Apr 08

Today’s News 8th April 2019

  • Hundreds Of Migrants Battle With Greek Riot Police After 'Fake News' About Open Border

    False rumors that the Balkan states were preparing to open their borders to allow the tens of thousands of migrants who have been stuck in Greece for years to travel on to Europe have led to days of skirmishes between Greek police and migrants near the country’s northern border.

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    According to Reuters and Al Jazeera, anti-riot police used tear gas and flares to try and force hundreds of migrants hoping to cross into North Macedonia to leave the area and return to their camps. Greek authorities even sent buses to bring some of the migrants back to their refugee camps, but the migrants refused to board and demanded to be let through.

    The skirmishes have been going on for days, as thousands of migrants have pitched tents in an area near an official migrant camp and steadfastly refused to leave.

    The first bouts of unrest flared up on Friday. At around midday on Saturday, riot police fired teargas at dozens of people, some of whom were carrying children. Meanwhile, migrants hurled stones and bottles at the police as they tried to break through the cordon. Some lit fires. On Sunday, hundreds of migrants remained in the area, though some had taken the Greek government’s offer to travel back via the buses. Hundreds have been camped out in a field outside the official migrant camp in Diavata, Greece.

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    The migrants insisted they didn’t want to fight with police – they just wanted to make it to Macedonia.

    “We don’t want to fight with the Greek police,” said 36-year old Yaser, a Syrian refugee, sitting on a blanket with his baby son in his arms.

    “We want to go to Europe, we don’t want to stay in Greece,” he told Reuters through an interpreter.

    His 26-year old wife Fatemeh, who was carrying their six-month old baby, said the family was determined to stay at the makeshift camp.

    “We will stay here until the borders open, we don’t have any other choice,” she said, standing close to where the clashes took place.

    Workers with an international service tending to the needs of refugees blamed smugglers for the spreading the false rumors on Facebook:

    Jana Frey, country director for the International Rescue Committee Greece, said the unrest highlighted “the amount of false information being presented to asylum seekers and refugees.”

    “IRC staff have received reports of refugees who are being lured to the border by smugglers, who are feeding them lies about the border to Europe opening up,” she said.

    Tens of thousands of refugees and migrants from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan have been stuck in Greece since the Balkan countries closed their borders in 2016.

    Watch footage from the skirmishes below:

  • Brexit: Parliament Is Revolting

    Authored by Rob Slane via TheBlogMire.com,

    Back on 29th June 2016, just after the referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union, I indulged in a little speculation about what would happen next:

    “I don’t usually like to indulge in prophetic utterances, and I’m not sure I would describe this as such an attempt – more an informed hunch – but I believe that the 17,410,742 people who just expressed their opinion in a democratic vote to leave the European Union are about to find themselves involved in what can only be described as the mother of all stitch ups. Brexit just isn’t going to happen!!!”

    However, although I believed that we were going to see the mother of all stitch ups, I was wrong about how this would happen. At the time, I fully expected that ways would be found to avoid ever triggering Article 50, and so I was somewhat surprised when it was. Still, it didn’t alter my view that a Remain Prime Minister in a Remain Parliament was highly unlikely to carry out the mandate given by the majority of voters in that referendum, and nothing I’ve seen or heard since has changed that view.

    But we now come to what could well be the crunch week in the whole charade, with the number of possible outcomes being narrowed down to just a few. These are, I believe, the main possibilities:

    1. Another extension, either until 30th June, or a “flextension”, as has been mooted in the last few days

    2. A no deal Brexit

    3. A Parliamentary majority for Revoking Article 50

    Of these possibilities, unfortunately I believe that the third is now by far the most likely, even though it was one of the options rejected by MPs in the series of indicative votes held in Parliament, and even though it still wouldn’t command a majority were a vote held on it early in the week. So I guess this needs some explaining.

    What I expect to happen next week is as follows. Talks between the leaderships of the two main parties will break down, with both sides blaming one another. This will mean that the default position will remain a no deal Brexit (or to put it more accurately, a World Trade Organisation Brexit) on 12th April.

    On 10th April, the EU Council will once again meet to discuss Brexit, and in particular Theresa May’s request to the EU Council President, Donald Tusk, for an extension until 30th June. It should be noted that she made the exact same request in previous letter to Mr Tusk, and it should be further noted that that request was turned down, with two alternative dates proposed — 12th April and 22nd May –, which were tied to her failure or success in getting the Withdrawal Agreement through Parliament. And so it seems that having seen that deal rejected by MPs on three occasions, she is now going for a second shot at having her extension date request rejected by the EU, and who knows, perhaps she’s hoping to make that three as well! I am not convinced that she is in complete possession of an entire collection of marbles, as it were.

    I believe that the EU Council is extremely likely to turn her request down. But unlike the previous occasion, I also think it extremely unlikely that they will grant her any extension at all. And the reason for this is simply this: Emmanuel Macron.

    M. Macron is an extreme EU integrationist. He really does want to see a United States of Europe, replete with its own army and a number of new institutions including:

    • A European agency for “the protection of democracies”

    • A revamping of the EU’s passport-free Schengen zone

    • A common border police

    • A European asylum office

    • A European council of internal security.

    • A defence and security treaty to increase defence spending and put in place an operational mutual defence clause

    • A European Security Council

    And despite the fact that the German leadership is nowhere near as keen on these things, this does not seem to dampen Macron’s enthusiasm and he wants to go full speed ahead on this now. However, he is already extremely frustrated that Brexit has been taking up so much of everyone’s time. It was Macron who was the sticking point in the granting of the previous deadlines, and it is he who supposedly kicked back against Mrs May’s request for an extension until 30th June. In the end, as I understand it, Macron grudgingly accepted an extension, but insisted on two shorter dates, tied to the success or failure of Mrs May to get her Withdrawal Agreement through.

