Nov 012019
 
 November 1, 2019  Posted by at 8:41 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  17 Responses »


Salvador Dali Landscape near Cadaques 1921

 

‘Nothing Illegal In Trump-Zelensky Call’ – NSC’s Tim Morrison (ZH)
Voters In Key Battleground States Oppose Impeachment (ZH)
Debunking Some Of The Ukraine Scandal Myths (Solomon)
The Two Democrats Who Voted ‘No’ On The Impeachment Inquiry Resolution (CNN)
Telling the Truth Has Become an Anti-American Act (PCR)
Trump’s Antiwar Speech Deserved A Better Reception (Sjursen)
QE Has Radically Changed The Nature Of The West’s Financial System (Saker)
Fed Has Shovel, Digs Bigger Hole (Denninger)
Workington Man (George Galloway)
11 Years Ago Today Satoshi Nakamoto Published the Bitcoin White Paper (CT)

 

 

Well, that deflated fast. On the very day the House votes for the Dems’ resolution, the long awaited savior says nothing was wrong. This literally happened at the same time. Rep Jim Jordan said he had to leave the hearing to go vote on the resolution.

Now we have three people that Bill Taylor claimed to quote last week, contradicting what he said. There’s Volker, there’s Sondland, and now Tim Morisson. I think we call this ‘reaching’, and we find it ugly.

Mind you, others, like Reuters, claim Morrison fully agreed with Taylor. But really, he said something entirely different.

‘Nothing Illegal In Trump-Zelensky Call’ – NSC’s Tim Morrison (ZH)

A top National Security Council official who was present on a July 25 phone call between President Trump and Volodomyr Zelensky, Tim Morrison, told House investigators on Thursday that he does not believe anything illegal was discussed, according to The Federalist. “I want to be clear, I was not concerned that anything illegal was discussed,” said Tim Morrison, former NSC Senior Director for European Affairs who was on the July 25 call between the two leaders. Morrison also testified that the transcript of the phone call which was declassified and released by the White House “accurately and completely reflects the substance of the call.”


“Morrison testified that Ukrainian officials were not even aware that certain military funding had been delayed by the Trump administration until late August 2019, more than a month after the Trump-Zelensky call, casting doubt on allegations that Trump somehow conveyed an illegal quid pro quo demand during the July 25 call. “I have no reason to believe the Ukrainians had any knowledge of the [military funding] review until August 28, 2019,” Morrison said. That is the same day that Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the chief anti-Trump inquisitor in the U.S. House of Representatives, disclosed on Twitter that funding had been held up. Politico also published a story that day, sourced to anonymous leaks, that military funding had been temporarily held up.” -The Federalist

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“..in these states where the election is really going to be fought, we’re seeing that voters oppose impeachment, and there’s an intensity to that opposition.”

Voters In Key Battleground States Oppose Impeachment (ZH)

New polling from several 2020 battleground states reveal that more people oppose than support using impeachment to remove President Trump from office, according to The Hill, which describes the results as “a potential danger sign for Democrats.” Voters in Wisconsin and Florida – two key states which Trump won in 2016, oppose impeachment. Of note, Wisconsin turned red for the first time in decades, while Florida flipped red again after Obama won the state twice. In the swing states of Arizona and New Hampshire, most voters similarly oppose impeachment.

“A New York Times–Siena College battlegrounds poll released Wednesday found that majorities in Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona and Florida oppose removing the president from office through impeachment. Majorities or pluralities do support an investigation of Trump, however. Trump’s reelection campaign is emboldened by the polling, which it believes shows that Democrats are running against public opinion in the states that matter the most. “-The Hill. “We’ve known for a long time that everybody in California and New York want Trump to be impeached, they’ve wanted that since the day he came into office,” one Trump campaign official told The Hill, adding “But in these states where the election is really going to be fought, we’re seeing that voters oppose impeachment, and there’s an intensity to that opposition.”

Meanwhile, FiveThirtyEight’s impeachment polls tracker reveals that 51% of voters across the country support the House impeachment inquiry vs. 42% who don’t support it. 47.6% of voters support impeaching and removing Trump vs. 43.4% who oppose it. According to the report, “some Republicans believe those surveys are overly weighted by left-leaning independents in states that won’t matter in 2020” – a theory which may hold water given the polling in swing states.

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Sometimes we get the impression John Solomon is the only person out there who knows the facts. And cares about them.

Debunking Some Of The Ukraine Scandal Myths (Solomon)

There is a long way to go in the impeachment process, and there are some very important issues still to be resolved. But as the process marches on, a growing number of myths and falsehoods are being spread by partisans and their allies in the news media. The early pattern of misinformation about Ukraine, Joe Biden and election interference mirrors closely the tactics used in late 2016 and early 2017 to build the false and now-debunked narrative that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin colluded to hijack the 2016 election. Facts do matter. And they prove to be stubborn evidence, even in the midst of a political firestorm. So here are the facts (complete with links to the original materials) debunking some of the bigger fables in the Ukraine scandal.

