Aug 112019
 
 August 11, 2019  Posted by at 9:01 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,


Pablo Picasso Man with straw hat and ice cream cone 1938

 

JPMorgan: The Fed Will Need To Restart QE Soon
How Jeffrey Epstein Got His Hooks Into Les Wexner (William D. Cohan)
These Are The Dying Days Of A Rancid Old Order (Hutton)
The Very Idea Of A United Kingdom Is Being Torn Apart By Toxic Nationalism (G.)
Cross-Party Schemes Drawn Up To Prevent A Johnson No-Deal Brexit (O.)
No 10 Cancels Staff Leave, Hinting At Likelihood Of Snap Election (G.)
Brexit Enforcer Cummings’ Farm Took €235,000 In EU Handouts (O.)
British Government’s Hong Kong Intervention Riles China (O.)
Trump’s Financial Carelessness Could Cost His Kids $1.3 Billion In Taxes
Squawkzilla (F.)

 

 

The Fed must drink all the poison it brewed.

JPMorgan: The Fed Will Need To Restart QE Soon

In the latest Flows and Liquidity report from JPMorgan’s Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou published late on Friday, the strategist analyzes various components of market liquidity and concludes that “liquidity will likely continue to tighten gradually in the US banking system even after the Fed has stopped its balance sheet shrinkage.” Specifically, the JPM analysis looks at the bank’s model of US excess money supply, which derives a medium-term money demand target based on 1) the transaction motive, which relates money to nominal incomes and 2) the portfolio motive, which relates money to the nominal values of other assets such as bonds and equities, and 3) the precautionary motive, proxied by US policy uncertainty, whereby agents wish to hold more cash during periods of elevated risk perceptions. This model suggests that this broad US excess liquidity evaporated during the course of 2018 and shifted further into negative or contractionary territory this year.

The last time this measure of US excess money supply had shifted into negative territory was during the euro debt crisis years of 2010- 2012, which prompted the Fed to launch QE2 (as well as Operation Twist and QE3) and also eventually resulted in the ECB violating Article 123 of the Maastricht treat, prohibiting monetary financing of states, and led to Draghi launching his own QE. As Panigirtzoglou further explains, the contraction in JPM’s measure of broad liquidity this year has been mostly more driven by a rise in demand and less by a fall in money supply (relative to US GDP). In particular the main drivers have been the rise in uncertainty and the rise in the stock of US financial assets, both of which depress excess money supply via boosting demand.

Read more …

Excellent from Cohan for Vanity Fair. Obviously written before the ‘apparent suicide’. About which there are a million articles, but let’s wait and see if we can get beyond speculation.

How Jeffrey Epstein Got His Hooks Into Les Wexner (William D. Cohan)

Lewis remembered that Wexner didn’t care about the numbers, which is more relevant than ever after Wexner released a letter on August 7 asserting that Jeffrey Epstein had “misappropriated vast sums of money” —at least $46 million—from him, and casting himself as just another of Epstein’s victims. “He didn’t understand the numbers,” Lewis said. “He’s never understood numbers. This is not his strength. This man is a genius at dressing women. This is a guy who feels what they feel. That’s his strength. And I figured that out when I first met him and I don’t know how he got that set up in his brain but in his soul, he has a sense of how people feel when they wear his clothing. And that’s a gift. That’s just what it is. Some guys write music, this guy knows how to dress women. He’s very, very talented.”

[..] Around the same time, Lewis became aware that Jeffrey Epstein had entered Wexner’s life, presumably to manage some of Wexner’s money, as has been widely reported. Lewis couldn’t figure out why Wexner had turned to Epstein to manage his money when Lewis already had an unparalleled track record managing some of Wexner’s money—returning more than 30% a year to his partners for 10 years. (Later, Lewis would find trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission; he pleaded guilty to stock manipulation in 1989, and was barred from the securities industry. President Bill Clinton pardoned Lewis, and a federal court judge later said Mr. Lewis acted for all the right reasons. He was vindicated.)

Lewis says he thinks Epstein was a “con artist” who took advantage of Wexner’s personal weaknesses. “I can’t imagine, frankly, why a man of his intelligence would simply hand the controls over to another guy.” He said Wexner was always a lonely guy. “And this con artist, this fucking idiot, comes into his life,” he continued. “…My feeling is that he had been seduced. And I don’t mean seduced in a physical sense, I mean emotionally seduced out of his loneliness to trust this guy and he figures, he’s so fucking smart he can trust anybody.” Wexner, he said, was “a shy man who got taken” by Epstein.

