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Debt Rattle October 30 2024

Oct 302024
 
 October 30, 2024  Posted by at 9:41 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  63 Responses »


Frans Masereel Montmartre 1925

 

• Trump Supporters Are ‘Garbage’ – Biden (RT)
• I’m The Opposite of a Nazi – Trump (RT)
• Whoopi: Trump Will Break Up Interracial Marriages, Deport The Non-Whites (MN)
• ‘World’s Most Accurate Economist’ Predicts US Election Outcome (RT)
• Musk Denies Allegations He Worked Illegally in America (ET)
• Chaos and Crime: Legacy of the Biden-Harris Border Policies (Mark Green)
• Steve Bannon Released From Prison After Serving 4 Months (ET)
• Secessionism and Polarization on Rise in US (Sp.)
• Jay Bhattacharya Receives Prestigious Award for Intellectual Freedom (Turley)
• Assange’s Father on Von Der Leyen: EU Falls to Bits Under ‘Frau Genocide’ (Sp.)
• When Evil Is Allowed In, Evil Stays (Paul Craig Roberts)
• Ex-President Warns of Growing Ukrainian Anger Over Military Draft (RT)
• Support For New UK PM collapses (RT)
• Delusions Of Adequacy: How British Ambassadors Became A Joke (Jay)
• A Heroic Preference For Self-Destruction Takes Hold In Israel (Alastair Crooke)
• Mass Industrial Strikes Begin In Germany (RT)

 

 

 

 

Lethal

Bret

Georgia

PA fraud

MEP
https://twitter.com/i/status/1851213588695826440

RFK

Elon

Tucker Dore

Jocelyn

 

 

 

 

He said it while Kamala was doing her final speech at the Ellipse. That got no attention because of it. Was that the intention?

• Trump Supporters Are ‘Garbage’ – Biden (RT)

The supporters of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump are “garbage,” outgoing US President Joe Biden said on Tuesday. He later claimed that he misspoke and meant to condemn a specific speaker at Trump’s recent Madison Square Garden rally. Biden made his comments during a Zoom call organized by the Hispanic advocacy group Voto Latino. He began by bringing up comedian Tony Hinchcliffe who made a joke on Sunday comparing Puerto Rico to “a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean.” “Just the other day, a speaker at [the Trump] rally called Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage,” Biden said, adding that Puerto Ricans are “good, decent honorable people.” “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters. His demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American,” Biden stressed. “It’s totally contrary to everything we’ve done, everything we’ve been.”

The president went on to accuse Trump of trying to “divide the country based on race,” and insisted that the Democratic candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, “will be a president for all of America.” Biden later took to X to clarify that he had “referred to the hateful rhetoric about Puerto Rico spewed by Trump’s supporter at his Madison Square Garden rally as garbage.” “That’s all I meant to say. The comments at that rally don’t reflect who we are as a nation,” Biden wrote. The president’s remarks were quickly condemned by Trump’s allies. “He’s talking about everyday Americans who love their country,” Republican Senator Marco Rubio said, urging the Biden campaign to apologize. “We are not garbage, we are patriots who love America,” Rubio said during a Trump rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

Hinchcliffe himself had accused Democrats of overreacting to his set at the Madison Square Garden event. “These people have no sense of humor,” he wrote on X on Sunday, claiming that the Harris team had taken the joke out of context “to make it seem racist.” Both Democrats and Republicans have frequently accused each other of hateful rhetoric and demonization. Some conservatives have drawn a parallel between Biden’s ‘garbage’ comment and that of Hillary Clinton, who described Trump supporters in 2016 as a “basket of deplorables.” Trump himself has been recently criticized for labeling his opponents an “enemy from within.”

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“Trump explained that his father taught him to never use either “Nazi” or “Hitler” as a slur..”

“..the US soldiers who took part in the Normandy landings in June 1944 would have been offended [..] If you think those brave men were fighting for an open border and sex change surgeries for illegal aliens, the proper term for you is ‘dips**t”

• I’m The Opposite of a Nazi – Trump (RT)

US Republican candidate Donald Trump has lashed out at Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign for comparing an event he held in New York’s Madison Square Garden last week with a rally of Nazi supporters at the same venue in 1939 at which speakers praised Hitler’s Germany. At the recent Trump event, comedian Tony Hinchcliffe compared Puerto Rico to a “floating island of garbage,” triggering a wave of rebuke from across the political spectrum. A senior advisor for the Republican campaign told the press that “this joke does not reflect the views of President Trump” and his team. Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz jumped on the gaffe, telling a rally in Henderson, Nevada of a “direct parallel to a big rally that happened in the mid-1930s at Madison Square Garden.”

Trump responded by telling a crowd of backers in Atlanta, Georgia: “The newest line from Kamala and her campaign is that everyone who isn’t voting for her is a Nazi. We’re Nazis.” “I’m not a Nazi. I’m the opposite of a Nazi,” he stated. Trump explained that his father taught him to never use either “Nazi” or “Hitler” as a slur. Both words, among many other insults, have been hurled his way, he said. “They call me everything from a mad genius looking to take over the world to a very very stupid person,” according to Trump. While proclamations that Trump is a new Hitler who seeks to abolish democracy are nothing new, such language was only recently adopted by the Harris campaign. The vice president publicly called her rival a “fascist” last week, citing the opinion of retired General John Kelly, who served as the chief of staff in the Trump administration.

Trump’s running mate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, meanwhile, said at the same rally that “I imagine that nearly every person in this room has a relative who served in the Second World War. Our families actually went and defeated the Nazis. To call us Nazis is a disgrace.” Vance claimed that the US soldiers who took part in the Normandy landings in June 1944 would have been offended by the policies proposed by the Democratic campaign. “If you think those brave men were fighting for an open border and sex change surgeries for illegal aliens, the proper term for you is ‘dips**t’,” he declared.

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Completely gone. As is Mika.

NOTE: JD Vance’s wife is “non-white”.

• Whoopi: Trump Will Break Up Interracial Marriages, Deport The Non-Whites (MN)

The media continues to make absurd assertions against Donald Trump in a desperate effort to derail his campaign just a week out from the election. The latest came via Whoopi Goldberg on The View who claimed that Trump plans to break up interracial married couples and deport the person who is not white. Not only that, but Golderberg also claimed that Trump would then “put the white guy with someone else.” It’s completely absurd claim that resides only in her warped reality. “He’s not gonna be – he’s not gonna say, ‘Oh, you’re with a white guy, I’m gonna keep you from being deported,’” Goldberg blurted. “No, he’s gonna deport you and put the white guy with someone else,” she ridiculously asserted.

“The man is out there!” she screamed wide eyed. Who is “out there” exactly? Who are the ones fomenting division? If this is what they’re like now, imagine what’s going to happen when Trump wins. As if that wasn’t enough batshit crazy, The View then wheeled out “Morning Joe” host Mika Brzezinski who literally started crying and saying all Trump supporters are Nazis. “These are the final hours,” she warned, adding “I come with such dire warnings, and I mean them from the bottom of my heart!” asserting that we are witnessing the “descent into fascism.”

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“..the most probable outcomes are: Trump victory; GOP clean sweep.”

• ‘World’s Most Accurate Economist’ Predicts US Election Outcome (RT)

Republican candidate Donald Trump will “most probably” win the US presidential election next month, economist Christophe Barraud, ranked by Bloomberg as the top forecaster of the American economy, has said. With one week to go until the election, Democratic candidate and current vice president Kamala Harris leads Trump by less than one percentage point, according to the New York Times, which has reported that the gap is narrowing and that battleground states remain “extraordinarily tight.” Making his prediction in a post on X (formerly Twitter) on Monday, Barraud wrote: “Looking at different metrics such as betting markets, polls, election modelers’ forecasts, financial markets, as of now, the most probable outcomes are: Trump victory; GOP clean sweep.”

Barraud is chief economist and strategist at Market Securities, and has been awarded the title of Top Forecaster of the US Economy by Bloomberg every year bar once since 2012. He also presented several possible scenarios of the US election outcome in an interview with Business Insider earlier this week. “A Trump win with a Republican sweep” and a majority in the Senate would enable the new president to implement tax cuts for corporations and households, as well as focus more on domestic rather than foreign policy, Barraud said. It would also have a short-term positive impact on US economic growth, creating a GDP boost between 2.1% and 2.3% in 2025, he added.

Among the other scenarios is a Trump victory with a divided Congress, according to the expert. This would limit his ability to cut taxes, forcing him to focus on foreign policy, likely by implementing trade restrictions and tariffs, Barraud said. The outcome would hurt global growth and slow the US economy in the long term, he added. If Harris wins with a divided Congress, there will be minimal changes to economic policies, according to Barraud. Earlier, Allan Lichtman, known as the “Nostradamus” of US elections for accurately predicting nine of the last ten presidential outcomes since 1984, said Harris will win the November 5 vote.

Trump Political Director

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“I was on a J-1 visa that transitioned to an H1-B. They know this, as they have all my records..”

• Musk Denies Allegations He Worked Illegally in America (ET)

Tech billionaire Elon Musk has denied allegations that he worked illegally in the United States in the early days of his career. An Oct. 27 report from The Washington Post alleges that Musk began his career working illegally in the U.S. for a period in 1995 while he was building a Silicon Valley startup, Zip2, which sold for about $300 million four years later. The outlet cited company documents, former business associates, and a past CEO of the company who said investors were worried that Musk could be deported if discovered. In a series of posts on social media, Musk denied the allegations. Responding to a video of President Joe Biden referencing the Post’s claims, Musk said he had authorization to work in the United States.

In another post, he provided more details about his immigration status. Musk says he was initially on a J-1 visa for international students to pursue academic training or research, then transitioned to an H1-B visa allowing temporary employment for specialty occupations. “I was on a J-1 visa that transitioned to an H1-B. They know this, as they have all my records,” Musk said. Musk was born in South Africa. At age 18, he immigrated to Canada after gaining Canadian citizenship through his Canadian-born mother. He attended Queen’s University at Kingston in Canada before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania. Musk moved to California in 1995 to attend Stanford University but dropped out after two days and co-founded Zip2 with his brother Kimbal. He became a U.S. citizen in 2002.

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Rep. Mark E. Green, chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, represents Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District.

• Chaos and Crime: Legacy of the Biden-Harris Border Policies (Mark Green)

Upon being inaugurated, one of the responsibilities Joe Biden and Kamala Harris assumed was to keep the American homeland secure and safeguard our sovereign borders. Nearly four years later, looking at the catastrophic, unprecedented border crisis that has unfolded on their watch, can anyone say with a straight face they have fulfilled that obligation? The answer, unequivocally, is no – and Americans are the ones paying the price. From the beginning, Biden, Harris, and other key officials in their administration were determined to end President Donald Trump’s effective border security policies – regardless of the consequences. They also refused to enforce long-standing immigration laws that administrations of both parties have enforced.

According to a new report by my committee, the incoming Biden-Harris team was warned by current and former Department of Homeland Security law enforcement during the presidential transition of what would happen if they embarked on this path – and yet, they chose to do so anyway. This dereliction of duty has led to disastrous outcomes in the realm of public safety. Under Biden and Harris’ leadership, our borders are wide open and ripe for exploitation, and interior enforcement has fallen off a cliff. The numbers bear this out. Since Fiscal Year 2021, the Border Patrol has recorded more than 55,000 arrests of illegal aliens with criminal histories, compared to just around 22,000 from FY2017-2020. Border Patrol Chief Jason Owens has said that “[h]ardened criminals often hide in smuggled migrant groups.” According to one Border Patrol deputy chief patrol agent, “any crime that can be committed, we do encounter people who have committed them.”

The problem of criminal aliens is not just limited to the border. Between FY2017-2020, Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested more than 480,000 aliens with criminal convictions or pending charges on their record. By contrast, in the first three years of the Biden-Harris administration, such arrests dropped to just around 165,000, despite the historic numbers of illegal aliens crossing the border. Likewise, the Trump administration removed more than 604,000 criminal aliens from FY2017-2020, while the Biden-Harris administration only removed around 158,000 from FY2021-2023 (ICE data for FY2024 has not yet been publicly released). Additionally, removals of gang members last year were down 40% from their peak during the Trump administration.

These numbers have dropped because the Biden-Harris administration tied the hands of law enforcement. According to guidance issued by DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in September 2021, ICE personnel cannot “rely on the fact of conviction … alone” in deciding whether to detain a suspected criminal alien, a statement that one federal judge ruled in 2022 “flips the presumption of detention on its head.” It should come as no surprise, then, that ICE’s Non-Detained Docket has exploded to well over 7.4 million individuals – up from just around 3.2 million at the end of FY2020. Among these millions are nearly 650,000 aliens with criminal backgrounds, including more than 13,000 convicted murderers, 15,000 with sexual assault convictions, and more than 62,000 convicted of assault.

The consequences of this policy of non-enforcement have been deadly. One need only ask the families of Laken Riley, Rachel Morin, Jocelyn Nungaray, and many others whose lives have been taken or otherwise irrevocably shattered at the hands of those here illegally.

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No, the US has no political prisoners…

• Steve Bannon Released From Prison After Serving 4 Months (ET)

Steve Bannon, who served as a top White House adviser early on in the Trump administration, was released from prison on Oct. 29 after serving four months for contempt of Congress. “The four months in federal prison not only didn’t break me, it empowered me,” he said during his “WarRoom” podcast. “I am more energized and more focused than I’ve ever been in my entire life.” Bannon, 70, was serving time in the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Connecticut. His release comes after a federal judge on Oct. 22 denied his request for early release. Bannon entered prison in July after the Supreme Court refused to take up his request to avoid his four-month sentence. When he began serving his sentence in July, Bannon called himself a “political prisoner.” “I am proud of going to prison,” he said at the time, adding that he was standing up to Attorney General Merrick Garland and what he called a “corrupt” Justice Department.

A jury convicted him in 2022 for two counts of contempt of Congress after he refused to comply with requests from the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol breach. Bannon, 70, claimed that former President Donald Trump had extended executive privilege over his testimony. Bannon’s attorney, David Schoen, told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that the district court had wrongly excluded evidence surrounding another attorney advising Bannon that he didn’t have to comply with the subpoenas because Trump had invoked that privilege. “At a bare minimum, it’s required that the defendant know or understand that his or her conduct was unlawful or wrong,” Schoen told the court in November 2023. “Mr. Bannon acted in the only way he believed and understood from his lawyer that the law permitted him … to behave in response to the subpoena.” The appeals court said that under its precedent, Bannon’s advice-of-attorney defense “is no defense at all.”

“As both this court and the Supreme Court have repeatedly explained, a contrary rule would contravene the text of the contempt statute and hamstring Congress’s investigatory authority,” Judge Brad Garcia said, writing for the court. “Because we have no basis to depart from that binding precedent, and because none of Bannon’s other challenges to his convictions have merit, we affirm.” Bannon faces other criminal charges in New York, where a judge has set Dec. 9 as the start date for the trial in his border fundraising case. Prosecutors allege that Bannon helped funnel more than $100,000 to a co-founder of the nonprofit WeBuildTheWall Inc. who was allegedly getting a secret salary after Bannon and others had promised donors that every dollar would be used to help construct a wall along the U.S.–Mexico border. Bannon has pleaded not guilty to money laundering and conspiracy charges, calling them “nonsense.” In 2021, Trump pardoned Bannon in a federal case similar to the one he’s currently facing from New York prosecutors.

That case was brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office, which also prosecuted Trump for alleged election interference involving a payment to adult performer Stephanie Clifford, known as Stormy Daniels. Trump similarly pleaded not guilty. Bannon entered prison the same month that another former Trump White House adviser, Peter Navarro, exited under similar circumstances. Navarro claimed executive privilege in defying a congressional subpoena, but D.C. District Judge Amit Mehta said he hadn’t shown enough evidence the privilege was asserted. Trump is facing potential prison time for his role in the events of Jan. 6, 2021, but has successfully avoided trial in Washington. His appeal on presidential immunity resulted in a landmark Supreme Court case and a lengthy delay of the pre-trial process for special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution of him.

Bannon

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“..It is “the overreach of the Biden-Harris administration”, starting from anti-Trump lawfare and ending with transgender propaganda, that has fuelled the division dramatically..”

• Secessionism and Polarization on Rise in US (Sp.)

The election integrity dispute surrounding the 2020 vote reportedly reinvigorated secessionist sentiment across the US which is continuing to grow ahead of election day. The Texas Nationalist movement, which advocates for Texas to secede from the US, is gaining momentum amid the southern border crisis. The Lone Star state is not the only one where activists are pushing for independence: around 25 US states are “ready” to leave, according to the Daniel Miller, the president of the secessionist Texas Nationalist Movement, in April. It is “the overreach of the Biden-Harris administration”, starting from anti-Trump lawfare and ending with transgender propaganda, that has fuelled the division dramatically, according to Michael Shannon, a Conservative political commentator and Newsmax columnist.

“Things like that and then the federal government mandating that men who think they are women can compete in women’s sport, arresting abortion protesters, people praying quietly in front of abortion mills, the political manhunt against the January 6th rioters that has extended even down to grandmothers, all of this really concerns Republicans, conservatives and I guess the few independents who still respect the rule of law. And so that’s what started this real division,” Shannon told Sputnik. The US political commentator noted that Texas secession is unlikely to happen any time soon. Still, he does not rule out that some red states could strive to leave the nation if Harris wins. “If there becomes a real split, it’ll probably start with Ron DeSantis in Florida, who will begin by refusing to cooperate with any federal agency that tries to, and this is assuming Harris wins, any federal agency that tries to impose these, frankly, totalitarian edicts from Washington,” Shannon noted.

The YouGov February poll indicated that 23% of Americans would support their state seceding from the US, whereas 28% would support a state other than their own leaving. While 51% of American respondents firmly oppose secession, 27% remain unsure. A separate YouGov survey shows that the divide across the nation comes along party lines: Democrats and Republicans think they have little in common, unlike their peers a decade ago. Last February, House Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene called for nothing short of a “national divorce” between Republican and Democratic states. The Trump-Harris race is very close, making the country almost evenly split, Aubrey Jewett, a political science professor at the University of Central Florida, told Sputnik. Bottom line is that one side is going to be very disappointed by the election results no matter who wins, according to the pundit.

“If Trump wins, you’re going to have almost 50% of the country where Democrats are very disappointed,” Jewett said. “And if Kamala Harris wins, you’re going to have all those Republican Trump fans, almost 50% of the country. They’re going to be very upset as well. I think in the short run, it’s definitely going to exacerbate, make it worse.” Therefore, the question is whether the winner would try to pull people together, or whether half of American voters will remain alienated, the academic noted, drawing attention to the fact that presently there is some big difference between Democratic and Republican states.

“We’ll have to see how the leaders on both sides react if they react as normal or the winner is gracious and the loser is gracious, and then maybe those partisan divides won’t be so bad. But if they do not, if they question the election results, or if the winner really rubs it in and says ‘okay, now I’m going to do everything I want and I’m only representing the people that voted for me’ – that’s not going to be great for American society overall.” The professor warns that partisan divisions might get worse potentially in the longer run.

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“It is equally right to condemn all those who sought to silence a scientist who is now being praised for resisting their campaign to silence him and others.”

• Jay Bhattacharya Receives Prestigious Award for Intellectual Freedom (Turley)

Few in the media seemed eager to attend a ceremony last week in Washington, D.C., where the prestigious American Academy of Sciences and Letters was awarding its top intellectual freedom award. The problem may have been the recipient: Stanford Professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. [Stanford Professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya] has spent years being vilified by the media over his dissenting views on the pandemic. As one of the signatories of the 2020 Great Barrington Declaration, he was canceled, censored, and even received death threats. That open letter called on government officials and public health authorities to rethink the mandatory lockdowns and other extreme measures in light of past pandemics. All the signatories became targets of an orthodoxy enforced by an alliance of political, corporate, media, and academic groups. Most were blocked on social media despite being accomplished scientists with expertise in this area. It did not matter that positions once denounced as “conspiracy theories” have been recognized or embraced by many.

Some argued that there was no need to shut down schools, which has led to a crisis in mental illness among the young and the loss of critical years of education. Other nations heeded such advice with more limited shutdowns (including keeping schools open) and did not experience our losses. Others argued that the virus’s origin was likely the Chinese research lab in Wuhan. That position was denounced by the Washington Post as a “debunked” coronavirus “conspiracy theory.” The New York Times Science and Health reporter Apoorva Mandavilli called any mention of the lab theory “racist.” Federal agencies now support the lab theory as the most likely based on the scientific evidence. Likewise, many questioned the efficacy of those blue surgical masks and supported natural immunity to the virus — both positions were later recognized by the government. Others questioned the six-foot rule used to shut down many businesses as unsupported by science. In congressional testimony, Dr. Anthony Fauci recently admitted that the 6-foot rule “sort of just appeared” and “wasn’t based on data.”

Yet not only did the rule result in heavily enforced rules (and meltdowns) in public areas, the media further ostracized dissenting critics. Again, Fauci and other scientists did little to stand up for these scientists or call for free speech to be protected. As I discuss in my new book, “The Indispensable Right,” the result is that we never really had a national debate on many of these issues and the result of massive social and economic costs. I spoke at the University of Chicago with Bhattacharya and other dissenting scientists in the front row a couple of years ago. After the event, I asked them how many had been welcomed back to their faculties or associations since the recognition of some of their positions. They all said that they were still treated as pariahs for challenging the groupthink culture. Now the scientific community is recognizing the courage shown by Bhattacharya and others with its annual Robert J. Zimmer Medal for Intellectual Freedom.

