- Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance Between The Vatican, The CIA, & The Mafia
Authored by via Off-Guardian.org,
On the hot summer morning of Aug. 2, 1980 a massive explosion ripped apart the main waiting room of the Bologna railway station. Eighty-five people were killed and hundreds more injured. Though at first blamed on Italy’s legendary urban guerrillas, The Red Brigades, it soon emerged that the attack had, in fact, originated from within the ‘deep state’ of the Italian government itself.
The full nature of this secret parallel state would only come to light a decade later when the Italian premier, Giulio Andreotti, under questioning from a special commission of inquiry, revealed the existence of arms caches stashed all around the country and which were at the disposal of an organization which later came to be identified as ‘Gladio’.
The members of this group turned out to include not only hundreds of far-right figures in the intelligence, military, government, media, Church and corporate sectors, but a motley assortment of unreconstructed WW2 fascists, psychopaths and criminal underworld types to boot. And despite Andreotti’s attempts to airbrush the group as ‘patriots’ it appeared evident to much of the rest of the Italian polity that these seemed rather more like pretty bad folk indeed. Little did they know. Follow-up research by the likes of Daniele Ganser, Claudio Celani, Jurgen Roth and Henrik Kruger traced connections to similar groups spread throughout Europe of which all were found to be deep state terrorist organizations, and all of which were found, ultimately, to be subservient unto the highest levels of the CIA and NATO command structures.
The moniker ‘Gladio’ (after the two-edged sword used in classical Rome) was eventually broadened to include a bewildering host of related deep state terrorist structures including: ‘P2’ In Italy, ‘P26’ in Switzerland, ‘Sveaborg’ in Sweden, ‘Counter-Guerrilla’ in Turkey and ‘Sheepskin’ in Greece. This (hardly definitive) European list was then found to have connections not only to virtually every US sponsored secret state terrorist organization the world over (including the likes of Operation Condor in Latin America), but also to many of the global drug cartels that provided the secretive wealth needed to fund and otherwise lubricate the whole rotting, corrupt shebang.
If all this sounds sinister enough, it pales in light of the detailed structure of the dazzlingly diabolical Gladio edifice. And it is to those details we now repair vis a vis an overview of the remarkable, if otherwise unheralded, 2015 work by journalist Paul L. Williams entitled, ‘Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance Between the Vatican, the CIA and the Mafia’. Though there are other books on the subject worthy of honourable mention (including Daniele Ganser’s seminal tome, ‘NATO’s Secret Armies’, and Richard Cottrell’s recent and stylishly written, ‘Gladio: NATO’s Dagger at the Heart of Europe’), it is to Williams that I believe we owe a particular debt of gratitude in having provided a more or less fully integrated portrait of the global machinations of Operation Gladio.
Before embarking on our grim, if yet fascinating, journey it is worth first noting that whilst ‘Gladio’ was officially acknowledged and condemned by the European Parliament (in Nov., 1990; Washington and NATO having ever after refused ‘comment’ on the matter), and its multifarious organs and factions ordered dismantled, it is hardly likely that the latter was ever fully enacted. The historical context of ‘Gladio’, then, is really the quintessential backdrop to understanding the trademark false flag events of the modern era.
OF SPOOKS AND MADE MEN
The general origins of this labyrinthine network of deep state actors lay in the so-called ‘stay-behind-armies’ set up at the end of WW2 by the Allied powers (principally the US) ostensibly to act as resistance forces should the Soviets ever decide to invade Europe. Quickly, however, the raison d’etre of the ‘armies’ transmogrified into a mission to counteract, not external invasion, but ‘internal subversion’. Such would eventually result in the undermining not just of post-war European socialism, but of Italian, Greek – and later global – democracy itself.
But we get ahead of ourselves.
The primal author of the ‘stay-behind-armies’, Williams informs us, was General Reinhard Gehlen, the head of German military intelligence during the Second World War. Having foreseen early on that the Reich was doomed to defeat, Gehlen had “concocted the idea of forming clandestine guerilla squads composed of Hitler youth and die-hard fascist fanatics” ostensibly to fend off the inevitable Soviet invasion. These guerilla units he referred to as ‘werewolves’.
Not ones to miss a fascist opportunity when they saw it, the US Office of Strategic Services (the OSS, and the forerunner of the CIA), under the leadership of William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, quickly enlisted both Gehlen and SS General Karl Wolff (in 1945) in forming the Gehlen Organization (later to transform into the present-day German BND) and which received its initial funding from US Army G-2 intelligence resources.
The American point-man on this was Allen Dulles, the first president (in 1927) of the Council on Foreign Relations, and later the first head of the CIA. Duly incorporated into the American fold, the ‘werewolves’ were, given that their initial meddling took place in Italy, rebranded as ‘gladiators’. Operation Gladio was born.
In 1947 the CIA (having, that year, superseded the OSS) was faced with its first daunting task, i.e. how to prevent the Italian Communist Party (PCI) from forming the next government. Elections were scheduled for 1948 and the PCI was a virtual shoe-in not just in Italy proper, but in Sicily as well. Fortunately, ‘Gladio’ was ready and waiting. The gladiators had been training in a special camp set up in Sardinia under the local command of the former WW2 Italian fascist leader, Prince Junio Valerio Borghese.
In addition, hundreds of American mafioso began to arrive on the shores of Italy to lend a hand with the communist ‘problem’. The arrival of the ‘made men’ was the result of Donovan’s efforts from 1943 onward in working with American mobsters Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano and Vito Genovese to conger new (drug) funding for the OSS’s off-books’ operations, and to reinstall the Sicilian mafia on the island in the leadup to Operation Husky (the Allied invasion of Sicily). These forces were now unleashed on the Italian electorate, and through 1948 an average of five people a week were murdered by the CIA-backed terrorist units. The results were grimly predictable. Hallelujah, the PCI were defeated and the Christian Democrats returned to power.
Still, the threat remained. Fully half the Italian electorate were communist sympathizers and, moreover, leftist politics pervaded much of the rest of the diseased European body. More would have to be done. The problem, however, was money. There simply wasn’t enough of it. Thus, the initial $200 million in funding for Gladio (which had come from the Rockefeller and Mellon foundations) was quickly exhausted. And though the National Security Act of 1947 had provided the loophole that allowed for the CIA’s covert operations, it had not allowed for their overt Congressional funding. There lay the rub. Thankfully, Paul Helliwell knew how to salve the itch.
Paul Helliwell was an inner member of the original OSS (along with key scions of the Morgan, Mellon, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, DuPont and Ryan families) and, according to Williams, likely the greatest unsung hero of the nicknamed ‘Oh-So-Social’ club. It was he, who having cut his teeth in the drugs-for-arms trade by shepherding opium deals with the Kuomintang (KMT, the Chinese National Army fighting against Mao Zedung), conjured the brilliant inspiration to do the very same thing – in the United States itself.
Thus, it was at his suggestion that Donovan elected to forge the deep bond (and that exists to this day) between the nation’s intelligence services and organized crime. Enter stage left such notables as ‘Lucky’ Luciano, Vito Genovese, Meyer Lansky and the Trafficante and Gambino crime clans. Quickly the streets of, first, New York, and later many an American metropolis, were flooded with heroin. These early, halcyon days would soon lead to the infamous ‘French Connection’, thence to the ‘Golden Triangle’ (where the CIA’s very own ‘Air America’ transported drugs out of South East Asia during the Vietnam War) and, later, to the Balkan, Mexican, and Colombian drug cartels.
All very well and good. But, to begin with, there was yet a fly in the whole drugs-for-arms-for-terror ointment. To wit: how to pay off the mafioso without anyone noticing; indeed, how to stash, launder and hide all of this financial derring-do from the prying eyes of the authorities; you know, the real-enough authorities, the Treasury cops and so forth. How do you do that?
