- Obama Slams Door In Putin's Face, Refuses To Discuss "Very Dangerous" Missile Defense System
Authored by Eric Zuesse, via The Saker,
Actions speak louder than mere words, and U.S. President Barack Obama has now acted, not only spoken. His action is to refuse to discuss with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Russia’s biggest worry about recent changes in America’s nuclear strategy – a particularly stunning change that is terrifying Putin.
On Sunday June 5th, Reuters headlined “Russia Says U.S. Refuses Talks on Missile Defence System”, and reported that, “The United States has refused Russian offers to discuss Washington’s missile defence programme, Russian Deputy Defence Minister Anatoly Antonov was quoted as saying on Sunday, calling the initiative ‘very dangerous’.”
Russia’s concern is that, if the “Ballistic Missile Defense” or “Anti Ballistic Missile” system, that the United States is now just starting to install on and near Russia’s borders, works, then the United States will be able to launch a surprise nuclear attack against Russia, and this system, which has been in development for decades and is technically called the “Aegis Ashore Missile Defense System”, will annihilate the missiles that Russia launches in retaliation, which will then leave the Russian population with no retaliation at all, except for the nuclear contamination of the entire northern hemisphere, and global nuclear winter, the blowback from America’s onslaught against Russia, which blowback some strategists in the West say would be manageable probems for the U.S. and might be worth the cost of eliminating Russia.
That theory, of a winnable nuclear war (which in the U.S. seems to be replacing the prior theory, called “M.A.D.” for Mutually Assured Destruction) was first prominently put forth in 2006 in the prestigious U.S. journal Foreign Affairs, headlining “The Rise of Nuclear Primacy” and which advocated for a much bolder U.S. strategic policy against Russia, based upon what it argued was America’s technological superiority against Russia’s weaponry and a possibly limited time-window in which to take advantage of it before Russia catches up and the opportunity to do so is gone.
Paul Craig Roberts was the first reporter in the West to write in a supportive way about Russia’s concerns that Barack Obama might be a follower of that theory. One of Roberts’s early articles on this was issued on 17 June 2014 and headlined “Washington Is Beating The War Drums”, where he observed that “US war doctrine has been changed. US nuclear weapons are no longer restricted to a retaliatory force, but have been elevated to the role of preemptive nuclear attack.”
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has tried many times to raise this issue with President Obama, the most recent such instance being via a public statement of his concern, made on May 27th. Apparently, the public statement by Antonov on June 5th is following up on that latest Putin effort, by Antonov’s announcement there that Obama now explicitly refuses to discuss Putin’s concerns about the matter.
The fact that these efforts on the part of the Russian government are via public media instead of via private conversations (such as had been the means used during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, when the shoe was on the other foot and the U.S. President was concerned about the Soviet President’s installation of nuclear missiles 90 miles from the U.S. border) suggests that Mr. Obama, unlike U.S. President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in 1962, refuses to communicate with Russia, now that the U.S. is potentially in the position of the aggressor.
Russia is making its preparations, just in case it will (because of the Aegis Ashore system) need to be the first to attack. However, some knowledgeable people on the subject say that Russia will never strike first. Perhaps U.S. President Obama is proceeding on the basis of a similar assumption, and this is the reason why he is refusing to discuss the matter with his Russian counterpart. However, if Mr. Obama wishes to avoid a nuclear confrontation, then refusing even to discuss the opponent’s concerns would not be the way to go about doing that. Obama is therefore sending signals to the contrary — that he is preparing a nuclear attack against Russia — simply by his refusal to discuss the matter. In this case, his action of refusal is, itself, an answer to Putin’s question, like slamming the door in Putin’s face would be. It’s a behavioral answer, instead of a merely verbal one.
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
- Jeffrey Sachs Destroys Hillary Clinton's Foreign Policy Speech
Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,
Hillary’s record includes supporting the barbaric “contras” against the Nicaraguan people in the 1980s, supporting the NATO bombing of the former Yugoslavia, supporting the ongoing Bush-Iraq War, the ongoing Afghan mess, and as Secretary of State the destruction of the secular state of Libya, the military coup in Honduras, and the present attempt at “regime change” in Syria. Every one of these situations has resulted in more extremism, more chaos in the world, and more danger to our country. Next will be the borders of Russia, China, and Iran. Look at the viciousness of her recent AIPAC speech (don’t say you haven’t been warned). Can we really bear to watch as Clinton “takes our alliance [with Israel] to the next level”? Where is our sense of proportion? Cannot the media, at the least, call her out on this extremism? The problem, I think, is this political miasma of “correctness” that dominates American thinking (i.e. Trump is extreme, therefore Hillary is not).