So what about all of those in government, academia, and the media who spent years hounding these scientists? Biden Administration officials and Democratic members targeted Bhattacharya and demanded his censorship. For example, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) attacked Bhattacharya and others who challenged the official narrative during the pandemic. Krishnamoorthi expressed outrage that the scientists were even allowed to testify as “a purveyor of COVID-19 misinformation.” Journalists and columnists also supported the censorship and blacklisting of these scientists. In the Los Angeles Times, columnist Michael Hiltzik decried how “we’re living in an upside-down world” because Stanford allowed these scientists to speak at a scientific forum. He was outraged that, while “Bhattacharya’s name doesn’t appear in the event announcement,” he was an event organizer. Hiltzik also wrote a column titled “The COVID lab leak claim isn’t just an attack on science, but a threat to public health.”

Then there are those lionized censors at Twitter who shadow-banned Bhattacharya. As former CEO Parag Agrawal generally explained, the “focus [was] less on thinking about free speech … [but[ who can be heard.” None of this means that Bhattacharya or others were right in all of their views. Instead, many of the most influential voices in the media, government, and academia worked to prevent this discussion from occurring when it was most needed. There is still a debate over Bhattacharya’s “herd immunity” theories, but there is little debate over the herd mentality used to cancel him. The Academy was right to honor Bhattacharya. It is equally right to condemn all those who sought to silence a scientist who is now being praised for resisting their campaign to silence him and others.

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“If they’re worrying about Julian Assange, well, they ought to get a new job..”

• Assange’s Father on Von Der Leyen: EU Falls to Bits Under ‘Frau Genocide’ (Sp.)

The European Union is “falling to bits” under the leadership of the head of the European Commission Ursula Van der Leyen, who is commonly called “Frau Genocide,” John Shipton, an Australian activist and the father of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, said in an interview with Sputnik. “The EU is falling to bits. Everybody within the EU is squabbling. The commissioner of the EU, Van der Leyen, we call her Frau Genocide – it is very popular. I mean, everybody despises her. She’s an authoritarian figure. In Germany the GDP [growth] last year was 0.2%. That’s not even 1%, it’s two-tenths of 1%,” Shipton noted. In December 2023, Clare Daly, a member of the European Parliament (MEP) from Ireland, called von der Leyen “Frau Genocide” and said that she was responsible for the escalation of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Immediately after the escalation of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, von der Leyen, who took a pro-Israeli position and for some time ignored the deterioration of the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip and the deaths of civilians, was harshly criticized in the media, which accused her of “double standards,” recalling her statements on the conflict in Ukraine, and warned against making statements on behalf of the entire EU. Later, the European Commission press service and the European External Action Service had to correct von der Leyen’s one-sided statements, explaining that the opinion expressed “is her personal and does not reflect the position of the entire EU.” The United States does not like and does not accept the truth about itself, John Shipton, an Australian activist and the father of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, said in an interview with Sputnik.

In July, Assange was released from a British prison after many years of imprisonment and returned to Australia following a plea agreement with the US authorities. According to Shipton, Washington “took very strong measures against Julian for publishing the truth.” “And also they put Chelsea Manning in jail for 35 years. And Edward Snowden had to have asylum in the Russian Federation. So it is clear that they do take very strong exceptions to the truth about themselves being published. They don’t like the truth about themselves,” the activist said about the US actions. However, Shipton said Washington had “too many problems” to continue worrying about the Assange case. “If they’re worrying about Julian Assange, well, they ought to get a new job,” Shipton advised the US authorities.

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“Humankind, said T.S. Eliot, “cannot bear very much reality.”

• When Evil Is Allowed In, Evil Stays (Paul Craig Roberts)

On two previous occasions Israel sent its vaunted army into southern Lebanon only to be driven out by the Arab militia, Hezbollah, operating without tanks, without an air force, without air defense. It appears that it has now happened again. Israel has been stopped cold on the ground, causing the Israeli defense minister to announce an end to the ground operations. The Israeli Army is only good at killing women and children from the air, as in Gaza. Israel’s war against Hezbollah has been replaced with Israeli air strikes against civilian residential areas in Beirut, which provides more evidence that the only function of the Israeli military is to murder women and children from the air. The obvious conclusion is that the Israeli military doesn’t fight; it commits war crimes against civilians. The reason civilian neighborhoods in Beirut, the capital of Lebanon and not Hezbollah territory, are being destroyed from the air is that Iran and Russia permit it by not providing air defense systems to Lebanon.

Iran and Russia are “maintaining peace” by permitting Israel to slaughter Lebanese women and children and destroy schools and hospitals from the air. It is a paradox that Washington, Putin, and Iran are equally indifferent to Israel’s slaughter from the air of civilians in Gaza and civilians in Lebanon. Any one of the three countries could stop the murder of civilians, but not one of them will do anything. Putin has placed his bets on BRICS, but that is an economic organization that might or might not succeed. Its success is handicapped by the fact that the Russian and Chinese economists are indoctrinated by the American neoliberals, and, therefore, are not merely worthless to their countries but positively harmful. If Washington wanted the Israelis’ murder of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians to stop, Washington would stop providing Israel with the weapons. Clearly, Israel is doing what Washington wants.

But why do Russia and Iran want Palestinian and Lebanese civilians to be massacred when either country can stop it? It is beginning to look as if it is not merely Washington and Israel that Satan has in his grasp, but Russia and Iran as well. Every time Putin gets off-focused from Russia’s only threat–Washington–he finds himself with a mess on this hands. With Putin focused on the Olympics in China, Washington sent the Georgian army into South Ossetia. With Putin focused on the Sochi Olympics, Washington overthrew the Ukrainian government and brought war to Russia. Now Putin is focused on BRICS and Washington is stirring up a color revolution in Georgia to regain the former Russian province as another beached against Russia. The opposition parties and the President of Georgia do not accept the election results, which are favorable to Russia.

I think that Putin by refusing to use power is losing credibility. I don’t think Putin understands the ideological character of the Democrat Party and the ideological woke liberal-left that controls it. If the Democrats manage to retain control over the government, I don’t think Putin is prepared for the consequences. Humankind, said T.S. Eliot, “cannot bear very much reality.” That is as true of Russians as of Americans. Reality conflicts with hopes, aspirations, and plans, and when ignored upsets all of them. Putin’s Ukraine conflict which has greatly widened, the brewing color revolution in Georgia supported by Washington, and Iran’s demonization and isolation are all self-inflicted disasters caused by ignoring reality.

When powerful countries such as Russia, China, and Iran stand aside from genocide, they destroy their own reputations. The world is crying out for someone with the means to stand up for humanity, for justice, for truth, and there are no takers. In Gaza children undergo amputations without anesthesia. The little water available is polluted. Everyone is sick. Washington keeps sending the weapons used from the air against purely civilian populations. Disease and starvation will finish the job for the Americans and the Israelis. It is America that has enabled this genocide. And Americans, in their insouciant existence, think they are the salt of the earth.

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They’re calling up another 160,000.

• Ex-President Warns of Growing Ukrainian Anger Over Military Draft (RT)

Ukrainian society is growing increasingly resentful of Kiev’s mobilization campaign and is now plagued by divisions, former President Leonid Kuchma has said. In an interview with Interfax on Monday, Kuchma, who held office between 1994 and 2005 and led Kiev’s delegation during talks to settle the Donbass crisis between 2014 and 2020, lamented that Ukraine’s internal unity has eroded since the escalation of hostilities with Russia in February 2022. According to Kuchma, the army, society and the leadership initially managed to set their differences aside and became a “monolith.” “Even in politics, the infighting disappeared for a while. Today it is no longer the case,” he said, adding that Ukrainian elites “have renewed the rat race of their petty interests.” In wider society, there is also dissatisfaction “with the army’s demands for increased mobilization,” Kuchma added.

“The government blames society for not being ready to stand up for the state, while society urges the authorities to lead by example and start with themselves. There are many such contradictions,” he said. The former Ukrainian leader said that while the country remains “united by hatred of the enemy,” there is “less mutual understanding” among people and that this “postpones victory” for Kiev. Ukraine’s foreign policy is beset by a similar problem, Kuchma claimed. A kind of pluralism appeared in our global communication,” he stated, contrasting it with the early stages of the conflict, when Kiev signaled it would “fight to the end” and called for help from nations around the world. This comes from a need to hone separate narratives for different international partners depending on how hawkish they are on Russia, Kuchma said.

“Some are defenders of fundamental Western values, others are supporters of ‘business as usual’ with Russia. Some are determined ‘hawks’, others are cautious ‘peacemakers’,” Kuchma said. Kiev announced general mobilization after the escalation of hostilities with Russia, barring most men aged between 18 and 60 from leaving the country. This spring, faced with mounting losses, Kiev lowered the draft age from 27 to 25, and significantly tightened mobilization rules. Videos showing recruitment officers attempting to catch eligible men in various public places, often resulting in violent clashes, have since appeared online. Ukrainian frontline troops interviewed by Western media consistently complain of a lack of manpower, leading to long rotation, extreme exhaustion, and gradual retreat under Russian pressure.

Read more …

“..the largest post-election drop in approval rating of any British prime minister in modern history..”

Took him just 4 months. Who’s next?

Not long ago, Elon Musk predicted civil war in the UK. To what extent was he wrong?

• Support For New UK PM collapses (RT)

Keir Starmer has suffered the largest post-election drop in approval rating of any British prime minister in modern history, according to a recent poll. Starmer is now more unpopular than his predecessor, Rishi Sunak, was when he resigned in July. Starmer rode to power in July on the back of a landslide general election victory for the Labour Party. Seeking to distance himself from the leftism of the party’s former leader, Jeremy Corbyn, Starmer promised to drag Labour back to the centrism of Tony Blair, and to deliver “good government, national security, secure borders, and economic stability.” Less than four months into his premiership, Starmer’s approval rating has plummeted from a post-election high of +11 to a dismal low of -38, according to a survey of 1,012 adults carried out by More in Common. This 49-point drop in approval is “unprecedented” in modern history, More in Common Director Luke Tryl told the Telegraph on Monday.

According to the poll, Starmer is less popular than Rishi Sunak was when he resigned as prime minister and leader of the Conservative Party following July’s election. Sunak had an approval rating of -37 when his party was wiped out by Labour, which has since risen to -31. Blair enjoyed a +60 approval rating following Labour’s landslide 1997 election win, which took three years to fall into negative territory. Tryl told The Telegraph that two key decisions have cratered Starmer’s popularity. “If you ask what people have noticed, by a country mile it is the decision on the winter fuel allowance and the early release of prisoners,” he explained, adding that controversy over Labour donor Waheed Alli’s gifts to senior officials, including Starmer, has also dented the PM’s standing.

Last month, Starmer’s government tightened eligibility rules for winter fuel payments, effectively denying around 10 million pensioners payments of up to £300 ($390) toward heating their homes. Days earlier, it was announced that thousands of prisoners, including convicted killers and kidnappers, would be released after serving just 40% of their sentences, in a bid to ease prison overcrowding. As images of career criminals celebrating their release and publicly thanking Starmer emerged, the PM said that he “shares the public’s anger,” but insisted that “there was no choice.”

Meanwhile, hundreds of people have been jailed for taking part in anti-Islam and anti-immigration riots across the UK in late July and early August. More than two dozen people have been handed prison sentences for online offenses, including a Conservative councillor’s wife who received 31 months behind bars for making X posts calling for migrant accommodation to be burned down. The More in Common poll was published ahead of Starmer’s first budget on Wednesday, which is expected to include tax hikes to fund healthcare and housing spending. Around 68% of respondents said they are worried about the budget, while 70% said that overall, “things are getting worse” in the UK.

Read more …

“The shocking part is how the journalists comply with this draconian system which would have made Stalin glow with pride.”

• Delusions Of Adequacy: How British Ambassadors Became A Joke (Jay)

The ugly incident at the airport in Moscow with the British deputy ambassador to Russia grabbing at journalists’ cameras and even ripping a press badge off one should be seen as a message to all of us, when talking about British diplomacy. It’s dead. Tom Dodd’s embarrassing few minutes, which will surely haunt him for the rest of his career, could not be a more damning example of what diplomacy was once and what it is now. Like international journalism, diplomacy is barely a shadow of its former self and those who work as diplomats are third grade at best, cardboard cut outs for their predecessors 30 years ago who really had clout and affected how the world operated. The new generation of British diplomats, like Dodd, are not only entirely ineffective and a waste of space and taxpayers’ money but they also come with a number of peculiarities which you wouldn’t normally expect.

Narcissism, arrogance and delusion are the new qualities of this breed and it was all there to see in the video clip of Dodd who was absolutely outraged that journalists could actually approach him with questions. Of course there is quite a great deal of tension between Russia and the UK at the moment as Dodd is now part of a team “inspecting the work of the country’s mission in Moscow in the aftermath of the spy scandal”, reports RT. In mid-September, six British embassy staff were declared persona non grata over their alleged involvement in “subversive activities” and espionage. Dodd is confused though. He broke the unwritten rules of the foreign office. Typically, ambassadors in Africa and Middle East countries manipulate local media for their own needs and generally treat local journalists like their personal servants. Of course, they avoid international journalists like the plague, especially their own.

They basically go native and align themselves with the regime’s own strategy on handling local press. But this ‘rule’ cannot apply in Moscow where, apart from the press there having more freedoms that your average British hack, the UK is considered practically an enemy of the state. And so Dodd was lost by the ambush situation where his requirements as a ‘new generation’ foreign office twerp didn’t extend to dealing with press with tricky questions. His predecessor of 30 years ago would have revelled in the opportunity to deal with the questions with a certain élan and composure. Yet it’s narcissism which is the weakest point which shows. It’s this belief that the individual themselves is the most important subject which shames Britain as a once glorious country, now making it look like a failed state which no longer has any relevance on the world stage.

Todd belongs to a generation of diplomats who consider journalists more or less as stenographers who dutifully write what you tell them to write, on the occasion, and remain silent for the rest of the period. Like rats in a basket which you occasionally shake to amuse yourself. And yet you can hardly blame him. Britain’s own press is such a shambles these days and so embedded in the government’s annals that you can hardly call it the fourth estate any more. Any foreign correspondent who emails a question to the foreign office media team will tell you that. When a reply comes, it is Sir Humphry gobbledygook language which doesn’t even tackle your question. On many occasions, in my own experience, the FCO plainly lies to journalists. That isn’t what is shocking. The shocking part is how the journalists comply with this draconian system which would have made Stalin glow with pride.

The system, which you would normally associate with a regime in West Africa, is supported by the journalists themselves. And Dodd is part of this system. Corrupt, outdated, backward delusional view about Britain and how it should deal with the press. But it’s a pattern which I have noticed is quite typical of British ambassadors. While I was in Lebanon, there was a British ambassador there who agreed to an interview with me. When I didn’t do the ‘local’ thing of writing a shining piece on his achievements but instead wrote objectively about him, the same ambassador turned on me. Tom Fletcher, an effeminate narcissist who posed for a photo shoot as James Bond while ambassador and spent most of his time filling social media with photos of himself and super models with swollen upper lips, defamed me to a group of MEPs who visited Beirut, trying to destroy my credibility – as an act of childish petulance for the interview which touched upon his vanity and lack of knowledge of the region.

Read more …

“Netanyahu, Gallant and Halevi are gambling with Israel’s very existence… they never think for a moment about the day after..”

• A Heroic Preference For Self-Destruction Takes Hold In Israel (Alastair Crooke)

The war without limits ideology – purely theoretically – could be a thinkable solution: Ron Dermer, a former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. and confidant of Netanyahu, was asked a few months earlier what he saw as the solution to the Palestinian conflict. He replied that both the West Bank and Gaza must be totally dis-armed – “yes”. Yet more important than disarmament, Dermer said, was the absolute necessity that all Palestinians be “de-radicalised”. (This has now been extended to the whole region that must be ‘de-radicalised’). When asked to expand, Dermer pointed approvingly to the outcome of WW2: The Germans were defeated, but more plainly the Japanese were fully ‘de-radicalised’ at the end of the war. ‘De-radicalisation’ therefore means installing a Leviathan-esque “despotism that reduces the majority to total powerlessness, including spiritual, intellectual and moral powerlessness.

The total Leviathan is a unique, absolute and unlimited power, spiritual and temporal, over other humans”, as Dr Henri Hude has observed. Thus, as postmodern culture sinks into the inhuman and favours the Leviathan – with the total annihilation of other peoples and the suppression of their separate identities – the question arises, could ‘war without limits’ work? Could such terror impose on the Middle East an unconditional surrender “that would allow it to change profoundly, militarily, politically and culturally, and to transform as a satellite within Pax Americana?” Hude goes on to note, “The conditions demanded of Japan by the USA were exorbitant, and it was to be expected that Japan would put up a tremendous resistance. The atrocious use of the bomb broke this resistance”. The clear response that Dr Hude gives in his book Philosophie de la Guerre is that war without limits cannot be the solution, because it cannot deliver long-lasting ‘deterrence’ or de-radicalisation.

“On the contrary, it is the most certain cause of war. Ceasing to be rational, despising opponents who are more rational than it is, arousing opponents who are even less rational than it is. The Leviathan will fall; and even before its fall, no security is assured”. The latter gives two insights as to how Hude’s analysis might apply to today’s wars: One is that whenever postmodern culture capsizes into ‘necessary’ violence (which it hyper-culpabilises, since it prioritises life, rather than suffering), it can only justify the violence through evoking a more than absolute evil – the demonized enemy. Secondly, Hude identifies such extreme ‘will to power’ – without limits – as necessarily containing the psyche of self-destruction within it too. For the Leviathan to function, it must remain rational and powerful. Ceasing to be rational, despising opponents who are more rational, and angering opponents who are less rational than it is itself, the Leviathan then must fall.

One respected military observer – Maj. Gen. (Res.) Itzhak Brik, a former senior IDF commander and a former long-serving IDF ombudsman – has warned again of Israel’s looming fall: Netanyahu, Gallant and Halevi are gambling with Israel’s very existence… they never think for a moment about the day after. They are disconnected from reality and exercise no judgment … When the catastrophe strikes, it will already be too late … These three megalomaniacs imagine that they are capable of destroying both Hamas and Hizbullah and ending the ayatollahs’ regime in Iran … They want to accomplish everything through military pressure, but in the end, they won’t accomplish anything. They have put Israel on the brink of two impossible situations [–] the outbreak of a full-fledged war in the Middle East, [and secondly] continuing the war of attrition. In either situation, Israel won’t be able to survive for long.

Only a diplomatic agreement has the power to extricate us from the quagmire into which these three men have dragged us. Israel teeters at the edge: It doesn’t have the necessary forces; it doesn’t have a culture of tolerating persistent suffering; and it will not be able to impose itself over the plurality of resistance that it faces. Reason already is cast aside, its opponents are ridiculed: a ‘heroic’ preference for self-destruction has taken hold. ‘Masada’ is being spoken of.

Read more …

No Russian gas.

• Mass Industrial Strikes Begin In Germany (RT)

German trade union IG Metall on Tuesday launched strikes in the nation’s metal and electrical industries in an attempt to win higher wages, German media has reported. The action comes amid growing concern about the health of the EU’s largest manufacturing economy. According to the tabloid Bild, employees began walking off the job during the night shift, including at Volkswagen’s plant in the city of Osnabruck, where workers worry the plant may be closed. Elsewhere, around 200 employees of the battery manufacturer Clarios went on strike in Hanover, Lower Saxony, carrying torches and union flags, the outlet wrote. Meanwhile, in Hildesheim, Lower Saxony, around 400 employees, including those at Jensen GmbH, KSM Castings Group, Robert Bosch, Waggonbau Graaff and ZF CV Systems Hannover, have reportedly halted operations.

Protests are also expected at BMW and Audi plants in Bavaria. Work is to be stopped nationwide during the course of the day, the tabloid wrote. ”The fact that production lines are now at a standstill and offices are empty is the responsibility of the employers,” IG Metall’s negotiator and district manager Thorsten Groger stated, as quoted by Deutsche Welle. IG Metall is demanding a 7% pay raise compared to the 3.6% raise over a period of 27 months offered by employers’ associations, due to soaring inflation. The companies call such demands unrealistic. The mass strikes come as Volkswagen announced on Monday it would close “at least” three of its ten plants in Germany, lay off tens of thousands of staff and downsize remaining plants in the country.

The measures are part of a cost-cutting drive, the conglomerate said earlier. Oliver Blume, chief executive of the VW Group, has cited a “difficult economic environment” and “failing competitiveness of the German economy” as factors behind the decision. The German Association of the Automotive Industry warned last year that the country was “dramatically losing its international competitiveness” due to soaring energy costs. A recent survey by the VDA auto industry association suggested that the reshuffling of the German car industry could lead to 186,000 job losses by 2035, roughly a quarter of which have already occurred.

Read more …

 

 

 

YMCA

 

 

Little things
https://twitter.com/i/status/1851182802735108492

 

 

Turbo cancers
https://twitter.com/i/status/1851199741276602449

 

 

Kiseki

 

 

 

 

Support the Automatic Earth in wartime with Paypal, Bitcoin and Patreon.

 

 

 

 

 

Debt Rattle October 7 2023

Oct 072023
 
 October 7, 2023  Posted by at 9:15 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  53 Responses »


Fra Filippo Lippi The Virgin Mary 1450-65

 

• Biden Calls for More War, Putin Calls for Peaceful World (SCF Op-ed)
• And So It Begins… The Great Unravelling (Finian Cunningham)
• Putin and the Magic Multipolar Mountain (Pepe Escobar)
• Comes the Dancing Skeleton (Kunstler)
• US Escalation Pushes Russia To Take Extreme Measures – Lukashenko (TASS)
• Ukrainian Forces Acknowledge Total Dependence On US (TASS)
• Juncker Spreads ‘Russian Narrative’ – Zelensky (RT)
• Von der Leyen Backtracks On Ukraine Pledge (RT)
• Backing Ukraine Bid for EU Membership Simply Suicidal – Polish Journo (Sp.)
• McCarthy Mutiny Reveals Cracks in Constellation of Pro-Trump Universe (RCW)
• Deprogramming the “Deplorables”: Hillary Clinton (Turley)
• Hunter Biden Claims Immunity, Seeks Dismissal of Federal Gun Charges (Sp.)
• Trump Accused of Leaking Submarine Secrets (RT)

 

 

 

 

Putin: who even are you?
https://twitter.com/i/status/1709967555668881522

Putin Germany

 

 

 

 

Macgregor

 

 

Biden past

 

 

 

 

Yank my licence
https://twitter.com/i/status/1709882701799428571

 

 

Mar-a-Lago 1986

Greg Price: Just so we’re keeping score: The Biden DOJ is suing SpaceX for not hiring refugees, the DOJ and SEC are investigating Tesla, the EEOC is also suing Tesla, the FTC demanded @elonmusk hand over internal Twitter comms and the SEC is now investigating Elon’s purchase of Twitter.