THE VATICAN CONNECTION
Article 2 of the Lateran Treaty of 1929 was clear and unequivocal. The Article, which served to regulate matters between the Holy See and the Italian state, expressly forbade any interference of the latter in the affairs of the former. It is hardly conceivable, of course, that the framers of the Treaty ever foresaw what such immunity could actually mean in practice. But then they probably hadn’t reckoned on the fiendish formation of the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR), or more colloquially, the Vatican Bank.
Established by Pope Pius XII and Bernardino Nogara in 1942, the Bank would quickly come to serve as the principal repository post-war both for the Sicilian Mafia and for the OSS/CIA wherein all of the monies and documents relating to drug trafficking and to Gladio would be stored and laundered. Already in 1945 the pope had held private audiences with Donovan to discuss the implementation of Gladio and where, as Williams reports, Donovan was knighted as an anti-Communist crusader with the Grand Cross of the Order of Sylvester. Prior to this time Pius XII had proven himself a loyal ally in working with Dulles and the OSS to establish the ratlines used to help prominent Nazis escape Europe. Now, new horizons beckoned. The first duty at hand, of course, was to destroy the communist menace in respect of the 1948 elections. To this end the pope authorized his own terror squads (under Monsignor Bicchierai) to assist the gladiators and the ‘made men’ in intimidating the Italian electorate. Task accomplished.
The second duty at hand, however, was longer term. Communism, socialism and, indeed, any Godless form of progressive government, anywhere, had to be stamped out at source. For this money would be needed. Lots of money. Untraceable money. Drug money. Now in the months before the 1948 election the CIA deposited some $65 million into the Vatican Bank. The source of these monies came from heroin produced by the Italian pharmaceutical giant, Schiaparelli, and which was then transported by the Sicilian mob into Cuba where it was cut and then distributed to New Orleans, Miami and New York by the Santo Trafficante family. Lucrative though this trade was, it was not nearly enough to suit the needs of the CIA and ‘Gladio’. More would be required. More drug networks and more banks. Gladio was about to global.
To start with a new alliance was forged with the Corsican mafia. Unlike the Sicilian mob, the Corsicans had extensive experience in processing heroin, a skill they had picked up through years of working with Laotian, Cambodian and Vietnamese technicians in French Indochina. A supply route then emerged running from Burma through Turkey to Beirut and thence to Marseille. Alas, there was a slight hitch when the leftist dockworkers in Marseille, being sympathetic to the rebel army under Ho Chi Minh, refused to load and unload the boats from Indochina. No worries. A deft bit of terror administered by the Corsican boys (and funded by the CIA), and problem solved. By 1951, then, Marseille had become the center of the Western heroin industry. Voila, the ‘French Connection’.
Meanwhile, Wild Bill Donovan had ‘resigned’ from the CIA to form the World Commerce Corporation (WCC) whose primary function was to facilitate the arms-for-drugs deals with the KMT. Paul Helliwell lent a needed hand at the helm by heading up Sea Supply, Inc., a CIA front company gainfully employed in shipping heroin from Bangkok. By 1958 the whole operation was so successful that a second supply route was established running through Saigon. Here, the help of Ngo Dinh Diem, the US installed despot of South Vietnam, proved invaluable.
Still, there was a potential cloud on the horizon, i.e. word of all these shenanigans was bound to leak out. What to do? The first reflex, naturally, was to pin the blame for the West’s growing heroin problem on the Communist Chinese under Mao Zedung. Check. The second, more considered response, was to organize an ongoing campaign to deflect attention away from, and burnish the image of, the CIA. And to this end, in 1953, did the CIA establish ‘Operation Mockingbird’. Under ‘Mockingbird’ the Agency recruited hundreds of American journalists to spread false stories and propaganda about the Company’s ‘benign’ activities. Eventually, this depraved fabric of anti-journalism enlisted entire news networks including ABC, NBC, Newsweek, Associated Press, and The Saturday Evening Post. Now the guys and gals at Langley could relax. Henceforth, American (and global) eyes were dutifully prismed through the rose-coloured lens of ‘Mockingbird’.
But back to the Vatican. The IOR, solid banking pillar of the Gladio community that it was, could hardly be expected to do all the heavy lifting itself. After all, the global heroin industry would, by 1980, be pulling in a cool $400 billion annually. En route an extensive and orchestrated financial network would be required to supplement God’s Bank. As with any fine orchestra it helps to have a maestro of exquisite genius to run the show. A nice round of applause, then, for one Michele Sindona. The biography of Sindona begins, humbly enough, with his degree in tax law from the University of Messina in 1942 after which, in quick succession, he rockets to stardom as a leading financial adviser to the Sicilian mafia, an agent for the CIA, and, thereafter, a financial intimate of the Holy See. By the late 1950s Sindona had become the lynchpin in a nexus between the mob, the CIA and the Vatican that would eventually, as Williams chillingly puts it, “result in the toppling of governments, wholesale slaughter and financial devastation.”
Though a full elaboration of this bewilderingly complex financial system is best left to the author, it is worth briefly savouring a few highlights. To begin with Sindona purchased Fasco AG, a Liechtenstein holding company and through which he purchased his first bank – the Banca Privata Finanziaria (BPF). The BPF then became, by way of a Chicago-based intermediary bank, Continental Illinois, a principal conduit for transferring drug money from the IOR for the purposes of Gladio. In fact, it was this banking pipeline in particular which provided the filthy lucre that fueled the 1967 coup d’etat in Greece. But more on this heady stuff in a bit.
It was through his Chicago contacts that Sindona first met Monsignor Paul Marcinkus, popularly known as ‘the Gorilla’. The Gorilla was six foot four, “a gifted street fighter…and a lover of bourbon, fine cigars and young women”. Under Sindona’s patronage Marcinkus would soon rise to become both Pope Paul VI’s personal body guard and the head of the IOR. A third musketeer in the person of Roberto Calvi (the assistant – and later full – director of the famous, Milan-based Banco Ambrosiano) came to complete the three Vatican amigos. Together they would cut a dramatic, collective figure in the global banking underworld all through the ‘anni di Piombo’ (the Gladio ‘years of lead’ in Italy from 1969 to 1987). Exactly how dramatic is illustrated, par excellence, by Calvi’s eventual dark demise. Who among us, old enough to remember, can forget the macabre spectacle (June, 1982) of Calvi’s body hanging from Blackfriars Bridge, his feet dangling in the Thames and pockets stuffed with five masonry bricks. Sindona would also later be murdered (1986) by means of a cyanide-laced cup of coffee whilst in jail and under ‘maximum protective custody’.
Calvi was a key figure in establishing a series of eight shell companies (six in Panama, two in Europe) through which drug lords like Pablo Escobar in South America were encouraged to deposit their ill-gotten loot. (The CIA put shoulder to wheel by helping ferry the Escobar cocaine in a fleet of planes operating out of Scranton airport in Pennsylvania). The monies were then transferred via Banco Ambrosiano to the IOR which took a 15 to 20 percent processing fee. From there funds were distributed to a host of European banks set up by Sindona for use by Gladio units spread throughout the continent. In addition to the flow of cash from the cartels, funds were bled from Banco Ambrosiano into the eight shell companies – again for use by the CIA in funding its covert operations.
This points up a general operating procedure of the entire Gladio ‘banking’ system, i.e. the system, far from being designed to turn a profit, was expressly designed to ‘lose’ money; that is, to have it siphoned off into covert ops. Such explains the regular and spectacular failure of a host of CIA-related banks including: Franklin National Bank (purchased by Sindona), Castle Bank & Trust, Mercantile Bank & Trust (both set up by the ubiquitous Paul Helliwell), Nugan Hand Bank (in Australia, and from which funds were diverted to undermine Prime Minister Gough Whitlam during the Vietnam War), and the infamous Bank of Credit and Commerce International (based in Karachi in aid, primarily, of the Southeast Asian heroin trade). Indeed, it was precisely the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano itself that brought both Calvi and Sindona to their untimely ends.
