tuesday, speaking to MSNBC, Rice said she didn’t use intelligence about Mr. Trump’s associates for political purposes and said she didn’t leak anything regarding her successor, Mike Flynn. In the television interview, she also described requests to unmask the identities of Americans mentioned in intelligence reports as necessary to do her job and entirely different than leaking classified information.

    “The notion, which some people are trying to suggest, that by asking for the identity of an American person, that is the same as leaking it, is completely false,” Ms. Rice said on MSNBC. “There’s no equivalence between so-called unmasking and leaking. The effort to ask for the identity of the American citizen is necessary to understand the importance of an intelligence report in some instances.”

    However, she declined to comment on whether she had made such requests with respect to people associated with Trump who may have been mentioned in intelligence reports. She was also not asked why she lied in an interview two weeks ago on PBS in which she said she had no information about any “unmasking.”

    A Republican official familiar with deliberations by GOP lawmakers on the House Intelligence Committee said the names of two U.S. citizens who were part of the Trump transition team have been unmasked in intelligence reports. One is Mr. Flynn and the other hasn’t been identified, said the official, adding that this person appeared in a report that had nothing to do with Russia, unlike the report featuring Mr. Flynn, which documented phone conversations he had in late December with the Russian ambassador to the U.S.

     

    Flynn was forced to resign after misleading White House officials and Vice President Mike Pence about the nature of those conversations, which current and former officials said concerned the possible easing of Obama-era sanctions on Russia. The existence of those conversations was leaked to the media in January, almost exclusively to the WaPo and NYT.

    The question is who did the leaking.

    The Republican official and others said Rice wasn’t the administration official who instigated Flynn’s unmasking. Rice acknowledged in her televised interview Tuesday that she requested names of Americans be unmasked in intelligence files. But she refused to comment about whether she sought the unmasking of any Trump transition members.

    “The additional unmasking of an American is a disaster,” the Republican official said. “There was no reason to unmask that name.”

    Rice said in the MSNBC interview that she couldn’t get into which names were unmasked in specific reports. “I don’t know what Devin Nunes reviewed at the White House,” she said. “What I can say is that  there is an established process for senior national security officials to ask for the identity of U.S. persons in these reports.” Rice also said she didn’t know what reports were being referred to “by those who are putting out this story.” 

    “I don’t know what time frame they were from, I don’t know the subject matter, and I don’t know who they think was collected upon,” she said.

    Rice also said she didn’t leak the name of Mr. Flynn.  “I leaked nothing to nobody and never have and never would,” Rice said.

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    The process of unmasking, like many actions within the U.S. intelligence apparatus, is highly secretive and contentious because they themselves are classified and revealing them publicly could be a crime.

    And while Susan Rice may not have “known” much in her MSNBC interview, she will have to come up with answers during her sworn testimony.

    At which point the only question on everyone’s lips will be: will she plead the Fifth?

  • Paul Craig Roberts On The Real Russiagate: "Obama's Stasi State"

    Authored by Michael Hudson and Paul Craig Roberts,

    Mike Whitney has written an excellent expose of the “Russiagate” cover story for Obama’s political use of national security to help his party oppose Republicans. 

    Covert surveillance of politicians on Obama’s Nixon-like “Enemies List” has been going on for many years, but is only now being unmasked as a result of the failure of Obama’s cover story–“We weren’t spying on political opponents; only on Russians to protect America.”

    The presstitute media has passed on the cover story authored by former Obama-administration officials led by CIA director John Brennan, FBI director James Comey, the DNC, and Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff. The loose ends in this cover-up have now been so widely exposed as hearsay and political that only 13% of Republicans believe the fact-free story – but 67% of Democrats cling to it.

    Whitney reports that Comey began the investigation in July 2016. As of last Friday (March 31, 2017) not a scrap of evidence has turned up. This did not deter Comey from telling Congress that Putin “hated Secretary Clinton so much that the flip side of that coin was that he had a clear preference for the person running against the person he hated so much.” So the Russians allegedly “engaged in a multifaceted campaign to undermine our democracy.”

    Comey based this conclusion on what has become a hilarious bit of gullibililty.

    The Russians, he said “were unusually loud in their intervention. It’s almost as if they didn’t care that we knew, that they wanted us to see what they were doing.”

    Alternatively, someone wanted investigators to infer that the Russians were doing the hacking. As Wikeleaks Vault 7 releases prove, the CIA can hack computers and leave anyone else’s signature. Due to poor security, the CIA’s cybertechnology ended up in the Internet domain.

    “They’ll be back. They’ll be back, in 2020. They may be back in 2018,” warned Mr. Comey. But who is the “they”? “They” seem to be “us,” or at least what numerous former national security officials have suggested: either the NSC, CIA or its “Five Eyes” partner, British MI6.

    Wall Street Journal editorialist Kimberley A. Strassel poses the real question: Why hasn’t the Trump administration had the Secret Service to arrest Comey, Brennan, Schiff, the DNC and Hillary for trying to overthrow the President of the United States?

    “Mr. Nunes has said he has seen proof that the Obama White House surveilled the incoming administration—on subjects that had nothing to do with Russia—and that it further unmasked (identified by name) transition officials. This goes far beyond a mere scandal. It’s a potential crime.”

    What we are watching is turning out to be traces of a plot against a government elected by the American people. Attempts to get at the truth by House national security committee Chairman Devin Nunes have been countered with demands by Democrats to recuse himself so as to stop his exposé of how “Team Obama was spying broadly on the incoming administration.”

    It seems that this has been going on for many years now. Former Rep. Dennis Kucinich has dropped a bombshell about what appears to be his own illegal surveillance under Obama’s NSC.