Wexner was “so bright and so capable,” Lewis continued, “but the talents that he had, those kinds of talents are not financial talents. These are not numbers. He does not look at numbers. He doesn’t want to. What he’s thinking about is the art form of dressing a woman. That’s what he’s good at. That’s what he’s done.” Les Wexner, he said, “would not know a stock from a bond. He does not look at the markets. He does not look at futures or anything like that. That’s not what he does.” Lewis said that Wexner was looking for a friend. “I really believe that,” he said. “And I think that when you see a man who is as bright as he is and he is looking for a friend and he picks the wrong friend, then there’s all hell to pay.”

Read more …

Brits are waxing philosophical. Here’s one saying Woodstock led straight to Reagan/Thatcher and then to white supremacy. Fukcing hippies!

These Are The Dying Days Of A Rancid Old Order (Hutton)

Don’t despair. We may be living through an attempted rightwing revolution, but its foundations are rotten. There may be a counter-revolution, as there is after every revolution, and it will be built on much firmer ground. The charlatans may be in control in both Britain and the US, but their time is limited. Their programmes are self-defeating and destructive and they do not speak to the dynamic and increasingly ascendant forces in both our societies. What has happened in the US after the atrocities in El Paso and Dayton is instructive. It is a tipping point. The National Rifle Association may tell Donald Trump repeatedly that any attempt at gun control will not fly with his political base, but Trump can read the runes.

For the Republicans to become the party in de facto defence of what has suddenly become crystallised as white supremacist terrorism would be electoral suicide. The president has to move, not least because, faced with this reality, even his base is shifting. Too many Americans now fear becoming the victims of random murder. Few can dispute that, astonishingly, while the US has 5% of the world’s population, it has 35%-50% of civilian gun ownership, a trend that simply has to be reversed. Within a decade, I am sure, the debate will move on, as white supremacists continue their killing spree, from hardening background checks to debating the constitutional right to bear arms. This must and will happen and it will highlight the marginalisation of rightwing republicanism. And when the political wind changes in the US, it also changes in Britain.

Trump in the US and Boris Johnson in the UK are the extreme culmination of what Reagan and Thatcher began 40 years ago. It started as a legitimate if contestable desire to reframe the postwar settlement, limit the state, promote business and individual self-reliance. But as the great political scientist Samuel Beer famously argued, it was, paradoxically, supported culturally by the individualism, anti-state instincts and nonconformism of the Woodstock generation. Forty years on, continued rightwing political ascendancy has morphed into today’s menacing rightwing ideologies.

Read more …

“As the Second World War ended, George Orwell made a distinction between patriots who instinctively love their country and the opposite, a political nationalism that he defined as “power hunger tempered by self-deception..“

The Very Idea Of A United Kingdom Is Being Torn Apart By Toxic Nationalism (G.)

Boris Johnson’s government is hell-bent on conjuring up the absurd and mendacious image of the patriotic British valiantly defying an intransigent Europe determined to turn us into a vassal state. His soundbites, pledging token sums for the NHS and 20,000 more police on the street at some future date, cannot disguise a government driven not by the national interest but by a destructive, populist, nationalist ideology. And with Scottish nationalists pushing a more extreme form of separation and Northern Ireland’s unionists becoming, paradoxically, Northern Irish nationalists – digging in, even if it means, against all economic logic, a hard border with the Irish Republic – we are, at best, only a precariously united kingdom.

Johnson’s flying visits to all corners of the UK have done nothing to dispel the impression that under him the world’s most successful multinational state is devoid of a unifying purpose powerful enough to hold it together and to keep four nationalisms – Scottish, Irish, English and also a rising Welsh nationalism – at bay. Recent polling shows a majority of Scots support Scottish independence. In a new Hope Not Hate poll, many more – 60% – agree a no-deal Brexit will accelerate the demand for independence. Only 15% disagree. What is most worrying is not just that so many think the union will end but how at least for now so few appear to care. Only 30% of British Conservatives (and only 14% of Brexit party voters) would oppose Brexit if it meant the break-up of the union: 56% of Tories (and 78% of Brexit party voters) – in total 70% of Leavers – would go ahead regardless, even if the union collapsed.