– From the post: “We’re Going to War” – Oliver Stone Opines on the Dangerous Extremism of Neocon Hillary Clinton
Jeffrey Sachs has been on a roll lately. His latest might be his best one yet.
Published at the Huffington Post, Clinton’s Speech Shows That Only Sanders Is Fit for the Presidency, is an absolute must read. Here it goes:
Hillary Clinton’s recent foreign policy speech was an attack on Donald Trump but was also a reminder that Clinton is a deeply flawed and worrisome candidate. Her record as Secretary of State was one of the worst in modern U.S. history; her policies have enmeshed America in new Middle East wars, rising terrorism and even a new Cold War with Russia. Of the three leading candidates, only Bernie Sanders has the sound judgment to avoid further war and to cooperate with the rest of the world.
Clinton is intoxicated with American power. She has favored one war of choice after the next: bombing Belgrade (1999); invading Iraq (2003); toppling Qaddafi (2011); funding Jihadists in Syria (2011 till now). The result has been one bloodbath after another, with open wounds until today fostering ISIS, terrorism, and mass refugee flows.
In her speech, Clinton engaged in her own Trump-like grandiose fear mongering: “[I]f America doesn’t lead, we leave a vacuum — and that will either cause chaos, or other countries will rush in to fill the void. Then they’ll be the ones making the decisions about your lives and jobs and safety — and trust me, the choices they make will not be to our benefit.”
This kind of arrogance — that America and America alone must run the world — has led straight to overstretch: perpetual wars that cannot be won, and unending and escalating confrontations with Russia, China, Iran and others that make the world more dangerous. It doesn’t seem to dawn on Clinton that in today’s world, we need cooperation, not endless bravado.
Clinton professed her belief “with all my heart that America is an exceptional country — that we’re still, in Lincoln’s words, the last, best hope of earth.” Yet surely President Lincoln was speaking in moral terms, not in Clinton’s militaristic terms. Lincoln did not mean that the last best hope of earth should send NATO bombers into Libya, the CIA into Syria, and Special Ops forces into countless other countries. Surely Lincoln would have been more prudent than to push NATO expansion to Russia’s very doorstep in Ukraine and Georgia, thereby triggering a violent response from Russia and a new Cold War.
Clinton lacks all self-awareness of how poorly she performed as Secretary of State. She trumpets her “successes” as follows:
Unlike [Trump], I have some experience with the tough calls and the hard work of statecraft. I wrestled with the Chinese over a climate deal in Copenhagen, brokered a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, negotiated the reduction of nuclear weapons with Russia, twisted arms to bring the world together in global sanctions against Iran, and stood up for the rights of women, religious minorities and LGBT people around the world.
Pure braggadocio. While Clinton “wrestled with China” over a climate deal, she failed to achieve one. While she “brokered a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas,” she failed to head off the disastrous Gaza War in the first place. While she “negotiated the reduction of nuclear weapons with Russia,” she championed a remarkably confrontational approach with Russia based on NATO expansion to Ukraine and Georgia and a new nuclear arms race that will cost American taxpayers more than $355 billion over a decade. While she claims to have “stood up for the rights of women [and] religious minorities,” her Syrian adventurism left Syria devastated, displaced 10 million people, and destroyed the religious minority communities she claimed to defend.
Clinton declared that she has a plan to defeat ISIS, but ISIS wouldn’t even exist were it not for Clinton’s “regime change” policy in Syria. ISIS emerged as a result of the US policy to partner with Saudi Arabia to topple Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. This mistaken policy created the chaos in which ISIS gained ground and weaponry, including US weaponry that was diverted from American-backed jihadists.
Of course, there’s more. Recall what we learned last year about the Clinton Foundation in the post, How Donations to the Clinton Foundation Led to Tens of Billions in Weapons Sales to Autocratic Regimes:
Even by the standards of arms deals between the United States and Saudi Arabia, this one was enormous. A consortium of American defense contractors led by Boeing would deliver $29 billion worth of advanced fighter jets to the United States’ oil-rich ally in the Middle East.
Israeli officials were agitated, reportedly complaining to the Obama administration that this substantial enhancement to Saudi air power risked disrupting the region’s fragile balance of power. The deal appeared to collide with the State Department’s documented concerns about the repressive policies of the Saudi royal family.