    I simply don’t think that Macron is going to give way again. And so I expect that he, possibly along with a number of other countries, will reject Mrs May’s request. And so the EU Council will, I believe, conclude their meeting by saying that because the British Government has failed to get the Withdrawal Agreement through Parliament, and because the British Prime Minister has failed to set out a fresh and credible reason as to why an extension should be granted, they will not be offering one.

    Should this occur, late on Wednesday 10th April, regardless of what has happened in the passage of the Cooper-Letwin Bill, Britain will be just 48 hours from exiting the European Union with a no deal Brexit.

    MPs will then be faced with a very stark choice with just hours to go. The Withdrawal Agreement will have passed away. The possibility of an extension will be dead. The choice will be startlingly simple: Accept No Deal or Vote to Revoke. And despite the fact that most MPs voted against Revoke in the indicative vote, and despite the fact that they fear the reaction of their constituents should they vote for this, faced with this choice with literally hours to go, I believe them quite capable of, and indeed highly likely to vote to Revoke Article 50. And indeed they are equally capable of justifying it by claiming that they couldn’t in all conscience see the country plunged into chaos (which could well prove to be a case of irony on steroids).

    And thus the Mother of all Stitch ups, the Revolt of Parliament against the people will be complete.

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    No doubt events shall prove me wrong. However, as the clock ticks down, and as this convoluted process boils down to an increasingly narrow range of possibilities, unfortunately it seems to me that a last minute Revoking of Article 50, along with all that that would entail, is now looking increasingly likely.

  • Secret Document Reveals Plans For Civil War In Lebanon, Israeli False Flags, & Invasion

    Authored by Randi Nord via GeopoliticsAlert.com,

    During his visit with US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, Lebanese President Michael Aoun reportedly received a US-Israeli document detailing plans for creating a civil war in Lebanon with covert false flag operations and possible Israeli invasion.

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    Although the source of the document is Israeli and created in partnership with Washington, no one knows who presented it to Aoun. The Lebanese TV station, Al-Jadeed, initially reported the document on Lebanese TV and a video on its website. Geopolitics Alert translated the report for this article.

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    Israel and the United States Foment Civil War in Lebanon

    The document details American plans to splinter the Lebanese Internal Security Forces, a domestic institution separate from the Lebanese Army. The plans involve Washington investing 200 million dollars into the Internal Security Forces (ISF) under the guise of keeping the peace but with the covert goal of creating sectarian conflict against Hezbollah with 2.5 million specifically dedicated to this purpose.

    The document states the ultimate goal is to destabilize the country by creating a civil war in Lebanon which will “help Israel on the international scene.” The United States and Israel plan to accomplish this by supporting “democratic forces,” sounding remarkably similar to the same strategy used in Syria, Libya, Venezuela, and elsewhere.

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    According to the document, although “full load of our firepower will be unleashed,” they somehow do not anticipate any casualties.

    They do, however, expect the civil war to “trigger requests” for intervention from the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) which Israel must only agree to after extreme reluctance.

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    The document says Israel will also play an important role by creating “covert false flag operations” as the conflict progresses. Perhaps these operations would include chemical attacks similar to the chemical attacks on civilians in Syria or even direct attacks on Lebanese or Israeli civilians to blame on Hezbollah and justify international intervention.

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    The document admits that the United States and Israel will need an unprecedented amount of credibility to pull this off and also admits that the Lebanese Army may be an obstacle, likely due to the Army’s diverse makeup. As a legitimate political party with members throughout all aspects of Lebanese society, Hezbollah already has members and allies throughout the ISF as well as the Army.

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    Click images to enlarge. Screenshots from Al-Jadeed. Article continues below…

    Mike Pompeo Holds Meeting with Lebanese Officials

    During his meeting with Lebanese President, Michael Aoun, US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo presented an ultimatum: contain Hezbollah or expect unprecedented consequences.

    According to Foreign Policy, Pompeo told Aoun that if he fails to complete the impossible task of removing Hezbollah from government institutions and cracking down on its military activities, Lebanon should expect an end to US aid and even potential sanctions.

    “It will take courage for the nation of Lebanon to stand up to Hezbollah’s criminality, terror, and threats,” Pompeo said.

    At a dinner, Pompeo reportedly warned Lebanese officials that they themselves were potential targets for sanctions such as members of the Free Patriotic Movement, President Aoun’s party with the majority of its support coming from Lebanese Christians.

    Potential sanctions will likely first target the Lebanese Health Ministry which is currently managed by an elected member of Hezbollah’s political party. Civilians across Lebanon rely on a functioning Health Ministry for subsidized medications and general medical care so these sanctions would create immense suffering for the entire Lebanese population.

    The civil war plan detailed in the document is not likely to succeed according to US plans. The Lebanese Security forces are not a homogeneous group. Members of Hezbollah and their Christian allies hold many positions not only in the ISF but throughout the Lebanese Army and several branches of government. The Lebanese constitution and political system require all sects have adequate representation in government. As such, a potential manufactured civil war would likely focus on re-writing the Lebanese constitution as a top priority.

    It is unclear if Pompeo’s staff presented Aoun with this document as a threat prior to their meeting. It is clear, however, that the US and Israel are plotting behind closed doors to create sectarian conflict in Lebanese society and its democratic political process, similar to actions in Syria, Lybia, Yemen, Venezuela, Iran, and so on.

  • Russiagate: A Moral Reckoning Is Due

    Authored by Renee Parsons via Off-Guardian.org,

    With Russiagate, the Democrats created some powerful karma to answer for; especially for the likes of Rep. Adam Schiff and Rep. Eric Swalwell, (D-Calif.), both of whom persist in the mindless search for the Holy Grail.

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    After cheating Bernie out of the nomination in 2016, the Dems had not yet learned their karmic lesson when they lost the Presidential election. The Mueller Report is but the latest of that karmic reckoning.