[..] As the Second World War ended, George Orwell made a distinction between patriots who instinctively love their country and the opposite, a political nationalism that he defined as “power hunger tempered by self-deception”. He noted its defining features: unreality about the country’s prospects; introversion bordering on the xenophobic; and hate-filled obsessiveness that treats people solely in terms of their loyalty and utility. Orwell argued passionately that the descent into a narrow, chauvinistic nationalism could be halted only by what he called “moral effort”.

Read more …

The plotters. Cheap cigars, smoky backrooms and bad scotch.

Cross-Party Schemes Drawn Up To Prevent A Johnson No-Deal Brexit (O.)

Most MPs may now be on the beach, but for those worried about the chances of Britain crashing out of the EU with no deal it has not been the normal break in the sun. For a start, the holiday reading list has been less entertaining than normal. Standing order 24, paragraph 2.7 of the cabinet manual and section 2(3) of the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act have become the must-reads of the summer. Family outings have been interrupted by battles to find phone reception at various beauty spots to talk to opposition MPs. After a week that saw Boris Johnson and his key adviser Dominic Cummings make clear threats about leaving the EU whatever the cost at the end of October, concerned MPs have already begun to plan.

New governments, emergency legislation, breaches of convention and court cases are already being proposed by what several described as the “rebel alliance”. Many anti-no deal MPs are also concerned about the lack of coherence so far. All those who spoke to the Observer had doubts that no-deal Brexit could be avoided. “Everyone has to pull together, and that is never a guarantee,” said one former Tory minister trying to coordinate efforts. “We are trying to hold together an unholy coalition of moderate Labour, Labour frontbench, Lib Dems, Scottish Nationalists, minor parties, independents and moderate Tories. It’s difficult.” However, details of some of the plans are already emerging.

Senior figures within both the Labour and Conservative parties believe that the simplest way to stop no deal is through a new law, forcing the prime minister to ask for an extension to Britain’s EU membership. This is the focus of early efforts. The rebels see two possible routes. The easiest move is to hijack any legislation that the government proposes in the autumn. Yet the plotters know that the government may simply refuse to propose any new laws to avoid such an ambush. “The moment there is legislation, we can amend away,” said one plotter. “But their strategy is clearly not to legislate about anything and have endless debates in parliament about the colour green instead.”

Read more …

As the MPS are on the beach, the special advisers are not.

No 10 Cancels Staff Leave, Hinting At Likelihood Of Snap Election (G.)

Boris Johnson’s chief of staff cancelled all leave for government advisers until 31 October in a missive on Thursday night, raising further speculation the government is planning for a forced snap election in the aftermath of the UK leaving the EU with no deal. Special advisers were emailed by Johnson’s senior adviser Edward Lister on Thursday night, saying there was “some confusion about taking holiday”. They were told none should be booked until 31 October, with compensation considered “on a case by case basis” for those who had already booked leave, though the email said advisers were free to spend their weekends “as you wish”. “There is serious work to be done between now and October 31st and we should be focused on the job,” the email said.

The directive angered many recipients, who say staff are exhausted and are facing an unprecedented workload in September and October. One recipient described the email as “posturing” and said special advisers, known as “spads”, are being used as part of the PR war to convince the public the government is serious about no deal. Johnson himself also wrote to all members of the civil service telling them the government’s main focus was now to prepare for a no-deal Brexit. In the letter, Johnson said he wanted to underline that the UK would be leaving on 31 October “whatever the circumstances” and that the civil service must prepare “urgently and rapidly” as its top priority.

“I know many of you have already done a great deal of hard work in mobilising to prepare for a no deal scenario, so that we can leave on 31 October come what may,” the letter said. “Between now and then we must engage and communicate clearly with the British people about what our plans for taking back control mean, what people and businesses need to do, and the support we will provide.”

Read more …

“His blog clarified the claim, explaining “the Treasury gross figure is slightly more than £350m of which we get back roughly half, though some of this is spent in absurd ways like subsidies for very rich landowners to do stupid things”.

Brexit Enforcer Cummings’ Farm Took €235,000 In EU Handouts (O.)

Boris Johnson’s controversial enforcer, Dominic Cummings, an architect of Brexit and a fierce critic of Brussels, is co-owner of a farm that has received €250,000 (£235,000) in EU farming subsidies, the Observer can reveal. The revelation is a potential embarrassment for the mastermind behind Johnson’s push to leave the EU by 31 October. Since being appointed as Johnson’s chief adviser, Cummings has presented the battle to leave the EU as one between the people and the politicians. He positions himself as an outsider who wants to demolish elites, end the “absurd subsidies” paid out by the EU and liberate the UK from its arcane rules and regulations.