These were not the only relationships bridging leaders of the two nations. In the years before Hillary Clinton became secretary of state, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia contributed at least $10 million to the Clinton Foundation, the philanthropic enterprise she has overseen with her husband, former president Bill Clinton. Just two months before the deal was finalized, Boeing — the defense contractor that manufactures one of the fighter jets the Saudis were especially keen to acquire, the F-15 — contributed $900,000 to the Clinton Foundation, according to a company press release.
Now back to Sachs…
Clinton rightly accused Trump of being unpredictable, yet Clinton is dangerously predictable. She is always trying to prove how tough she is, how tough America is, how exceptional is America’s power. Trump is unqualified to be President because he lacks both the necessary experience and good judgment. Clinton, by contrast, has the extensive experience that proves that she too lacks the good judgment to be President.
Bernie Sanders, by contrast, not only offers a vastly better economic program than Clinton, but also a foreign policy based on wisdom, decency, and especially restraint. As a result, the American people trust Sanders rather than Clinton. She wins the closed primaries while he wins the open ones, that is, primaries that include the independent voters who will decide the November elections.
The Democrats would be foolhardy to accept Clinton as the “inevitable” nominee; she is the voice of foreign policy failure, while Sanders is the voice of hope, the young, and the future, and who is far more likely to beat Trump this fall.
As I remarked on Twitter earlier today:
Yes, then we can begin the charade of choosing between a sociopath and a demagogue. https://t.co/oHAC51nHCq
— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) June 6, 2016
- The U.S. States With The Highest Tax Burdens In 2016
Across the United States, some residents have to pay far more state and local tax than others. The amount you pay depends heavily on the state you reside in with New Yorkers suffering under the heaviest tax burden according to website Wallethub.
As Statista details, the tax burden measures the percentage of a person’s income which goes towards state and local tax, different to the tax rate, which depends heavily on income and personal circumstances.
You will find more statistics at StatistaPeople in New York pay 13.12 percent of their income towards state and local tax, the highest rate nationwide.
Its neighbours Vermont (11.13 percent), Connecticut (10.91 percent) and New Jersey (10.38 percent) also have some of the highest tax burdens in the country.
- "Clinton Nemesis" Klayman Comes To Trump's Defense: "Trump Right About Judicial Bias And Prejudice"
It has been a difficult day for Donald Trump, with virtually everyone, enemies as well as alleged allies coming down on him like a ton of bricks over his comments about Judge Gonzalo Curiel’s alleged bias and prejudice against him. Just moments ago, The Hill issued an article titled “GOP aghast as Trump doubles down” in which it writes that “a defiant Donald Trump is refusing to backtrack over racially charged remarks he made last week, and the controversy has opened up a major divide between the presumptive Republican presidential nominee and senior GOP leaders. Republican calls for Trump to walk back the comments or apologize have mounted. But true to his style, he is doubling down.“
In fact, so for just one person has stepped up in Trump’s defense on the record: that person is Larry Klayman, a former prosecutor for the U.S. Department of Justice who was on the trial team that broke up AT&T, and founder of Judicial Watch and now Freedom Watch. Klayman has been called the “Clinton nemesis” for his dozens of lawsuits against the Bill Clinton administration in the 90s. Also, without the Judicial Watch organization which he founded, virtually no discovery would have been achieved in any of the “probes” involving Hillary Clinton’s email server. The founder of Judicial Watch and the government watchdog group Freedom Watch, he has brought legal action against former Vice President Dick Cheney, President Barack Obama, OPEC, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and the National Security Agency.
Klayman issued this statement in response to the overly harsh and dishonest criticism leveled against Donald Trump over federal judge Gonzalo Curiel’s alleged bias and prejudice against him.
“This harsh criticism, designed to inflame Latino-Americans, and influence the upcoming presidential election by Hillary Clinton and the Republican establishment like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan (who would like to see Trump lose to Clinton so they can run their Republican establishment candidate against her in 2020), that Trump is racist as shown by his comments about the possible influence of federal judge Curiel’s Mexican-American heritage in making rulings in the Trump University case now before him, intentionally ignores reality and is intellectually and intentionally dishonest. So too is overly harsh reaction by the mainstream media about Trump’s claims.