Finally, it is worth noting here that these august institutions were linked in a tight criminal embrace with many of the most prestigious financial firms in America including Citibank, the Bank of New York, and the Bank of Boston. The base of the iceberg, in short, extended far and wide. But then, what was all this money really doing?
THE TERROR
Following the thwarting of Italian democracy in 1948 the Gladio ‘secret armies’ entered into a period of what one might characterize as pregnant incubation. Thus, it was during the 1950s that the various drug supply routes and financial networks were being created, as were some of the principal political organizations. Probably the most important of the latter was ‘Propaganda Due’ otherwise known as ‘P2’.
Created in 1877 as a Freemasonry lodge for the Piedmont nobility, it was banned by Mussolini in 1924 only to be resurrected post-war with the approval of Allen Dulles, himself a thirty-third degree Mason. The lodge, though at first dominated mainly by spooks, spies, military and mafia figures, would soon encompass a who’s who of Italian political, corporate, banking and media supremos to boot. Indeed, the organization would eventually spread shoots throughout Europe as well as North and South America, and its members would come to include such luminaries as Henry Kissinger and General Alexander Haig.
A ‘P2’ denizen of especial significance was Licio Gelli. The latter’s pedigree was impressive: a former volunteer in the 735th Black Shirts Battalion, a former member of the elite SS Division under Field Marshall Goering and, thereafter, a chummy employee of the US Counter Intelligence Corps of the Fifth Army. Working with William Colby, the OSS agent in France, and Allen Dulles, the OSS director, Gelli soon gained entry to the Vatican where he helped set up the Nazi escape routes to Argentina. His ties with Argentina would later prove critical in facilitating Operation Condor (the US-backed mass assassination program in 1970s and ‘80s South America). Moreover, in 1972, Gelli would emerge as P2’s supreme ‘Worshipful Master’ under whose leadership the lodge would reach its full, horrific flowering. Finally, it is worth mentioning at this juncture that it was as a result of a police raid on Gelli’s villa in 1981 that the full, tentacled structure of Gladio would come to light. But we digress.
One of the first substantive actions of Gladio was the Turkish coup of 1960. Here the incumbent Prime Minister, Adnan Menderes, made the fatal mistake of believing he was really in charge and thereafter initiating a visit to Moscow to secure economic aid. The ‘stay-behind-army’ in Turkey known as Counter-Guerilla, in alliance with the Turkish military, quickly disabused him of any such delusions by arresting and executing him. Throughout the 1970s both Counter-Guerilla and its youth wing, the Grey Wolves, would stage “ongoing terror attacks…that resulted in the deaths of over five thousand students, teachers, trade union leaders, booksellers and politicians”.
Counter-Guerilla would also figure in the Turkish coup of 1980 when its commander, General Kenan Evren, toppled the moderate government of Bulent Ecevit. According to Williams, US President Jimmy Carter phoned in his approval to the CIA station-chief in Ankara, Paul Henze, with a jubilant, ‘Your boys have done it!’ What they had done, of course, was set up a tyranny in which thousands more would be tortured while incarcerated. The Turkish Gladio boys would also be unleashed in the 1980s upon the PKK – the Kurdistan Workers Party. All of this was in keeping with Zbigniew Brzezinski’s (Carter’s national security advisor) core vision of the importance of controlling Central Asia to which Turkey was both a vital portal and, thus, a key NATO ally.
Alas, Gladio would prove something of a disappointment in France, where, after having backed a series of assassination attempts against the regrettably too independent President Charles de Gaulle, it found itself on the receiving end of de Gaulle’s boot. Actually, it was NATO itself – at the time, headquartered in Paris – that was unceremoniously kicked out of France (in 1966, whence it took up its present cozy and famously corrupt abode in Brussels). But, of course, de Gaulle was ahead of the curve and understood all too well who was really behind the mayhem and murder.
Greece, unfortunately, did not fare as well. In 1967 the ‘Hellenic Raiding Force’, a franchise of Gladio and playing to a NATO authored script entitled Operation Prometheus, overthrew the left-leaning government of George Papandreou. The ensuing military dictatorship would last until 1974 though this would hardly signal the end of Greece’s tribulations. From 1980 until near the turn of the millennium, the nation would suffer under a reign of terror and political assassinations nominally attributed to ‘November 17’, an alleged Marxist revolutionary group, but which in fact (and here I briefly tag-team with authors Cottrell and Ganser) was yet another faction of Greek-Gladio known as ‘Sheepskin’.
This illustrates a point originally brought home by Ganser’s research to the effect that virtually every alleged ‘leftist revolutionary’ group said to have been operating in Europe throughout the post-war years was, in truth, either a Gladio ‘secret army’ unit or else had been completely infiltrated by state intelligence services, and was subsequently being steered by them for Gladio-style state-terrorist ends.
Such is well documented for the ‘Red Brigades’ in Italy and the ‘Baader-Meinhof Gang’ in Germany (the ‘gang’ being conveniently and cold-bloodedly exterminated on the ‘night of the long knives’, Oct.18, 1977, whilst under custody in Stammheim prison). It also, just by the by, speaks to the universally attested prior association of many a modern-day ‘terrorist’ and their police and intelligence handlers.
In Spain, during the early ‘70s, Stefano delle Chiaie and fellow Gladio agents from Italy provided their consulting expertise to General Francisco Franco’s secret police who conducted over a thousand violent acts and some fifty murders. Following Franco’s death in 1975, delle Chiaie moved to Chile to lend a fatherly hand in helping the CIA-backed Augusto Pinochet set up his death squads. In later years the Spanish Gladio unit would find gainful employment hunting down and assassinating the leaders of the Basque separatist movement.
Of Italy we have already mentioned the ‘years of lead’, but just to capture a few highlights. The ‘strategy of tension’ unleashed in 1969 in Italy – the same year ‘Condor’ was unleashed in Latin America – was in response to the renewed popularity of Communism throughout the country and which, itself, was partly in response to the uptick in revolutionary sentiment globally as a result of antipathy towards the US war on Vietnam. The antidote, naturally, to this woeful state of progressive affairs was a healthy dose of terror. According to Williams, “Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s National Security Advisor, issued orders to Licio Gelli through his deputy, General Alexander Haig, for the implementation of terror attacks and coup attempts.” The terror attacks began on December 12, 1969 when a bomb exploded in the crowded lobby of a bank in Milan’s Piazza Fontana in which seventeen people were killed and eighty-eight injured. Over the ensuing years (from 1969 to 1987) there followed more than ‘14,000 acts of violence with a political motivation’. The most infamous of these was, of course, the Bologna bombing in August of 1980 and which led to the initial exposure of Gladio in Italy.
Of the many attempted coups and related high-level political machinations engineered by Gladio forces in Italy (1963, 1970, 1976) and Sicily (more or less continually on tap throughout the decade), the kidnapping on March 16, 1978 – and murder a month or so later – of Prime Minister Aldo Moro was likely the most sensational. Moro had dared to include communists in his new coalition government. At first blamed on the usual suspects, i.e. the Red Brigades, further investigation (to begin with by journalist Carmine ‘Mino’ Pecorelli who paid with his life) led to the real usual suspects including CIA operative Mario Moretti (eventually convicted of the killing) and thence up the line to Gelli, then to Italy’s interior minister Francesco Cossiga and onwards to Zbigniew Brzezinski.
The high-level intrigue did not stop at the murder of a prime minister however. At least two Popes felt the sharp end of the Gladio sword as well. In August of 1978, Pope Paul VI died. His successor, the preternaturally timid John Paul I, soon gave his handlers a very real shock when, after looking at the IOR accounts, he issued a ‘call for reform’. The very next day the otherwise fastidiously health-conscious pontiff – in office barely a month – was dead. Not just dead but expired with the telltale bulging eyes and horrific grimace of acute poisoning. His autopsy was definitively thwarted by an illegal and hastily contrived embalming, and his personal papers disappeared without a trace. Archbishop Marcinkus, having been temporarily removed prior, was returned to office whilst Calvi and Sindona, also under scrutiny at the time, breathed a (temporary) sigh of relief.