    “When the president raised the question of wiretapping on his phones in Trump Tower, he was challenged to prove that such a thing could happen. It happened to me.”

    Here’s what happened, which was revealed two years after he left office in 2013 when the Democrats were overjoyed to see Ohio Republicans redraw the election district lines to get rid of his candidacy. The Washington Times asked him to authenticate a secret recording of a cell phone call “from Saif el-Islam Qaddafi, a high-ranking official in Libya’s government and a son of the country’s ruler, Moammar Qaddafi.”

    Before taking the call, Rep. Kucinich “checked with the House’s general counsel to ensure that such a discussion by a member of Congress with a foreign power was permitted by law.”

    “I was assured that under the Constitution a lawmaker had a fundamental duty to ask questions and gather information—activity expressly protected by the Article I clauses covering separation of powers and congressional speech and debate.”

    Given the quality of the recordings was excellent on both ends of the call, Kucinich concluded that “the tape was made by an American intelligence agency and then leaked to the Times for political reasons. If so, this episode represented a gross violation of the separation of powers.”

    His repeated Freedom of Information Act requests made in 2012 before leaving office have been stonewalled by the intelligence agencies for five years.

    We are now in a position to see the real story behind “Russiagate.”

    It’s not about Russia. The real news is the Obama regime’s abuse of the government’s surveillance powers to spy on Donald Trump and other Republicans in order to build a dossier for the DNC to leak to the press in an attempt to slander or compromise Trump and throw the election to Hillary.

    They’ve been caught, but we can now see that they took steps to protect themselves against this. They prepared a cover story. They pretend they were not spying on Trump, but on Russians – which only by fortuitous happenchance turned up alleged incriminating smoke against Trump.

    This cover story was buttressed by the fake news story prepared by former MI6 freelancer Christopher Steele. As Whitney reports, Steele “was hired as an opposition researcher last June to dig up derogatory information on Donald Trump.” Unvetted and unverified information by so-called informants somehow found its way into U.S. intelligence agency reports. These reports were then leaked to Democrat-friendly media. This is where the crime lies. Obama regime and DNC were using these agencies for domestic political use, KGB style.

    The Obama/Clinton cover story is now falling to pieces. That explains the desperation in the attack by Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, on Committee Chairman Devin Nunes to stop the exposure. Russiagate is not a Trump/Putin collusion but a domestic spy job carried out by Democrats.

    Law requires Trump to arrest those responsible and to put them on trial for treason and conspiracy to overthrow the government of the United States. If Trump fears to prosecute the Obama operatives within the Deep State, they will try all the harder to attack him to the point of forcing his removal or at least discrediting him and his fellow Republicans to pave the way for the 2018 elections.

  • Susan Rice Responds To Trump Unmasking Allegations: "I Leaked Nothing To Nobody"

    If anyone expected former National Security Advisor Susan Rice, the same Susan Rice who “stretched the truth” about Benghazi, to admit in her first public appearance after news that she unmasked members of the Trump team to admit she did something wrong, will be disappointed. Instead, moments ago she told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell that she categorically denied that the Obama administration inappropriately spied on members of the Trump transition team.

    “The allegation is that somehow, Obama administration officials utilized intelligence for political purposes,” Rice told Mitchell. “That’s absolutely false…. My job is to protect the American people and the security of our country. ”

    “There was no such collection or surveillance on Trump Tower or Trump individuals, it is important to understand, directed by the White House or targeted at Trump individuals,” Rice said.

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    “I don’t solicit reports,” Rice said Tuesday. “They’re giving it to me, if I read it, and I think that in order for me to understand, is it significant or not so significant, I need to know who the ‘U.S. Person’ is, I can make that request.” She did concede that it is “possible” the Trump team was picked up in “incidental surveillance.”

    “The notion, which some people are trying to suggest, that by asking for the identity of the American person is the same is leaking it — that’s completely false,” Rice said. “There is no equivalence between so-called unmasking and leaking.”

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    That said, Rice did not discuss what motive she may have had behind what Bloomberg, Fox and others have confirmed, was her unmasking of members of the Trump team.

    Rice also flatly denied exposing President Trump’s former national security advisor Michael Flynn, who was forced to resign in February after media reports revealed that he misled Vice President Pence about the contents of a phone call with the Russian ambassador. Asked by Mitchell if she seeked to unmask the names of people involved in the Trump campaign in order to spy on them, Rice says: “absolutely not, for any political purpose, to spy, expose, anything.” And yet, that is what happened. She was then asked if she leaked if she leaked the name of Mike Flynn: “I leaked nothing to nobody.”

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    In a follow up question, Rice said that when it comes to Mike Flynn with whom she had “civil and cordial relations”, that she learned “in the press” that he was an unregistered agent for the Turkish government.

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    We doubt that anyone’s opinion will change after hearing the above especially considering that, in addition to Benghazi,  Rice is the official who praised Bowe Bergdahl for his “honorable service” and claimed he was captured “on the battlefield”, and then just two weeks ago, she told PBS that she didn’t know anything about the unmasking.

    Unfortunately, Mitchell’s list of questions did not go so far as to ask about her false claim in the PBS interview, in which she said “I know nothing about unmasking Trump officials.”

    It is thus hardly surprising that now that her memory has been “refreshed” about her role in the unmasking, that Rice clearly remembers doing nothing at all wrong.

    On Monday night, Rand Paul and other Republicans called for Rice to testify under oath, a request she sidestepped on Tuesday. “Let’s see what comes,” she told Mitchell, when asked if she would testify on the matter. “I’m not going to sit here and prejudge.”

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