    There is no pride in being one of those who “got it right” that there was no evidence, not a scintilla of material fact to prove collusion between the Trump campaign and the dastardly Russians. As the country has been torn asunder by a two year politically tainted investigation begun with no evidentiary standard and no probable cause, there is little satisfaction to be gained.

    That being said, I am royally pissed off at all the players who supported this unprecedented farce as an attack on the country’s rule of law. How could the autocratic digital giants, the intel community (which missed 911), the already discredited MSM and the pathetically trivial Democratic party think they could get away with lie after lie? Because they counted on the Democratic rank n file and other hypnotized Americans to believe anything they are told – repeat a lie often enough and the masses will own it.

    The determination of no new indictments and no collusion is little cause for celebration in that the country should not have had to endure the extended anguish of an insistent, irrational, near-hysterical drumbeat generated by the MSM and Democrats as co-conspirators. It is fair to say that all participants were consciously aware that they were repeatedly lying to the American public just as it is highly probable that Special Counsel Robert Mueller who was appointed in May, 2017 knew well before the 2018 mid-term elections that allegations of collusion and obstruction were unsubstantiated.

    Now that the Report into the Investigation on Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election has been delivered, all can rest assured that the American system of government works, that the checks and balances did their job and that American democracy survived another close call.

    As a result of the hyperventilating hubris, the word ‘collusion’ has now become an empowered part of the lexicon. There is now an implicit warning for any candidate, or indeed any citizen, to be wary with whom they speak, be wary of their associations, to not fraternize with just anyone and to be ultra sensitized to meeting with any potential adversary, even in the legitimate interests of diplomacy.

    In addition, without the political will to do so, there will be little initiative for PTB (powers that be) to undo the new generation of intense political repression and censorship initiated by Russiagate that can be traced directly to HRC’s loss in 2016.

    Two weeks after that election, the Washington Post, long believed to be a CIA asset, combined allegations that Russia exploited American online platforms “critical of the US government” with the now discredited creation of ‘fake news’ that 200 American websites were “peddlers of Russian propaganda.”

    As Attorney General William Barr quotes from the Mueller Report:

    The Special Counsel found that Russian government actors had successfully hacked into computers and obtained emails from persons affiliated with the Clinton campaign and Democratic Party organizations and publicly dessiminated those materials throughout various intermediaries including Wikileaks.”

    This statement is in direct contradiction with Bill Binney, former NSA Technical Director for Analysis and co-founder of NSA’s Signal Intel Center who conducted independent forensic research. Binney concluded that the data was ‘leaked by a person with physical access to the DNC computer” and that the “DNC data was downloaded to a storage device and transported to Wikileaks, like on a thumb drive or cd rom.”

    While neither Mueller, any Congressional committee nor the FBI ever contacted Binney regarding his findings, the DNC refused to turn over their computer to the FBI for forensic testing. After the full Mueller report is publicly available, Binney’s feedback promises to be enlightening.

    As some Democrats and MSM continue to spin the illusion of a pending obstruction of justice charge, Barr’s letter relying on the Mueller Report is clear – the “Report identifies no actions that constitute obstructive conduct” and that ‘evidence does not establish that the President was involved in an underlying crime,” therefore, there is no proof ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ that obstruction occurred. Legalese 101 says that obstruction cannot be alleged if no crime was committed but when did proof or evidence ever make a difference to the co-conspirators. Review of the Mueller Report itself will provide further details.

    It was the unverified Steele dossier that provided the FBI with the basis for its submission to the FISA Court that Russian collusion had occurred and in order to obtain the necessary warrants (four of them) to spy on the Trump campaign; specifically US Naval Academy graduate, the hapless Carter Page. Prior to its FISA Court submission, the FBI knew that the Dossier was a bogus document. We know that the HRC campaign and the DNC funded Fusion GPS firm to get the dirt on Trump. Fusion then brought in Christopher Steele who put together a salacious piece of garbage that the FBI took and ran with.

    The dossier was then circulated by Obama CIA Director John Brennan and publicly released by BuzzFeed and CNN in January, 2017. Former Obama Director of National Intelligence James Clapper provided ‘inconsistent information’ to the House Intelligence Committee that he “flatly denied” any media discussions regarding the dossier and then “subsequently acknowledged discussing the dossier with CNN’s Jake Tapper” and perhaps others.

    CNN (Tapper, Carl Bernstein, Evan Perez and Jim Sciutto) went on to win White House Correspondents Association’s 2018 Merriman Smith Award for outstanding reporting with the Judges noting that the “depth of reporting demonstrated in these remarkable and important pieces, and the constant updates as new information continued to be uncovered showed breaking news reporting at its best.” The WHCA gathers annually to “celebrate the First Amendment and the crucial role of journalism in informing and protecting the public.”BuzzFeed, which broke the original story, did not share in the $2500 award.

    In reality, the award apparently struck other WHCA members as unusual, considering the entire story took little actual reporting and instead relied on leaks from Brennan and Clapper.

    There should be enough shame to go around but there appears to be no evidence of a conscience or the need to pay a karmic debt among any of the perpetrators.

    In the aftermath of Mueller, Judicial Watch has filed an FOIA suit to obtain the records of communication between Brennen, Clapper and CNN including all documents related to the dossier.

    In a September, 2016 text message from FBI attorney Lisa Page to Peter Strock, she relates the preparation of talking points to brief FBI Director Jim Comey on the efforts to bring down Trump. In that same message, Page adds that “POTUS wants to know everything we are doing.”

    The question arises whether the usual mealy-mouth Republican establishment and a previously compromised FISA Court will step up and better protect the Constitution than they have in the past?

  • Visualizing The Most Hyped Technology Of Every Year From 2000-2018

    Nothing captures our collective imagination quite like emerging technology.