Having been (almost) burned once the overseers of Gladio made sure to engineer the follow-up Papal succession. Thus did Cardinal Karol Wojtyla shuffle onto the historical proscenium as Pope John Paul II. Now, at first, John Paul worked seamlessly with the CIA and Gladio. Together they oversaw the destruction of Liberation Theology in Latin America, the continued undermining of Italian democracy, and the dispensing of black funds for Solidarity in Poland. Ah, but how the best laid plans do oft go astray. By the spring of 1981 not only were events spinning out of control for Gladio itself, but so too were they for Banco Ambrosiano, and by extension, the IOR. The Pope, inexplicably, refused to act. Compounding this lapse was an unaccountable trifecta of moral turpitude that witnessed the Holy Father suddenly breaking into treasonous song singing the benefits of rapprochement with the Soviets; recognition of the Palestine Liberation Organization; and, egads, nuclear disarmament. The order from on high was given: ‘Kill the Pope’.
But best blame it on the Soviets. So issued the ‘Bulgarian Thesis’ wherein a lowly Bulgarian airline employee (Sergei Antonov) was set up as the patsy. In truth, the key actors in the Papal plot came straight from Gladio central casting. The starring role in the drama fell to General Giuseppe Santovito, the head of Italy’s military intelligence (SISMI) and the commander of the Italian Gladio units. His co-star, Theodore Shackley, was the infamous CIA mastermind who had already served as executive producer on such epics as Operation Phoenix (involving the murder of some 40,000 non-combatants in Vietnam), Operation Condor, the setting up of Nugan Hand Bank, and, along with delle Chiaie, the murder of Salvador Allende. West Germany’s BND (the national security services) garnered a significant credit by harbouring and financing the two actual assassins, Mehmet Agca and Abdullah Cath (both from Turkish Gladio). And, of course, the Mighty Wurlitzer, i.e. Operation Mockingbird, figured prominently in the aftermath grinding out endless tunes on the ‘Bulgarian Thesis’ – despite the fact of Agca’s eventual (lone) conviction in the shooting.
The production ended all somewhat anticlimactically when the Pope (on May 13, 1981) was only seriously wounded. In a fascinating denouement, however, on Christmas Day 1983, the Pope opted to publicly forgive Agca. Italian state television was allowed to record the moment when John Paul asked his assassin from whom he had received his orders. Leaning forward to hear Agca’s response the Pope appeared momentarily frozen, then clasped his hands to his face. Though the Pontiff kept it secret, there was little need to guess at the answer.
The adventures of both Agca and Cath are the stuff of legend. Indeed, Cath figures in events well beyond the time line of Gladio proper, enough to suggest that Gladio never really shut down at all. But that, as they say, is a whole other story – and one I leave to the author to take up.
* * *
Paul Williams has made a fine contribution here. Certainly, if the day ever comes when, seated across from some smug establishment interlocutor, you are taken to task for being a ‘conspiracy monger’ – well, you need only lean back, smile gently, and utter but two words….’Operation Gladio’.
- Textron Delivers Next Generation Squad Weapon To Army
Textron Systems’ AAI Corporation, an aerospace and defense development and manufacturing firm, located in Hunt Valley, Maryland, announced last week the delivery of its initial Next Generation Squad Weapon-Technology (NGSW-T) prototype demonstrator to the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command (CCDC) Armaments Center and Joint Services Small Arms Program (JSSAP), the company said in a statement.
“Moving from contract award to delivery of a revolutionary, next-generation weapon in just 15 months not only demonstrates the maturity of our Cased-Telescoped technology, but also the project execution excellence our team possesses to rapidly fill critical warfighter needs on schedule,” said Textron Systems Senior Vice President of Applied Technologies & Advanced Programs Wayne Prender.
“Our Cased-Telescoped weapons and ammunition offer the growth path to a true next-generation small arms weapon for U.S. warfighters, including increased lethality at longer ranges, while also delivering significant weight reductions to the warfighter.”
In development since 2004, AAI’s NGSW-T offers increased lethality and weighs 40% less than current standard issue light machine guns. The weapon chambers a telescoped round between 6.5mm and 6.8mm and is expected to be the future replacement for the M16 rifle, M4 carbine, and M249 light machine gun.
In October, the Army selected the 6.8mm, next-generation round as the official requirements for the NGSW-T. The new bullet is designed to penetrate the world’s most advanced body armor at a range of up to 600 meters.
The Pentagon’s current shift from urban warfare in Iraq and Syria to the mountains and open terrain of Afghanistan have been the driving force behind modernizing standard issue weapons for infantry units. While standard rifles are well-suited for close combat in cities like Mosul and Raqqa, it lacks the range to kill adversaries in open stretches.
The Army is expected to test AAI’s NGSW-T weapon at firing ranges this summer. If the weapon meet’s the Army’s requirements for NGSW-T, then AAI could get a large contract to send the gun into series production to produce more than 250,000 units and 150 million rounds. The expected field date could be as early as 2020.
- Taiwan, The BRI, & The Geopolitical Chessboard
Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Asia Times,
What remains of Western unity does not represent a vision of the future any more…
It’s all about the cross-strait median. No, that’s not a drink in a Hong Kong bar. It’s the de facto maritime border between continental China and Taiwan.
Last Sunday morning, two Chinese J-11 fighters crossed the median and stayed on Taiwanese air space for about 10 minutes – even after Taiwanese interceptors were dispatched. Tsai Ing-wen, the President of Taiwan, defined the incursion by the PLA Air Force as “reckless and provocative.”
And, ominously, demanded the “forceful expulsion” of Chinese fighter jets if it ever happened again. Well, that used to happen, quite frequently, but only up to 1999, when Beijing and Taipei clinched a deal to make them stop.
US mainstream media predictably spun this latest incursion as yet another Chinese provocation, omitting the essential background to what is only one more move in an extremely complex – and dangerous – geopolitical chessboard.
Taiwan has made an official request to buy more than 60 F-16 fighter jets from the US. And the Trump administration tacitly approved it. It works like this. Trump’s advisers “encouraged” Taipei to make a formal request. They acted in tandem with Lockheed Martin, which builds the F-16s.
The request then became an actual proposal by the Pentagon and State Department. Finally, Congress has 30 days to consider whether the sale may go ahead. Considering this particular case suits not only the industrial-military complex, but also the overall US government agenda of containment of China, it might as well be considered a done deal.
Call in your CHIPS
Without this crucial context, it’s impossible to understand the logic behind the Chinese “provocation.” And that is also directly linked to John Bolton torpedoing negotiations with North Korea (the DPRK) and the non-stop demonization of both Russia and Iran.
China, Russia and Iran are the essential nodes in the laborious, ongoing, long-term Eurasia integration process. Russia and China were also essential advisers to the DPRK in its nuclear negotiations with the Trump administration.
The demonization of Russia and Iran proceeds in parallel with what is in effect a Washington-orchestrated SWIFT-CHIPS war.
CHIPS is the US dollar clearing system used by 88% of the transactions in global trade. This means that the US dollar is on one side of every international transaction 88% of the time.
If you are cut out of this system, it’s extremely difficult to conduct world trade – you need barter, trading in local currencies or an untested system like INSTEX, set up by the EU for non-dollar transactions with Iran after the Trump administration crashed out of the JCPOA, or Iran nuclear deal.
China is way more dependent on world trade than Russia as it needs to import massive amounts of natural resources that must be paid for by exports.
Russia, for its part, could very easily become self-sufficient, as it holds about 96% of the natural resources it needs. The US, by comparison, needs to import many vital natural resources for its advanced industries.