But his critics say the revelation that Cummings has benefited from the system he intends to smash underscores how many British farmers are reliant on EU money that would evaporate if the UK leaves. An Observer analysis of Land Registry documents and EU subsidy databases reveals that a farm in Durham, which Cummings jointly owns with his parents and another person, has received roughly €20,000 a year for most of the last two decades. The revelation opens Cummings up to charges of hypocrisy, as writing on his blog, he has attacked the use of agricultural subsidies “dreamed up in the 1950s and 1960s” because they “raise prices for the poor to subsidise rich farmers while damaging agriculture in Africa”.

He notoriously came up with the claim that leaving the EU would allow the UK to spend an extra £350m a week on the NHS. His blog clarified the claim, explaining “the Treasury gross figure is slightly more than £350m of which we get back roughly half, though some of this is spent in absurd ways like subsidies for very rich landowners to do stupid things”.

Read more …

The ‘one country, two systems’ deal runs untiil 2047.

British Government’s Hong Kong Intervention Riles China (O.)

China has lashed out at the British foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, after he spoke to Hong Kong’s leader about protests that have morphed from a campaign against a controversial extradition bill into rolling street demonstrations demanding electoral reforms. Raab spoke to Hong Kong’s chief executive, Carrie Lam, and stressed the need for “meaningful political dialogue and a fully independent investigation into recent events as a way to build trust” in the territory, the UK Foreign Office said. The former British colony has seen widespread protests in recent months which began with a campaign against a controversial extradition bill and has gone on to include a push for electoral reforms in the Chinese territory.


Hua Chunying, a spokeswoman for the Chinese foreign ministry, said the days where Britain ruled Hong Kong were “long gone … The UK has no sovereignty, jurisdiction or right of supervision over Hong Kong. Affairs of Hong Kong brook no foreign interference. It is simply wrong for the British government to directly call Hong Kong’s chief executive to exert pressure.” A UK foreign office spokesperson said: “The foreign secretary underlined the strength of the relationship between the UK and Hong Kong, noting our support for Hong Kong’s high degree of autonomy as provided for in the joint declaration and our commitment to the principle of ‘one country, two systems’.

Read more …

Humor.

Trump’s Financial Carelessness Could Cost His Kids $1.3 Billion In Taxes

Forbes estimates that Trump has paid each of his three eldest children—Donald Jr., Ivanka and Eric Trump—some $35 million in salary, commissions and bonuses for their work as executives at the Trump Organization, and he has given them modest stakes in a handful of relatively insignificant ventures. The rest of the first family—daughter Tiffany, son Barron and wife Melania—don’t seem to have received much at all. That leaves 73-year-old Donald Trump firmly in control of a $3.1 billion tax time bomb. Simply put, it’s bad planning. The president of the United States, one of the wealthiest people in America, appears to have one of the worst tax strategies in the country.


“It’s puzzling,” says Bruce Steiner, a New York estate lawyer who advises high-net-worth clients. “At death if he’s given away nothing, half of it disappears.” Then again, Donald Trump is also in position to relieve his family of much of the burden by simply repealing the federal estate tax altogether. It’s something he has already tried and failed to do once. Now, two years after the Trump tax cuts tweaked the estate tax rules, but not enough to impact the super-wealthy, Trump’s allies in Congress are trying to kill the tax once more. If they prove successful, it would likely save the Trump family more than $1 billion—enough to make it the most lucrative deal of Donald Trump’s life.

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A 40-inch parrot. Hey, the moa was 10 feet!

Squawkzilla (F.)

Palaeontologists announced they’ve discovered the largest parrot that ever lived, which they named after the Greek demi-god Heracles in reference to its enormous size and strength Islands are natural laboratories for a variety of fascinating avian evolutionary experiments, particularly islands that lack mammalian predators. New Zealand, for example, is home to a variety of peculiar parrots. There’s the mischievous Kea, the world’s only mountain-dwelling parrot who specializes in dismantling automobiles and re-arranging traffic cones, and the kakapo, a flightless nocturnal parrot that looks like a big green owl, and is the only living parrot that shags free-roaming zoologists.