 

 

Travis_in_Flint: Judge Engoron has ordered that Trump and members of his family must disclose all entities they own to a court monitor. The court monitor is Bill Clinton appointed former Judge Barbara Jones. NY AG Leticia James and Judge Engoron are able to work together and completely take control over the assets of Donald Trump and his two sons for a simple civil infraction when he doesn’t even get a day in court or present and defense. This is the worst case of injustice we’ve witnessed in this country. If they can do this to a former President and his family, imagine what they’ll do to you!

leslibless: Biased NYC Dem Judge Arthur Engoron, who is presiding over Trumps civil trial, just blocked Trump & his family from transferring their money or property to any entities. They also must provide a list by next week of every entity they own and to ‘what extent any third party may have in ownership or interests of their entities.’ This is a complete abomination of the Justice system!

 

 

 

 

“The Kiev regime – headed by a Nazi-saluting Jewish puppet president – has committed atrocity after atrocity to smear Russia, thanks to the indulgence of the Western propaganda media.”

• Biden Calls for More War, Putin Calls for Peaceful World (SCF Op-ed)

Ukraine’s slaughter is the culmination of this historical destructive process. The association between Western self-proclaimed “democracies” and a corrupt NeoNazi regime in Kiev is the ultimate organic outcome of the fascism that lies at the heart of Western imperialism, with its pseudo-liberal face. The present conflict in Ukraine is the historical nemesis of Western imperialist power. The Second World War was but a punctuation mark that lapsed into the Cold War and eventually its revival which the world is now being subjected to again. President Putin presented a positive and hopeful vision of the world this week during a speech delivered at the Valdai Discussion Club in Sochi. He portrayed “harmonious coexistence” and peace based on principles of equality and justice between nations. In that regard, Putin was reiterating the foundational vision of the United Nations established in 1945 following the devastation of the Second World War.

“The Ukraine crisis is not a territorial conflict,” said Putin. “The issue is much broader and more fundamental and is about the principles underlying the new international order.” Biden and his Western vassals and their mendacious media keep repeating the baseless lie that Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine is an “unprovoked aggression”. This narrative is a brazen denial of the history of the CIA-backed coup in Kiev in 2014 and the NATO weaponization of a NeoNazi regime that was killing ethnic Russians in former Ukraine for nine years. The Kiev regime – headed by a Nazi-saluting Jewish puppet president – has committed atrocity after atrocity to smear Russia, thanks to the indulgence of the Western propaganda media. The Bucha massacre in March 2022, the missile attacks on Kramatorsk in April 2022, Poland in November 2022, and in Konstantinovka last month.

This week saw a massacre of 51 people in the village of Hroza in Kharkov region that was immediately blamed on Russia, but which has the hallmarks of another Kiev false-flag provocation. This is the kind of filthy and fiendish regime that epitomizes the U.S.-led NATO war machine. Putin laid out clearly how a peaceful international order can be achieved by repudiating “artificial geopolitical associations” and Cold War-style “blocs” being “forced onto the world”. “Lasting peace will only be possible when everyone feels safe and secure, understands that their opinions are respected and that there is a balance in the world where no one can unilaterally force or compel others to live or behave as a hegemon pleases even when it contradicts the sovereignty, genuine interests, traditions, or customs of peoples and countries,” said the Russian president.

Putin added: “Russia was, is and will be one of the foundations of this new world system, ready for constructive interaction with everyone who strives for peace and prosperity, but ready for tough opposition against those who profess the principles of dictatorship and violence. We believe that pragmatism and common sense will prevail, and a multipolar world will be established.” The world is literally changing before our eyes and by our own hands, as Putin also noted. The emergence of a multipolar world, the G20, the BRICS+, and so on, are the fulfilment of a vision for international peace, justice, sovereignty, equality and development.

Read more …

“When Uncle Sam does a runner, and he will, the game is finally up for him and all his vassals. The great unravelling of Western imperialist power is underway and is accelerating.”

• And So It Begins… The Great Unravelling (Finian Cunningham)

The biggest fear among America’s vassals in Europe, Canada, Japan and elsewhere is that Washington will abruptly jettison the failed proxy war in Ukraine. Not out of principle, but rather political expediency, thereby leaving them high and dry. The United States and the European Union have committed up to $200 billion in military and other economic aid to Ukraine since the conflict with Russia erupted 20 months ago in February 2022. Europe has been impacted much more badly than the U.S. from the loss of Russia’s energy supplies and from the influx of millions of Ukrainian refugees. Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign policy chief, asserts that Europe will continue to support Ukraine even if the United States were to halt its aid. Borrell is indulging in delusional fantasy.

Already European NATO members are becoming leery and reluctant about the endless financial largesse doled out to prop up the corrupt Kiev regime. Hungary and now Slovakia are vowing to cut off the weapons supply and other funding. Mass protests are occurring in Germany and other EU countries against the NATO-fueled war. European political leaders are increasingly seen as feckless Yes-Men for Washington and betraying their national interests. Biden and the warmongering U.S. establishment are deeply committed to the proxy war against Russia. The war function is the engine of American capitalism and imperialist ambitions. But if the economy is fundamentally broken – and it surely is with an unsustainable $33 trillion national debt – the reality of bankruptcy and political/public opposition becomes untenable.

Biden’s “assurances” to the NATO vassals are embarrassingly worthless after he was blindsided by the ensuing chaos in his own Congress. The American president is in no position to pledge anything. The Pentagon and the European militaries are also complaining they don’t have any more weapons to give to Ukraine, their arsenals having been depleted by reckless donations to the squandering, incompetent Kiev regime. The already nervy Europeans and other NATO partners are no doubt having flashbacks of the treacherous way that Biden and Washington abruptly and unilaterally pulled the plug on Afghanistan. The NATO allies were stunned by that fast move to exit the quagmire. Biden didn’t even give them a heads-up, never mind consulting with them.

For eight decades after the Second World War, NATO and later the European Union were always a handy vehicle for American imperialism. The vassals were held together by the relative strength of the U.S. empire. That empire is now unravelling from endless wars, bankruptcy and endemic corruption in Washington. The last episode of the historic failure is being played out in the fraudulent proxy war in Ukraine – sold to the Western public by the lying mainstream media as yet another “noble cause” to allegedly defend democracy (how absurd!). The ultimate degeneracy is evident from the “moralizing”, “superior” Western powers being found in bed with a Nazi regime. And along with that degeneracy, financial debts are off the charts and a grievous insult to the onerous democratic needs of the Western public. When Uncle Sam does a runner, and he will, the game is finally up for him and all his vassals. The great unravelling of Western imperialist power is underway and is accelerating.

Read more …

“There’s no situation when something can threaten the existence of the Russian state. No sane person would consider the use of nuclear weapons against Russia.”

• Putin and the Magic Multipolar Mountain (Pepe Escobar)

It was clear to the overwhelming majority of analysts at Valdai that the concept of Russian civilization is an “existential challenge” to the collective West. Especially because it includes, historically, the radical universality of the Soviet Union. Now is time for Russian thinkers to work hard on refining the internationalist aspect. Alexander Prokhanov came up with another startling formulation. He compared the Russian dream with a cathedral on the top of a hill, whereas the Anglo-Saxon dream is a fortress on the top of the hill, engaged in constant surveillance. And if you misbehave, you “will receive some Tomahawks”.

The conclusion: “We will always be in conflict with the West”. So what? The future, as I discussed off the record with Grandmaster Sergey Karaganov, one of the founders of Valdai, is in the East. And it was Karaganov who arguably posed the most challenging question to Putin. He stressed how nuclear deterrence does not work anymore. So should we lower the nuclear threshold?” Putin replied, “I am well aware of your position. Let me remind you the Russian military doctrine has two reasons for the possible use of nuclear weapons. The first is if nuclear weapons are used against us – as retaliation. The response is absolutely unacceptable for any potential aggressor.

Because from the moment a missile launch is detected, no matter where it comes from – anywhere in the world’s oceans or from any territory – in a retaliatory strike, so many, so many hundreds of our missiles appear in the air that no enemy will have a chance of survival, and in several directions at once.” The second reason is “a threat to the existence of the Russian state even if only conventional weapons are used.” And then came the clincher – actually a veiled message to the characters whose dream is “victory” via a first strike: “Do we need to change that? Why? I see no point. There’s no situation when something can threaten the existence of the Russian state. No sane person would consider the use of nuclear weapons against Russia.”

Read more …

“..the sobering moment when all the preposterous, mendacious, criminally insane propositions of recent years stand nakedly exposed. That’s when “Joe Biden” begins to be seen as a dancing skeleton.”

• Comes the Dancing Skeleton (Kunstler)

This Halloween month, America looks super-busy preparing for the death of something, maybe itself. Surely many now live in terror of the malevolent blob that the US government has become, led by a very paragon of ghouls, “Joe Biden.” This week, the blob declared in a “leak” to Newsweek magazine, that supporters of Donald Trump, the Golden Golem of Greatness, are now officially deemed to be enemies of the state. So, the blob that has lately subsumed the state, explicitly targets Trumpists (the MAGA crowd) for wholesale persecution, cancellation, de-personing, and incarceration. That is, opponents of the blob regime organizing for the coming election will be systematically neutralized and / or liquidated, taken off the game-board one way or another, by any means necessary.

The blobistas would do well to take heed of those Halloween lawn displays. A stupendous, howling rage is building across this land in revolt against the blob’s monumental insults to a once proud and productive people. Soon, that plastic totem army of stock mythological monsters cavorting in the front yards will be superseded by real flesh-and-blood Americans aiming to shred the blob and scatter its quivering tatters to the four winds — as John F. Kennedy once remarked of the CIA in 1962, before it killed him in retaliation.

Coincidentally, a scion of the JFK generation now running for president on an as-yet-to-be-specified independent party seeks to do exactly what his uncle promised to do. As you gaze on this developing battlefield, you will now see two sizable armies marshaling against the unholy hosts of blobbery — Mr. Trump’s MAGAs and Bobby Kennedy’s emerging division representing the old stoic virtues betrayed by vicious blob tyrants. The plausible outcomes on this battlefield are in flux thirteen months before the election. But it looks a little like the blob is outflanked; hence, its growing desperation.

The psychodrama in the House of Representatives this week looked like a possible inflection point in the blob’s war against the American people. Mr. Gaetz evicted the quisling Speaker Kevin McCarthy in a rather brave gambit, opening up the possibility of unifying his party against the programmatic wickedness of the post-Covid-19 era — the suicidal spending, the insane and unnecessary Ukraine proxy war, traitorous refusal to control the southern border, the official DOJ lawfare waged against half the citizenry, the disgusting official censorship campaign, and the ongoing criminal conspiracy between the pharma companies, the US public health officialdom, and shadowy globalist forces embedded in the World Health Organization, the World Economic Forum, and scores of sinister multinational organizations ranging from George Soros’s Atlantic Council to the Sinaloa Cartel.

In the background of all that — a true-life horror — lies the crumbling bond market, the foundation of the money-and-banking system that is supposed to support the on-the-ground economy that produces things of value like food and roofing shingles. The bond market is wobbling badly. As rates rise, banks’ collateral melts away and they go bust, liquidation moves to stock markets, derivatives implode, and the vast reservoirs of capital vanish. There’s your stealth true Halloween psychodrama sneaking up on the scene. Gradually, then all at once, the quarreling nation finds itself stone broke, and even the blob shrinks from the scene in horror. It will be hard to gaslight the country anymore when that happens. That will be the sobering moment when all the preposterous, mendacious, criminally insane propositions of recent years stand nakedly exposed. That’s when “Joe Biden” begins to be seen as a dancing skeleton.

Read more …

“ust imagine powerful missiles hitting 300 kilometers deep inside Russian territory. Do you think that the Russian president and military will be calmly watching this?”

“Once again, some fools think they’ll stay safe across the ocean..”

• US Escalation Pushes Russia To Take Extreme Measures – Lukashenko (TASS)

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has said that escalation on the part of the United States is pushing Russia to use extreme measures. “The fanning of tensions and escalation will lead to a situation where they [Russia] will take the red button and put it on the table,” Lukashenko said during a visit to the Defense Ministry’s training facility Resistance Node in the Brest Region, the Telegram channel Pul_1, close to the presidential press service reports. It explains that the Belarusian leader thus pointed out it was the United States that was pushing Russia to use extreme measures. He has an impression that the Americans are “pushing the Russians to use the most terrible weapons.”

“Vladimir Zelensky and his army may be armed with long-range missiles. Let it be even those with a range of 300 kilometers. Just imagine powerful missiles hitting 300 kilometers deep inside Russian territory. Do you think that the Russian president and military will be calmly watching this?” Lukashenko asked. The BelTA news agency quotes him as saying “the response will be colossal.” “Once again, some fools think they’ll stay safe across the ocean. They’ll drag the whole world into this grave war,” the Belarusian leader warned. Earlier, Lukashenko urged the US and Europe not to supply modern weapons to Ukraine. He emphasized that it was the US that had initiated all military conflicts in the European region and benefited from them.

Read more …

“..the US’ 45-day budget solution, which does not include aid for Ukraine, means Kiev will not be able to continue the hostilities and will lead to the “fall of the regime.”

• Ukrainian Forces Acknowledge Total Dependence On US (TASS)

The Ukrainian Armed Forces are totally dependent on the US, and further arms shipments are extremely necessary, says Ukrainian General Staff Colonel Gennady Kovalenko. On Thursday, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky connected Washington’s reduction in support to Kiev to the growing “political storm” in the US and urged EU nations to act independently in these circumstances. However, EU High Representative Josep Borrell has already said that the EU will not be able to compensate for the aid suspended by the US. “We are 100% dependent on the United States,” Kovalenko told The Washington Post. According to the colonel, the Ukrainian Army requires continued and probably even expanded arms shipments from the US, as he believes hostilities are not likely to end any time soon.

Meanwhile, the former Foreign Minister of Ukraine Pavel Klimkin told the newspaper that regular Ukrainians are tired of the conflict. According to the ex-minister, in 2022, the Ukrainian people were gung-ho going into the conflict, but now everyone realizes that the hostilities are being carried out to attrition. Western media increasingly frequently report that Kiev’s allies are growing weary of Ukraine, and in particular of leader Vladimir Zelensky. On October 4, Le Monde noted that the “Zelensky magic” is fading, as his words now either fall on deaf ears or annoy partners who are tired of hearing that they are not giving enough. During the October 4 Warsaw Security Forum, Chair of the NATO Military Committee Rob Bauer stated that the stockpile of weapons for Ukraine is running out. Meanwhile, some analysts say that the US’ 45-day budget solution, which does not include aid for Ukraine, means Kiev will not be able to continue the hostilities and will lead to the “fall of the regime.”

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Zero corruption in Ukraine. It’s all just a story.

• Juncker Spreads ‘Russian Narrative’ – Zelensky (RT)

Allegations of rampant corruption in Ukraine are a “Russian narrative” designed to erode Western support for Kiev, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky claimed on Friday. Speaking after the summit of the bloc’s leaders in the Spanish city of Granada, Zelensky accused former president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, of spreading Russian propaganda about Ukraine. Earlier this week, Juncker said Ukraine was plagued by corruption “at all levels of society” and should not be accepted into the bloc any time soon. Zelensky insisted that “not a single dollar was stolen from our partners” amid the conflict with Russia, but admitted that there were “different people and cases.”

“First of all, it is the well-known Russian narrative about corruption. They understand that they cannot split the overall unity of Europe and support for Ukraine. The US and its intelligence services learned about the roots of the idea, how to undermine society, support in the world,” Zelensky said. Instead of spreading the purported “Russian narrative” about Ukraine’s corruption, Juncker should have personally done more for Ukraine, Zelensky suggested. “That is of no interest for him? Now he decided to write some Russian narratives since everyone has forgotten who he is? I think it’s stupid,” Zelensky said.

Juncker, who chaired the European Commission between 2014 and 2019, made the controversial remarks in an interview with Germany’s Augsburger Allgemeine newspaper, published earlier this week. He argued that Ukraine should undergo “massive” reforms before it can join the EU, while Brussels “should not make any false promises to the people in Ukraine who are up to their neck in suffering.” “Those who have dealt with Ukraine know that this is a country that is corrupt at all levels of society,” Juncker had said.

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Either backtrack or look stupid.

• Von der Leyen Backtracks On Ukraine Pledge (RT)

Countries aspiring to join the EU must follow the “merit-based” accession process and reach the milestones outlined by the bloc’s rules, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said on Friday. The EU chief made the remarks during a press conference following a summit of the bloc’s leaders in the Spanish city of Granada. Von der Leyen touched upon the accession process of prospective members, stating that all of them must follow due procedures. “The process is merit-based,” the EU Commission head explained. “There are clear rules, there are milestones that have to be achieved.” Such a stance was included in the joint declaration that was adopted during the summit.

While the document reiterated the bloc’s readiness to “continue to support Ukraine and its people for as long as it takes,” it also warned that potential new members will be given no shortcuts during the accession process. “Aspiring members need to step up their reform efforts, notably in the area of rule of law, in line with the merit-based nature of the accession process and with the assistance of the EU. In parallel, the Union needs to lay the necessary internal groundwork and reforms,” the declaration reads. While the document did not provide any timeframe for when an expansion will actually happen, the president of the European Council, Charles Michel, said the bloc should be ready to expand by 2030.

“What’s important is to stop procrastinating,” he said during the press conference. The remarks by the top EU officials come in contrast to earlier statements about the prospects for Ukraine’s accession. In mid-September, for instance, von der Leyen said Ukraine would “complete” the bloc and claimed that the move would not necessarily require an amendment to the Treaties of the European Union, the legal foundation for its existence. Joining the EU has been a key talking point for pro-West Ukrainian politicians for decades, yet little actual progress on that path was achieved before the conflict between Kiev and Moscow broke out in February 2022.

However, the hostilities have seemingly re-invigorated the process, with top Ukraine officials repeatedly demanding the country be accepted into the bloc as soon as possible due to its perceived role in defending the EU from an allegedly looming Russian invasion. However, in recent weeks, numerous current and former EU officials have warned against fast-tracking Ukraine’s admission, arguing, for various reasons, that it might do more harm than good to the bloc itself. Perhaps the most damning opinion was voiced by Jean-Claude Juncker, a former president of the European Commission, who argued that Ukraine was simply way too corrupt to join the EU anytime soon. “Those who have dealt with Ukraine know that this is a country that is corrupt at all levels of society,” Juncker said in an interview with Germany’s Augsburger Allgemeine newspaper.

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“..amazement over Polish politicians’ apparent willingness to be led along like sheep..”

• Backing Ukraine Bid for EU Membership Simply Suicidal – Polish Journo (Sp.)

Anonymous diplomats told media this week that Brussels is preparing to kick off formal talks on Ukraine’s accession into the European Union, with an announcement on the matter expected as soon as December. The news has prompted senior serving and former EU officials to give contradictory views on the potential consequences of such a radical move. Ukrainian membership in the EU would fundamentally undermine Poland’s economic interests and constitute a form of political suicide, independent Polish journalist and commentator Lukasz Warzecha has warned. “Please imagine this: in a few years, in the perspective new budget, Poles will be made to pay not only gigantic amounts of money due to the EU’s absurd climate policy, but be informed that tens of billions of euros’ worth of our money will be flowing to Ukraine, which will be our direct rival in the bloc,” Warzecha wrote. “The course of supporting Ukrainian membership is simply suicidal, and goes against Polish interests. Moreover, these is no trace of debate on the matter in our country,” the journalist added.

Pointing to media revelations this week that the EU would have to dole out €186 billion to Kiev to fill the massive holes in Ukraine’s budget if it became an EU member, which would turn Eastern European net recipients of EU aid into donors, Warzecha expressed amazement over Polish politicians’ apparent willingness to be led along like sheep, “without a trace of reflection about the consequences for Poland, to immediately begin to support Ukraine’s admission, which would bring the greatest benefit for Germany.” Warzecha’s warning comes amid reports that EU leaders plan to green light talks for Ukraine’s accession into the European Union, and news that the bloc may be preparing to unfreeze €13 billion euros in monies owed to Hungary by Brussels over a “rule of law” dispute, in exchange for Hungarian support for Kiev. Budapest has called the blockage of funds attempted “blackmail.”

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I think the opposite is happening. Finally people are standing up against RINOs.

• McCarthy Mutiny Reveals Cracks in Constellation of Pro-Trump Universe (RCW)

While lining up support for his bid for speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy made a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago, all but endorsed Donald Trump, and sat with congressional allies of the former president. The California Republican spoke admirably of Trump, who offered his blessing at the 11th hour earlier this year and who had even bestowed on him a not entirely negative nickname. But when the McCarthy mutiny began in earnest, Trump didn’t ride to the rescue of “My Kevin.” The larger pro-Trump constellation was split as the right flank ran McCarthy out of office: Some groups condemned the mutiny, at least one worked behind the scenes to pull it off, but most said nothing as the latest populist vacuum enveloped the Grand Old Party.