Does anyone believe that judges, like nearly all persons, are not influenced by their backgrounds and heritage? Indeed, in my nearly 40 years of legal practice, I have come upon many judges who wear their national origin and race on their sleeve. Judges are human and react to events just like everyone else. And, regrettably, particularly in the federal judiciary, where judges are nominated based on political patronage, and frequently take the bench after confirmation without any training in how to be a judge and mete out not just justice but the appearance of justice, this bias and prejudice frequently seeps through to their decision-making.
Clinton, McConnell, and Ryan, to name just a few of the political hacks that infest the nation’s capital and our body politic at large, are dishonestly selling an “Alice in Wonderland” bill of goods to the American people to further their own political agendas.
In 1994, I founded Judicial Watch – the name was meant to connote watching and keeping judges honest – because I had experienced as a trial lawyer the same type of bias and prejudice and unfair rulings of which Trump claims. In the years leading up to my founding of Judicial Watch, I represented mostly U.S. importers and foreign exporters in international trade cases and litigation and saw the bias and prejudice of some judges against my clients because their national origin and the influence of big money with the politicians who got them their jobs. I was offended and disgusted, and wanted to do something about this, and so I founded Judicial Watch.
Recently, in a criminal prosecution of Cliven Bundy in Las Vegas federal court, where I have sought to appear as Mr. Bundy’s criminal defense counsel along with a fine local lawyer (as I have written on www.wnd.com in my weekly columns), I have again experienced bias and prejudice against my client by a federal judge of Mexican-American heritage who is likely in part hostile because I represent Sheriff Joe Arpaio in a Supreme Court case challenging President Barack Obama’s executive amnesty orders. This federal judge, Gloria Navarro, like Judge Curiel in the Trump University case, is a Latina activist and attended law school in Maricopa County, where Arpaio is sheriff. She was recommended to the bench by Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, who has said publicly that Cliven Bundy and his family are “domestic terrorists,” and that they should be imprisoned. President Obama, who nominated Navarro at Reid’s urging, has also attacked Cliven Bundy, falsely suggesting that Cliven Bundy is racist. In short, Judge Navarro, I sincerely believe, influenced by her national origin and allegiance to Reid and Obama, has made a number of biased and highly prejudicial rulings that have abridged and effectively trashed Cliven Bundy’s constitutional rights by denying him his Sixth Amendment right to counsel and a speedy trial. For a time, Judge Navarro also apparently had Cliven Bundy imprisoned in solitary confinement. Judge Navarro has even suggested that Cliven Bundy’s wife should be indicted along with him and his sons, following the lead of her benefactors, Reid and Obama. My co-counsel in Cliven Bundy’s criminal defense has moved to disqualify her, which she predictably denied and the matter is now headed to the appeals court.
Judge Curiel in the Trump University case was reportedly a member of La Raza, a radical Latino group that believes in Latino superiority over non-Latinos. Thus, whether or not Trump is right about his bias and prejudice, in the real world it is likely that his alleged unfair rulings have been influenced by this.
Those who criticize Trump or others who see the world for what it is, and attack them for raising important issues about the judicial bias and prejudice that permeates our federal judiciary in particular, are not being honest with the American people.
In short, our federal legal system and its judiciary is politicized, frequently intellectually dishonest and in some quarters even totally corrupt (the state court judiciary is not much better) and that is one big reason why I carry on as head of my new group Freedom Watch and in private practice to fight against this tyranny.”
- China's Real Unemployment Rate Is Three Times Higher Than The Offical Number
When it comes to fake data, China is in a class of its own: between fabricated export and import numbers (where hundreds of billion in capital flight are hidden), to massaged, goalseeked GDP “data”, Chinese economic reporting has become a laughing stock across the developed world. Just last night, we showed a Goldman analysis according to which China was also misrepresenting its broadest credit aggregate, Total Social Financing, by hundreds of billions if not more as it was not accounting for shadow banking flows that did not end up in the economy.
And now, based on a new report by Fathom Consulting, it appears that China is also dramatically misreporting what may be the one most critical for social stability metric, its unemployment rate, which when stripped away of the political propaganda, is more than three times greater than the officially reported rate.
According to Fathom, China’s underemployment Indicator has tripled to 12.9% since 2012 even while the official jobless rate has hovered near 4% for five years.
Here Bloomberg confirms what we said last year, namely that the risk of a social upheaval as a result of millions of newly unemployment workers in a “deregulated economy”, is why China quickly went back to its old ways unleashed the recent record amount of debt. To wit: “the weakening labor market may explain China’s decision to uncork the credit spigots and revive old growth drivers in an effort to stabilize the world’s no. 2 economy.”