    In a short amount of time, technological innovations such as wireless internet and social networking have become a ubiquitous part of our everyday lives, quietly transforming the way we live, work, and communicate. Other promising technologies have their moment in the sun, only to fade into obscurity.

    As Visual Capitalist’s Nick Routley notes, Gartner’s Hype Cycle charts the roller coaster ride of emerging tech, from the first stirrings of public awareness to the point of wider adoption and economic viability. Today’s graphic is a retrospective look at which trends scaled the summit of the Hype Cycle each year since 2000.

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    Reaching the Peak

    As the media searches for the next big thing, certain technologies tend to dominate the headlines. Meanwhile, venture capital flows into the companies racing to bring the tech to market, valuations swell, marketing departments generate excitement, and the expectations of the general public begin to grow as well.

    One example of this phenomenon at work is the adoption of microblogging. Today, we don’t think twice about posting a tweet or updating our status on Facebook, but a decade ago, the act of posting a short public message was major shift in the way people used technology to communicate with one another. The intense buzz that sent microblogging towards the top of the Hype Cycle is corroborated by Google Search data.

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    Living Up to the Hype

    A few technologies transcend the hype to transform entire industries. Here are some examples that lived up to their time in the spotlight.

    Cloud Computing
    Right from the beginning, the analogy of data breaking the shackles of folders and clunky external drives – instead zipping efficiently into the invisible cloud – generated a lot of excitement. It felt like the future of computing, and enterprises and individuals eagerly adopted the technology.

    Today, Microsoft and Amazon’s cloud computing divisions each make $6-7 billion in revenue per quarter, and that number is still growing at a brisk pace.

    NFC Payments
    Near Field Communication – the technology that enables contactless payments – is transforming the way people pay for purchases around the world.

    The global contactless payments market is expected to reach $138.4 billion by 2023. Here’s a look at where NFC payments are making the greatest in-roads:

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    The Ones That Underwhelmed

    During the Christmas season of 2009, Kindle became the most gifted item in Amazon’s history. This watershed moment looked like the end of physical books as the public embraced the e-reader as the new way of consuming text.

    Fast-forward to today, and only 19% of adults in the U.S. own an e-reader.

    Of course, not every technology that grabs the headlines is going to become the next iPhone. Here are some others that didn’t immediately meet expectations after topping the Hype Cycle.

    m-Commerce
    Some concepts fail primarily because they’re ahead of their time. Such is the case with mobile commerce.

    By 2001, more than half of Americans owned mobile phones, and this represented a huge opportunity. Unfortunately, early m-commerce was restricted by the limitations of mobile phones of that time period. It wasn’t until the introduction of smartphones that the concept really took off. Today, nearly half of all online transactions are made via mobile devices.

    3D Printing
    Few technologies reach the fever pitch that 3D printing did in 2012. From the $1.4 billion merger of the largest players in the sector to the reports of firearm blueprints circulating the web, you could forgive people for believing that the 3D printer was destined to become the next microwave. In the end, interest in 3D printing leveled off.

    While it is getting used for prototyping in many different industries, it remains to be seen whether the technology will ever achieve the wide consumer-level adoption that was promised.

    What’s Next?

    When 2019’s Hype Cycle is released later this year, it remains to be seen which technology will rise to the top. Based on the trajectory from last year, search volume, and current news reports, 5G is a strong competitor.

  • Prepare For The Political Pendulum's Payback…

    Authored by Tim Knight via SlopeOfHope.com,

    Allow me to start off what is intended as an economic musing by referring to a favorite comic of mine, Patton Oswalt. He has a fairly new bit in which he explains the Trump phenomenon as a totally understandable response to the Obama presidency.

    The political pendulum in America, deep in the throes of the financial crisis, had swung so far that the United States elected its first black President, and a rather progressive one.

    After eight years of that, the “mirrored” response was to elect a political novice known principally as the billionaire star of a reality television show.

    Oswalt conjectures, probably quite accurately, that the next President will probably be an equally hard swing to the left (perhaps the first gay President) and, following his administration, a Klansman with the ass cut out of his jeans. America is a very centrist country, and the ideological moving average of our Presidents has to adhere to some kind of median, even if that median is comprised of wild swings to the left and right.

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    This oscillation applies to economic thought as well. Nothing is ever perfect, and given whatever circumstances are going in a given era, there will eventually be a critical mass of people who decides that something else must be better, so they give that a try instead. And the something else isn’t perfect either, so eventually yet another thing is tried, probably quite different, and probably fairly close to whatever system was in place two attempts ago. Back and forth, left and right, to and fro it goes.

    The economic pendulum in the United States has likewise swung fairly regular. I’ll broadly characterize these movements as to the “left” (push for economic equality, higher taxes, anti-business, anti-rich) and “right” (low taxes, pro-business, pro-rich). For a while it was almost like clockwork:

    • RIGHT – 1900s – Gilded Age;

    • LEFT – 1910s – Trustbusters, income tax begins, Federal Reserve;

    • RIGHT – 20s – Roaring 20s, Hoover tax cuts;

    • LEFT – 30s – Pecora Commission, New Deal, growth of unions;

    • RIGHT – 40s/50s – American prosperity, Eisenhower, soaring stocks;

    • LEFT – 60s/70s – heavy regulation, powerful unions, Great Society;

    • RIGHT – 80s/90s – Bull market; Reagan revolution; deficit prosperity;

    • LEFT – 2000s – Sarbanes-Oxley, Obama election, Dodd-Frank;

    • RIGHT – 2010s – Quantitative easing, 0% interest, Trump tax cuts

    I would argue, however, that the swing to the left in the 2000s was extremely muted. Economic equality peaked around 1971, and we’ve been swinging to the right pretty hard since then, almost half a century now. The chasm between rich and poor has been becoming wider by the year. If it weren’t for government employees, unions would be almost non-existent. Taxes are 15% for the rich. And the Federal Reserve appears to be permanently “accommodative”. In short, the rich have never had it better than right now, and this divide has accompanied political polarization hand-in-hand.