Now there’s a weird new parrot in town, according to an international team of scientists from New Zealand and Australia. The researchers announced the discovery of the fossilized remains of the largest parrot yet identified, standing half as tall as a human adult with a massive beak that could bite through anything it liked. The researchers estimated the giant parrot was 1 meter (39 inches) tall, and weighed roughly 7 kilograms (15.5 pounds). This is approximately the size of the extinct dodo, and twice the size of New Zealand’s critically endangered kakapo, which is the largest and heaviest parrot alive today.

The researchers named the new parrot Heracles inexpectatus — Hercules the unexpected — in recognition of its Herculean size and strength and because its discovery was completely unexpected. Considering how destructive kea are, just imagine what this giant parrot could have chewed up.


Artist’s reconstruction of the giant parrot Heracles, dwarfing a bevy of 8cm high Kuiornis – small prehistoric wrens that lived 9–16 million years ago on New Zealand – scuttling about on the forest floor. Heracles may have eaten other, smaller, parrot species. (Credit: Brian Choo / Flinders University)

Read more …

 

 

 

 

 

Home Forums Debt Rattle August 11 2019

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  • #49147

    Pablo Picasso Man with straw hat and ice cream cone 1938   • JPMorgan: The Fed Will Need To Restart QE Soon • How Jeffrey Epstein Got His Hooks I
    [See the full post at: Debt Rattle August 11 2019]

    #49148
    Dr. D
    Participant

    “ How Jeffrey Epstein Got His Hooks Into Les Wexner (William D. Cohan)”

    Cool story bro. Problem is, we already know that he was using the Victoria Secrets catalog, not for clothes, but for women you would like to **** buy. No way that was happening without him being in hook, line, and sinker. Was he blackmailed? Almost certainly! But for what? And he never attempted to escape? Or protect his collateral women? Yeah, whatever. These 15-year-old runaways have more bravery in their pinky finger, for still going after this even years later, against the combined force of the Palm Beach and NYC police, the FBI, MI6, and the Queen of England. But aw, he was just a poor wictim, who never meant to rape and traffic all his models for 30 years.

    “We may be living through an attempted rightwing revolution,”

    Uh, no, we are not. What would that revolution be?

    “What has happened in the US after the atrocities in El Paso and Dayton”

    Where two registered Democrats, including one confirmed to be Antifa shot some folks? The third one wrote about hating “White S.F. Tw-ts” and shot white people at a white festival. And this is “Rightwing” Strange definitions.

    “The National Rifle Association may tell Donald Trump repeatedly that any attempt at gun control will not fly with his political base… For the Republicans to become the party in de facto defence of “

    Defense of what? Of literal, written, Federal law? That’s what the 2nd Amendment is, though everyone treats it as a sort of optional suggestion. Oh wait: like all laws-I-don’t-feel-like-following. So the Republican revolution involves having and enforcing existing law, or changing laws legally and appropriately with a discussed, debated, approved amendment? Sign me up. Otherwise the Law will be “The Guardian” just following laws they feel like, and ignoring laws they don’t feel like depending on how powerful and connected you are, and that’s what we have now.

    So far, fake or false in every paragraph.

    “Too many Americans now fear becoming the victims of random murder.”

    No, they don’t. And nothing has changed. We’ve had this discussion since 1968, and every year they add a new gun law, the shootings get worse. Are we slow on the uptake?

    “Few can dispute that, astonishingly, while the US has 5% of the world’s population, it has 35%-50% of civilian gun ownership, a trend that simply has to be reversed.”

    We have for centuries, and for the 20th c most of the world did as well and no one was getting shot. Now “The Guardian’s” home, London has that, and higher murder rate than NYC continues briskly with knives as the Bobbys confiscate spoons. Neither are there any stats. If you remove the top 12 Democratic cities, most of which have stringent gun laws, violence is identical to the world average. Neither are white supremacists anywhere – ANYWHERE on that list — nor statistically even whites themselves. But since objective statistics are racist now and used by Hitler, I’ll let you look them up for yourself. Oh wait: “The Guardian”, nevermind. Everyone in America would tell you this if you called both sides on the phone and asked like a “reporter” does, but you didn’t, because when you already know everything from your 6-figure flat in West London, why bother talking to people or reading facts? They just get in the way and confuse the conclusion the smart set told me was “In” when they didn’t look at “stats”, “facts”, or “evidence” either.