Recent history is filled with examples – for instance, Japan and South Korea – showing that national self-sufficiency works. China is fine-tuning the model as applied to the Made in China 2025 strategy.
The problem with Russia is that the Central Bank under Elvira Nabiullina arguably does not operate in the Russian national interest.
As I have extensively discussed with Russian analysts, a solution would be for the Russian Central Bank to create currency controls to prevent oligarchs from siphoning their wealth overseas, a move that only serves to further collapse the ruble. And also create credit to build the industries that would replace imports – a de facto massive import substitution. No credit should be issued for any other purpose.
Entering the next decade, what would constitute a sort of nuclear option would be for Russia to divert to China most of the natural resources sold to the West, whose retribution is packages of sanctions, while importing from China the advanced technologies required for Russia.
China is de facto an equal or even ahead of the US in plenty of technology areas – as documented, for instance, by Kai-Fu Lee on AI Super-Powers: China, Silicon Valley and the New World Order. Much is not visible yet because advances have not been commercialized.
All of the above is being debated in Moscow, in detail, on myriad levels. It’s not by accident that Russia is fully on board the New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), in connection with the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU).
The latest graphic example of the Russia-China economic partnership is the railroad bridge across the Amur river linking the Russian Far East with China’s Heilongjiang province.
The future rises in the East
Throughout the next decade it will be clear how the entire Eurasian land mass is linked with, or by, the BRI. In comparison, Chas Freeman, a former US ambassador to China, is one of the few informed observers who have sounded the alarm; Washington treats the BRI as a military strategic challenge.
Alastair Crooke has shown how a mini-BRI is already shaping up, linking Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. In fact, this is the emerging Southwest Asia BRI node.
At the same time, Beijing had made it very clear that – harsh methods included – Xinjiang, the key BRI hub in Western China, would not be allowed to become another Syria, Libya or Iraq. Xinjiang directly links with the essential BRI connectivity corridors to the Middle East, Africa and Europe.
The West, or what remains of its unity, does not represent a vision of the future any more. China is striving for the BRI to fulfill this role. That’s something a few extra F-16s patrolling the cross-strait median won’t be able to change.
- Banning Buybacks Would Crash The Market, Goldman Warns
Few topics prompt as powerful (and violent) a response from financial professionals as what the role of financial buybacks is in determining stock prices. One group, largely those bulls who after a decade of central bank manipulation still believe that markets are efficient and unrigged, and in hope of increasing their AUMs claim that they are financial geniuses for riding the world’s biggest financial bubble in history, argue that stock buybacks have no impact on stock prices. Others, those who actually understand that if there is a trillion dollars in price indiscrimiante stock bids (as was the case in 2018 and will again happen in 2019) is the single most effective way to boost stock prices (and management’s incentive-linked comp, linked to higher stock prices), know – correctly – that corporate buybacks, which until not too long ago were banned, and which over the past decade emerged as the single biggest source of stock purchases, are one of the two most important factors behind the all time highs in the stock market (the other being the Fed, whose policies have allowed companies to issue debt with record low yields, allowing them to fund these trillions in buybacks).
And with the debate raging, either side happy to “convince” others in its echo chamber while hurling insults at the other, few have been as vocal in their defense of stock buybacks as Goldman Sachs.
One month ago, the firm’s chief equity strategy David Kostin wrote a report – let’s call it the carrot – seeking to debunk “misconceptions” about stock buyabcks, which he claimed had gotten an unfair rap in the US. Specifically, Kostin said that “one of the greatest misconceptions in the public discourse surrounding corporate buybacks is the belief that managements repurchase stock in an attempt to inflate earnings per share and meet incentive compensation targets,” Goldman wrote. And while Goldman tried, to demonstrate that “executives whose compensation depends on EPS, did not allocate a higher proportion of 2018 total cash spending to buybacks than companies where management pay is not linked to EPS”, the bank was forced to admit that last year buybacks did surpass capex as the biggest use of capital allocation.
Goldman’s valiant effort to halt regulatory and legislative focus on buybacks – which also included Goldman’s ex-CEO Lloyd Blankfein issuing a rebuttal defending the practice on Twitter, saying the money “gets reinvested in higher growth businesses that boost the economy and jobs” did little however to stem the tide and as a result buybacks have been getting increasing scrutiny in the wake of the tax reforms in late 2017, when companies used money saved from the lower taxes as well as repatriated cash to return money to shareholders in record amounts, with total announced buybacks surpassing $1 trillion for the first time in 2018.
As a result, Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida released a plan last month that would curb buyback incentives. Democratic Senator Chris van Hollen of Maryland may propose legislation curbing executive share sales after repurchase announcements. The culmination – so far – was the US Senate convening hearings and introducing legislation to prohibit public companies from repurchasing their shares on the open market.
This was too much for Goldman, which realized that the carrot approach is not working, and late on Friday went all “stick”, when one month after his first report exposing buyback “misconception”, Goldman’s David Kostin doubled down, effectively warning that a ban on buybacks would likely result in a market crash, as “eliminating buybacks would immediately force firms to shift corporate cash spending priorities, impact stock market fundamentals, and alter the supply/demand balance for shares.”
And just to underscore his dire warning, Kostin said that from a portfolio strategy perspective, “the potential restriction on buybacks would likely have five implications for the US equity market: (1) slow EPS growth; (2) boost cash spending on dividends, M&A, and debt paydown; (3) widen trading ranges; (4) reduce demand for shares; and (5) lower company valuations.”
Kostin then breaks down these core points into the detail components, all of which have dire consequences for the market if the single biggest buyer of stocks is forced to step aside:
1. Slow EPS growth.
From a fundamental perspective, removing buybacks would have a negative effect on EPS growth. Aggregate earnings growth trails EPS growth because buybacks boost earnings per share by reducing the number of shares outstanding. During the past 15 years, the gap between EPS growth and earnings growth for the median S&P 500 company averaged 260 bp (11% vs. 8%). In 2018, the spread equaled 200 bp (20% vs. 18%). Another approach to estimating the boost to EPS growth in excess of earnings growth is the net buyback yield [(share repurchases – share issuance) / starting market capitalization]. This yield reflects the percent of market cap repurchased during the trailing 12 months. The S&P 500 net buyback yield averaged 2.6% during the past five years, close to the actual 290 bp gap between median EPS and earnings growth (10% vs. 8%).
2. Shift cash spending priorities.
S&P 500 firms allocated an average of 25% of their annual cash spending to buybacks since 2009. Eliminating repurchases would compel firms to find new uses for that cash. Some firms might choose to make formal tender offers for their shares, which firms employed to retire stock prior to 1982. But most managements would probably redirect cash that was previously spent on buybacks towards dividends (both regular and special) and funding more M&A. Spending on capex and R&D would probably not change if buybacks ceased, according to Goldman. During the past decade, capex and R&D have accounted for an average of 45% of S&P 500 annual cash spending which has consistently equaled about 8% of sales. Investment spending has always been the first priority for corporations, at least until 2018 when spending on buybacks surpassed CapEx for the first time. Simply put, to Goldman this means that without new investment opportunities firms are unlikely to suddenly spend more than 8% of sales on capex and R&D, and firms would be forced to hoard the case. This means that in a world without buybacks, companies would almost certainly increase dividend growth and raise cash M&A spending. Dividends have accounted for 18% of annual cash use during the past decade and growth has averaged 6%. The S&P 500 dividend payout ratio currently equals 34%, below the 30-year average of 38%. Cash M&A spending would also jump. During the past decade, cash M&A spending accounted for 13% of corporate cash use and growth averaged 16% annually (Ex. 2). More than 75% of mergers involve some cash consideration. Firms might also choose to redirect cash spent on buybacks to reduce debt outstanding.