Myth: There is no evidence the Democratic National Committee sought Ukraine’s assistance during the 2016 election. The Facts: The Ukrainian embassy in Washington confirmed to me this past April that a Democratic National Committee contractor named Alexandra Chalupa did, in fact, solicit dirt on Donald Trump and Paul Manafort during the spring of 2016 in hopes of spurring a pre-election congressional hearing into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. The embassy also stated Chalupa tried to get Ukraine’s president at the time, Petro Poroshenko, to do an interview on Manafort with an American investigative reporter working on the issue. The embassy said it turned down both requests.

Myth: There is no evidence that Ukrainian government officials tried to influence the American presidential election in 2016. The Facts: There are two documented episodes involving Ukrainian government officials’ efforts to influence the 2016 American presidential election. The first occurred in Ukraine, where a court last December ruled that a Parliamentary member and a senior Ukrainian law enforcement official improperly tried to influence the U.S. election by releasing financial records in spring and summer 2016 from an investigation into Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s lobbying activities. The publicity from the release of the so-called Black Ledger documents forced Manafort to resign.

Myth: The allegation that Joe Biden tried to fire the Ukrainian prosecutor investigating his son Hunter Biden’s Ukrainian gas firm employer has been debunked, and there is no evidence the ex-vice president did anything improper. The Facts: Joe Biden is captured on videotape bragging about his effort to strong-arm Ukraine’s president into firing Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin. Biden told a foreign policy group in early 2018 that he used the threat of withholding $1 billion in U.S. aid to Kiev to successfully force Shokin’s firing. It also is not in dispute that at the time he forced the firing, the vice president’s office knew Shokin was investigating Burisma Holdings, the company where Hunter Biden worked as a board member and consultant.

Team Biden was alerted to the investigation in a December 2015 New York Times article. The unresolved question is what motivated Joe Biden to seek Shokin’s ouster. Biden says he took the action solely because the U.S. and Western allies believed Shokin was ineffective in fighting corruption. Shokin told me, ABC News and others that he was fired because Joe Biden was unhappy that the Burisma investigation was not shut down. He made similar statements in an affidavit prepared to be filed in an European court. You can read that affidavit here.

[..] Myth: Ukraine’s investigation into Burisma Holdings was no longer active when Joe Biden forced Shokin’s firing in March 2016. The Facts: This is one of the most egregiously false statements spread by the media. Ukraine’s official case file for Burisma Holdings, provided to me by prosecutors, shows there were two active investigations into the gas firm and its founder Mykola Zlochevsky in early 2016, one involving corruption allegations and the other involving unpaid taxes. In fact, Shokin told me in an interview he was making plans to interview Burisma board members, including Hunter Biden, at the time he was fired.

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Well, they must be shamed then. CNN does the honors.

The Two Democrats Who Voted ‘No’ On The Impeachment Inquiry Resolution (CNN)

Two Democrats broke from their party and voted against the resolution the House passed Thursday formalizing the procedures of the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump. Reps. Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey and Collin Peterson of Minnesota both voted “nay” on the historic resolution. They also voted against going forward with resolution during the preliminary procedural vote. The resolution passed with a vote of 232-196. Their votes are no surprise as both were initially part of a group of Democrats who have not made public statements in support of starting an impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump or have only posited conditional support for it. They also represent districts where Trump won in 2016.


No Republicans supported the resolution. Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan, who is an independent and left the Republican party earlier this year, voted in favor. Van Drew said he believes the inquiry will “further divide the country” without bipartisan support. “Without bipartisan support I believe this inquiry will further divide the country tearing it apart at the seams and will ultimately fail in the Senate,” he said in a statement after the vote on Thursday. “However, now that the vote has taken place and we are moving forward I will be making a judgment call based on all the evidence presented by these investigations. My hope is that we are still able to get some work done to help the American people like infrastructure, veterans’ benefits, environmental protections, immigration reform, reducing prescription drug cost, and strengthening Social Security.”

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“..the state of tension today between the United States and Russia is more dangerous than during the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union..”

Telling the Truth Has Become an Anti-American Act (PCR)

Stephen Cohen and I emphasize that the state of tension today between the United States and Russia is more dangerous than during the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union. For calling needed attention to the risk of nuclear war heightened by the current state of tension, both Cohen and I have been called “Russian dupes/agents” by PropOrNot, a website suspected of being funded by an element of the US military/security complex.