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    In a wiser world, the financial crisis of 2008 would have been a huge wake-up call, and there would have been a very hard swing to the left. But there’s no point in arguing hypotheticals, because the modest response (in the form of Dodd-Frank, now largely neutered to the point of non-existence) hardly constituted a pendulum swing to the other side. It was more of a brief bobble, principally because there wasn’t enough political will to do more. The public has become so utterly snowflake-ized that there’s no way they could dare suffer, so trillions and trillions of dollars of QE were rained down upon them.

    The “spoiling” of the public has basically cheated them out of any wisdom that might have been garnered by the financial crisis, but instead, they have become so accustomed to government aide that both rich and poor really, really like it and want it bigger and better than ever. This had led to many insanities, the pinnacle of which are the malformed twins of Universal Basic Income and Modern Monetary Theory.

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    These will both, in the end, be decried as abject lunacy, but it’ll be a while.

    There has been virtually no pushback against such madness thanks to three simple words that almost everyone has embraced: Deficits Don’t Matter. Why should they? After all, what harm are they causing? Inflation? What inflation? The trillions of new money have hardly caused a blip. So keep those presses rolling!

    Well, we all know there has been inflation – – massive amounts of it – – but it’s the kind of inflation that the rich love. Specifically, asset inflation.

    The general public doesn’t want to see bread and meat go up 500% in price. But those who own assets – – especially the small percentage of the public that owns a lot of assets – – has no problem at all with this kind of inflation. The higher, the better!

    The old style of thinking was along these lines:

    • If the government goes deeper into debt and creates a lot of new money…

    • …then people will have a lot more money to spend…

    • …and prices of everything will go up…

    • …so eventually it’ll even out, so what was the point of all that new debt? Because the inflation will rob people of purchasing power.

    But in this new gilded age:

    • The government goes deeper into debt and creates a lot of new money…

    • …the highest echelon of businesses and private citizens are the beneficiaries of that new money, which they spend on assets…

    • …the assets go up in price, which encourages them to buy even more assets at even higher prices (with triple-digit P/E ratios)…

    • …so a virtuous cycle is created, and the stuff soaring in price are things like high-end real estate, objects of fine art, and other luxuries

    The end result being a larger and larger gulf between the rich and the poor. But as long as the poor aren’t starving and rioting in the streets, what difference does it make, right? Bread and circuses, baby.

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    For the purposes of this thought experiment, let’s make one assumption. Let’s dust off some old sayings that seem to have been true for human history: “there’s no such thing as a free lunch”; “you can’t print your way to prosperity“; and anything else appropriate.

    Let’s say, just to be crazy, that human wisdom still holds true today. Put more directly, let’s suppose the shit actually hits the fan one day, and all this QE and 0% interest stop working. In fact, that they start causing harm. The economic cycle grabs hold again. Rates go up. Jobs go away. The lower 95% of the public starts to get pissed off.

    I would suggest that, sooner or later, a revenge mentality is going to take place. I would further speculate that placations about more QE aren’t going to cut it anymore, because the public (at long, long last) will see through such tricks.

    But the fact is that the debt is there (which, by then, will be – – $30 trillion? $50 trillion? Depends on when this all happens) and it needs to be serviced. And where’s the money going to come home? The rich, perhaps? And why would the government pursue the rich in order to get funds to service the debt? To quote Willie Sutton: “Because that’s where the money is.“

    And the public will back them up. The swing to the left, both politically and economically, will be far more severe than normal, because there is a certain “pendulum payback” waiting in the wings. White collar prisoners. Confiscatory tax rates. Luxury and asset taxes. And a push toward socialism that few of us can imagine.

    And I think that’s a shame. Because such a hard reversal will, in the end, hobble America. But my supposition is that there’s a certain price to be paid for indulging America’s highest classes for a few decades, and that price is going to be borne by everyone.

    It won’t have been worth it. At least not for most of us.

  • UK To Fine Facebook, Google For Hosting Terrorist Content

    The cat and mouse game between the world’s largest media company and global governments continues.

    Just days after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg called for more government regulation in an attempt to mollify the company’s growing critics, while seeking to squash smaller competitors as well as give governments a legitimate reason to enforce censorship and chip away at freedom of speech in order to comply with Facebook’s mysterious “community standards”, the company and its tech peers are facing a new UK law that will impose “substantial” fines, or even ban companies if they don’t act swiftly enough to remove content that encourages terrorism and child sexual exploitation and abuse.

    Additionally, hinting that Facebook is now openly seen as a media empire instead of merely a distributor of content, the companies’ directors could also be held personally liable if illegal content is not taken down within a short and pre-determined time-frame, the UK’s Home Office said, which is also seeking to tackle the spread of fake news and interference in elections.

    In short: wholesale government censorship under the guise of cracking down on the private sector.

    The exact level of fines will be examined during a 12 week consultation following the legislation’s launch on Monday, Bloomberg reported.

    The crackdown on UK online content takes place amid the fallout from the case of 14-year-old Molly Russell, whose father said the teenager killed herself in 2017 after viewing self-harm and suicide content online. The terrorist attack in New Zealand last month in which 50  Muslims were killed while footage was live-streamed online also prompted UK legislators to demand a new law over a voluntary code.

    “Put simply, the tech companies have not done enough to protect their users and stop this shocking content from appearing in the first place,” Home Secretary Sajid Javid said in a statement released by his office. “Our new proposals will protect U.K. citizens and ensure tech firms will no longer be able to ignore their responsibilities.”

    The crackdown on internet content will spread far beyond just Facebook: search engines, online messaging services and file hosting sites will all fall under the remit of a new regulator. Annual reports on what companies have done to remove and block harmful content will be required and streaming sites aimed at children, such as YouTube Kids, will be required to block harmful content such as violent imagery or porn.