For his part, the former president only offered tepid support, writing in a social media post: “Why is it that Republicans are always fighting among themselves, why aren’t they fighting the Radical Left Democrats who are destroying our country?” The statement did nothing to quell passions, and it didn’t give Republicans on Capitol Hill any indication of what Trump preferred. Some insisted he was more candid in private. His conversations, Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz told Laura Ingraham on Fox News, “I’m going to keep to us, but I think I’m in pretty good stead with the former president.” Added the architect of the McCarthy mutiny, “You will see me on the campaign trail with him soon.” Just hours earlier, Gaetz filed a motion to vacate. With the unanimous support of Democrats and eight Republicans, it passed 216 to 210.

McCarthy became the first speaker removed from office. He lasted nine months. Even Stephen Miller had warned Republicans not to do this. Miller worked in the Trump White House as a senior advisor, and the founder of America First Legal remains close to the former president. His message to those mulling the mutiny: “I understand all the emotions that are playing out right now.” But Miller added during the interview with Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo, “For the love of God, we are losing this country, and we are losing it fast.” Miller and others stressed the most basic political reality: Republicans only control the House. With a slim majority, hardliners would “have to agree to spending levels you might not like, but to get the policy that you want.”

This kind of compromise was untenable for Russ Vought, a former White House colleague and ideological ally of Miller. It was Vought’s ultra-conservative Center for Renewing America that served as a nerve center for the foot soldiers of the first McCarthy mutiny. It was Vought who handed rank-and-file conservatives a strategy used to force McCarthy into making key concessions to become speaker. Less than 24 hours after the midterms failed to produce a wide majority for Republicans, he said that the hardline House Freedom Caucus “was made for this moment.” In the weeks that followed, CRA offered both parliamentary advice and public cover for the revolt.

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“What is ironic is to watch Amanpour and Clinton denounce the right for reckless rhetoric and anti-democratic sentiments as they voice voice intolerant and inflammatory views.”

• Deprogramming the “Deplorables”: Hillary Clinton (Turley)

Hillary Clinton has caused another stir by suggesting that the millions of Trump supporters may require a “formal deprogramming” in a CNN interview. It was a moment clearly enjoyed by CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, who previously suggested that the FBI should have stopped Trump from making certain campaign statements. Even former FBI Director James Comey balked at Amanpour’s suggested censorship. Now, Amanpour has clearly found a kindred spirit. My concern over the comment is less whether Hillary Clinton is serious. (I really do not know). I am more concerned by the continued reckless rhetoric from national leaders. I previously objected to other comments by Trump. Yet, the media rarely applies the same level of scrutiny to such comments or personal attacks from figures on the left.

Discussing the recent vacating of the position of the Speaker by all of the Democrats and eight Republicans, Clinton said that Democrats had to groom selected Republicans while treating the rest as sick cultists: “[S]adly, so many of those extremists, those MAGA extremists take their marching orders from Donald Trump, who has no credibility left by any measure. He’s only in it for himself. He’s now defending himself in civil actions and criminal actions. And when do they break with him? Because at some point, you know, maybe there needs to be a formal deprogramming of the cult members, but something needs to happen.” It appears that the “basket of deplorables” are now a cabal of cultists due to “emotional, psychological needs and desires.”

Amanpour was clearly bemused by the suggestion, but the combination of the two is chilling for those of us concerned about free speech in this age of rage. Many countries have historically treated dissenters as mentally ill or requiring reeducation. The media has long embraced the need to educate the public to accept its views. Former President Barack Obama joined a number of journalists in discussing how to reeducate the public. Obama denounced “anger-based journalism while promoting an advocacy-journalism model in which the media shape the news for citizens who supposedly need help to properly frame ideas. The fact that Amanpour elicited these comments only magnified the unease over the underlying intolerance for opposing viewpoints. In an interview with James Comey, Amanpour pressed Comey on why the FBI did not “shut down” President Donald Trump’s “hate speech” during the 2016 presidential election.

Comey correctly pushed back on Amanpour by noting that she was suggesting something grossly improper and unconstitutional: “That’s not a role for government to play. The beauty of this country is people can say what they want even if it’s misleading and it’s demagoguery.” Neither CNN nor Amanpour ever addressed a CNN host suggesting the use of the FBI to shutdown political debate. Now, however, Amanpour has found a leader who is willing to treat political opponents as sick cultists. The sense of smug superiority is precisely why Hillary remains one of the least popular political figures in America. What is ironic is to watch Amanpour and Clinton denounce the right for reckless rhetoric and anti-democratic sentiments as they voice voice intolerant and inflammatory views.

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Back to the plea deal the judge laughed out of court.

• Hunter Biden Claims Immunity, Seeks Dismissal of Federal Gun Charges (Sp.)

Hunter Biden, the businessman son of US President Joe Biden, has pleaded not guilty to federal gun charges, telling the judge he would seek their dismissal due to an earlier plea agreement. The charges allege Biden lied to the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) by claiming he had no addiction, when he was actually struggling with a cocaine habit. Biden faces a maximum of 25 years in prison if convicted on all three charges. According to a Thursday filing in a Delaware US District Court, Biden’s lawyers argued that a July plea deal or “diversion agreement that both parties signed remains in force, and he will seek to dismiss the indictment against him pursuant to the immunity provisions of that agreement.”

Officials further argue that special counsel David Weiss was only “permitted to bring” one charge against Biden: the misdemeanor tax charges that have already been dismissed as a consequence of the collapse of the plea deal.
“If the special counsel no longer wishes to pursue that charge, it has the right to do that,” Biden’s lawyers wrote. According to that deal, Biden would have pleaded guilty to two tax misdemeanors and entered a diversion program on the gun charge, in which he would have performed community service and accepted other limitations, such as a curfew, for a duration of time. It would also have given him broad immunity from further charges.

After two years of probation, the deal would have expunged Biden’s record. However, Weiss argued in another filing on Wednesday that the “proposed diversion agreement” hadn’t been signed by a court official, so “it did not enter into effect.” Pre-trial motions are set for November 3, although it’s unclear when Biden’s next court appearance will be booked. The trial has begun amid a congressional impeachment investigation focused in part on the relationship between President Biden and Hunter Biden’s business life and suspicions about unethical behavior. No charges have been recommended in the probe thus far.

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A nothingburger the size of a submarine.

• Trump Accused of Leaking Submarine Secrets (RT)

Former US President Donald Trump has reportedly been accused of discussing sensitive information about the nation’s nuclear submarines while chatting with an Australian businessman at his Mar-a-Lago country club in Florida. The conversation with billionaire Anthony Pratt occurred in April 2021, three months after Trump left office, and it allegedly included references to how many warheads US submarines carry and how close they can get to a Russian vessel without being detected, ABC News reported on Thursday. Pratt, who runs packaging company Pratt Industries, allegedly shared the information with more than a dozen Australian officials, as well as journalists and some of his employees, the outlet said, citing unidentified people familiar with the matter.

ABC conceded that it’s not clear whether Trump’s comments about US submarines were accurate; nor did the outlet’s anonymous sources specifically claim that the information was classified. However, US prosecutors and FBI agents have interviewed Pratt at least twice this year about his conversation with Trump, and investigators urged the businessman not to spread the information any further because it was potentially sensitive. The allegations were reported to US special counsel Jack Smith’s team of investigators. Smith is prosecuting Trump for allegedly mishandling classified documents and has filed a separate indictment against the ex-president for trying to overturn his defeat in the 2020 election. The indictment on handling of classified documents didn’t include any allegations related to Trump’s conversation with Pratt.

Earlier this year, CNN aired a recording of Trump allegedly discussing US military secrets at his New Jersey country club. The outlet also reported in May that Trump had admitted to retaining a classified document detailing the US military’s plans for a potential attack on Iran. Pratt, a Mar-a-Lago member, told investigators that he was trying to make conversation with Trump when he brought up US nuclear submarines. The billionaire suggested that Australia should start buying its submarines from the US. Trump responded by making claims about the capabilities of the US vessels. Pratt added that Trump didn’t show him any government documents.

The conversation came at a time when Australia was negotiating with President Joe Biden’s administration to buy US nuclear-powered submarines. The deal was completed earlier this year, with Australia agreeing to purchase three of the subs. Pratt said he told others about the conversation with Trump to show how he was advocating for Australia’s interests in the US. A Trump spokesperson denied any wrongdoing on the former president’s part, ABC reported. The accusations concerning the conversation with Pratt lack “proper context and relevant information,” the spokesperson said.

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Formerly known as Twitter

 

 

Picasso

 

 

 

 

Lizard
https://twitter.com/i/status/1710401255716098541

 

 

 

 

Support the Automatic Earth in wartime with Paypal, Bitcoin and Patreon.

 

 

 

 

 

Debt Rattle December 19 2020

Dec 192020
 
 December 19, 2020  Posted by at 10:22 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  14 Responses »


Sergio Larraín Valparaiso Passage Bavestrello 1952

 

• Facebook Joins Twitter In Reverting To Pre-Election News Feed Algorithms (RT)
• Lawmakers Ask Whether Massive Hack Amounted To Act Of War (Hill)
• California Reports Record COVID Cases and Deaths—Despite Strict Lockdown (FEE)
• Research Suggests COVID19 Enters The Brain, May Be Autoimmune Disease (RT)
• Trump Blasts John McCain After New Texts From FBI Lover Peter Strzok (DM)
• Steele Dossier Was ‘Intended To Influence’ Media – Strzok (RT)
• The Gyre Widens (Jim Kunstler)
• When Deplorables Become Ungovernables (Escobar)
• Peter Navarro Releases Report About The 2020 Presidential Election (JTN)
• Tesla, the Largest-Cap Stock Ever to Enter S&P 500 (RA)
• FDR Knew Exactly How to Solve Today’s Unemployment Crisis (Ellen Brown)
• LeBron James To Be Appointed As Ambassador To China (BBee)

 

 

John Hussman:

 

 

Just in time delivery.

• Facebook Joins Twitter In Reverting To Pre-Election News Feed Algorithms (RT)

Facebook has reversed its election-season policy of prioritizing mainstream media stories in News Feed after a similar move from Twitter. This is as Mark Zuckerberg is sued for allegedly helping tip the vote in favor of Joe Biden. An algorithm tweak that saw Facebook users deluged with mainstream media stories following last month’s elections has been reversed, the social media behemoth told the New York Times on Wednesday, insisting that the change – which significantly boosted traffic for establishment outlets like CNN, NPR, and the Times itself while suppressing alt-media and right-wing sites – was never meant to be permanent.

Boosting the importance of “news ecosystem quality,” essentially a reputational score applied to news outlets, was “a temporary change we made to help limit the spread of inaccurate claims about the election,” Facebook spokesman Joe Osborne told the outlet. He explained that the platform was still prioritizing so-called “authoritative and informative news” on “important global topics like elections, Covid-19 and climate change.” The tech giant opted to return to pre-election policies despite the protests of some employees who preferred the “nicer news feed,” sources present at one post-vote Facebook meeting claimed, describing the prioritization of establishment sources as one of several “break glass measures” designed for the care and feeding of a desirable post-election narrative.

Twitter also admitted that adding ‘context’ to its Trending section – which essentially turned the feature into a yawn-inducing list of mainstream media headlines accompanied by the ‘correct’ opinion users should have about them – made it “less relevant for many people’s interests.” Both platforms liberally applied “misinformation” warnings to content questioning the integrity of last month’s election results, despite allowing – even encouraging – users to question the legitimacy of 2016’s presidential election for years after the fact. Supporters of President Donald Trump cried foul, especially after dozens of the commander-in-chief’s own posts regarding alleged election fraud were censored, hidden, and otherwise suppressed.

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Twitter and Facebook will now deliver this sort of insanity.

• Lawmakers Ask Whether Massive Hack Amounted To Act Of War (Hill)

Lawmakers are raising questions about whether the attack on the federal government widely attributed to Russia constitutes an act of war. The hacking may represent the biggest cyberattack in U.S history, and officials are scrambling to respond. The response is further complicated by the presidential transition — President Trump has yet to comment publicly on the attack — and the fact that the U.S. has no clear cyber warfare strategy. “We can’t be buddies with Vladimir Putin and have him at the same time making this kind of cyberattack on America,” Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said of the attack during an interview Wednesday on CNN. “This is virtually a declaration of war by Russia on the United States and we should take that seriously.”

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) on Thursday compared the incident to Russian bombers “flying undetected over the entire country,” and harshly criticized Trump for not doing enough to counter the attack. “Our national security is extraordinarily vulnerable,” Romney said on SiriusXM’s “The Big Picture with Olivier Knox.” “In this setting, not to have the White House aggressively speaking out and protesting and taking punitive action is really, really quite extraordinary.” Hackers believed to be part of a nation state have had access to federal networks since March after exploiting a vulnerability in updates to IT group SolarWinds’s Orion software. The hack has compromised the Treasury, State and Homeland Security departments and branches of the Pentagon, though it is expected to get worse. SolarWinds counts many more federal agencies as customers, along with the majority of U.S. Fortune 500 companies.

On Thursday, Politico reported that the Energy Department’s National Nuclear Security Administration, which maintains the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile, was also compromised, further raising the stakes. Lawmakers say the scope of the attack, widely presumed to be by Russia, which has denied responsibility, demands some kind of response. “No response is not appropriate, and that’s been our national policy by and large for the past 10 or 15 years,” Sen. Angus King (I-Maine), the co-chair of the Cyberspace Solarium Commission (CSC), said during an event hosted by Defense One on Thursday. “I want somebody in the Kremlin, sitting around that table to say, ‘wait a minute boss, if we do this we are liable to get whacked in some way,’ and right now they are not making that calculus.”

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Time for questions. High time.

• California Reports Record COVID Cases and Deaths—Despite Strict Lockdown (FEE)

Newsom’s decision to reimpose lockdowns in light of the evidence we have today has left some California public officials puzzled. “During the first Shelter in Place order, which I wholeheartedly endorsed, the virus was brand new and had the capability of spreading exponentially due to zero immunity and people’s complete lack of awareness,” San Mateo County Health Officer Scott Morrow recently observed on the county’s website. “[That order] was very much consistent with my long-held views about the judicious use of power.…However, I very quickly rescinded my initial orders shuttering society and focused my new orders on the personal behaviors that are driving the pandemic… .” Morrow implied that many of the actions being taken suggest California officials have learned little since the spring.

“Just because one has the legal authority to do something, doesn’t mean one has to use it, or that using it is the best course of action,” he wrote. “What I believed back in May, and what I believe now, is the power and authority to control this pandemic lies primarily in your hands, not mine.” Morrow was blunt in his appraisal of the restrictions being imposed across the Golden State. “I’m not sure we know what we’re doing,” he wrote. “I look at surrounding counties who have been much more restrictive than I have been, and wonder what it’s bought them.” Morrow appears to have gleaned an insight once observed by the economist Milton Friedman. “One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results,” Friedman famously observed.

With every passing week the results of government lockdowns become more clear. They cause tremendous and widespread harms—no one disagrees on this point—but the supposed benefits of the policies remain tenuous. Despite the bevy of evidence they possess, lawmakers continue to embrace restrictions because of bad incentives. The great economist Ludwig von Mises noted long ago that a great deal of modern social conflict is a struggle over who gets to design the world, individuals or authorities. Mises believed that individuals, if left to their own devices, would generally make rational decisions based on their own self interest. This is why he saw few things as dangerous as central planners who seek to supplant individual planning with their own (despite their knowledge limitations) in an effort to create a more perfect society.

“The planner is a potential dictator who wants to deprive all other people of the power to plan and act according to their own plans,” Mises wrote in Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis. “He aims at one thing only: the exclusive absolute pre-eminence of his own plan.” The Washington Post reported yesterday that nearly 8 million Americans have slipped into poverty since summer. When one considers the damage government lockdowns have wrought compared to the positive results they’ve achieved, one begins to see why Mises saw the unchecked power of authorities as such a threat.

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Autoantibodies.

• Research Suggests COVID19 Enters The Brain, May Be Autoimmune Disease (RT)

A new study by Yale University has found that critical Covid-19 patients disproportionately possess so-called ‘autoantibodies’ that weaponize their immune systems against them, making their condition far worse. Researchers used an advanced screening technique on 170 hospitalized patients to detect “autoantibodies” that inflict collateral damage on the patient by attacking their own organs and immune system as opposed to targeting the virus. They compared the antibodies to those who had milder or asymptomatic infections, as well as those who had not been infected. In the hospitalized Covid-19 patients, they found autoantibodies – such as interferons, natural killer cells, and T cells – that could disrupt the work of the body’s frontline immune system troops, which had essentially been made to defect to the enemy, on the viral side.

The presence of autoantibodies was repeatedly detected in the most critical Covid-19 patients, and tests on mice indicated that the autoantibodies likely exacerbated the disease. Unfortunately, the researchers did not find any Covid-19 specific autoantibodies that might alert medical staff to an impending, developing severe case of Covid-19 in patients. The mystery surrounding the varying severity of the disease remains, but the research suggests that people with pre-existing autoantibodies in their systems are likely at higher risk of a severe bout of Covid-19. The research, which has yet to be peer reviewed, supports the idea that, for some unfortunate patients at least, Covid-19 could well be considered an autoimmune disease triggered by the coronavirus.

Several previous studies revealed that patients without a history of autoimmune disease had been found to have developed these autoantibodies after contracting Covid-19. Elsewhere, other research found that patients with severe Covid-19 infections can also develop autoantibodies to interferons – another key component of humans’ ability to fight viral infections.

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Yes, sure, Durham is investigating, but…

• Trump Blasts John McCain After New Texts From FBI Lover Peter Strzok (DM)

President Donald Trump has vented his fury at late Senator John McCain, following the release of newly declassified text messages from former FBI agent Peter Strzok indicating that McCain leaked the infamous ‘dirty dossier’ to legendary journalist Carl Bernstein.’Check out last in his class John McCain, one of the most overrated people in D.C.’ Trump tweeted late on Wednesday of the Arizona Republican who died of brain cancer in 2018, linking to a report on the new messages. The text messages, released by Republican Senators Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley on Wednesday, include a January 9, 2017 exchange between Strzok and Lisa Page, then the FBI lawyer with whom he was having an affair.

‘Carl Bernstein (yes that Carl) called [Office of Public Affairs], said he got a ‘dossier’ from McCain,’ Strzok texted Page, who quickly replied: ‘Awesome, let Carl run it down then.’ McCain aide David Kramer has previously testified that he leaked British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s anti-Trump dossier to journalists including Bernstein. Bernstein, the former Washington Post reporter who broke the Watergate scandal alongside Bob Woodward, had a byline on the January 12, 2017 CNN report that revealed the existence of the so-called ‘dirty dossier’. The dossier, which included salacious allegations, was funded in part by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Some of its allegations have been discredited, and others remain unproven.

The dossier became a key piece of intelligence under-girding Strzok’s ‘Crossfire Hurricane’ FBI probe into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to interfere in the 2016 election. Strzok, who also ran the FBI’s ‘Midyear Exam’ probe into Clinton’s private email server, later joined Special Counsel Robert Muller’s team, along with Page. Both Strzok and Page left the FBI in disgrace after their secret love affair was discovered by supervisors. Mueller’s probe failed to prove Russian collusion with the Trump campaign. The legality of the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation is now the subject of a separate probe, led by US Attorney John Durham, who himself was appointed as a special counsel earlier this month.

The new text messages revealed on Wednesday also suggest that the FBI’s Trump-Russia probe was opened earlier that has been officially admitted. A Justice Department Inspector General report in December 2019 claimed that the FBI opened its Trump-Russia investigation on July 31, 2016, after receiving a tip from an Australian diplomat. However, a Stzrok text message to Page on July 28, 2017, the same day the Australian tip was received, says he wants to discuss ‘[o]ur open C[ounter-]I[ntelligence] investigations relating to Trump’s Russian connections’.

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“I would definitely say at a minimum Steele’s reports should be viewed as intended to influence as well as to inform.”

• Steele Dossier Was ‘Intended To Influence’ Media – Strzok (RT)

A report filled with unverified claims about Donald Trump that prompted a probe into his alleged ties to Russia, was tailored to score points with the press, ex-FBI agent Peter Strzok suggests, in a recently declassified message. Senate Republicans on Thursday released a new batch of text messages from Strzok, who was fired by the FBI in 2018 after internal communications showed that he wanted to use the agency’s investigation into Russian collusion as an “insurance policy” to attack Trump if he won the White House. In one newly revealed message dated September 23, 2016, Strzok appears to acknowledge that the dodgy dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele, and later used by the FBI to obtain warrants to spy on the Trump campaign, could at the very least be used to create a media narrative.

Referring to a Yahoo article based on an unnamed source that alleged Trump campaign adviser Carter Page attended a secret summit in Moscow with two Kremlin insiders, Strzok wrote: “I would definitely say at a minimum Steele’s reports should be viewed as intended to influence as well as to inform.” The FBI ended its relationship with Steele after it became clear that he was leaking information to the press. However, the agency failed to inform the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) that Steele had been a source for the Yahoo article, which was used to corroborate the dossier and obtain a warrant to spy on Page. In January 2020, a court ruled that two of the four warrant applications submitted by the FBI to snoop on Page were “invalid.”

Another newly-released Strzok message, from January 12, 2017, shows that the FBI recorded a phone call between former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos and an unnamed executive at Fox News. Notably, the Justice Department never obtained a warrant to spy on Papadopoulos or Fox, and likely used a so-called National Security Letter to carry out the surveillance.

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“..America’s own domestic enemies, who must be neutralized first before we’re capable of dealing with outsiders..”

• The Gyre Widens (Jim Kunstler)

The trouble is, Mr. Trump actually does have the evidence, and he intends to use it after four years of being remorselessly fucked around by his antagonists. So, the nation is at the point in this long, winding drama that has become a fight to the death and there will be no rituals of torch-passing just to keep up appearances that everything is functioning normally. Mr. Trump has the evidence of widespread, yes widespread, ballot fraud. He is the president, after all, and he has all the information. As he’s said more than once, he’s caught them all. And they know it. Of course, the CIA and the FBI, those pillars of the Intel Community, are still trying to withhold what they can, but the president is not having it.