Leaders have stressed that keeping employment stable is a top priority. Fathom’s data shows that while mass layoffs haven’t materialized, the number of people not working at full capacity or hours has increased. “The degree of slack has surged in recent years,” analysts at the London-based firm wrote. “China has a substantial hidden unemployment problem, in our view, and that explains why the authorities have come under so much pressure to re-start the old growth engines.”
Leaders of the world’s most populous nation have promised to slash excess capacity in coal mines and steel mills while at the same time ensuring that the economy grows by at least 6.5 percent this year. Across the nation, state-backed ‘zombie’ factories are being kept alive by local governments to keep a lid on any social unrest. To keep the plants ticking over, employees in some cases have been asked to work half the time for half the pay.
Meanwhile, the official registered unemployment gauge is notorious for not changing during economic cycles. In other words, just like most other Chinese economic indicators, it is a total fabrication. It’s compiled from the number of people who register at local governments for unemployment benefits, which excludes most of the nation’s more than 270 million migrant workers. Another official jobless rate, just as useless, based on surveys into major cities and supposed to be more accurate, stayed at about 5.1% as of April. That’s also little changed in the past two years.
Though official data show employment weathering a slowdown, any deviation from that would touch a nerve for top Communist Party officials. “Job insecurity is a key driver of social instability – something that China’s authorities need to avoid at all costs,” Fathom wrote.
Another issue: just like in the US, productivity has become a major threat to China’s economy and as a result Beijing’s top officials are also concerned about waning productivity growth. That’s been “particularly weak” in the services sector, which absorbs most labor, the consultancy says.
Oddly enough, the same situation is taking place in the US – one could ask if the BLS is taking hints from China’s National Bureau of Statistics or vice versa.
While growth slowed last year to 6.9%, the weakest in 25 years, Fathom estimates it was just a fraction of the official pace: 2%. This also means that unless China manages to continue creating $1 trillion in new debt every quarter – an amount equal to about 10% of its GDP – to keep the local population semi-employed and content, it is only a matter of time before Beijing biggest fear, social instability, materializes.
- An Angry Bernie Sanders Responds To Hillary's Nomination
Expect many confused pundits, and Bernie Sanders fans, to mull for hours why the AP released its critical announcement that Hillary had won the delegate race just hours before the important CA primary. For now, however, here is the response from a confused, unhappy, and perhaps angry, Bernie Sanders, released moments ago by his spokesman, Michael Briggs.
It is unfortunate that the media, in a rush to judgment, are ignoring the Democratic National Committee’s clear statement that it is wrong to count the votes of superdelegates before they actually vote at the convention this summer.
Secretary Clinton does not have and will not have the requisite number of pledged delegates to secure the nomination. She will be dependent on superdelegates who do not vote until July 25 and who can change their minds between now and then. They include more than 400 superdelegates who endorsed Secretary Clinton 10 months before the first caucuses and primaries and long before any other candidate was in the race.
Our job from now until the convention is to convince those superdelegates that Bernie is by far the strongest candidate against Donald Trump.
Welcome to the real world Bernie, and good luck because…
“Who is: Goldman Sachs?” $GS pic.twitter.com/LhzyFI2qum
— Jeopardy! Stocks (@JeopardyStocks) June 7, 2016
- Demagoguery, Duopoly, & The Death Of America's Body Politic
It seems such an improbability, impossibility at times, that such a diverse population in ethnicities, races, religions and ideologies be politically housed in two tents. But this United States of America for all its diversity, and at times forced accommodation, did manage early on in its history to develop an economic critical center of gravity – a large, unprecedented economic marketplace – that kept the nation un-fragmented, magically glued principally because of a single reason: an unrivaled economic prosperity that the United States maintained for its people vis-à-vis other economies in the world.
However, that unique economic and political America that Alexis de Tocqueville would describe almost two centuries ago [Democracy in America] may have had its incredible seven-generation run, and be now ready for a meltdown; for the patent to that magic glue held by America has now expired, free for all to emulate via globalization. And, ‘though the international playing field has yet to become competitively flat, we might just be a short generation away from that occurring; and the miracle that once was America could soon become but a memory of recent past.