    “Forty years on, continued rightwing political ascendancy has morphed into today’s menacing rightwing ideologies.”

    Again, with facts, don’t think so, as the GOP has moved wildly left, with Trump holding almost the same political agenda as Bill Clinton in 1992. On what are they “right”? Well obviously not racism, since it was the Right that fought a bitter battle for equality against the Southern (All) Democrats. Does the Right want to re-establish the Christian state, with required Church attendance? Oh wait, we never had that. Are they going against gay rights and gay marriage? Nope, not really, and especially not this President. Are they reversing suffrage and equal protection laws against women? Not that I’ve heard. Let’s go old school: the Right are Monarchists; so are they trying to re-establish the king? No? Supporting the government and protecting everyone in Congress and Justice departments, right or wrong, refusing to attack corruption there, regardless of cause? I don’t think so. Expand government to grab power? No? Maybe culturally, they wish to erase technology, get rid of smart phones, PCs, re-establish slavery, go back to the 1950s? Nope.

    So I’m at a loss. “The Right” means literally nothing, it is only a scare word to invoke bad feels among a certain body that has been carefully engineered to respond that way. On the other side, “Liberal” serves the same function, but they no longer have meaning. Tim Pool yesterday ran a story of the *real* FBI caution, which was NOT against White Nationalists, since they’re apparently harmless cranks who take no action and all of them would fit in a county stadium, but against their equivalent Black Nationalists, who are ALSO looking for segregation and their ethnostate. I don’t care for either side, that’s not the point, the point was: these two groups who are functionally equivalent, the White side was considered “on the Right” and the Black side, which has the exact same beliefs, were “on the Left”.

    Howwwwwwww? How? Because just as this reporter shows, “Left” and “Right” mean literally nothing anymore. There is no definition. The FBI had a definition though: they said since speech and belief are protected under the 1st Amendment (the same Federal Law and Amendments “The Guardian” feel are strictly optional) they don’t really care about the beliefs of their perpetrators. Only whether they COMMIT CRIMES or not. Only whether they are violent. And they don’t care what color they are, violence is a crime. Somewhat refreshing to hear, and also they they are punishing wrong ACTIONS which are real and can be proven, and not wrong THOUGHTS, which cannot.

    P.S. the “anti-state instincts” he mentions exist exclusively on the Right, which is how you know Hitler was a Leftist. Tell me how Republicans, who want a government so small you could drown it in a bathtub, are going to have the government apparatus and secret state to oppress anyone? Isn’t that a bit counterproductive? Yet astonishingly, on the Left, they think Donald Trump is Hitler who is coming to kill them all, and they STILL want larger, more powerful, more intrusive government, and believe so highly in Authoritarian dictatorships, the even when their enemy is in power, they believe in increasing state power MORE, and in the opening days of the administration approved a multi-billion dollar Pentagon/Spy bill to make that happen. We on the outside: “How. Is. That. Possible???” If anything would disabuse the Left of worshiping government, surely it would be the rein of Satan-in-charge, but no! Not even that will dissuade their religious fundamentalism that Government-isGod.

    “The Very Idea Of A United Kingdom Is Being Torn Apart By Toxic Nationalism (G.)”

    Um, how could that be, since Nationalists by literal definition keep their nation together? I won’t expand on this, but “The Guardian” is ON today. With an EU that is nearly collapsed and provably harming its people, lied about everything, following no rules but power, and in a few short years has accomplished the remarkable task of being worse than Westminster, and they’re STILL worshiping the biggest Authoritarian who pretend to the throne, because Government-is-God, there shall be no gods before me. Not even life, income, or self-preservation, apparently.

    Article language? They are “Populist” and “National” meaning they are a democratic people who which for self-determination as a nation. How dare they???? Darn you Democracy all to heck! Do what we in Brussels and Westminster, and The Guardian, all your betters, DO WHAT WE SAY! Or I shall taunt thee a second time see if I don’t. And after we taunt thee for being peasants you shall vote for us, you’ll see.

    No wonder they hate all and any of us who don’t think Government-is-God, or even (shhhh) that there may be a real God. We are heretics, and burned daily, for we get in the way of their petty tyranny.