He’s taking away the CIA’s most precious asset: its resources for making mischief on-the ground — its airplane fleet and its armaments, handing them over to the Pentagon — reducing the CIA to the simple task of analyzing signals from the world scene. And so, the CIA has been refusing to cooperate with the Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe, as a last gasp to preserve its long-running illicit prerogatives. That will eventually trigger the president’s invocation of the 2018 Executive order 13848, allowing, at long last, the arrest and prosecution of many desperate characters who tried to run away with the US Government. But probably not before the last legal avenues have been traveled: Sidney Powell’s case against the Dominion vote system in the Supreme Court, a long-shot like all the other cases that the court is loath to touch..

[..] and the business of the alternate electoral college slates to be hashed out in the Senate on January 6, Vice-President Mike Pence, presiding. Democrats and their coastal elite supporters are not going to like it. If they call out their Antifa troops, those feckless weenies with their hoisted cell phones and stupid umbrellas are going to be crushed this time, not indulged like three-year-olds. The wild-card all of a sudden is what the nation will also do about the foreign actors reportedly messing around with the government’s most critical computer systems. China? Iran? Russia? They’re a match for America’s own domestic enemies, who must be neutralized first before we’re capable of dealing with outsiders. The gyre widens.

Read more …

“The error was to steal too many votes. This grand theft indicts the whole system, that has always been corrupt.”

• When Deplorables Become Ungovernables (Escobar)

China, Russia and Iran are the top three existential “threats” to the U.S., according to the National Security Strategy. Three features distinguish the top three. They are all sovereign powers. They are under varying degrees of sanctions. And they are the top three nodes of the 21st century’s most important, evolving geopolitical process: Eurasia integration. What do the three sovereigns see when they examine the dystopia that took over Exceptionalistan? They see, once again, three – discombobulated – nodes in conflict: 1) the post-historic Pacific and Atlantic coasts; 2) the South – a sort of expanded Dixieland; and 3) the Midwest – what would be the American heartland.

The hyper-modern Pacific-Atlantic nodes congregate high-tech and finance, profit from Pentagon techno-breakthroughs and benefit from the “America rules the waves” ethos that guarantees the global primacy of the U.S. dollar. The rest of America is largely considered by the Pacific-Atlantic as just a collection of flyover states: the South – which regards itself as the real, authentic America; and the Midwest, largely disciplined and quite practical-minded, squeezed ideologically between the littoral powerhouses and the South. Superstructure, though, is key: no matter what happens, whatever the fractures, this remains an Empire, where only a tiny elite, a de facto plutocratic oligarchy, rules.

It would be too schematic, even though essentially correct, to assert that in the presidential election, invisible campaigner Joe Biden represented the Pacific-Atlantic nodes, and Trump represented the whole South. Assuming the election was not fraudulent – and that remains a big “if” – the Midwest eventually swung based on three issues. 1) Trump, as much as he relied on a sanctions juggernaut, could not bring back manufacturing jobs home. 2) He could not reduce the military footprint across the Greater Middle East. 3) And, before Covid-19, he could not bring down immigration. Everything that lies ahead points to the irreconcilable – pitting the absolute majority that voted Dem in the Atlantic-Pacific nodes versus the South and a deeply divided Midwest. As much as Biden-Harris is bound to isolate the South even more, their prospects of “pacifying” the Midwest are less than zero.

Whose ground control? Beyond the raucous altercations on whether the presidential election was fraudulent, these are the key factual points. 1) A series of rules in mostly swing states were changed, through courts, bypassing state legislatures, without transparence, before the election, paving the way to facilitate fraud schemes. 2) Biden was de facto coronated by AP, Google and Twitter even before the final, official result, and weeks before the electoral college vote this past Monday. 3) Every serious, professional audit to determine whether all received and tabulated votes were valid was de facto squashed. In any Global South latitude where the empire did “interfere” in local elections, color revolution-style, this set of facts would be regarded by scores of imperial officials, in a relentless propaganda blitz, as evidence of a coup.

On the recent Supreme Court ruling, a Deep State intel source told me, “the Supreme Court did not like to see half the country rioting against them, and preferred the decision be made by each state in the House of Representatives. That is the only way to handle this without jeopardizing the union. Even prominent Democrats I know realize that the fix took place. The error was to steal too many votes. This grand theft indicts the whole system, that has always been corrupt.”

Read more …

‘The Immaculate Deception’

• Peter Navarro Releases Report About The 2020 Presidential Election (JTN)

Dr. Peter Navarro released a report on Thursday related to the 2020 election titled “The Immaculate Deception: Six Key Dimensions of Election Irregularities.” “From the findings of this report, it is possible to infer what may well have been a coordinated strategy to effectively stack the election deck against the Trump-Pence ticket,” the report states. “Indeed, the observed patterns of election irregularities are so consistent across the six battleground states that they suggest a coordinated strategy to, if not steal the election outright, strategically game the election process in such a way as to ‘stuff the ballot box’ and unfairly tilt the playing field in favor of the Biden-Harris ticket.” The report argues that the election results could shift to a win for President Trump, even if just some of the ballots related to “identified election irregularities” were tossed out as unlawful.


“The ballots in question because of the identified election irregularities are more than sufficient to swing the outcome in favor of President Trump should even a relatively small portion of these ballots be ruled illegal,” the report states. Navarro, who advises President Trump as the Director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, hosted a call on Thursday “in his capacity as a private citizen” to speak about his findings, according to a press release. The report warns that without a rigorous investigation, many Americans will consider a Joe Biden presidency to be illegitimate: “Absent a thorough investigation prior to Inauguration Day, a cloud and a stain will hang over what will be perceived by many Americans as an illegitimate Biden administration,” the report says.

Read more …

“By the close of trading on December 21, index funds, ETFs, and other index-tracking strategies will have purchased Tesla shares valued at nearly $220 billion..”

• Tesla, the Largest-Cap Stock Ever to Enter S&P 500 (RA)

Tesla is entering the S&P 500 with a stupendously high valuation and will likely be ranked sixth in the index. Traditional cap-weighted indices, such as the S&P 500, are structured to buy high and sell low—and Tesla is a prime example of this maxim. The eightfold increase in Tesla’s share price since its March low meets our two-part definition of a bubble: 1) implausible assumptions are needed to justify its valuation, and 2) buyer interest is based on a great narrative rather than being supported by a conventional valuation model. Our research shows that a continuation of Tesla’s 2020 share-price performance is vulnerable on two additional fronts: 1) as a top-dog stock (top 10 market-cap stocks), the odds are against its remaining a top-dog stock, and 2) as an addition to the S&P 500, history indicates it is likely to underperform the market (S&P 500) in the year after entry.

[..] On November 16, S&P Dow Jones Indices announced that Tesla will (finally) join the prestigious S&P 500 Index on December 21. From the beginning of 2020 to the announcement date, Tesla’s share price rose 400% from $83.67 to $408.09. Most of that run-up occurred after the media began speculating in March about Tesla’s likely addition to the index. From the announcement date through December 7, Tesla’s share price rose another 49% to $608.32. That’s an eightfold increase from its March low. Given Tesla’s very large market-cap, the US Index Committee, which maintains the S&P 500, did consider a gradual transition into the index rather than adding the company’s full weight at one time.

Currently about $11 trillion in assets track the index,1 and a substantial portion will seek to buy Tesla at the exact closing price on December 21. On December 1 the Index Committee announced that Tesla will be added all in one go, which prompted another 10% share-price increase the following week. The result is that founder Elon Musk now has the second-largest fortune in history. For now, only Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, is wealthier. Tesla will be the largest stock to enter the S&P 500 in the history of the index, by both rank (likely the sixth largest company in the index2) and absolute market capitalization ($608 billion as of the December 7, 2020, market close). By the close of trading on December 21, index funds, ETFs, and other index-tracking strategies will have purchased Tesla shares valued at nearly $220 billion, most seeking to trade at the opening price.

To make way for this purchase, these funds and strategies will sell a similar dollar amount from the other 505 stocks in the index (corporate actions have pushed the number of S&P 500 holdings to 505 names). At well under 1% of the outstanding market-cap of these companies, the requisite sales are not likely to precipitate major price moves. Because Tesla’s addition to the index is not a secret, we can comfortably surmise that hedge fund managers and other liquidity suppliers have already stockpiled most of the $220 billion and are ready to supply the shares to the indexers for this largest single trade in history. What does it all mean for investors?

Read more …

“A self-funding national infrastructure bank..”

• FDR Knew Exactly How to Solve Today’s Unemployment Crisis (Ellen Brown)

A self-funding national infrastructure bank modeled on the “American System” of Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt would help solve not one but two of the country’s biggest problems. Millions of Americans have joined the ranks of the unemployed, and government relief checks and savings are running out; meanwhile, the country still needs trillions of dollars in infrastructure. Putting the unemployed to work on those infrastructure projects seems an obvious solution, especially given that the $600 or $700 stimulus checks Congress is planning on issuing will do little to address the growing crisis. Various plans for solving the infrastructure crisis involving public-private partnerships have been proposed, but they’ll invariably result in private investors reaping the profits while the public bears the costs and liabilities. We have relied for too long on private, often global, capital, while the Chinese run circles around us building infrastructure with credit simply created on the books of their government-owned banks.

Earlier publicly-owned U.S. national banks and U.S. Treasuries pulled off similar feats, using what Sen. Henry Clay, U.S. statesman from 1806 to 1852, named the “American System” – funding national production simply with “sovereign” money and credit. They included the First (1791-1811) and Second (1816-1836) Banks of the United States, President Lincoln’s federal treasury and banking system, and President Franklin Roosevelt’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) (1932-1957). Chester Morrill, former Secretary of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, wrote of the RFC: [I]t became apparent almost immediately, to many Congressmen and Senators, that here was a device which would enable them to provide for activities that they favored for which government funds would be required, but without any apparent increase in appropriations. . . . [T]here need be no more appropriations and its activities could be enlarged indefinitely, as they were, almost to fantastic proportions.

Even the Federal Reserve with its “quantitative easing” cannot fund infrastructure without driving up federal expenditures or debt, at least without changes to the Federal Reserve Act. The Fed is not allowed to spend money directly into the economy or to lend directly to Congress. It must go through the private banking system and its “primary dealers.” The Fed can create and pay only with “reserves” credited to the reserve accounts of banks. These reserves are a completely separate system from the deposits circulating in the real producer/consumer economy; and those deposits are chiefly created by banks when they make loans. New liquidity gets into the real economy when banks make loans to local businesses and individuals; and in risky environments like that today, banks are not lending adequately even with massive reserves on their books.

A publicly-owned national infrastructure bank, on the other hand, would be mandated to lend into the real economy; and if the loans were of the “self funding” sort characterizing most infrastructure projects (generating fees to pay off the loans), they would be repaid, canceling out the debt by which the money was created. That is how China built 12,000 miles of high-speed rail in a decade: credit created on the books of government-owned banks was advanced to pay for workers and materials, and the loans were repaid with profits from passenger fees. Unlike the QE pumped into financial markets, which creates asset bubbles in stocks and housing, this sort of public credit mechanism is not inflationary. Credit money advanced for productive purposes balances the circulating money supply with new goods and services in the real economy. Supply and demand rise together, keeping prices stable. China increased its money supply by nearly 1800% over 24 years (from 1996 to 2020) without driving up price inflation, by increasing GDP in step with the money supply.

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“Colin Kaepernick was also floated but ultimately didn’t get picked.”

• LeBron James To Be Appointed As Ambassador To China (BBee)

The incoming Biden administration has floated LeBron James as its ambassador to China, sources learned today. James says he’s “excited” to be able to once again normalize relations between the two countries and make sure that the United States doesn’t do anything to upset the world power, like call attention to its slave labor camps and poor conditions for workers, or the fact that it unleashed a deadly virus on the globe. “LeBron will do a great job ensuring we do everything China wants us to,” said Joe Biden. “He’s a great football player, one of the best. In my day, the leagues were segregated, but that’s all behind us now. You know, I played a little pigskin in my day. You know why they call it pigskin? Well, we used to cook up a little bacon and some pulled pork, and we’d take the leftover pig and roll it up in a little ball and start hucking it at one another, as was the style in those days.” Colin Kaepernick was also floated but ultimately didn’t get picked.

Read more …

 

 

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Reason Assange

 

 

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Debt Rattle October 27 2020

Oct 272020
 
 October 27, 2020  Posted by at 9:19 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  17 Responses »


Henri Matisse Bathers by a River 1910

 

• Hillary Clinton Says Trump & Russian Media ‘Stole’ Election From Her (RT)
• Meacham Attacks Trump Supporters As Lizard Brains (Turley)
• Supreme Court Rules Wisconsin Ballots Must Be Received By Election Day (Fox)
• Biden’s Parade of Horribles For Changing The Supreme Court (Turley)
• Debt-To-Income Ratios Are Worse Than They Appear (RIA)
• Confirmed Influenza Cases Hit Rock-Bottom, Puzzling Experts (JTN)
• China Moves To Legalise Digital Yuan, Ban Competitors (SCMP)
• China Launches Crackdown On Mobile Web Browsers, ‘Chaos’ Of Information (R.)
• Social Media’s Erasure Of Palestinians Is A Grim Warning For Our Future (Cook)
• The Revelations Of Wikileaks: No. 9 – Opening the CIA’s Vault (CN)
• ‘Iraq War Diaries’ At Ten Years: Truth is Treason (Ron Paul)
• US Pulls Plan To Give Early Vaccine To Santa Claus (BBC)

 

 

Making Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court confirmation an election issue may not be the smartest move ever for the Dems.

But not as bad as Hillary again blaming her loss on the Russians. Look, people don’t like you. Go home. Stay home. Like Joe.

 

 

 

 

Lincoln Project

 

 

Strassel Hunter

 

 

Nothing is ever my fault.

• Hillary Clinton Says Trump & Russian Media ‘Stole’ Election From Her (RT)

Failed 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is claiming Trump “basically stole the election” from her four years after her loss, a statement that is earning her plenty of ridicule on social media. In an interview with journalist Kara Swisher’s podcast for the New York Times Opinions network released on Monday, Clinton spoke about losing in 2016 because of a “disinformation campaign” run by then-Republican candidate Donald Trump and “Russian media.” She even claimed the election was “stolen” from her. “I think that Trump and a lot of the people around him know that his victory was not on the up and up. They had an extensive campaign to suppress black voters. We now know much more about that than we did,” the former secretary of state said.


She also blamed third party voters who handed Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson and Green Party nominee Jill Stein historic results for their parties and claimed they were “boosted” by “Russian media.” “They had third party candidates boosted, particularly by Russian media. And the lies and ridiculous stories made up about me were meant to either keep you at home, or drive you third party if they couldn’t get you to vote for Trump,” she said. Trump, she said, holds a presidency that has an “air of illegitimacy,” something she has said many times over the past four years. She now drives Trump and Republicans “crazy” because “I was the candidate that they basically stole an election from.”

Read more …

Here, have some more deplorables.

• Meacham Attacks Trump Supporters As Lizard Brains (Turley)

We recently discussed how Vanderbilt professor and historian Jon Meacham gave a quiz in his course on the 2020 Election in which students were asked “Was the Constitution designed to perpetuate white supremacy and protect the institution of slavery?” You had to answer “yes” or get points deducted. It appears that the final exam in the class could prove even more demanding for any intellectually honest student if Meacham asks about the voters themselves. The NBC analyst this week declared that President Trump and his supporters are examples of being controlled by what is called “the lizard brain”. It only got worse from there.

Meacham addressed a simple question of whether Trump helped himself with his base in the second presidential debate Thursday night. It is impossible on NBC, however, to refer to Trump voters without some derisive or insulting precursor. Meacham did not disappoint his audience. “I think Trump did himself good with his base tonight,” Meacham said. “The question for America is how big that base is. There is a lizard brain in this country. Donald Trump is a product of the White man’s, the anguished, nervous White guy’s lizard brain.” Meacham was referring to a primitive part of the brain in psychological literature: “Many people call it the ‘Lizard Brain,’ because the limbic system is about all a lizard has for brain function. It is in charge of fight, flight, feeding, fear, freezing up, and fornication.”

Of course, even with the lead held by Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden in the polls, roughly half of this country still supports Trump (or at least rejects Biden, who Meacham has endorsed). That is a lot of lizard people. What is striking is that Meacham is supposed to give what NBC, MSNBC and PBS present as neutral, scholarly analysis. But his comment about Trump supporters having lizard brains captures why conservative or independent voters view the networks as biased and gratuitously insulting. Indeed, these comments show that networks like NBC are now focusing entirely on Democratic and liberal viewers — writing off half of the American people as gag lines.

[..] I have watched the stereotyping of Trump supporters at media conferences for years. It suggests that roughly 63 million people in this country who voted for Trump in 2016 are knuckle-dragging racists. The media have simply never tried to see any nuance or gain any insight into what is motivating Trump supporters. It is easier to dismiss them as a whole as racists and lizard people. Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin has declared that Trump supporters as a whole are racists. That common stereotyping of Trump supporters is uncontested, even as the media object to Trump’s generalizations about other groups. Miami Herald columnist and NBC analyst Leonard Pitts wrote a column headlined: “No, it’s not the economy, stupid. Trump supporters fear a black and brown America.”

Read more …

I know we use the term ‘election year’, but I don’t think it was ever meant to be used in this sense. It was always ‘election day’.

• Supreme Court Rules Wisconsin Ballots Must Be Received By Election Day (Fox)

The Supreme Court on Monday ruled against a request by Wisconsin Democrats to allow an extension for mail-in ballots that are received after Election Day. In a 5-3 ruling, the justices refused to reinstate a lower court order that called for mailed ballots to be counted if they are received up to six days after the Nov. 3 election. A federal appeals court had already put that order on hold. Democrats argued that the flood of absentee ballots and other challenges posed by the coronavirus pandemic makes it necessary to extend the period in which ballots can be counted. Wisconsin is one of the nation’s hot spots for COVID-19, with hospitals treating a record high number of patients with the disease.


Republicans had opposed extending the Nov. 3 deadline, saying that voters have plenty of opportunities to cast their ballots by the close of polls on Election Day and that the rules should not be changed so close to the election. The Wisconsin Department of Health Services said that more than 201,000 people in the state have tested positive for COVID-19 as of Monday. The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals had approved a six-day extension of a deadline for absentee ballots to be received in Wisconsin. Absentee ballots postmarked on or before Election Day would have been counted as long as they came in before Nov. 9. Chief Justice John Roberts sided with his conservative colleagues. Justice Elena Kagan, Stephen Breyer, and Sonia Sotomayor dissented.

Read more …

“He insists Democrats can change the system to guarantee Republicans “will never win another election..”

• Biden’s Parade of Horribles For Changing The Supreme Court (Turley)

The vote on Monday to make Judge Amy Coney Barrett the 115th Supreme Court justice will be more than a confirmation. It will be a dispensation, according to former Vice President Joe Biden and various Democratic senators. They have cited the vote as relieving them of any guilt in fundamentally changing the court to manufacture a liberal majority. Like school kids daring others to step over a line as an excuse to fight, Democrats insist that filling this vacancy will invite changes ranging from “packing” the court to stripping it of authority to rule in certain cases. The problem is that the line the Senate will step over is set by the Constitution, while the proposals by Democrats would retaliate against the use of a power granted by the Constitution. Democrats are floating a parade of horribles to “reform” the Supreme Court and negate its growing conservative majority.

Biden said this week that the court is “out of whack” and, as president, he would assemble a commission of “experts” to explore “a number of alternatives that go well beyond packing.” The commission would report to him 180 days after his inauguration. Polls show almost 60 percent of Americans oppose the court packing scheme supported by Democrats, including Biden’s running mate, Senator Kamala Harris. One person not polled was the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who denounced such a scheme as guaranteeing the court’s destruction. A New York Times and Siena College poll found only 31 percent favor court packing. That is a familiar figure: For the last four years, the same 30 percent of both parties have supported the most destructive political measures and rhetoric.

Those extremes continue to control our politics, while the vast majority of us in the middle watch in disbelief as virtually every Democratic senator embraces one of the most reviled tactics in American history. Those senators are not alone. A host of professors (who likely will be on the short list for Biden’s commission) are giving credibility to court packing. Harvard professor Michael Klarman attacked the foundations of Congress before attacking the foundations of the court. Klarman condemned a “malapportionment” in the Senate that he believes gives Republicans greater power, and referred to their refusal to vote on Obama court nominee Merrick Garland as “stealing a seat.” While controversial (and I was among those calling for a vote on Garland), that decision was clearly constitutional.

Yet Klarman illogically calls it “court packing” to justify any act of retaliation: “Democrats are not initiating this spiral. They are simply responding in kind.” He then says not to worry about Republicans responding with their own court packing when they return to power. He insists Democrats can change the system to guarantee Republicans “will never win another election,” at least not without abandoning their values. Of course, Klarman concedes “the Supreme Court could strike down everything I just described” so the court must be packed in advance to allow these changes to occur. Here are some of the other wacky ideas to get the court back into “whack.”

Read more …

Only needed to read the headline to understand why.

• Debt-To-Income Ratios Are Worse Than They Appear (RIA)

I recently published an article discussing why “recessions” are a good thing by reverting debt buildups excesses during expansions. The argument against debt reversions is always the same in that “debt-to-income” ratios low. To wit: “One reason (of many) we don’t need a debt reversion is that household debt service costs (interest etc.) as a % of household incomes are currently at a 40 year low.” – S. Porter If you look at a chart, it certainly would seem that would be the case. But, like most data from the Federal Reserve, you have to dig behind the numbers to reveal the real story. So let’s do that, shall we?