Poof… goes the American mythic star! The diamond-studded American exceptionalism, together with the touted and revered American dream – dual virtuosity that we were made to believe came from above… from a god who prejudicially played favoritism on our behalf – are rapidly coming to an end, as we begin to recognize and acknowledge that our lucky star was mainly the result of an unprecedentedly large marketplace that industrious Americans created in their westward territorial expansion… something which de Tocqueville clearly saw and aptly described in the 1820’s.
No matter what politicians of the two hardly distinguishable brands tell us, the future does not bode well for either political party content in alternating their unashamed ineptitude running the nation for as long as most of us can remember for the benefit of a privileged few. Both Democrats and Republicans, and here we mean the officialdom and not the rank and file, might soon be in for a rude awakening with the exit of politics-as-usual and the disappearance of the newly-birthed nobility in America represented by the parasite political-class which has usurped “the government by the people” in that proclamation of national purpose made by Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg (1863).
If politicians were honest, be they apprentices or masters, they wouldn’t be clamoring such ignorant-idiocy during the presidential campaign as expressed in “make America great again (Donald Trump),” or “fighting for us (Hillary Clinton),” but rather spouse more dignified, non-xenophobic slogans, aiming at what has been lacking in our lives: fairness and justice for everyone in America. But in politics, just as in other aspects of American life, sleaze reigns supreme; honesty and dishonesty so intertwined in our lives that often we have difficulty differentiating between those who commit crimes and their victims; those leaders who have our best interests and welfare at heart, and those paladins of sleaze who politically take advantage of us for their personal enrichment.
The disappearance of that favored economic status which gave Americans a cushion in helping to cope with diversity is already being felt, bringing about both rebuke and remake of politics as we are experiencing them today, with the final rites for two-party politics to take place sooner than anticipated as Republican and Democratic politicians could soon be writing their duopoly obituaries after jointly having placed much of the population in dire straits relative to both the economy and personal safety.
And the different constituencies – not so much their leaders but their memberships – are beginning to question whether their loyalty to either of the two parties have been abused or misused; whether they might have fared better had they taken charge of their own destiny with their own clear advocacies and “in-house” leadership, instead of leaving things in the hands of master politicians who have continually demonstrated to be no patron saints to their memberships, nor strong advocates for their needs.
Demagoguery has ruled the day for blacks, browns and labor unions who have cast their lot with the self-serving leadership of the Democratic Party, all vestiges of progressivism thrown out the window during Bill Clinton’s tenure in the White House; and, similarly, that demagoguery has also applied to fiscal and social conservatives who have rendered homage to a leadership in a Republican Party whose sole advocacy has been the advancement [in money and power] of an elite that has little in common with the highly regarded historical precepts of the Grand Old Party, or ideological conservatism.
It does look as if this presidential election, given both the character and the judgment of the presumptive (and presumptuous) nominees, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, could very well be the catalyst for a renovation of our body politic; at least fire that first shot to initiate a race that will overhaul, rapidly and democratically, American politics.
- Live Webcast: Hillary Holds Campaign Rally After Learning She Is The Presumptive Nominee
While Bernie Sanders’ fans will be understandably surprised, if not downright furious, by the timing of the AP report, Hillary’s supporters will be delighted, as will Hillary herself. Here she is campaigning in rally in Long Beach, CA, where he has just learned she is the presumptive nominee.
- China Capital Outflow Crackdown: "Surprisingly Plump" Man Busted With $74,000 Strapped To His Waist
As the pace of capital outflows from China gathers pace (as detailed here, here, here, and here) it appears the Chinese are not satisfied with just Bitcoin. Today, in a scene straight out of the Wolf of Wall Street, we learn that a man was caught by Shenzhen officials as he tried to leave the country with US$74,000 strapped to his waist.
Mainland rules state that people who leave the country with more than US$5,000 in cash must notify the customs authority, which will then issue a bank certificate permitting the funds to leave the country – if authorities choose to allow it. The man clearly wasn't about to go down that path and alert authorities (at least intentionally) that he was leaving town with US$74k, something that will let's say be "frowned upon" by Chinese authorities.
Shenzhen officials became suspicious of the man because he wore a jacket even though it was hot and humid, and then the "surprisingly plump" looking man appeared nervous while queuing up to pass through customs. After he was stopped and questioned by customs officers, an alarm sounded when a scanner revealed that the man had US dollars packed into six large pockets that were sewn into a large scarf and wrapped around his waist.
* * *
It is unclear what the ultimate fate of the man will be, although there is a good chance he will be "disappeared" – should have gone with the girl…
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