    The latest, and certainly not last, crackdown comes one week after Zuckerberg called for “a more active role for governments and regulators.” And, given the opportunity control the narrative and the dissemination of news at its source, governments and regulators are delighted to take advantage of this symbiotic offer.

  • The Management Of Savagery: Pro-War Lobbyists Push To Ban Book Exposing Regime Change Wars

    Authored by Alexander Rubinstein via MintPress News

    The Syrian American Council and a collection of pro-war lobbyists have led an intimidation campaign aimed at bullying a major Washington-based bookstore, Politics and Prose, into canceling award-winning journalist and author Max Blumenthal’s launch event for his new book The Management of Savagery.

    And it appears to have worked. Politics and Prose announced that it would “postpone” the event, citing “concerns” over the event’s “format, substance, … [and] security” in a tweet. In a testament to the ferocity of the harassment campaign against the small chain, the company has pinned the statement to the top of its Twitter page so that anyone visiting it sees immediately that they caved.

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    Politics and Prose is the go-to space for D.C. book events. If you are on a book tour and coming to Washington, chances are that Politics and Prose will be hosting your event.

    On Monday, I called the Politics and Prose location that was to host the event for Blumenthal. I was directed to the events department, as nobody in the store itself had authority on such matters. After being put on hold for a few minutes, I was told by an employee, “I spoke to all of my co… my manager and also our events person and we have no plans for canceling that event. It is going to go on as scheduled.”

    What was left out was that the store had already begun making onerous demands of Blumenthal, including requiring him to have an “interlocutor” on stage, specifically, one who would appease the Syrian American Council. Blumenthal secured Andrew Cockburn, one of the premiere journalists covering U.S. and Middle East politics and a longtime correspondent for Harper’s Magazine. But Blumenthal told MintPress that Cockburn was denied; Politics and Prose management insisted that Cockburn was “too sympathetic” to his own views.

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    As the pressure campaign increased, so too did the company’s suspicions of Blumenthal. One would think that they would be familiar with Blumenthal already, as he has appeared for three previous book events there.

    Critics say that Blumenthal paints a rescue organization as a terrorist group and has mocked victims of war crimes. What they leave out is that Blumenthal’s reporting exposed that rescue organization — the infamous White Helmets — as a Western government-funded public-relations project that has, in fact, been operating alongside extremist groups like Jabhat al-Nusra and Al Qaeda. And he has not mocked victims of war crimes, but instead made light of the lack of evidence of those crimes beyond manipulative social-media videos that ranged from the slickly produced to outright sloppy.

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    In a phone conversation with Blumenthal just hours before the April 3 event, Politics and Prose co-owner Bradley Graham informed him that his reporting from Venezuela, where he recently challenged corporate media deceptions from Caracas, had also become a problem. Graham said:

    A number of people … have expressed concern on various aspects of the event; first and foremost that you’re being given a platform and in some cases raising not just objections about your positions on Syria, but on Venezuela, on other issues.”

    “I don’t know what is behind all this, and this is the point I’m trying to get to,” Graham told Blumenthal, according to the journalist. “We haven’t had the time to sort through what all these claims are and whether there’s any relevance to them or not.”

    Politics and Prose co-owner Lisa Muscatine chimed in: “We just felt so up-against-the-wall. They’re all over our social media… We’ve been fucking inundated.”

    The Syrian American Council celebrated the success of their pressure campaign, thanking Politics and Prose for “listening” to the “Syrian American community,” whose views, in their implicit opinion, are monolithic. They went on to accuse Blumenthal of denying the “lived experiences” of Syrian Americans, who in reality are not so homogenous.

    Thus they were able to silence their most effective critique. Blumenthal’s latest book, The Management of Savagery, reveals the cynical aspirations of this lobby, from regime change to genocide, if its bedfellows are any indication of its aims.

    Deceptions and double standards

    Blumenthal told MintPress News that the criticism of his book willfully misrepresented its content:

    None of these people who tried to have me canceled have read this book, but it’s understandable that they would want it banned, because it is actually about them. But if they had opened the book they would see that it’s actually a critique of right-wing politics and Islamophobia through the framework of American empire, showing how these proxy wars and regime change wars that the West has waged from Afghanistan to Iraq to Libya to Syria have been like steroids for the ultra-right, whipping up a xenophobic frenzy thanks to a series of refugee crises that our national security state fomented.

    In my book, I go back to the era well before the so-called “war on terror” to show how this campaign of destabilization fueled the rise of Islamophobia, which Donald Trump effectively exploited to become president. So anyone trying to say this book is somehow Islamophobic – I’ve seen that allegation carelessly thrown around – clearly hasn’t read it. I think this book is one of the most damning surveys of the rise of the Islamophobia industry and the national security state’s role fueling it – and funding it in many cases. Clearly these regime change lobbyists want to burn my book because it exposes their own cynical tactics, but in doing so they’re seeking to deprive people of the ability to to learn about the horrible political crisis we’re in in the West from a new and unique angle.”

    Blumenthal has been covering what he calls the “anti-Islam industry” for years. In fact, it is part of what brought the author to prominence. His investigation into the rise of Islamophobia in which Blumenthal named and shamed leading anti-Muslim agitators and funders predated mainstream studies of the trend and was even blamed in an angry screed by the far-right FrontPageMag for providing “the idea behind” the Center for American Progress report on anti-Muslim politics, “Fear Inc.” Blumenthal told MintPress that he founded the Grayzone Project at AlterNet in 2015 in part to provide critical coverage of the dangerous anti-Muslim politics that Trump was exploiting at the time.

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    During his exchanges with the owners of Politics and Prose, Blumenthal said he emphasized the double standards they were applying to him.