3. Widen trading ranges.
Removing or limiting buybacks would lead to a greater amplitude of index moves, a wider distribution of individual stock returns, and higher volatility: in short many more market crashes, both flash and otherwise. Worse, Goldman notes that prohibiting buybacks would reduce downside support for equity prices since companies could no longer step in to repurchase shares if their stock prices tumble. A case study of the potential impact of eliminating buybacks can be seen each quarter around the time the buyback blackout rolls in, about five weeks prior through two days after a company releases earnings. During these periods, firms are restricted from executing discretionary buybacks.
And here is the clearest indication just how much of an impact buybacks have no stock prices: during the past 25 years, the 20th percentile return for stocks within the S&P 500 has averaged -27% (annualized) in buyback blackout periods compared with -16% when companies can freely repurchase their shares. The average (11% vs. 5%) and 80th percentile (61% vs. 40%) stock returns are also higher during buyback blackouts likely due to the boost from quarterly earnings releases. Return dispersion (16 pp vs. 14 pp) and volatility (16.4 vs. 15.8) during blackout windows have also been higher compared with non-blackout periods (Exhibit 3).
4. Reduce demand for shares
This is where Goldman’s warnings start to get especially dire, because as Kostin cautions, without company buybacks, demand for shares would fall dramatically. Repurchases have consistently been the largest source of US equity demand. Since 2010, corporate demand for shares has far exceeded demand from all other investor categories combined. Net buybacks for all US equities averaged $420 billion annually during the past nine years. In contrast, during this period, average annual equity demand from households, mutual funds, pension funds, and foreign investors was less than $10 billion for each category – despite the fact these categories collectively own 83% of corporate equities. Buybacks represented the largest source of equity demand in 2018.
According to the Federal Reserve’s most recent Financial Accounts quarterly report, corporate demand for stocks, measured as gross repurchases minus share issuance plus M&A, totaled $509 billion last year. Households were the only other net buyer of stocks (+$191 billion). Pensions, mutual funds, and foreign investors sold $243 billion, $124 billion, and $94 billion of equities in 2018, respectively. High equity exposure among major investor categories increases the importance of buybacks as a source of equity demand. Equity allocations for each of the major investor categories are elevated vs. history. Aggregate equity allocation totals 44% across households, mutual funds, pension funds, and foreign investors (86th percentile relative to the past 30 years). In contrast, we estimate that allocation to debt and cash are only at the 39th and 3rd percentiles, respectively.
5. Lower valuations
A decline in expected earnings growth could also lead to P/E multiple contraction. In a world without buybacks, forward EPS growth could be trimmed by 250 bp, close to the impact of net buybacks on company-level EPS growth. During the past 30 years, a 250 bp lower expected FY2 EPS growth has corresponded with a one multiple point lower forward P/E multiple for the median S&P 500 stock. And since Goldman already warned liquidity would be even more dire, one can expect that 1x PE multiple shrinkage to have dire consequences on stock prices.
Finally, prohibiting buybacks could also apply downward pressure to equity prices if it increases the supply of equities relative to demand at current prices, as eliminating the largest source of equity demand could lower the demand curve if other investor categories do not replace the corporate bid from buybacks. And since buybacks have been the go-to backstop for the market – along with the Fed – the probability of another “investor category” stepping up to buy stocks when the buyer of last reserve is gone, is virtually nil.
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So as Goldman turns from a carrot to a stick approach, one can summarize the latest Goldman report by observing that very bad things will happen if Congress proceeds with its intentions to ban buybacks. There is a silver lining: while Goldman previously sided with the generally clueless segment of “financial experts”, claiming that the impact of buybacks on stocks is at best muted, now that buyback legislation is becoming an increasingly greater threat by the day, Goldman can finally admit the truth: without buybacks the market will crash.
And with Goldman’s abrupt and honest reversal, we are confident that the debate whether buybacks influence stocks or not, can finally be laid to rest.
- Reality TV Star Prostitute Gets Prison For Racking Up $20,000 On Dead "Client's" Debit Card
A former reality TV “bad girl”, Shannade Clermont, is now actually heading to jail for a year on wire fraud charges. The sentence comes as a result of “making and attempting more than $20,000 in fraudulent charges using debit card information she stole from a man who died during the course of a prostitution date with her,” according to the Justice Department.
Clermont admitted to stealing the debit card information from a man she visited in his Manhattan apartment. The DOJ said:
“When the man died of an overdose, instead of notifying the authorities or calling for help, Clermont callously chose to use the man’s debit card information to make tens of thousands of dollars in illegal purchases.”
After stealing his debit card information she attempted to purchase “thousands of dollars of luxury clothing and other merchandise, including, among other items, Valentino shoes, a Phillip Plein jacket, Beats headphones, as well as a gift certificate at a beauty salon”.
As far as Reality TV “talent”, Clermont was low on the totem pole to begin with. She had appeared on the Oxygen network series “Bad Girls Club” in 2015 which helped her grow a large social media following. Her and her sister have appeared in music videos and have also modeled for Kanye West’s Yeezy brand, appearing in the Yeezy Season 6 campaign. She was ordered to pay $5,000 in restitution.
The Southern District of New York issued the following fantastic Tweet after her sentence
USA Berman: As Shannade Clermont has now learned, her real-life bad behavior has real-life consequences, & has now landed her in federal prison.
— US Attorney SDNY (@SDNYnews) April 4, 2019
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman released a longer statement along the same lines:
“Former reality TV ‘Bad Girl’ Shannade Clermont lived up to her on-screen persona, as she admitted to stealing the debit card information from a man she visited for a prostitution date in his Manhattan apartment. When the man died of an overdose, instead of notifying the authorities or calling for help, Clermont callously chose to use the man’s debit card information to make tens of thousands of dollars in illegal purchases. As Shannade Clermont has now learned, her real-life bad behavior has real-life consequences, and has now landed her in federal prison.”
“On Jan. 31, 2017, my brother died and she went shopping,” the victim’s sister said at the sentencing, declining to give her name.
The overdose was reported to be from cocaine laced with fentanyl.
- The Number Of Americans With "No Religion" Has Soared 266% Over The Last 3 Decades
Authored by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog,
Over the last 30 years, there has been a mass exodus out of organized religion in the United States. Each year the needle has only moved a little bit, but over the long-term what we have witnessed has been nothing short of a seismic shift. Never before in American history have we seen such dramatic movement away from the Christian faith, and this has enormous implications for the future of our nation. According to a survey that was just released, the percentage of Americans that claim to have “no religion” has increased by 266 percent since 1991…
The number of Americans who identify as having no religion has risen 266 percent since 1991, to now tie statistically with the number of Catholics and Evangelicals, according to a new survey.
People with no religion – known as ‘nones’ among statisticians – account for 23.1 percent of the U.S. population, while Catholics make up 23 percent and Evangelicals account for 22.5 percent, according to the General Social Survey.
In other words, the “nones” are now officially the largest religious group in the United States.
At one time it would have been extremely difficult to imagine that one day the “nones” would someday surpass evangelical Christians, but it has actually happened.
And the biggest movement that we have seen has been among our young people. According to a different survey, two-thirds of Christian young adults say that they stopped going to church at some point between the ages of 18 and 22…
Large numbers of young adults who frequently attended Protestant worship services in high school are dropping out of church.
Two-thirds of young people say they stopped regularly going to church for at least a year between the ages of 18 and 22, a new LifeWay Research surveyshows.
These are the exact same patterns that we saw happen in Europe, and now most of those countries are considered to be “post-Christian societies”.
The young adults of today are going to be the leaders of tomorrow, and they have a much higher percentage of “nones” than the population as a whole. According to a study that was conducted a while back by PRRI, 39 percent of our young adults are “religiously unaffiliated” at this point…
Today, nearly four in ten (39%) young adults (ages 18-29) are religiously unaffiliated—three times the unaffiliated rate (13%) among seniors (ages 65 and older). While previous generations were also more likely to be religiously unaffiliated in their twenties, young adults today are nearly four times as likely as young adults a generation ago to identify as religiously unaffiliated. In 1986, for example, only 10% of young adults claimed no religious affiliation.