    “Trump’s Financial Carelessness Could Cost His Kids $1.3 Billion In Taxes”

    Nice! If he does, he’s a criminal, if he doesn’t, he’s an idiot. Aside from other considerations, the estate tax in the U.S. is this way because it would destroy every (remaining) farming family in every state in Flyoverland and give 100% of that land to ADM, Monsanto, and Chinese front companies. But they attempt to do that every year anyway. Here’s a thought: maybe The Donald just doesn’t care that much about money. I know this is hard for non-rich people to believe, but he is clearly willing and able to transfer the “money”, which is power, to load parts of his family according to their talent and ability without breaking them under the responsibility and strain. This tells me the others are not well-suited to winning the lottery as it were, and having their lives turned upside down, which government and private vultures — and the Madoffs and Epsteins of the world circling and pecking at the fortune daily. He’s holding it so HE can take those assaults instead of them. Would you FORCE your children to sit in that position if it harmed them? Isn’t protecting them, NOT giving it to them, how you would WANT it to be? Talk to some (non-psycopathic) rich people some time; you’ll find it illuminating. Most only use money to keep score because, who can use it? What good is it? It’s more responsibility than treasure. But when “Government-is-the-only-God and Mammon-is-his-prophet”, who would notice? We can’t understand this because money is our God, and the very thought of anything but money — like family — is incomprehensible to Forbes reporters.

    And they wonder why normal, sane people hate the media.

    #49149
    oxymoron
    Participant

    Dr. D you are such a shining light of reasoning and accountability and may you never stop writing in the comments section. I think it would cost me my readership.

    #49150
    J.A.Kosmos
    Participant

    • How Jeffrey Epstein Got His Hooks Into Les Wexner (William D. Cohan)

    Wexner gave Epstein a townhouse equipped with hidden cameras and microphones and with a lead coated room with surveilance equipment hidden under some stairs. He also started the Mega group (likely a mossad affiliation) with Charles Bronfman whos family have deep ties to organized crime. He doesnt seem like a victim in all this to me.

    #49156
    J.A.Kosmos
    Participant

    A $56 million townhouse that is.

    #49157
    J.A.Kosmos
    Participant

    HHave you read Mint Press News expose on the Epstein affaitr? I recommended it in another thread but I am surprised I haven’t seen it in a debt rattle.

    #49161
    John Day
    Participant

    http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/08/seeking-real-friends.html
    ​Tom sends this article from Ellen Brown about the Chinese economic model, which bleeds the economy at fewer points in the food chain than the western neoliberal model does. The west did not grow up and thrive under neoliberalism, either. Neoliberalism extracts value.
    ​ ​Just as the U.S. had engaged in a Cold War to destroy the Soviet communist model, so Western financial interests set out to destroy this emerging Asian threat. It was defused when Western neoliberal economists persuaded Japan and the Asian Tigers to adopt a free-market system and open their economies and companies to foreign investors. Western speculators then took down the vulnerable countries one by one in the “Asian crisis” of 1997-8. China alone was left as an economic threat to the Western neoliberal model, and it is this existential threat that is the target of the trade and currency wars today.

    Neoliberalism Has Met Its Match in China

    ​Spy software through the decades that feeds critical information to Mossad, Promis first, they Carbyne.
    Maxwell and Epstein. the last quarter of this long article has info on Promis and Carbyne.
    Robert Maxwell Ghislane Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein tied to top Israeli officials and Mossad by best global spyware ever.​ Thanks Travis.
    ​ ​Narativ, which wrote the first expose on Carbyne after Epstein’s arrest, noted that the Chinese government uses a smartphone app very similar to Carbyne as part of its mass surveillance apparatus, even though the original purpose of the app was for improved emergency reporting. According to Narativ, the Chinese Carbyne-equivalent “monitors every aspect of a user’s life, including personal conversations, power usage, and tracks a user’s movement.”

    Mega Group, Maxwells and Mossad: The Spy Story at the Heart of the Jeffrey Epstein Scandal

    ​Middle aged white guy Jim Kunstler:
    ​ ​Speaking of “stabbing motherfuckers in the heart,” why are the “progressives” who moiled outside Senator Mitch McConnell’s house the other night not cooling their heels in a federal lock-up for threatening to assassinate a public official? That’s the usual procedure. How difficult would it be to locate them? Nobody has even asked — a peculiar development.
    ​ ​Twitter boss Jack Dorsey took the predictable “progressive” action of banning Senator McConnell’s election campaign account for posting a video of the very mob looking to “stab motherfuckers in the heart” outside his house.