Cohen and I emphasize that during the Cold War both sides were working to reduce tensions and to build trust. President John F. Kennedy worked with Khruschev to defuse the dangerous Cuban Missile Crisis. President Richard Nixon made arms control agreements with the Soviet leaders, as did President Jimmy Carter. President Ronald Reagan and Gorbachev worked together to end the Cold War. President George H.W. Bush’s administration gave assurances to Gorbachev that if the Soviets agreed to the renunification of Germany, the US would not move NATO one inch to the East.

These accomplishments were all destroyed by the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama neoconized regimes. President Donald Trump’s intention to normalize US/Russian relations has been blocked by the US military/security complex, presstitute media, and Democratic Party. The Russiagate hoax and currently the illegitimate impeachment process have succeeded in preventing any reduction in the dangerous state of tensions between the two nuclear powers. Those of us who lived and fought the Cold War are acutely aware of the numerous occasions when false warnings of incoming ICBMs and other moments of high tension could have resulted in nuclear Armageddon.

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Danny Sjursen is a retired U.S. Army Major. “let’s review some of the sensible things Trump said in the meat of his speech, nuggets of earthy wisdom that this forever war veteran, for one, wishes Trump would follow through on…

Trump’s Antiwar Speech Deserved A Better Reception (Sjursen)

There were parts of President Trump’s latest speech on Syria, which, if read without the sound of The Donald’s gruff, bombastic voice, sounded a whole lot like Bernie Sanders might’ve delivered it. That’s right, sandwiched between Trump’s standard braggadocio about how he single-handedly secured “a better future for Syria and for the Middle East,” and his cynical pivot to decry his opponents’ supposed desire to accept “unlimited migration from war-torn regions” across the U.S. border, was one of the strongest blasts of antiwar rhetoric delivered by a sitting U.S. president since Dwight Eisenhower.

If any other president—think Obama—or major liberal political figure had spoken so clearly against endless war and so poignantly diagnosed the current American disease of military hyper-interventionism, CNN and MSNBC would’ve gushed about Nobel Peace Prizes. It must be said, of course, that Trump has hardly governed according to these peacenik proclamations—he has, after all added more troops in the region, especially in Saudi Arabia, and merely reshuffled the soldiers from Syria across the border to Iraq. Nevertheless, even if the president’s actions don’t match his words, the words themselves remain important, especially from a 21st century, post-9/11 commander in chief.

No doubt, Trump’s partial withdrawal from Syria was initially clumsy, and it’s extremely difficult to parse out any sort of coherent doctrine in his muddled Mideast policy. Reducing troop levels in Syria isn’t much of an accomplishment if it’s followed, as it might be, by a shift toward drumming up or executing a Saudi/Israeli-pressured war with Iran. Still, the speech, though problematic in several areas, deserved a fairer reception from the corporate media establishment.

Beyond the intellectual dishonesty of some press outlets’ displays of reflexive anti-Trumpism, there’s the salient fact that none of the president’s critics have proposed a practical, long-term alternative strategy for the U.S. military in Northeast Syria. Crocodile tears for the Kurds are naught but a cynical cudgel with which to attack the president; there was never any established plan to permanently carve out a viable Kurdish statelet in Syria, or serious weighing of the military, diplomatic and economic costs of such an endeavor. So, since none of the mainstream networks were willing to do it, let’s review some of the sensible things Trump said in the meat of his speech, nuggets of earthy wisdom that this forever war veteran, for one, wishes Trump would follow through on…

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“..once artificial demand is no longer being fabricated then these assets will plummet in value, with huge ripple effects in the “real” economy.”

QE Has Radically Changed The Nature Of The West’s Financial System (Saker)

Because they are so ensconsed in their little bubble and because they profit so much from maintaining the status quo, Western mainstream media pundits don’t – or perhaps can’t – admit how Quantitative Easing policies have so quickly and so radically changed the financial system of the West and their satellites. I imagine that most everyone reading this is already aware of what has transpired economically across the West over the last decade: • Elite-class asset (stuff rich people own – stocks, real estate, financial derivatives, luxury goods, etc.) prices have ballooned to pre-2008 levels • Debt (which is, of course, another elite-owned asset), mainly to pay for banker bailouts and their usurious interest levels, has ballooned national accounts to incredible levels. • The “real” economy has only weakened, as proven by endemic low economic growth across the West and Japan.


As a pro-socialist who has no faith that capitalism seeks anything but inequality, I believe that creating and compounding these issues has been the unstated goal of Western policy over the last decade. But that’s not the main point: what cannot be denied is that those ARE the economic results of the West’s “easy money” policies – i.e., QE and ZIRP (Zero percent interest rate policy) for the 1%, and austerity for the 99% (all coins have two sides). Similarly, I imagine that everyone reading this is generally aware of what will happen should the West stop easy money: obviously, once artificial demand is no longer being fabricated then these assets will plummet in value, with huge ripple effects in the “real” economy. The West will be right back to dealing with most of the same toxic assets they had back in 2007, but now compounded by a decade of more debt, more interest payments, and a “real” economy which was made weaker via austerity.