Every year, most Americans go further into debt just to “sustain” their standard of living. To wit: “In 1998, monetary velocity peaked and began to turn lower. Such coincides with the point that consumers were forced into debt to sustain their standard of living. For decades, WallStreet, advertisers, and corporate powerhouses flooded consumers with advertising to induce them into buying bigger houses, televisions, and cars. The age of ‘consumerism’ took hold.“

The idea of “maintaining a certain standard of living” has become a foundation in society currently. The average American believes they are “entitled” to a specific type of house, car, and general lifestyle. Such includes living necessities such as food, running water, electricity, and the latest mobile phone, computer, and high-speed internet connection. (Really, what would be the point of living if you didn’t have access to Facebook every two minutes?) However, maintaining this “entitled” lifestyle requires money, and as shown above, when income and savings run short, debt fills the gap.

Read more …

Are all COVID patients tested for flu?

• Confirmed Influenza Cases Hit Rock-Bottom, Puzzling Experts (JTN)

Even as worries persist over increasing COVID-19 cases in the United States, cases of another virus — influenza — have plummeted relative to their number a year ago. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s FluView influenza tracker lists an influenza-positive test percentage of 0.3% for week 42 of 2020 — a total of 33 positive tests out of 10,809 specimens. That’s down sharply from 2.4% during the same week last year. Visits to healthcare providers for “influenza-like illnesses” during week 42 were also down this year from the last, though not as sharply: This week that rate was 1.2% of all such visits, while last year it was 1.7%.

Sharp drops in influenza have also been observed elsewhere throughout the world over the past several months. World Health Organization global flu surveillance shows a severe dropoff in flu cases starting in early April; whereas in past years flu cases are sustained at a steady plateau over the mid-year months — driven by the Southern Hemisphere’s flu season — WHO observation has cases more or less disappearing from April onwards. “Globally, influenza activity remained at lower levels than expected for this time of the year,” the WHO wrote earlier this month, “though increased detections were reported in some countries.”

[..] Some experts have, perhaps unsurprisingly, cited the still-ongoing lockdowns, mitigation measures, mask mandates and social distancing orders as possible explanations for reduced flu rates worldwide. “It does seem that the rates are lower,” Phyllis Kanki, an infectious disease professor at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, told Just the News. “I think COVID mitigation measures are likely to lower levels. Some of these mitigation measures may have been particularly effective for high-risk groups for flu, like the elderly and immunosuppressed.” Nevertheless, she acknowledged, at this point there are “more questions than answers.”

[..] Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, is skeptical about the conventional wisdom that COVID mitigation efforts suppressed this year’s flu. “I think we can dismiss out of hand that that masks and social distancing are responsible for the decline in flu incidence this season,” he told Just the News, while also confessing to being uncertain as to why levels were so low. “First, why would they work for the flu, but not for COVID? Second, there is randomized evidence that those interventions do not work to suppress influenza incidence.” Bhattacharya was referring to a substantial body of evidence indicating that masks do not stop the spread of influenza. A World Health Organization review from last year found “no evidence” that masks helped to stop influenza transmission.

Read more …

Does this mean they’ll ban Bitcoin?

• China Moves To Legalise Digital Yuan, Ban Competitors (SCMP)

China is inching closer to the launch of its own sovereign digital currency by giving it a legal foundation in an upcoming law revision, while the central bank is also addressing problems that emerged in pilot tests for the digital yuan. The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) published a draft law on Friday that would give legal status to the Digital Currency Electronic Payment (DCEP) system, and for the first time the digital yuan has been included and defined as part of the country’s sovereign fiat currency. The draft law would also forbid any party from making or issuing yuan-backed digital tokens to replace the renminbi in the market.

Mu Changchun, head of the central bank’s digital currency research institute, said on Sunday at the Bund Summit in Shanghai that the DCEP will be allowed to circulate and be converted like physical banknotes and coins. “Its centralised management will be good to fight against cryptocurrencies and global stablecoins and prevent their erosion of currency-issuance rights,” he said. China released its design framework for the digital yuan soon after Facebook unveiled its ambitious Libra token project in the summer of last year, with plans for a two-tier issuance structure and a focus on small retail application scenarios. China appears to be the front runner in the race to issue the world’s first digital currency, having conducted a series of trials in four cities – Suzhou, Shenzhen, Chengdu and Xiongan – as well as at venues for the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing.


Earlier this month, a district in Shenzhen, just across the mainland border from Hong Kong, gave away 50,000 digital “red packets”, totalling 10 million yuan (US$1.5 million), to local residents in the largest-scale test so far. The central government has made it clear that the goals of the DCEP include replacing cash, maintaining government control over the currency and creating as many small retail application scenarios as possible. China is also looking to internationalise the yuan by enhancing its use in international settlements.

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“..dissemination of chaos by ‘self-media’“. Don’t think I’ve seen that term before.

• China Launches Crackdown On Mobile Web Browsers, ‘Chaos’ Of Information (R.)

China’s top cyber authority said on Monday it would carry out a “rectification” of Chinese mobile internet browsers to address what it called social concerns over the “chaos” of information being published online. China’s strict internet censorship rules have been tightened numerous times in recent years and in the latest crackdown, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) has told firms operating mobile browsers that they have until Nov. 9 to conduct a “self examination” and rectify problems. The problems include the spreading of rumours, the use of sensationalist headlines and the publishing of content that violates the core values of socialism, it said in a statement.


“For some time, mobile browsers have grown in an uncivilised way … and have become a gathering place and amplifier for dissemination of chaos by ‘self-media’,” the CAC said, referring to independently operated social media accounts, many of which publish news. “After the rectification, mobile browsers that still have outstanding problems will be dealt with strictly according to laws and regulations until related businesses are banned.” The campaign will initially focus on eight of the most influential mobile browsers in China, including those operated by Huawei, Alibaba Group Holding’s UCWeb and Xiaomi Corp, it said.

Read more …

We all heard of Big Brother. We just never understood who he is.

• Social Media’s Erasure Of Palestinians Is A Grim Warning For Our Future (Cook)

Western publics are waking up very belatedly to the undemocratic power social media wields over them. But if we wish to understand where this ultimately leads, there is no better case study than the very different ways Israelis and Palestinians have been treated by the tech giants. The treatment of Palestinians online serves as a warning that it would be foolish indeed to regard these globe-spanning corporations as politically neutral platforms, and their decisions as straightforwardly commercial. This is to doubly misunderstand their role. Social media firms are now effectively monopolistic communication grids – similar to the electricity and water grids, or the phone network of a quarter of a century ago.

Their decisions are therefore no longer private matters, but instead have huge social, economic and political consequences. That is part of the reason why the US justice department launched a lawsuit last week against Google for acting as a “monopoly gatekeeper for the internet”. Google, Facebook and Twitter have no more a right to arbitrarily decide who and what they host on their sites than telecoms companies once had a right to decide whether a customer should be allowed a phone line. But unlike the phone company, social media corporations control not just the means of communication, but the content too. They can decide, as the Hunter Biden story shows, whether their customers get to participate in vital public debates about who leads them.


The Hunter Biden decision is as if the phone company of old not only listened in to conversations, but was able to cut the line if it did not like the politics of any particular customer. In fact, it is even worse than that. Social media now deliver the news to large sections of the population. Their censoring of a story is more akin to the electricity company turning off the power to everyone’s homes for the duration of a TV broadcast to ensure no one can see it.

Read more …

At least Merkel said she was angry. But after that, crickets.

• The Revelations Of Wikileaks: No. 9 – Opening the CIA’s Vault (CN)

As its publisher remains in prison awaiting judgment on his extradition case, we continue our series of looking at WikiLeaks’ significant revelations contributing to the public’s right to know. On Feb. 6, 2017, WikiLeaks released documents detailing the Central Intelligence Agency’s espionage program in the months leading up to and following France’s presidential election in 2012. The agency used spies and cyberweapons to infiltrate and hack into the major political parties with competing candidates — the Socialists, the National Front and the Union for a Popular Movement. Their candidates — respectively François Hollande, Marine Le Pen and incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy — were also spied upon individually, as were many other prominent political figures.

The objectives of the program included ascertaining the contending parties’ political strategies and platforms, their views of the U.S., and their relations with the European Union, with other European nations (Germany, Britain) as well as Israel, Palestine, Libya, Syria, and others. The CIA’s French operation lasted 10 months, beginning in November 2011 and enduring until September 2012, several months after Hollande won the election and formed a Socialist government. WikiLeaks’ disclosure of the agency’s project bears a special irony: It was just as WikiLeaks published this material in 2017 that the CIA helped propagate unsubstantiated (and later discounted) “intelligence” that Russian hackers and propagandists were interfering with France’s presidential election that year.


Similar allegations (similarly lacking in evidence) were floated as the European Union held parliamentary elections in May 2019. As WikiLeaks reported at the time of the releases on the CIA’s covert activities in France, those revelations were to serve “as context for its forthcoming CIA Vault 7 series.” WikiLeaks’ apparent intent was to display a CIA’s hacking operation in action. Vault 7, the subject of this latest report on the history of WikiLeaks disclosures, stands as the most extensive publication on record of classified and confidential CIA documents. Never before and not since have the agency’s innumerable programs and capabilities been so thoroughly exposed to public scrutiny.

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“People who knowingly lied us into the war like Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, the Beltway neocon “experts,” and most of the media, faced neither punishment nor professional shaming for their acts.”

• ‘Iraq War Diaries’ At Ten Years: Truth is Treason (Ron Paul)

The purpose of journalism is to uncover truth – especially uncomfortable truth – and to publish it for the benefit of society. In a free society, we must be informed of the criminal acts carried out by governments in the name of the people. Throughout history, journalists have uncovered the many ways governments lie, cheat, and steal – and the great lengths they will go to keep the people from finding out. Great journalists like Seymour Hersh, who reported to us the tragedy of the Mai Lai Massacre and the horrors that took place at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, are essential. Ten years ago last week, Julian Assange’s Wikileaks organization published an exposé of US government wrongdoing on par with the above Hersh bombshell stories.

Publication of the “Iraq War Diaries” showed us all the brutality of the US attack on Iraq. It told us the truth about the US invasion and occupation of that country. This was no war of defense against a nation threatening us with weapons of mass destruction. This was no liberation of the country. We were not “bringing democracy” to Iraq. No, the release of nearly 400,000 classified US Army field reports showed us in dirty detail that the US attack was a war of aggression, based on lies, where hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed and injured. We learned that the US military classified anyone they killed in Iraq as “enemy combatants.” We learned that more than 700 Iraqi civilians were killed for “driving too close” to one of the hundreds of US military checkpoints – including pregnant mothers-to-be rushing to the hospital.

We learned that US military personnel routinely handed “detainees” over to Iraqi security forces where they would be tortured and often killed. Ten years after Assange’s brave act of journalism changed the world and exposed one of the crimes of the century, he sits alone in solitary confinement in a UK prison. He sits literally fighting for his life, as if he is successfully extradited to the United States he faces 175 years in a “supermax” prison for committing “espionage” against a country of which he is not a citizen. On the Iraq war we have punished the truth-tellers and rewarded the criminals. People who knowingly lied us into the war like Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, the Beltway neocon “experts,” and most of the media, faced neither punishment nor professional shaming for their acts. In fact, they got off scot free and many even prospered.

Julian Assange explained that he published the Iraq War Diaries because he “hoped to correct some of the attack on truth that occurred before the war, and that continued on since that war officially ended.” We used to praise brave journalists not afraid to take on the “bad guys.” Now we torture and imprison them.

Assange 10 years later

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Read it twice, still can’t decide if it’s serious.

• US Pulls Plan To Give Early Vaccine To Santa Claus (BBC)

The US has cancelled plans to offer Santa Claus performers early access to a coronavirus vaccine in exchange for their help in promoting it publicly. Those who perform as Mrs Claus and elves would also have been eligible for the jabs. The festive collaboration was part of a $250m (£192m) government campaign to garner celebrity endorsements of vaccinations once they are approved. But health authorities confirmed the advertising campaign had been scrapped. Ric Erwin, chairman of the Fraternal Order of Real Bearded Santas, called the news “extremely disappointing.”


“This was our greatest hope for Christmas 2020, and now it looks like it won’t happen,” he told the Wall Street Journal, which first reported the story. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has since confirmed the existence of the Santa plan to the New York Times. The idea was initially conceived by Michael Caputo, a former assistant secretary at the department. Mr Caputo announced last month that he would be going on leave, shortly after posting a video to Facebook where he accused government scientists of engaging in “sedition” against President Donald Trump.

Read more …

 

 

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The main difference between government bailouts and smoking is that in some rare cases the statement “this is my last cigarette” holds true.
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb in The Bed of Procrustes

 

 

To become a philosopher, start by walking very slowly.
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle June 16 2020

Jun 162020
 
 June 16, 2020  Posted by at 11:25 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,  22 Responses »


Gustave Dore Dante and the Angel of the Church before the Door of Purgatory 1868

 

• Biden Appears Likely To Pick Kamala Harris As VP (Mcleod)
• Gaslighted by the Ruling Class (Chris Hedges)
• New Zealand Ends Covid-Free Run With Two Cases From UK (G.)
• China Reports 40 New Coronavirus Cases In Mainland, 27 In Beijing (R.)
• Virus-Hit Beijing Tightens Outbound Travel; Shanghai Demands Quarantine (R.)
• FDA Warns Against Combination Of HCQ And Remdesivir (R.)
• FDA Revokes Emergency Use Status For HCQ To Treat COVID19 (R.)
• Fed Says It Is Going To Start Buying Individual Corporate Bonds (CNBC)
• Fed Launches Long-Awaited Main Street Lending Program (R.)
• Hong Kong Chief Says Opponents Of Security Law Are “Enemy Of The People” (R.)
• Disorders Now and To Come (Kunstler)
• Even At 50% Attendance, It’s An Economic Disaster (Y!)

 

 

First: there will be no Debt Rattle tomorrow, Wednesday June 17, or any other articles, because I’m going to try to fly to Athens. The entire game plan, the conditions etc., has kept on changing all the time, but it looks like it might happen.

What I understand at this point is that I will be tested at the airport upon arrival and then sent to a hotel for the night awaiting test results. Then if I test negative I’m free to go, the 1 week mandatory quarantine was scrapped two days ago. If I test positive there’s a 2 week quarantine. That would probably also apply if anyone else on the plane tests positive.

With all the extra safety measures and stuff at airports and planes, something tells me it’ll be a long day tomorrow.

 

 

Worldometer reports new cases (midnight to midnight GMT+0) at + 124,600.

My count from about 6 am EDT to 6 am EDT is + 124,778 cases.

 

 

 

 

New cases past 24 hours in:

• US + 20,722
• Brazil + 23,674
• Russia + 8,248
• India + 10,243
• Pakistan + 5,248
• Chile + 5,143

 

 

• Cases 8,141,389 (+ 124,778 from yesterday’s 8,017,241)

• Deaths 439,705 (+ 3,581 from yesterday’s 436,124)

 

 

 

 

I ike the slogan for Yaneer Bar-Yam’s EndCoronavirus.org:

THERE’S NO SENSE IN BEING PRECISE WHEN YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT.
John von Neumann (1903 – 1957)

 

 

 

From Worldometer yesterday evening -before their day’s close-:

 

 

From Worldometer:

 

 

From COVID19Info.live:

 

 

 

 

The game plan would be clear enough: Kamala Harris is black and aggressive, tough on crime, and her role will be to stir unrest among African-Americans, get them out on the streets, seen as THE new issue with which to defeat Trump, now that RussiaRussia and impeachment were such abject failures.

But but: Kamala Harris was about the most unpopular candidate running in the Dem prelimiaries, and because of that, one of the first to bow out. How does that not matter?

It sounds convincing though, almost like a done deal: Bookmakers agree, putting Harris’ chances at around 50%. No other candidate [..] has a better than one in ten chance.

Still, reading things like this can’t help to make me think: they don’t really want to win.

• Biden Appears Likely To Pick Kamala Harris As VP (Mcleod)

Amid an anti-police movement that has swept the country, the Democratic Party is choosing to run on a “tough on crime” ticket for November. A new Reuters exclusive reports that California senator and former prosecutor Kamala Harris is the clear favorite for the job of vice-president in a Biden White House. Bookmakers agree, putting Harris’ chances at around 50 percent. No other candidate, according to betting analyst Oddsmaker, has a better than one in ten chance. The nationwide protests, sparked by the police killing of George Floyd on May 25, have been increasingly led by Black Lives Matter, and the calls to defund or dismantle the entire policing system are growing louder. In response, more than 30 states mobilized the National Guard to quash the unrest.

A recent poll found that 74 percent of the country, including 87 percent of Democrats, support the protests, with two-thirds backing Black Lives Matter. Despite this, Biden is moving towards choosing a running mate that is most famous in activist circles for her conservative, “lock them up” stance when it comes to crime. As District Attorney of San Francisco, Harris strongly opposed marijuana legalization. Under her jurisdiction, arrests and convictions for the drug increased, as did the percentage of black people arrested for its possession. Yet during her unsuccessful run for the Democratic nomination last year, she laughed and joked about illegally using marijuana herself.

During the Democratic debates, she was also accused by Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard of blocking evidence that would have freed an innocent man from a death sentence. Harris was also a vocal supporter of the controversial three strikes law that sent repeat offenders to prison for life. When running for Attorney General, her position was to the right of her Republican opponent. Nevertheless, many in the business world appear very excited about the potential pick. “She understands the moment,” claimed Marc Lasry, Chairman of the Avenue Capital Group and a member of Biden’s national finance committee, “They want someone who will galvanize people. She seems to be that person.”

It seems unlikely, however, that either Biden or Harris will galvanize protestors demanding racial justice. Biden’s 1994 Crime Bill imposed the three strikes rule, leading to a great increase in the number of people in prison. Between 1994 and 1998, the total number of people in U.S. prisons rose by 19 percent and continued climbing for a decade longer. Biden himself began his political career by opposing racial desegregation and bussing, something that Harris grilled him on in the Democratic debates. “There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day. That little girl was me,” she said directly to him.

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The rulinng class in this case is Joe Biden.

• Gaslighted by the Ruling Class (Chris Hedges)

In 1994, then Senator Biden pushed through the Violent Crime and Law Enforcement Act. It was supported by the Congressional Black Caucus, evidence of the growing disconnect between black political elites and those they should protect. The caucus has, in the face of the current crisis, once again called for the tired and toothless reforms that got us into this mess. “Black elected officials have become adept at mobilizing the tropes of Black identity without any of its political content,” notes Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor in the New York Times.

The bill authorized $30.2 billion over six years for police and prisons. Biden boasted that he “added back into the Federal statutes over 50 death penalties — 50 circumstances in which, if a person is convicted of a crime at a Federal level, they are eligible for the death penalty.” The bill, he bragged, authorized “over 70 increased — 70, seven zero — 70 increased penalties in new offenses covering violent crimes, drug trafficking, and gun crimes.” It also established the Community Oriented Policing Services or COPS Program that has handed more than $14 billion to state and local governments, most of the money used to hire more police. COPS also provided $1 billion to place police in schools, accelerating the criminalization of children.

The 1994 bill more than doubled the prison population. The United States now has 25 percent of the world’s prison population, although we are 4 percent of the world’s population. Half of the 2.3 million people in our prisons have never been charged with physically harming another person and 94 percent never had a jury trial, coerced to plea out in our dysfunctional judicial system. Biden proudly said in 1994 he represented a new Democratic Party that was tough on law and order.

“Let me define the liberal wing of the Democratic Party,” he said at the time. “The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is now for 60 new death penalties. That is what is in this bill. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party has 70 enhanced penalties, and my friend from California, Senator Diane Feinstein, outlined every one of them. I gave her a list today. She asked what is in there to every one of them. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is for 100,000 cops. The liberal wing of the democratic Party is for 125,000 new State prison cells.” There is only one way to defeat these forces of occupation and the ruling elites they protect. It is not through voting. It will come from the streets, where tens of thousands of courageous men and women, facing arrest, indiscriminate police violence, economic despair and the threat of Covid-19, are fighting for not only an end to racism, but freedom.

Read more …

No cases for 24 days. Then they allow two UK women in for compassionate reasons. These women then go into a 2-week Isolation but remain untested for 9 days, until one of them gets sick.

Gov’t comment: “The women had “done everything right”. I’m starting to think New Zealand’s success story was based on pure luck.

• New Zealand Ends Covid-Free Run With Two Cases From UK (G.)

New Zealand has recorded its first new cases of coronavirus for 24 days after two women who arrived in the country from Britain were found to be infected. The pair were released early from government quarantine and permitted to drive from the city of Auckland to Wellington, the capital – nearly 650km away – before being diagnosed, health officials said. Their trip was an approved exemption from the mandatory isolation period for new arrivals to the country in order to visit a dying parent. The women had “done everything right” and had not put other members of the public at risk, said Ashley Bloomfield, New Zealand’s director-general of health, on Tuesday.

After both women tested positive for Covid-19 on Monday, one reported that in hindsight she had been experiencing symptoms, but had attributed them to a pre-existing medical condition. The pair marked New Zealand’s first new cases of Covid-19 for more than three weeks, and were diagnosed one week after the last known case in the country had recovered. The discovery of the new cases came one week after all domestic restrictions on the country were lifted, with Bloomfield warning at the time that more cases of the virus would inevitably arise as people infected with it crossed the border. The women – one aged in her 30s and the other in her 40s – had arrived in Auckland on a flight from the UK via Brisbane, Australia, on 7 June, Bloomfield said.

All new arrivals to the country – only New Zealanders, their families, and essential workers are currently permitted to cross the border – are required to spend two weeks in managed isolation at a hotel. But six days after the women arrived, Bloomfield said they travelled from Auckland to Wellington “in a private vehicle” after they were granted a compassionate exemption to do so and made a safety plan with officials. They had not been tested for Covid-19 at the time. The pair had made the drive of approximately eight hours without refuelling their vehicle or disembarking for any reason, including to use public toilets, he said. “They had no contact with anybody else during that trip,” added Bloomfield. He was “not nervous” that the women had infected anyone else, adding that they would now remain in self-isolation with a relative in Wellington.

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Given how fast it spread in the past 2-3 days, it’s obvious the disease had been present for a 1 or 2 weeks.