    Rude Awakening

    ​Twitter reinstates Mitch McConnell ​… after Republican party threat to pull all ads. (Guess he’s learned the error of his ways)
    ​ ​Together the organizations contribute hundreds of thousands of dollars into Twitter’s ad revenue – for example, Trump’s re-election campaign alone had forecast between $300,000 and $500,000 in Twitter spending for August, the campaign told The Post. https://sputniknews.com/us/201908101076517968-twitter-allows-mitch-mcconnells-account-back-online-after-gop-vows-to-stop-buying-ads/

    ​C.J. Hopkins sounds like an entitled cis white male, right? Thanks cis-het Eleni in Athens.
    If you enjoyed the global corporatocracy’s original War on Islamicist Terror, you’re going to love their latest spinoff, The War on White Supremacist Terror. It’s basically just like the old War on Terror, except that this time the bad guys are all white supremacists, and Donald Trump is Osama bin Laden … unless Putin is Osama bin Laden. OK, I’m not quite sure who’s Osama bin Laden. Whatever. The point is, the Terrorists are coming!
    Yes, that’s right, some racist psycho murdered a bunch of people in Texas, so it’s time to “take the gloves off” again, pass some new kind of Patriot Act, further curtail our civil liberties, and generally whip the public up into a mass hysteria over “white supremacist terrorism.”
    http://www.unz.com/chopkins/the-war-on-white-supremacist-terror/

    Moon of Alabama is on a roll:
    China is unlikely to stop buying preferentially priced oil from Iran at least as long as the current trade war with the U.S. continues to intensify. It is also unlikely to join the U.S. ‘coalition’. But it will protect its commercial interest – i.e. its ships that haul goods between Iran and China.
    China fears that the U.S. ‘coalition’ will confront its ships for breaking unilateral U.S. sanctions. The British did just that with the Iranian tanker they pirated at Gibraltar. There is also a historic precedence that demonstrates the necessity to protect Chinese ships against such U.S. schemes:
    It is remembered much better in China than it is in the United States, that in 1993 the PRC was the most conspicuous victim of principled US piracy in the matter of the shipping vessel Yinhe.
    https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/08/china-conciders-to-protect-its-ships-from-us-piracy.html#more

    There Will Be No Russian Military Base In Iran, Moon of Alabama. Pat sent me this.
    The OilPrice.com article was bullshit propaganda. Sorry.
    https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/08/no-there-will-be-no-russian-base-in-iran.html

    Moon of Alabama has good facts and history regarding India’s current Hindu Nationalist push into majority Muslim Jammu & Kashmir. The history related to the formation of India, Pakistan, and mostly autonomous Jammy & Kashmir is particularly helpful context.
    When the U.S. incited and supported Muslim extremists to attack the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, the movement spilled over into Pakistan and J&K. During the 1980s and 90s a Muslim insurgency, supported by Muslim Pakistan, fought against Indian soldiers. Hindu inhabitants of J&K were pushed out. The 12.5 million inhabitants of J&K are since under Indian occupation. Between 500.000 and 700.000 Indian soldiers are stationed in the state. During the last decades the conflict largely ceased and there were recently not big incidents. Up to today Pakistan had no current interest to escalate the issue.
    But the fascist Modi government, just recently reelected, needs to feed its radical Hindutva base. J&K’s special status protected its inhabitants from overwhelming migration of Hindus from main India. Modi will now push his followers to move into the state. His aim in the end is to create a majority Hindu state in a currently majority Muslim one.
    Last week India ordered all tourists to leave J&K. Since yesterday all communication lines to J&K are cut. Local leaders were put under house arrest and all schools and public institutions are closed. Thousand of troops were additionally send into J&K.
    https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/08/india-will-come-to-regret-todays-annexation-of-jammu-and-kashmir.html#more

    ​ ​Local reports are describing a total communications blackout in Indian states Jammu and Kashmir that’s so bad many don’t even know New Delhi revoked the region’s political autonomy early this week. The region has essentially been cut off from the rest of the country and the outside world, with a security blockade and checkpoints also set up by the military.
    https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-08-09/kashmir-lockdown-so-total-many-still-dont-know-autonomy-was-revoked

    ​More in depth about Kashmir. The people of Kashmir have been deeply betrayed after a lifetime of mostly-trust of India.
    ​https://thewire.in/politics/kashmir-special-status-revocation-final-betrayal

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