    “I pointed out that last week they hosted Janet Napolitano, who was essentially the deportation tsar under Obama, destroying thousands of immigrant families through the deportation machine she oversaw. And I said that nobody asked her to have somebody on stage to challenge her when she, unlike me, was actually personally involved in human rights abuses. Politics and Prose has also hosted David Frum, the neocon who appears in the pages of my book crafting the bogus case for the war in Iraq in which a million people were killed. Nobody said that he had to have someone grilling him for his role in one of the worst catastrophes in modern history. The owners really didn’t have a response to my comments.”

    * * *

    Gulf-backed experts, foreign operatives and pro-war lobbyists put the pressure on

    Blumenthal said that the owners of Politics and Prose insisted they’d spoken to “Middle East experts” about his book and that they expressed reservations about hosting him. But when pressed for the names of those experts, he received one: Amy Hawthorne, a former resident fellow at the Saudi-funded Rafik Hariri Center at the Atlantic Council – a think tank backed by the arms industry and various Gulf monarchies that has been at the center of the campaign for regime change in Syria.

    Before her time at the Atlantic Council, Hawthorne worked in the US State Department, where she “helped to shape and coordinate US support for Egypt’s transition and advised on the US response to the Arab Spring,” according to her bio.

    Another one of the self-styled Syria experts who pushed to have Blumenthal’s Politics and Prose event canceled was Charles Lister. Like so many of the lobbyists demanding the censorship of Blumenthal’s book, Lister is a fellow at a Gulf-funded think tank featured in the “Management of Savagery” for research that falsely claimed that 70,000 so-called “moderate rebels” were battling the Syrian government. When Blumenthal personally confronted Lister about his discredited claims during a 2017 Atlantic Council meeting, Lister flew into contortions and struggled to push back.

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    Mouaz Moustafa, the director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, also joined the campaign to block Blumenthal’s book event. In fact, Blumenthal’s book documents how Moustafa served as the Washington point man for the Syrian regime change operation, escorting John McCain to the Syrian border in 2013, where the late senator posed for photos with extremist insurgents involved in the kidnapping of Shia pilgrims.

    As Ben Norton reported at The Grayzone, Moustafa has continued to lobby the Trump administration on Syria. He even boasted that he was “hanging out” with CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer and MSNBC’s Chris Matthews at about the same time as he was clamoring online for the cancellation of Blumenthal’s book event.

    “It is totally understandable that a character like Moustafa would want my book banned,” Blumenthal said. “I excavated his shocking record of pro-war lobbying and expose all the deceptions that were deployed in the process.”

    The Syrian American Council, the pro-war lobbying outfit that led the charge against Blumenthal’s book, has also been involved with some unsavory figures during its push for regime change in Syria. As Norton reported, the Council hosted at its 2015 gala a Syrian opposition activist named Maher Sharafeddine who has openly called for the genocide of religious minorities in Syria.

    “I am warning the Alawites to get out of the country or they will all be slaughtered. There can be no reconciliation with the Alawites,” Sharafeddine said during an infamous 2015 appearance on Al Jazeera Arabic. “The only way for us to take [power] from them is over their dead bodies.”

    “It is the right of the [Sunnis] to demand the slaughter of the Alawites,” the host of that Al Jazeera show, Faisal al-Qassem said, “Of course, of course,” Sharafeddine replied.

    Perhaps the most remarkable figure to weigh in against Blumenthal’s book and demand the cancellation of his event was James Le Mesurier. A former British military intelligence officer and UAE-backed mercenary, Le Mesurier oversaw the foundation of the White Helmets in Turkey and placed himself at the center of destabilization campaign against Syria’s government. Through the White Helmets, who were at the scene seemingly any time a major chemical attack was alleged, Le Mesurier played a central role in driving the US to bomb Syria over so-called “red line” violations.

    “The whole history of Le Mesurier and the White Helmets in trying to push the US to decapitate the government of another previously stable Middle Eastern state is told in ‘The Management of Savagery,’” Blumenthal said. “Once again, you have a figure trying to cover up their dirty deeds by censoring a journalist who dared to expose them.”

    From my point of view, and I told this to Politics and Prose,” Blumenthal continued, “they have surrendered to a bullying campaign run by a lobbying apparatus that’s tried to silence me and shut down my factual journalism, which has helped expose what I consider to be one of the biggest scandals in recent memory, which is the multi-billion dollar campaign to arm and equip extremist insurgents to rip Syria to shreds. But I think the public wants to know more about this titanic scandal, and it wants to know what’s on the pages of my book, and there’s nothing these war lobbyists can do about that. The mask is off.”

    Blumenthal’s book is available through his publisher at Verso and many other locations. The launch event for ‘The Management of Savagery’ will be held at the Justice Center at 617 Florida Avenue NW, Washington, D.C. on Wednesday the 10th at 7:00 p.m. Eastern Time.

  • David Rosenberg: Fed Will Embrace 'Helicopter Money' In The Next Few Years

    Jerome Powell has denounced MMT has “just wrong”, but many Wall Street luminaries have surprisingly communicated an openness to the proposal. Most recently Ray Dalio proposed a marriage of monetary and fiscal policy that sounded suspiciously similar to MMT. Bill Gross, once a vocal critic of the Federal Reserve’s stimulus program, told Bloomberg shortly after he retired from managing outside money that higher taxes and the advent of MMT might be ‘necessary evils’  to combat the widening economic gap between the rich and the poor.

    MMT has been perhaps the most widely discussed topic in the realm of economics since Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proposed it as a possible mechanism for financing her ‘revolutionary’ Green New Deal. But this past week, President Trump’s exhortation that the Federal Reserve usher in QE4 by cutting interest rates stoked a frenzy of speculation that the world’s most powerful central bank might be closer to outright debt monetization – aka ‘helicopter money’ – than mainstream economists had realized. Of course, debt monetization is a central plank of the MMT program.