• China Reports 40 New Coronavirus Cases In Mainland, 27 In Beijing (R.)

Mainland China reported 40 new confirmed coronavirus cases for June 15, down from 49 a day earlier, the National Health Authority said on Monday. Twenty seven of the new cases were in Beijing, down from 36 a day earlier. The city is facing a new outbreak of the virus that is believed to have originated in a local grocery market. The NHC reported 8 new imported coronavirus cases in mainland China as of the end of June 15, down from 10 a day earlier. The commission also reported 6 new asymptomatic cases, down from 18 a day earlier. The total number of coronavirus cases in mainland China now stands at 83,221, and the death toll remains unchanged at 4,634. China does not count asymptomatic patients, who are infected with the virus but do not display symptoms, as confirmed cases.

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1 outbreak, 106 cases and counting.

• Virus-Hit Beijing Tightens Outbound Travel; Shanghai Demands Quarantine (R.)

Beijing banned high-risk people from leaving the Chinese capital and halted some transportation services on Tuesday to stop the spread of a fresh coronavirus outbreak to other cities and provinces. China’s financial hub of Shanghai demanded some travellers from Beijing be quarantined for two weeks, as 27 new COVID-19 cases took the capital’s current outbreak to 106 since Thursday. That makes it the most serious flare-up in China since February, stoking fears of a second wave of the respiratory disease which emerged in the central city of Wuhan late last year and has now infected more than 8 million people worldwide. “Beijing will take the most resolute, decisive, and strict measures to contain the outbreak,” Xu Hejian, spokesman at the Beijing city government, said at a press conference on Tuesday.


The outbreak has been traced to the sprawling Xinfadi wholesale food centre in the southwest of Beijing where thousands of tonnes of vegetables, fruits and meat change hands each day. Beijing had designated 22 neighbourhoods as medium-risk areas as of Monday. Medium-risk areas are required to take stringent measures to block the potential entry of infection. All high-risk groups in Beijing, such as people who are close contacts of confirmed cases, are not allowed to leave the city, state media reported on Tuesday, citing municipal officials. All outbound taxi and car-hailing services have also been suspended. Some long-distance bus routes between Beijing and nearby Hebei and Shandong provinces were suspended.

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A non-clinical study that showed no evidence. It’s becoming a familiar theme.

• FDA Warns Against Combination Of HCQ And Remdesivir (R.)

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Monday issued a warning to healthcare providers against administering malaria drug hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine in combination with Gilead Sciences’ experimental COVID-19 drug, remdesivir. The agency, based on data from a recent non-clinical study, said the co-administration may result in reduced antiviral activity of remdesivir. It also added it had no such evidence from a clinical setting and that it continues to evaluate all data related to remdesivir.


The warning comes hours after the agency revoked the emergency use authorization of hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19, which has been touted by the U.S. President Donald Trump. FDA said it was no longer reasonable to believe that oral formulations of hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine may be effective in treating the illness caused by the novel coronavirus. Gilead’s drug had received emergency use authorization earlier in May as a potential treatment for COVID-19, clearing the way for broader use of the drug in more hospitals around the United States.

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We get not a word about zinc.

But we do get a rehash of France, Italy and Belgium halting HCQ use, without mentioning that they did so based on a fully discredited piece in the Lancet, which itself has issued apologies for it.

• FDA Revokes Emergency Use Status For HCQ To Treat COVID19 (R.)

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Monday revoked its emergency use authorization for hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19, but quickly came under fire from President Donald Trump, who said only U.S. agencies have failed to grasp its benefit in fighting the coronavirus. Based on new evidence, the FDA said it was no longer reasonable to believe that hydroxychloroquine and the related drug chloroquine may be effective in treating the illness caused by the novel coronavirus. The FDA also warned that the drugs have been shown in lab studies to interfere with Gilead Sciences Inc’s antiviral drug remdesivir – the only medicine so far to show a benefit against COVID-19 in formal clinical trials.


The move comes after several studies of the decades-old malaria pills suggested they were not effective either as a treatment for or to prevent COVID-19. [..] Current U.S. government treatment guidelines do not recommend its use for COVID-19 patients outside of a clinical trial. France, Italy and Belgium late last month halted use of hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 patients. But the United States last month sent 2 million doses to Brazil, which has emerged as the pandemic’s latest epicenter. Hundreds of trials testing hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine as interventions for COVID-19 are still underway, including a U.S. study designed to show whether hydroxychloroquine in combination with azithromycin can prevent hospitalization and death from COVID-19.

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Call it what you want: nationalization, socialism, communism.

Or simply: the strongest attempt to kill off price discovery so far.

• Fed Says It Is Going To Start Buying Individual Corporate Bonds (CNBC)

The Federal Reserve is expanding its foray into corporate credit to now buy individual corporate bonds, on top of the exchange-traded funds it already is purchasing, the central bank announced Monday. As part of a continuing effort to support market functioning and ease credit conditions, the Fed added functions to its Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facility. The program has the ability to buy up to $750 billion worth of corporate credit. Its March 23 initial announcement is largely considered a watershed moment for the financial markets, reeling from the coronavirus threat spread. “The decision to buy a broad portfolio of corporate bonds represents a shift to a more active strategy for the secondary market corporate credit facility, rather than the passive approach originally envisioned,” said Steven Friedman, senior macroeconomist at MacKay Shields.

The move comes less than a week after a downbeat Federal Open Market Committee view of the U.S. economy in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. Moving to a more aggressive bond-buying strategy “may also reflect the Committee’s view that the economic recovery from the ongoing COVID-19 crisis will be an extended and challenging one, with credit markets requiring extensive support,” Friedman added. Under the latest guidelines, the Fed said it will buy, on the secondary market, individual bonds that have remaining maturities of five years or less. Those purchases will go along with the ETFs the Fed already has been buying, which are balanced toward investment-grade indexes but also include some junk bond funds that track debt which had been investment grade before the crisis but had been downgraded after.

The intent of the individual debt purchases will be “to create a corporate bond portfolio that is based on a broad, diversified market index of U.S. corporate bonds,” the Fed said in a news release. “This index is made up of all the bonds in the secondary market that have been issued by U.S. companies that satisfy the facility’s minimum rating, maximum maturity, and other criteria. This indexing approach will complement the facility’s current purchases of exchange-traded funds,” the statement said.

Read more …

The Fed doesn’t help Main Street. It simply sees an opportunity to help banks make more money at the expense of Main Street under the guise of a beneficial narrative.

• Fed Launches Long-Awaited Main Street Lending Program (R.)

The Federal Reserve on Monday launched its Main Street Lending Program, the most complex program undertaken yet by the U.S. central bank to help keep the backbone of the economy from buckling under the strains of the coronavirus pandemic. The program, targeted at companies that were in good shape before the pandemic but may now need financing to retain workers and fund operations, will offer up to $600 billion in loans through participating financial institutions to U.S. businesses with up to 15,000 employees or with revenues up to $5 billion. Lenders must register using the lender portal here and are encouraged by the Fed to begin making program loans to for-profit firms “immediately.”

The central bank also sought feedback on Monday on a proposal to expand the program to allow nonprofit organizations to borrow under the program as well. Administered by the Boston Fed, the Main Street program for businesses aims to offer credit for those that may be too large to qualify for the Paycheck Protection Program, which targets businesses with fewer than 500 employees. Unlike the PPP, which was established by Congress in late March and offers loans that can be converted to grants if businesses meet certain requirements, the loans offered under the Fed program must be repaid.

It has taken nearly three months for the Fed to design, build and launch a program to extend credit to companies in all walks of the economy, a huge departure from its role as a lender to the banking sector. Fed officials adjusted the Main Street program twice by expanding the range of loan sizes to make it available to more companies that need help keeping workers on staff. It also extended the loans to five years, with payments deferred for the first two years, to better help businesses struggling because of the crisis. “Supporting small and mid-sized businesses so they are ready to reopen and rehire workers will help foster a broad-based economic recovery,” Fed Chair Jerome Powell said in a statement last week after the most recent adjustment.

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A.k.a. deplorables.

• Hong Kong Chief Says Opponents Of Security Law Are “Enemy Of The People” (R.)

Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam on Tuesday urged opponents of Beijing’s plan to impose national security legislation in the financial hub to stop “smearing” the effort, saying those who did were “the enemy of the people”. Beijing last month announced a plan to introduce legislation in Hong Kong to tackle secession, subversion, terrorism and foreign interference and which could see Chinese security agencies set up bases in the city. Critics see the law as the most serious threat to a “one country, two systems” formula, agreed when the former British colony returned to Chinese rule in 1997, aimed at ensuring its freedoms and role as a global financial centre.

The Chinese government and Lam’ s Beijing-backed city administration say the law will not curtail freedoms but will target a small number of “troublemakers” and help bring stability after a year of anti-government protests. “I urge opponents who still use the usual tactics to demonize and smear the work to stop because by doing this they become the enemy of the Hong Kong people,” Lam said before a cabinet meeting, referring to the legislation. “The vast majority want to restore stability, and have safety, satisfaction and employment.” The government has mounted a campaign to rally public support for the legislation, with billboards, a booklet with questions and answers and a video of Lam defending the law “in the public interest”.

In the video, posted on the city government’s website, Lam decried a “terrorist threat” against a “traumatized” city, saying advocates of independence were “colluding with foreign forces” and undermining security. “Hong Kong has become a gaping hole in national security, and our city’s prosperity and stability are at risk,” said Lam as she stood flanked by the Chinese and Hong Kong flags, the first bigger than the second.

Read more …

“Have Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi appealed to their followers to end their violence? Maybe I missed that.”

• Disorders Now and To Come (Kunstler)

Never in US history has there been a faction as dishonest as today’s Democratic Party or as habituated to the application of bad faith in political conflict. Their addiction to malicious hoaxes and engineered untruths knows no limits — and naturally so, since they are motivated primarily by dissolving all boundaries in policy, law, sexual relations, and personal conduct. They’ve been busy proving the past few weeks that they’re against the social contract as a basic proposition, exhorting for an end to law enforcement while inciting street violence, crimes against property, and murder.

Many voters are onto them, of course, so the Resistance is also determined to derail the 2020 elections by any means necessary, only starting with ballot fraud but surely escalating to new, innovative chicanes and disruptions. Their chosen candidate for president — that is, their putative “leader” — is an obvious empty vessel fronting for sinister forces in the background. They stuffed Joe Biden in a basement twelve weeks ago and have no intention of setting him loose on the landscape where he would reveal his unfitness with every breath he takes and every move he makes. The news media especially, in its bad faith role, pretends not to notice, but its minions are too self-important to realize that there are other ways for citizens to learn what is happening out there.

Events are rushing ahead at a pace you can barely follow. Summer begins in another week and why, now, would you expect any lessening in civil disorders? A heat wave is upon us here in the crowded eastern US at the end of this week and that’s always an invitation to raucous behavior on the steamy streets. Have Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi appealed to their followers to end their violence? Maybe I missed that. They are hinting at a return to Covid-19 lockdown conditions — but you can forget about anyone following that when the temperature tops ninety degrees (and certainly the Dem leadership knows that).

The devastation of small business, careers, livelihoods, households, and futures continues. Take measures to protect your own future, as far as possible. Put your energy into imagining how you can be helpful to other people, and perhaps incidentally earn their trust and their assistance in mutually beneficial ways. Think about finding a plausible place to live where the rule of law perseveres. Think about how you might fit into an economy run at a smaller scale. Start taking action on that thinking. There’s potential for a lot of people to get hurt in the disorders-to-come. There’s plenty you can do to not be one of them.

Read more …

The problem with all mass events.

• Even At 50% Attendance, It’s An Economic Disaster (Y!)

College football is twelve Saturdays away. It may be hard to believe amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, but Division I colleges and universities across the country began to bring their football players back to campus for workouts this month. Now a number of schools have reported that some of their players tested positive for COVID-19: Auburn had three players test positive; University of Central Florida had three; Oklahoma State had five; Arkansas State had seven. That won’t stop the season from happening. The general attitude from schools is that the players who tested positive will self-isolate for two weeks, and the show will go on. The show must go on, because the money demands it.


“We are going to play football in the fall,” said the 76-year-old West Virginia University president Gordon Gee, “even if I have to suit up.” Gee said that a month ago, when the return of college football was still in question, since some universities were hesitant to commit to having classes in the fall. The California State University system, which includes football schools like San Diego State and Fresno State, announced it would start the fall with mostly online-only classes. The thinking at that time was that schools couldn’t have college football players come back if they didn’t have the rest of their students back on campus. There were also fears that the college football season might get pushed to spring 2021, which would mean NFL-bound stars like Clemson quarterback Trevor Lawrence or Ohio State quarterback Justin Fields would almost surely opt not to play.

Read more …

 

 

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Debt Rattle Thanksgiving 2019

Nov 282019
 
 November 28, 2019  Posted by at 9:52 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  13 Responses »


Paul Gauguin Brooding woman 1891

 

• Is Censure The Democrat Escape Clause? (Noble)
• Tulsi Gabbard Slams Democrats for Calling Trump Supporters ‘Deplorables’ (GP)
• China Threatens Retaliation After Trump Signs Hong Kong Democracy Bill (ZH)
• Obama Holdover Investigated for ‘Illegally Leaked’ Classified Document (ET)
• The Real Barack Obama Has Finally Revealed Himself (Jacobin)
• Reuters Gamed A Poll To Show Rising Support For Trump Impeachment (ZH)
• Fewer Than 120,000 Tactical Votes Could Block Boris Johnson Premiership (Ind.)
• US Wants NHS On Table For Post-Brexit Trade Deal – Labour Dossier (Ind.)
• Christopher Steele Distributed Other Dossier Reports (Solomon)
• “Russian Trolls” Did Not “Sow Discord” – They Influenced No One (MoA)
• Brick & Mortar Rent Meltdown, Manhattan Style (WS)
• Merkel Says NATO Is ‘More Important’ Now Than During Cold War (RT)

 

 

Well, censure appears to be the word of the day.

• Is Censure The Democrat Escape Clause? (Noble)

Rep. Brenda Lawrence (D-MI) is not one of those who represent a 2016 Trump-voting district. In fact, her safe Democrat district encompasses part of eastern Detroit. Even so, Lawrence has seen the writing on the wall: Among independent voters, enthusiasm for impeachment is waning, and Lawrence – who previously supported the idea – is perhaps now thinking beyond her own chances of re-election. “I will tell you, sitting here knowing how divided this country is,” Lawrence explained Nov. 24 during a radio interview, “I don’t see the value of taking [Trump] out of office, but I do see the value of putting down a marker saying his behavior is not acceptable.”

An editorial, published Nov. 23 by The Detroit News, suggests censure of the president rather than impeachment, and The Chicago Tribune followed suit on Nov. 25. It is neither unfair nor inaccurate to point out that the left-wing media rarely take up a political narrative not preapproved by someone within the Democratic Party. So the sudden appearance of editorials arguing for censure strongly suggests that Democrat strategists are leaning in that direction or at least testing the waters. Unlike impeachment, censure is not a constitutional measure. That is not to say that censure is unconstitutional, but that it is simply a course of action devised by Congress and not described in the nation’s founding document. There is no mandatory consequence to censure, and nobody would suggest that censure could lead to removal from the office of president.

It has been used most often to rebuke or reprimand members of Congress, though Trump, were he censured, would not be the first commander in chief to have faced it. In effect, censure is an act of disapproval. For a member of Congress, it may entail such undesirable consequences as loss of committee memberships or even suspension; it comes with no penalties when used against executive branch officials. And that is how it should be, or the concepts of separation of powers and co-equal branches of government would likely be swept away in an avalanche of partisan censure votes. Both the Senate and the House have the power to censure or reprimand, and each chamber may do it without the approval or involvement of the other. Censure requires only a simple majority. At least some Democrats, surely, are considering how much easier than impeachment censure will be. They also may be considering how a censure resolution will provide the opportunity to pontificate at length – on live TV – about Trump’s moral turpitude and failings, both as a human being and as a president.

Read more …

A lone voice in the wilderness: “..you can’t win support from people that you treat “like garbage.”

• Tulsi Gabbard Slams Democrats for Calling Trump Supporters ‘Deplorables’ (GP)

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard once again defended supporters of President Donald Trump, as well as her appearances on Fox News, during an interview with Joe Rogan on Tuesday night. The 2020 Democratic presidential candidate said that you can’t lead Americans as president if you’re going to throw “half of them away.” “It’s one thing to say you’re gonna go on Fox News and tussle with Sean Hannity about things you disagree on, but what they see as more dangerous is finding areas where you actually do agree,” Gabbard proclaimed.

“I have a platform to be able to speak to millions of people across the country about the kind of leadership I bring in the area of foreign policy. What I would do here in this country, what I would do there in that country if I were president today. And I have the opportunity to deliver that message directly to people’s living rooms or offices or wherever they are.” Rep. Gabbard was attacked by Sen. Kamala Harris during the November Democratic Primary debate for her willingness to appear on Fox News.

“I think in some of these areas, Tucker and I will disagree on a whole host of things, but on some of these issues of foreign policy he’ll say, ‘Yeah, I agree with you,’” she continued. “And I think when you look at this cancel culture — I was attacked on the debate stage for going on Fox News — how do you think you’re gonna lead this country, all Americans, if you’re completely not only shutting out and not willing to do talk to half the country that watches Fox News, but you’re in fact disrespecting and dismissing them just because they may disagree with you, or they watch a different news channel than you do. I think that’s the bigger issue here, is you know, yeah, there’s a political consequence.” She noted that you can’t win support from people that you treat “like garbage.”

Read more …

Trump had no choice, he was outnumbered. China also has no choice, it must respond, but Xi knows what situation Trump is in.

• China Threatens Retaliation After Trump Signs Hong Kong Democracy Bill (ZH)

[..] on day 510 of the trade war, it appears the president was confident enough that a collapse in trade talks won’t drag stocks too far lower, and moments after futures reopened at 6pm, the White House said that Trump had signed the Hong Kong bill backing pro-democracy protesters, defying China and making sure that every trader’s Thanksgiving holiday was just ruined.Needless to say, no differences will be “settled amicably” and now China will have no choice but to retaliate, aggressively straining relations with the US, and further complicating Trump’s effort to wind down his nearly two-year old trade war with Beijing.

Trump’s signing of the bill comes during a period of unprecedented unrest in Hong Kong, where anti-government protests sparked by a now-shelved extradition bill proposal have ballooned into broader calls for democratic reform and police accountability. “The Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act reaffirms and amends the United States-Hong Kong Policy Act of 1992, specifies United States policy towards Hong Kong and directs assessment of the political developments in Hong Kong,” the White House said in a statement. “Certain provisions of the act would interfere with the exercise of the president’s constitutional authority to state the foreign policy of the United States.”

The legislation, S. 1838, which was passed virtually unanimously in both chambers, requires annual reviews of Hong Kong’s special trade status under American law and will allow Washington to suspend said status in case the city does not retain a sufficient degree of autonomy under the “one country, two systems” framework. The bill also sanctions any officials deemed responsible for human rights abuses or undermining the city’s autonomy. The House cleared the bill 417-1 on Nov. 20 after the Senate passed it without opposition, veto-proof majorities that left Trump with little choice but to acquiesce, or else suffer bruising fallout from his own party. the GOP.

Trump also signed into law the PROTECT Hong Kong act, which will prohibit the sale of US-made munitions such as tear gas and rubber bullets to the city’s authorities. While many members of Congress in both parties have voiced strong support for protesters demanding more autonomy for the city, Trump had stayed largely silent, even as the demonstrations have been met by rising police violence. Until now.

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A tangled web.

• Obama Holdover Investigated for ‘Illegally Leaked’ Classified Document (ET)

The Obama holdover heading the Pentagon office reportedly under investigation by the U.S. attorney who is conducting the criminal probe of the Trump–Russia investigation was accused of leaking a classified document, in a recent court filing for retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. The connection hasn’t been previously reported. According to a Nov. 21 report by independent journalist Sara Carter, U.S. Attorney John Durham is questioning personnel in the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment (ONA). ONA awarded about $1 million in contracts to FBI informant Stefan Halper, who appears to have played a key role in alleged U.S. intelligence agency spying on 2016 Trump campaign advisers Carter Page and George Papadopoulos.

In addition, however, a court filing indicates that ONA’s director, James H. Baker, “is believed to be the person who illegally leaked the transcript of Mr. Flynn’s calls” to The Washington Post. Specifically, the filing states, “ONA Director Baker regularly lunched with Washington Post Reporter David Ignatius.” The filing adds that Baker “was Halper’s ‘handler’” at ONA. Moreover, according to the court filing, the tasks assigned to “known long-time operative for the CIA/FBI” Halper “seem to have included slandering Mr. Flynn with accusations of having an affair with a young professor (a British national of Russian descent).” The filing notes that Flynn’s defense team has requested phone records for then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, likewise in order to confirm contacts with Ignatius.

The filing singles out records for Jan. 10, 2017, when, according to the filing, “Clapper told Ignatius in words to the effect of ‘take the kill shot on Flynn.’” The Pentagon’s current inspector general has already found that Baker’s office “did not maintain documentation of the work performed by Professor Halper or any communication that ONA personnel had with Professor Halper.” As a result, according to the inspector general, ONA staff “could not provide sufficient documentation that Professor Halper conducted all of his work in accordance with applicable laws and regulations.”

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Quite the attack.

• The Real Barack Obama Has Finally Revealed Himself (Jacobin)

What does Barack Obama want? To ask the question is both to wonder how one of the world’s most influential people chooses to dedicate his time and to consider to what ends he thinks it is best put to use. As Nathan Robinson and I argued a little more than two years ago, a post-presidency offers us the ideal heuristic for doing exactly that. In office, or so it has often been suggested, Obama’s fiery progressive spirit was endlessly stifled by a combination of events, GOP obstruction, and the inherent conservatism of the American legislative process. Having left such constraints behind, many believed, post-2016 Obama would now be free to do just about anything he wanted — meaning that the former president’s real self could finally surface from beneath the depths of institutional necessity under which it had hitherto been submerged.