To go from 10 percent during Ronald Reagan’s second term to 39 percent today is an absolutely colossal shift.
Right now, only about 27 percent of U.S. Millennials attend church on a regular basis. Most of them simply have no interest in being heavily involved in organized religion.
And even the young people that are involved in church do not seem very keen on sharing their faith with others. According to one of the most shocking surveys that I have seen in a long time, 47 percent of Millennials that consider themselves to be “practicing Christians” believe that it is “wrong” to share the gospel with others…
A new study from the California-based firm Barna Group, which compiles data on Christian trends in American culture, has revealed a staggering number of American millennials think evangelism is wrong.
The report, commissioned by the discipleship group Alpha USA, showed a whopping 47 percent of millennials — born between 1984 and 1998 — “agree at least somewhat that it is wrong to share one’s personal beliefs with someone of a different faith in hopes that they will one day share the same faith.”
These numbers are hard to believe, but they are from some of the most respected pollsters in the entire country.
Politically, these trends indicate that America is likely to continue to move to the left. Those that have no religious affiliation are much, much more likely to be Democrats, and so this exodus away from organized religion is tremendous news for the Democratic Party.
In a previous article, I documented the fact that somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 churches in the United States are dying each year.
That means that more than 100 will die this week.
And thousands more are teetering on the brink. In fact, most churches in America have less than 100 people attending each Sunday…
A majority of churches have fewer than 100 people attending services each Sunday and have declined or nearly flatlined in membership growth, according to a new study from Exponential by LifeWay Research.
The study, which was conducted to help churches better understand growth in the pews, showed that most Protestant churches are not doing well attracting new Christian converts, reporting an average of less than one each month.
But even among all the bad news, there are some promising signs for the Christian faith. The home church movement if flourishing all over the country, and many of those home fellowships are focused on getting back to the roots of the Christian faith. All throughout history there have been relentless attempts to destroy the Christian faith, and yet it is still the largest faith in the entire world.
However, there is no doubt that Christianity is in decline throughout the western world, and churches are dying one after another.
This is what one pastor had to say about the slow death of his church…
‘My church is on the decline,’ he said. ‘We had 50 (congregants) in 2005 and now we have 15. We’re probably going to have to close (in a few years).’
‘Mainline Christianity is dying,’ he added. ‘It’s at least going away. It makes me feel more comfortable that it’s not my fault or my church’s fault. It’s part of a bigger trend that’s happening.’
John Adams, the second president of the United States, once said the following about our form of government…
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
As America has turned away from the Christian faith, we have become steadily less moral and steadily less religious.
If we continue down this path, many believe that the future of our nation is going to be quite bleak indeed.
- The Most & Least 'Stressed-Out' States
Across the US, suicide rates, drug overdoses and other “deaths of despair” are soaring – and recently contributed to the third-straight year of life-expectancy decline. Meanwhile, millennials, saddled with debt and suffering with a paucity of marketable skills, are putting off parenthood and homeownership as they toil away in expensive urban centers, surrendering more than half of their monthly income to rent and debt service.
With the outlook on the future of American society as grim as it has ever been (thanks to widening economic inequality, the dire warnings of climate alarmists, and the erosion of confidence in American institutions, among other reasons), it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Americans – particularly young Americans – are extremely stressed out.
Though stress can be an amorphous concept, researchers at WalletHub have tried to quantify stress-level trends across the US, incorporating data from average hours worked per week to personal bankruptcy rate to share of adults getting adequate sleep and using these data to assign a score to individual states.
Their study turned up an interesting result: It showed that states in the Deep South tended to be the most stressed, followed by expensive coastal states like New York and California, with the sleepy Midwest and plain states bringing up the rear.
Here’s a breakdown of the highest and lowest scoring states in each category analyzed:
Read more about how more Americans are dying young here…
- A New Call For Expanding "Racist" Labelling By Reporters
Authored by Mark Glennon via Wirepoints.com,
If everything is racist, nothing is racist.
You’d think that principle might be now be obvious, given how the terms racist and racism are used as often as they are. Maybe you’ve been hoping that racism’s most genuine enemies are concerned that overusing the term is causing real examples to be overlooked.
Forget it.
Instead, reporters now have the green light to use those labels far more often, as many of them will see things. In fact, some will feel obligated to do so, as they are interpreting new guidelines from the Associated Press. Those new guidelines are in the A.P.’s revised Stylebook, which is about more than style. It’s about politically correct language, and it’s the definitive source. We know it’s the definitive source not just because many reporters obey it but because, well, the A.P. says so.
It’s is a particularly bad development for places like Chicago that sit on perpetual racial powder kegs.
This is about separating factual reporting from opinion. Separately labeling commentary and opinion supposedly is a core ethical obligation in journalism, but the A.P.’s new guidelines undoubtedly will be accepted by many as permission to throw away any pretense about that.
Under the new guidelines, reporters should forget what it calls euphemisms like racially charged, racially divisive and racially tinged.
Instead, just call those things racist or racism, say the guidelines. At least that’s how many reporters will interpret them.
Some news sources already seem elated, welcoming the guidelines as authorization to report racism as fact in news stories:
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Previous years of soft-pedaling around the word ‘racist’ in news reporting are reflective of how we as a country have soft-pedaled around having an honest dialogue about the impact of racism not only in America but in American newsrooms,” said Sarah Glover, an editor at NBC-owned television stations.
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Minnesota Pubic Radio referred to racially-charged as “a weak-kneed euphemism used by news organizations who know what racism and racists look like, but don’t want to be pinned down on it.”
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“People have criticized news outlets,” as the Huffington Post sees things in its world, for using those sugarcoated words “particularly in reporting on President Donald Trump.”
Trump is undoubtedly who they’re most giddy about since they can now just report he’s a racist whenever he trolls on racial topics or goes over the top, as he often does
But this will go far beyond Trump. Think about the countless stories where those so-called euphemisms – or something still weaker — were appropriate but should have been replaced, according to the A.P., by racism reported as fact.
Some examples:
Hillary Clinton made what Fox News called a racially tinged joke. Fox should have called it racist?
John McCain’s comparison of Barack Obama to young, white celebrities was racially tinged, according to the New York Times. No, that was racism, they apparently should have written.
The list goes on endlessly.
Calling rioters thugs is racially charged, according to an NPR story. Burly has a racially charged history, according to the New York Times.
Leslie Jones of Saturday Night Live made racially charged jokes, as news reports had it. (Jones is black.) Should it all have been called racism in news stories?
Illinois offers a good example of the inflammatory impact the new A.P. standards could have.
A black legislator has a bill pending to mandate minority representation on boards of directors of public companies in Illinois. Last week, an opponent in the legislature criticized the bill with language that undoubtedly could be described by those euphemisms the A.P. now dislikes. The black sponsor said he was offended and the critic has now apologized.
Should the criticisms of the bill have been labeled racist in the news stories about it? Opinions may vary, but the A.P.’s guidelines clearly would encourage a news source to report the opposition as racist.
A hotter example of how the guidelines may be abused came up in a Twitter skirmish I had recently with Dan Mihalopoulos, a reporter at Chicago’s NPR station.
He wrote it’s “Already time to implement the new AP policy on calling a racist a racist,” referring to a news story about Pat Buchanan saying “we haven’t fully assimilated African-American citizens.”
The underlying story did it right, as I see things. it simply reported what Buchanan said. The story was by a source that’s left-leaning – Mediaite.
Instead of just reporting what Buchanan said, Mihalopoulos apparently thinks the story should have said racist or racism, per the A.P. policy.
I tweeted back: “Ridiculous. Instead of reporting what somebody said, you’re saying to report a subjective, highly charged characterization of what they said using a term defined very differently by different people.”