    But just days before Trump made his now-infamous QE4 comment, Gluskin Sheff chief economist David Rosenberg offered a prediction during an interview with MacroVoice’s Erik Townsend that, in retrospect, seems surprisingly prescient. 

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    David Rosenberg

    During a discussion about how the Fed ‘pause’ impacted Sheff’s monetary policy outlook, Rosenberg, a frequent guest on CNBC, declared that, instead of giving QE another try, the central bank would opt for something even more radical by embracing MMT. And not without good reason. Just because the Fed is ostensibly insulated from political considerations, doesn’t mean it’s not obligated to protect its credibility. And after a decade where its monetary policy did almost nothing to improve the circumstances of working Americans – but instead aggravated the economic inequality that helped bring about the rise of populism, which culminated in President Trump’s stunning electoral triumph – the central bank’s stimulus efforts will inevitably involve a more populist orientation.

    Erik: Let’s talk a little bit more about the Fed’s ability to fight back against the next downturn. And particularly with respect to MMT. Because I agree with you, the Fed is going to take the funds rate to zero. That’s kind of their first play. What I kind of see on the horizon is I think that if they try to propose another round of QE that looks like the last several, I think the political left is going to say “no way.”

    There’s going to be a huge revolt and people are going to say, look, if you’re going to create money out of thin air, it needs to be helicopter money. Give it to the people, not to Wall Street. And it seems to me – I certainly understand their point, I understand why people are frustrated with those bailouts – but that’s a whole different animal. QE that is to fund helicopter money is a completely different equation than the last few cycles.

    […]

    David: No, I think actually you’re 100% on the money with that observation. You know, QE1 addressed a market failure in mortgages that even the most ardent libertarian would have supported back in 2009. The ensuing quantitative easings and incursions by the Bernanke Fed were all aimed at promoting a stronger stock market.

    And, actually, what was incredible was then the day after QE2, which nobody really saw coming, the day after, Ben Bernanke actually had an editorial of his printed in the Washington Post, pretty well telling everybody we were doing this to generate a positive equity vol-effect on spending. And, while we didn’t get a whole lot of spending, we got a lot of equity market wealth. And of course it just provided added distortions. Because, not only do we have record income inequality, but this created a situation of also record wealth inequality. With no evident impacts that it had any significant multiplier impacts on overall economic growth. Although I’m sure the proponents, including Mr. Bernanke himself, would probably suggest otherwise.

    Historically, when the US has entered a recession, the Fed has had to cut interest rates by 500 basis points to help steer the economy back to growth. With that in mind, Rosenstein continues with a few observations about how most people underestimated how aggressive the last round of stimulus truly was.

    The first of that, historically, when you go into a recession – and this is on average, so on a very tight standard deviation – the Fed historically, to fight a recession, cuts the funds rate 500 basis points. Well, they’re peaking out at 2.5. There’s no 500 basis points this time for the Fed to play with. At least the last cycle, the funds rate peaked at 5.25.

    The Fed went to zero. This time around, the starting point is going to be 2.5. Historically, you’ve got to cut the funds rate by 5 percentage points. And what happened in the last cycle – that is going to serve at least as some sort of template – is that when the Fed realized the extent of the deflationary detonation that was happening in the credit markets and in the housing markets, that they had to cut the funds rate by 700 basis points, not 500. And so that’s really what they did with QE was to create a synthetically negative interest rate.

    […]

    Now, when push came to shove and you look at what’s called the shadow Fed funds rate (and you can see this on the St. Louis Fed website), de facto, with the balance sheet effect, the funds rate actually went to minus 5% this cycle. People don’t realize how aggressive the Fed got. They ultimately cut the funds rate, when you include the expansion sheet, by 1,000 basis points – 10 percentage points. They went much further than you could ever have imagined. And so that’s what they did with quantitative easing.

    Bottom line: Whatever the Fed might add to its balance sheet in the next round of stimulus, if history is any guide, it likely won’t have much of an impact. Which is why Rosenstein ‘firmly expects’ the central bank to engage in outright monetization “in the next couple of years.” Even before MMT started gaining all of this political momentum, the Fed and Ben Bernanke had been dropping a trail of breadcrumbs to lead us to the idea that outright monetization wasn’t out of the realm of possibility. Rosenstein points to remarks Bernanke made back in 2003 to the Bank of Japan where he recommended that the central bank try a “monetary financed tax cut” to try and shake the Japanese economy out of its growth malaise.

    If you accept the argument that the Fed has already done “90%” of this “Bernanke Playbook”, then the notion that it might embrace all-out monetization isn’t that far-fetched. And there aren’t many obstacles standing in the way of this collaboration between the Treasury and the Fed: It wouldn’t require changing the tax system or passing any new laws. The Treasury would simply need to issue a 100-year perpetual bond, hand it to the Fed, and collect its $5 trillion coin.

    But the point here is that what happens with debt monetization, or however you want to call it, or helicopter money, is the Treasury puts – call it a perpetual, could be a 5-trillion-dollar coin, a 100-year bond, on the balance sheet of the Fed. And the Fed prints that money and then hands it over to the Treasury to do with it what you would like. And you don’t have to change the tax system. You don’t have to change any laws and have it held up in the House or the Senate. And there’s a whole bunch of things you could do with that money to try and stimulate aggregate demand. And then we’ll create a whole new inflationary experience and then we’ll be worried at some point about inflation and we’ll deal with it then. But this is the last page of the Bernanke playbook. And, if you buy the premise that you’ve already done 90% in the past number of years of what Bernanke was already talking about at this point 17 years ago, I think that’s where we’re going to be heading.

    Of course, there are other alternatives available to the Fed: It could try negative interest rates – though they haven’t done much to stoke inflation and growth in Europe. But one thing is for sure: During the coming downturn, the central bank is going to need to get a lot more ‘creative’.

    Listen to the full interview below:


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