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Somone in the Comments linked to Karl Denninger. Been a long time. And Karl once again describes the obvious:

Fed Has Shovel, Digs Bigger Hole (Denninger)

You and your wife own a small, 2 bedroom “starter” house. You decide to have a family. You need a bigger house. Your house has gone up in value by 50% over the last 10 years. Good, right? Wrong! The new, larger house has gone up by the same percentage; in dollars it’s gone up by much more! 50% of $100,000 is $50,000. But 50% of $200,000 is $100,000! Not only that but the property taxes have gone up by that same 50% and they’re due every year forevermore into the future and, what’s worse, the interest is due on the loan too. So you say “well but I sell the $150,000 house and made $50k!”


Ah, Grasshopper, but the $200,000 house is now $300,000, and you only have $150k! You got ****ed out of another $50,000; if there had been no price change your net requirement was another $100,000. It’s now another $150,000 instead! SURPRISE! Of course the Realtor loves this because 6% of $300,000 is 50% more money than 6% of $200,000. And the bank loves it too because they to charge a percentage interest on the principal, MSRs are typically computed not on a “dollars per loan” but as a percentage and similar. The insurance company loves you too, because the higher “value” means premiums go up, since if the house burns or is hit by a tornado the loss is higher. And the city loves it because millage is just a fancy word for percentage and they get it every year.

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“George Galloway was a member of the British Parliament for nearly 30 years. He presents TV and radio shows (including on RT). He is a film-maker, writer and a renowned orator.”

Workington Man (George Galloway)

Britain’s liberal europhiles, still convinced that they lost the Brexit vote because ‘Workington Men’ are too old and stupid to appreciate their virtues, would rather euthanize them from the ballot box. That political discourse has coarsened during this century can scarcely be gainsaid. The availability of the means to insult people without looking them in the eyes, to slander without much fear of legal retribution, has emboldened the most egregious slurs and stereotypes. The British General Election has only just begun and a new stereotype – ‘Workington Man’ – has been produced by the spin-doctors as the microcosm of swing-vote Britain.

Predictably, it is a ‘he’ (he has no wife, daughters, sisters or mother, apparently), is northern working class and has no university education. Speaking as a northern working class male with no university education myself, I can well understand the sting of the assumption that we are thick, probably racist, and voted for Brexit. The meme that Brexit voters – all 17.4 million of us – are Workington Men, much loved by liberal Europhiles, has spread mightily over the three years since the Brexit referendum, when the best guess of the defeated party – like the Clintonites before them – was that they lost because we were too stupid to appreciate their virtues.

But another meme out of the very same stable is that we – the Brexit-supporting, economically radical, socially ‘conservative’ voters – are ‘Old.’ Full disclosure: I am 65 but I have four children under 12, so not quite typical. It is offensive to be described as old when it is used as a lazy explanation by people who have failed to convince us. One of the reasons seriously advanced for re-running the Brexit referendum was that more of us than them had died!

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The Automatic Earth is older than bitcoin…

11 Years Ago Today Satoshi Nakamoto Published the Bitcoin White Paper (CT)

Today, Oct. 31, marks eleven years since the publication of the Bitcoin white paper by the still-mysterious person or group pseudonymously identified as Satoshi Nakamoto. Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System — published on Oct. 31, 2008 — outlined a tamper-proof, decentralized peer-to-peer protocol that could track and verify digital transactions, prevent double-spending and generate a transparent record for anyone to inspect in nearly real-time. The protocol represented a cryptographically-secured system — based on a Proof-of-Work algorithm — in which Bitcoins (BTC) are “mined” for a reward by individual nodes and then verified by other nodes in a decentralized network.

This system contained the possibility of overcoming the need for intermediaries such as banks and financial institutions to facilitate and audit transactions — a major disruption to a siloed, monopolized field of centralized financial power. Eleven years on, Bitcoin is consistently setting new records for its network hash rate — a measure of the overall computing power involved in validating transactions on the blockchain at any given time. More power and participation establishes greater network security and attests to widespread recognition of the profitability potential of Bitcoin mining.

As of the middle of this month, network data revealed that since the creation of the very first block on the Bitcoin blockchain on Jan 3, 2009 — known in more technical language as its “genesis block” — miners have received combined revenue of just under $15 billion. The figure includes both block rewards — “new” bitcoins paid to miners for validating a block of transactions — as well as transaction fees, which broke the $1 billion mark this week. Bitcoin’s first-ever recorded trading price was noted on Mar. 17, 2010 — on the now-defunct trading platform bitcoinmarket.com, at a value of $0.003. The cryptocurrency’s appreciation thus stands at a staggering 304033233% as of press time, with Bitcoin currently trading at $9,120.

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