Mihalopoulos entirely missed that point, resorting instead to trying to link Buchanan’s views to mine. That’s hardly relevant, nor accurate, since I don’t share Buchanan’s views. He answered, “You think anybody needs you or Pat Buchanan to tell them how to assimilate? Including those whose ancestors were brought here forcibly as slaves? Assimilate to what? And you will reform media with such bias!” He proceeded to block me.
If Mihalopoulos wants to write an opinion piece saying Buchanan or his words were racist, great. But labeling things that way in a news story about what was said would violate the basic, ethical duty to separate reporting from opinion.
What’s fact is that racism now has vastly different meanings to different people. The new left’s version is about systemic, ubiquitous, implicit bias, and conformity to what many of us see as politically correct rules of language police like the A.P. To me and many others, it’s about judging on color instead of character and violating what Chief Justice Roberts wrote: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
Other people — good, reasonable people — may have other definitions, so it would be fine to see opinion columns branding Buchanan or his comments as racist or not racist.
But this is about reporting news.
That’s one obvious problem with the A.P.’s new guideline. Despite being fighting words to many, racist and racism are exceptionally controversial in meaning. The country is already torn apart over this. Why use those terms except where there’s some consensus on what they mean?
There’s certainly no shortage of examples where there should be consensus. To take just one, consider the conduct reported at Chicago’s Water Management Department. A white worker urinating in the cup of a black co-worker, crosses in front of the lockers of complaining African American employees, copies of Mein Compf placed on the desks of black co-workers and more.
I doubt many Chicagoans know that story, except black Chicagoans who are probably all too familiar with it. Why? Isn’t it partly because stories like that are lost in the fog? That’s the biggest problem with the A.P.’s new guidelines. The fog of stories about racism will thicken as reporters report it as fact where they, subjectively, see it. The public will become further desensitized.
If you carefully parse through the A.P.’s new guidelines, you can make a case that it actually calls for use of racism and racist only in limited circumstances. Racism, it says, “is a doctrine asserting racial differences in character, intelligence, etc., and the superiority of one race over another, or racial discrimination or feelings of hatred or bigotry toward people of another race.” [Emphasis added.] And the guidelines say not to use the word unless it really fits. That would be a fine interpretation.
But look through the whole thing and you’ll see it’s filled with weaselly contradictions that reporters so inclined will cite as their go-ahead for labeling more conduct as racist. Euphemism has insulting connotations. Users of the terms the A.P. calls euphemisms are cowards, the standards imply. And there’s this silliness, which is impractical for reporters with deadlines: “[D]ecisions should include discussion with colleagues and/or others from diverse backgrounds and perspectives.”
In short, many reporters will interpret the guidelines as this simple headline put it: “Reporters Urged to Use 2 Words They Often Avoid.”
Count on seeing racism reported as fact more often. It certainly will include the A.P. itself, which already is no exemplar of objective reporting. It will include other reporters who obey its rules, which apparently will include Mihalopoulos, whose NPR station is already among the most biased news sources in Illinois.
Their stories probably will be infused with the usual pretense of racial togetherness and understanding.
The opposite will result.
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- Amazon Is Challenging Google And Facebook For Dominance In Digital Advertising
If Jeff Bezos has proven anything during the quarter century since he founded Amazon as a humble online bookseller, it’s that no industry is immune to his company’s expansionary blood lust. Not even its fellow tech behemoths.
While the public’s focus over the past year has been on Amazon’s expansion into industries as diverse as groceries, pharmacies and delivery and logistics, one of the company’s biggest success stories has largely flown under the media radar – until yesterday, that is, when the Wall Street Journal published a deeply reported story about the e-commerce behemoth’s hostile conquest of the digital advertising business. According to WSJ, Amazon is the first firm to seriously challenge the Facebook-Google digital advertising duopoly that has for years controlled more than 60% of the market, largely thanks to the growth of Amazon’s search-ad business.
To be sure, Amazon has a long way to go to catch up with Google: It still controls 78% of the $44.2 billion US market for search ads. But market-research firm eMarketer is projecting that Amazon will generate more than $5 billion in search-ad revenue by the end of 2020, which would put it in the No. 2 spot ahead of Microsoft. This would cause Google’s market share to slip to just 71% by then, even as
And thanks to its giant online marketplace, Amazon is benefiting from synergies that simply don’t exist for Google.
But the shift in spending follows a major change in shopper behavior: While Google has long been the dominant player in online searches of all sorts, some 54% of people looking for a product now begin their search directly on Amazon, a jump from 46% in 2015, according to Jumpshot, a research firm that collects data from 100 million devices.
“Consumers are no longer double hopping between Google and Amazon, they just go straight to Amazon,” said Scott Hagedorn, chief executive officer of Omnicom Media Group North America, the ad-buying division of Omnicom.
The search-ad dollars shifting to Amazon are from companies that sell products on its platform, such as consumer packaged goods manufacturers and retailers, Mr. Hagedorn said.
Though eMarketer doesn’t have an estimate for Amazon’s search-ad revenues from 2018, it expects it will account for at least half of Amazon’s $11.3 billion in overall ad revenue this year.
Courtesy of WSJ
The way Amazon’s search-ad business is structured makes it particularly lucrative: companies bid in an auction-based system to have their product ads show up when a user searches for a term like “shampoo.” Of course, Amazon only sells ads to companies that sell on its platform. But companies that use the service report a remarkable ROI on dwarfs Google’s. Because of this, many have shifted more of their ad spend to Amazon.
Men’s grooming product maker Oars + Alps LLC was using Google search ads last year but has shifted most of its search-ad spending to Amazon. Its monthly ad outlays with Amazon now top $20,000.
“I was amazed at the return on ad spending on Amazon, so I lowered our spending in Google search,” said Laura Cox, co-founder of Oars + Alps, which sells its products at Target, Amazon.com and on its own website.
Ad executives said money for increased spending on Amazon search ads is also coming from other ad and marketing budgets, including in-store promotions and ads, and display ads.
Dentsu Aegis Network, another major ad buyer, said its Amazon search-ad spending in the U.S. increased upward of 60% last year but only a small portion of the money likely came from budgets previously earmarked for Google.
Moving beyond search ads, Amazon has build a brisk ad business that has moved the company into third place behind Google and Facebook.
Amazon’s advertising ambitions have steadily grown. Beyond search, it offers other opportunities for marketers including display ads, TV-like ads in live sports telecasts and targeted ads it serves to people as they travel around the web. Overall, it is now the third-largest digital ad player behind Google and Facebook Inc.—the “duopoly” that combined controls about 60% of U.S. online spending.
And Amazon is rapidly developing new advertising options, including video ads.
If there’s one risk to Amazon’s aggressive expansion into the search ad market, it might be the company’s own success. Because of its bidding system for placing search ads, brands’ rush to buy with Amazon has sparked a bout of dramatic price inflation, that is swiftly forcing brands to reevaluate whether the ROI is still worth the price. Some brands are also wary of Amazon’s ad business because they view the company as a competitor.
The rush of ad dollars to Amazon does have a downside: a big jump in ad prices in competitive categories such as consumer products, ad buyers said. The cost per click on the search term “laundry detergent liquid,” for example, was $17.51 last month, a 127% increase from September, according to Pacvue, which provides tools for brands to optimize Amazon ads.
“Amazon was extremely inexpensive” a few years ago but the influx of brands has caused a “significant increase in pricing,” said Melissa Burdick, co-founder of Pacvue.
Some brands remain leery of the company, viewing it as a competitor. Even as it helps other brands market their own products, Amazon is increasingly hawking its own private labels as well.
But in the not-too-distant future, the expansion of Amazon’s advertising business could transform the digital advertising duopoly into a triumvirate.
Though that’s probably the last thing digital media organizations and newspapers wanted to hear. But as the Trump administration ramps up its anti-trust scrutiny of big tech, this could be the rare issue where the Silicon Valley giants join forces with the Trump Administration against one of their own.
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