This prediction turned out to be true enough, just not in the way many Obama partisans assumed. Equipped with fame, wealth, and a vast reservoir of residual goodwill Obama now has more power to do good in an hour than most of us do in a lifetime. The demands of etiquette and propriety notwithstanding, he no longer has intransigent Blue Dog senators to appease, donors to placate, or personal electoral considerations to keep him up at night. When he speaks or acts, we can be reasonably certain he does so out of sincere choice and that the substance of his words and actions reflect the real Barack Obama and how he honestly sees the world.

It therefore tells us a great deal that, given the latitude, resources, and moral authority with which to influence events, Obama has spent his post-presidency cozying up to the global elite and delivering vapid speeches to corporate interests in exchange for unthinkable sums of money. Though often remaining out of the spotlight, he has periodically appeared next to various CEOs at events whose descriptions might be read as cutting satire targeting the hollowness of business culture if they weren’t all-too real. As the world teeters on the brink of ecological disaster, he recently cited an increase in America’s output of oil under his administration as a laudable achievement.

When Obama has spoken about or intervened in politics, it’s most often been to bolster the neoliberal center-right or attack and undermine the Left. Having emerged from seclusion to endorse the likes of Emmanuel Macron and Justin Trudeau, Obama also rang up Britain’s austerity-loving Conservative prime minister Theresa May on election night in 2017 to offer reassurance and trash the Labour Party’s electoral prospects. Only last week, while denouncing the Democratic Party’s “activist wing,” the former president who had once introduced himself to the nation as a progressive, community-minded outsider inveighed against those pushing for a more ambitious direction — contemptuously instructing a group of wealthy donors not to concern themselves too-much with the irrational zealotry of “certain left-leaning Twitter feeds.”

Read more …

Why do we still have polls left? What purpose do they serve other than entertainment?

• Reuters Gamed A Poll To Show Rising Support For Trump Impeachment (ZH)

After several major polls revealed a sharp decline in support for impeaching President Trump in the wake of unconvincing public testimony by aggrieved bureaucrats (and at least one House Democrat publicly opposing the move), Reuters/Ipsos now claims support for impeachment has increased. “The latest poll, conducted on Monday and Tuesday, found that 47% of adults in the United States felt Trump “should be impeached,” while 40% said he should not. The result, combined with Reuters/Ipsos polling over the past several weeks, showed that the number of Americans who want to impeach the president increasingly outnumbers those who do not.” -Reuters The problem? Reuters sampled a disproportionate number of Democrats. Buried at the bottom of their report, they disclose:

“The Reuters/Ipsos poll was conducted online, in English, throughout the United States. It gathered responses from 1,118 adults, including 528 Democrats, 394 Republicans and 111 independents. It has a credibility interval, a measure of precision, of 3 percentage points.” In other words, Reuters sampled more Democrats than Republicans and independents combined to arrive at their conclusion. They also reveal that ” about eight in 10 Democrats [were] supportive of impeaching Trump, and eight in 10 Republicans opposed,” and that seven in 10 Republicans felt the House impeachment inquiry had not been conducted fairly. As we noted during the 2016 US election, Reuters/Ipsos wasoversampling Democrats when they found that Hillary Clinton had a giant lead over Donald Trump – using a poll that sampled 44% Democrats and 33% Republicans.

But hey, Adam Schiff needs something to back his claim that support for impeachment has grown “dramatically” over the past two months.

Read more …

And here’s another poll. Does anyone fully understand this system?

• Fewer Than 120,000 Tactical Votes Could Block Boris Johnson Premiership (Ind.)

Fewer than 120,000 anti-Brexit tactical votes in the right seats could deny Boris Johnson an overall majority in the House of Commons, new polling suggests. A large-scale survey of almost 40,000 voters found that Conservatives are heading for 366 seats in the House of Commons, giving Mr Johnson a comfortable majority of 82. But analysis for the Best for Britain campaign for a second EU referendum found that in 57 seats, the Tory candidate could be defeated by 4,000 or fewer anti-Brexit voters voting tactically. And the campaign said that as few as 117,314 pro-EU tactical votes in the right seats could produce a hung parliament which could deliver a Final Say referendum.

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Scary enough fpr you?

• US Wants NHS On Table For Post-Brexit Trade Deal – Labour Dossier (Ind.)

US negotiators pushed for “full market access” to services including the NHS in talks on a post-Brexit free trade deal with the UK, a cache of leaked documents has revealed. The papers were dramatically unveiled by Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who said they left “in tatters” the prime minister’s denial that the NHS will be on the table in trade talks. The 451-page dossier of official files showed the US had “pushed hard” to extend patents on drugs developed by American corporations in a way which would raise prices to NHS patients. A UK negotiator said such a move could put Britain “in difficult territory”.

And the dossier made clear that the US has been “emphatic” in its insistence that climate change should not even be mentioned in the deal, which Boris Johnson wants to strike as soon as possible after the UK leaves the European Union. But furious Conservatives accused Mr Corbyn of “out-and-out lying” and suggested he was peddling conspiracy theories in a bid to distract attention away from his difficulties over antisemitism allegations and Labour’s plans for Brexit and taxation. Mr Johnson dismissed the Labour leader’s claims as “total nonsense”, and said: “I can give you an absolute cast-iron guarantee that this is a complete diversion. That the NHS under no circumstances would be on the table for negotiation, for sale.”

[..] After a slew of bad headlines about his refusal to apologise for his handling of antisemitism during a TV interview on Tuesday, Mr Corbyn came back fighting with the claim that Mr Johnson’s government was “preparing to sell our NHS”. He pointed to details in the dossier which showed that the US was pushing for a deal in which all services would be opened up to American companies unless they were specifically exempted. “Total market access” should be the “baseline assumption of the trade negotiations” because it “incentivises freer trade”, the dossier said. UK officials assured their US counterparts that Britain would be “a liberalising influence” and that together they could “fly the good flag for services liberalisation”.

“That’s a green light for breaking open Britain’s public services so corporations can profit from them,” said Mr Corbyn. And he warned: “The US is demanding that our NHS is on the table in negotiations for a toxic deal – it’s already being talked about in secret. That could lead to runaway privatisation of our health service. “Mega-corporations see Johnson’s alliance with Trump as a chance to make billions from the illness and sickness of people in this country. “And if the Conservatives have their way and this deal goes forward, the changes I’ve revealed will be almost irreversible.”

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A foreigner paid for dirt on a political opponent. What do we call that?

• Christopher Steele Distributed Other Dossier Reports (Solomon)

Just before Christmas 2015, the British intelligence operative Christopher Steele emailed a report to private clients that included an American lawyer for a Ukrainian oligarch. The title of the dossier was “FIRTASH Abortive Return to Ukraine,” and it purported to provide intelligence on why the energy oligarch Dmitri Firtash tried, but failed, to return to his home country of Ukraine. “FIRTASH’s talk of returning to Ukraine a genuine ambition rather than merely a ruse to reveal Ukrainian government’s hand. However the oligarch developed cold feet upon the news of a negative reception at Boryspil airport,” Steele reported on Dec. 23, 2015.

Perhaps most important to the recipients, the former MI6 agent’s report purported to share the latest thinking of Russian and U.S. officials on Firtash, who at the time faced U.S. criminal charges and was awaiting extradition from Austria. Those charges and extradition remain unresolved four years later. Firtash insists on his innocence, while the U.S. government stands by it case despite recent criticism from Austrian and Spanish authorities. “The prevarication over his return has lost FIRTASH credibility with the Russians, but his precarious position in Austria leaves him little choice but to acquiesce with Moscow’s demands,” the Steele report claimed. “Separate American sources confirm that US Government regards FIRTASH as a conduit for Russian influence and he remains a pariah to the Americans.”

The anecdote of the Firtash report underscores that challenges the FBI faced when it used Steele in 2016 as a human source in the Russia collusion probe. He not only opposed Trump and was paid by Hillary Clinton’s opposition research firm to dig up dirt on the then-GOP nominee, he also was in the business of selling intelligence to private clients – all perfectly legal — while informing for the FBI.

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Robert Mueller gave it away.

• “Russian Trolls” Did Not “Sow Discord” – They Influenced No One (MoA)

The U.S. has claimed that the Russia government tried to influence the 2016 election through Facebook and Twitter. Russia supposedly did this through people who worked the Internet Research Agency (IRA) in St. Petersburg (Leningrad), Russia. The IRA people ran virtual persona on U.S. social networks which pretended to have certain political opinions. It also spent on advertising supposedly to influence the election. U.S. intelligence claimed that the purpose of the alleged Russian influence campaign was to “sow discord” within the United States. But the IRA had nothing to do with the Russian government. It had no interests in politics. And a new study confirms that the idea that it was “sowing discord” is blatant nonsense.


IRA influencer

The Mueller investigation indicted 13 Russian persons and three Russian legal entities over the alleged influence campaign. But, as we wrote at that time, there was more to it than the media reported: “The published indictment gives support to our long held believe that there was no “Russian influence” campaign during the U.S. election. What is described and denounced as such was instead a commercial marketing scheme which ran click-bait websites to generate advertisement revenue and created online crowds around virtual persona to promote whatever its commercial customers wanted to promote. The size of the operation was tiny when compared to the hundreds of millions in campaign expenditures. It had no influence on the election outcome.”

The IRA hired people in Leningrad for little money and asked them to open accounts on U.S. social media. The virtual persona they created and ran were to attract as many persons to those accounts as possible. They did that by posting funny dog pictures or by taking strong political positions. They were ‘influencers’ who sold their customers’ products to the people they attracted. The sole purpose was the same as in any commercial media. Create content to attract ‘eyeballs’, then sell those eyeballs to advertisers.

The IRA also bought advertisement to attract more people to its accounts. But the amount it spent was tiny. The final price tag for the 2016 election was $6.5 billion for the presidential and congressional elections combined. The IRA spend a total of $100,000 to promote its own accounts. But only some $45,000 of that was spend before the election. It was 0.000007 cent for every election dollar that was spend during that time. It is statistically impossible that the mostly apolitical IRA spending had any effect on the election.

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Not the same all over Manhattan, but the trend is there.

• Brick & Mortar Rent Meltdown, Manhattan Style (WS)

These are major shopping corridors in Manhattan, and in nearly all of them, asking rents for ground-floor retail space have been dropping for years – and in some of them by half. For example, the average asking rent on Madison Avenue between 57th Street and 72nd Street, plunged 22% in the second half of 2019, compared to the same period last year, to $906 per square foot per year, and is down 47% from the first half in 2015, according to the bi-annual Manhattan Retail Report released today by the Real Estate Board of New York. The REBNY report points out, “An increased amount of leases expiring has contributed to the high availability rates [meaning, vacancies] that has led owners to lower asking rents and offer more short-term lease agreements.”

Falling asking rents and better terms in the Madison Avenue corridor – better deals for prospective tenants – help bring out prospective tenants, according to the report: “Softening rents has led to increased absorption as recent leases consist of retailers relocating to smaller-sized storefronts with better co-tenancy. Notables tenants such as Akris, Mont Blanc, and Morgane Le Fay indicate that apparel tenants still dominate this corridor.” The report is entirely focused on ground-floor retail spaces. Of the 17 shopping corridors in Manhattan tracked by the REBNY, average asking rents fell in 11 of them. But since 2015, asking rents in all but three of them have dropped sharply.

Read more …

The true colors of Mutti.

• Merkel Says NATO Is ‘More Important’ Now Than During Cold War (RT)

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said NATO is now equally or more important than it was during the Cold War, a praise being sang to a military bloc long without its arch-rival and with a history of interventions.
East Germany native Angela Merkel provided her very complimentary take as NATO braces to mark their 70th anniversary at a special summit in London. Keeping the military bloc in place today “is even more in our very own interests as it was in the Cold War – or at least as important as it was in the Cold War,” the Chancellor told German MPs. “Because, and the Foreign Minister [Heiko Maas] said yesterday, Europe currently cannot defend itself on its own,” she reiterated.

Slightly contradicting her own words, the chancellor admitted that the US “no longer automatically takes up responsibility when it’s burning around us.” As the formal etiquette prescribes, Merkel called NATO a “bulwark for peace and freedom” over the past 70 years, without highlighting the bloc’s war on former Yugoslavia and the 2011 bombardments of Libya. The German leader has recently locked horns with France’s Emmanuel Macron over his famous “NATO’s brain death” remark that sent shockwaves through European elite circles. Macron’s “drastic words” were “unnecessary, even if we do have problems and must get it together,” Merkel complained at the time.

Rebuking Macron was also NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, who said last week that “European unity cannot replace Transatlantic unity as we need both … especially after Brexit.” But bringing the 70-year-old alliance together is increasingly becoming a challenge for its members. On the latest occasion, Turkey – a country that has one of NATO’s largest standing armies – refused to sign a new defense plan for the eastern European countries, according to Reuters.

Read more …

 

Clive James died yesterday.

 

 

 

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Trump Is America’s National Piñata

Oct 292018
 
 October 29, 2018  Posted by at 5:11 pm Primers Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  7 Responses »


Mestre da Família Artés The Last Judgment and the Mass of Saint Gregory 1500-1520

 

It’s been quite a while since I first wrote that I resented the MSM (New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC etc etc) for effectively monopolizing the entire discussion about Donald Trump. Don’t remember exactly when I wrote that, do remember Jim Kunstler sent a mail and thanked me for saying it. Because he felt- and feels- the same way.

The 24/7 daily Trump bashing machine that was unleashed in late 2015/early 2016 meant that people like us had a choice of criticizing Trump where he needed to be criticized, but that would put us in the MSM camp, where we don’t want to be. And we don’t want to not criticize him either, because there’s so much that needs scrutiny.

A third choice would be to not write at all, but hey, we’re writers. And so we’re either Trump-fans, something I’ve been accused of a lot, and I’m sure Jim has too, or we’re Trump haters, depending on what we publish. In reality, of course, we’re neither, but the way the conversation has been built, there’s no neutral ground. You’re either with us or with him.

Today, almost 3 years later, nothing much has changed about this. Other than, as I wrote at a later date, the mass media have become consciously aware that Trump is their money machine. Their financial people started pointing out that posting negative stuff about Trump all the time got them a lot of new readers and viewers and income streams. And so they continued doing it.

Their ‘news’ didn’t have to necessarily be true, or provable, it only had to look as if it could be true, until the next show or article, or the next day. That’s how we got the Russiagate story, which still lacks all evidence. Like a million other narratives, none of which have really gotten anywhere. It doesn’t matter. People who don’t like Trump eat it up. And there’s plenty of those, not in the least because of the picture the MSM has painted. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy thing.

 

And today, if you take a good look, you can see that the MSM are stuck. Their entire business model over the past 2.5 years has been built on bashing Trump, and now they have to stick with that. This is how they make their money. If their viewers and readers would understand this, then perhaps some of them would wonder: ‘What am I watching here really?’ But they don’t.

There are some who are simply gullible, there are those who fall victim to information overkill and can’t tell black from white anymore, and then there’s still quite a large group who will never like anything Trump does, no matter what. Because.

But that should never be enough for an organization that purports to report only the news, impartial and objective. You can’t publish stuff solely because you know it will be eaten up and make you money. That’s not the news business, that’s entertainment.

Now, I rarely watch TV. When I’m in Greece, where I’ve spent most of my time the past few years, I see none, other than the odd soccer game at a sports bar. But last weekend I flew to Holland, and there I got to see me some CNN. Oh boy. It was when the first dummy bomb package had been reported, and more of them started to spread.

Nobody knew anything about the ‘bombs’ themselves (we still don’t), about motive, about who sent them, none had gone off, they didn’t know if these things could have gone off, nothing at all. But nevertheless CNN labeled the event: ‘Mass Assassination Attempt’. And then, you know, they have all these time slots to fill, so they all yap and yap as if this is something real that they know something about.

 

And then at some point Trump called for civility in the nation. And CNN, sadly and predictably, reacted by agreeing with him. Only to follow that up with: “Trump has to become more civil”. Which may or may not be true, but that was not his point and neither is it mine today.

You see, CNN pulled a perfect bait and switch: While demanding that Trump tone it down in response to his own call for civility, they categorically and emphatically denied that their tone, their ‘news reporting’ must come down too. They didn’t just deny it, they entirely ignore the whole issue. Because according to them, all they do is report the news, you know, objective and neutral, no opinions involved.

After bashing Trump for two years+ they react to his call for a more civil tone by … bashing Trump and ignoring their own role completely. The exact opposite. And then they’re surprised that his reaction to being bashed one more time, again, is to point out that they do, in fact, play a role.

CNN et al paint themselves as victims, as the ones being targeted by Trump (and not even by whoever sent the bombs), completely omitting to what extent they themselves were the ones who targeted Trump. CNN is entirely blind to their own role. They proclaim, and really seem to believe, that they speak for the American people.

But if that were true, Trump would not be president. They may speak for part of the American people, but certainly not ‘the people’. And if they continue in their present ways, they never will. As long as the MSM puts all their chips on making money off of the segment of the American population who despise their president, they only sharpen the divide.

 

Another thing I’ve mentioned before is that with the midterms coming up in a few days, the MSM don’t actually want to impeach Trump, or get rid of him in any other way. They want to continue writing negative stuff about him forever. They want him to maybe lose the midterms, but then to win in 2020. Obama was killing them financially. Now they got their golden goose.

And it’s not Trump who profits from the nation being so divided, or at least not nearly as much as the media does. Trump would like to be appreciated for what he achieves, but when it comes to that, he can’t get a word in edgewise. They can’t risk writing positive stuff about him, it would risk their new business model.

Moreover, after that court ruling that said Trump can’t ban people on Twitter, everyone feels free to call Trump whatever they want, idiot, lunatic, you name it, I even saw Hitler pop up again, and he cannot ban them. Trump is America’s national piñata. While he’s also the President.

And the media say they’re just reporting the news. “Trump calls for civility, but continues his attacks on the media”. Well, the media continue their attacks on him, too. “Trump refuses to acknowledge his rhetoric makes this happen.” So does the MSM rhetoric. “Words Matter”. Indeed, they do. But not only Trump’s words. Everybody’s words.

The MSM have never managed – nor tried- to move beyond the notion that Trump supporters are deplorables. They’re stuck in a time warp. That is what divides the nation. Sarah Sanders was right: the first thing Trump did was to condemn the violence, the first thing CNN did was to blame Trump for it. CNN says that’s not true, they only reported the news. Yeah, 100% objectively.

 

Let’s do a test: when is the last time CNN, or the WaPo, have said anything truly positive about Trump? And I don’t mean three words strung together, but an actual report on for instance jobs and the state of the economy. When is the last time they complimented him, other than perhaps when American rockets landed in some remote and deserted Syrian sandbox?

So you don’t like Trump. And in the MSM you find voices that express your ideas. What you probably don’t realize is that they amplify those ideas as well, and that’s no coincidence. You’re being used by the MSM to prolong their newly-found very profitable anti-Trump rhetoric business model. You’re an easy victim. All they have to do is confirm your thoughts all the time, and tomorrow you’ll tune in for more, and so on.

Or how about this one: There’s so much to blame Trump for, there are so many negative sides to the man, and then the media focus for a long time on a made-up story about collusion with Russians, for which a special counsel with unlimited budget and resources hasn’t found any proof after two whole years. Doesn’t that make you think? Shouldn’t it?

The MSM’s interest is to divide the country, that’s how they make money. If they would write or broadcast positive stories about Trump, which must exist, they would threaten the dividing line that keeps people from talking to each other. Once they do start talking, Trump-bashing will become much less lucrative. They can’t have that.

You don’t need to be a Trump fan to see that, and I’m definitely not, you need to be blind NOT to see it. You’re being played. And what are you going to do when the GOP wins the midterms, despite what you’ve been told would happen, what if there is no blue wave? Are you going to start talking to the other half of the country then, or are you going to dig deeper into the trenches with the MSM? Honest question.

 

 

Debt Rattle November 14 2016

Nov 142016
 
 November 14, 2016  Posted by at 9:57 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  1 Response »


Wyland Stanley Transparent Car, General Motors exhibit, San Francisco 1940

• Era of Low Interest Rates Hammers Millions of Pensions Around the World (WSJ)
• President Trump Will Fumigate The Fed (Mises Inst.)
• Teslas in the Trailer Park: California Faces Its Housing Squeeze (NYT)
• China Home Sales Value Rose 38% YoY in October (BBG)
• Emerging Market Bond, Currency Markets Face ‘Meltdown’ After Trump Win (CNBC)
• Bond Rout Deepens as Trump Bets Boost Dollar, Industrial Metals (BBG)
• We Are Living In A Depression – That’s Why Trump Took The White House (G.)
• Deplorables 1, Empire 0 (Edwards)
• Morgan Stanley: “Trump Policies Are Like Schrodinger’s Cat” (ZH)
• It’s Trump Versus New Normal In Play For US Growth (BBG)
• ‘Nobody’ Won the 2016 Presidential Election – and It Was a Landslide(TAM)
• What So Many People Don’t Get About the US Working Class (Joan C. Williams)
• EU Offers Trump Cooperation While Signaling Policy Firmness (BBG)
• Trump Splinters Europe: UK, France, Hungary Snub EU Emergency Meeting (ZH)
• Julian Assange To Be Interviewed Today Over Sex Assault Claim (G.)

 

 

Trouble coming to the USA: “They range from as low as a government bond yield in much of Europe and Asia to 8% or more in the U.S.”

• Era of Low Interest Rates Hammers Millions of Pensions Around the World (WSJ)

Pension funds around the world pay benefits through a combination of investment gains and contributions from employers and workers. To ensure enough is saved, plans adopt long-term annual return assumptions to project how much of their costs will be paid from earnings. They range from as low as a government bond yield in much of Europe and Asia to 8% or more in the U.S. The problem is that investment-grade bonds that once churned out 7.5% a year are now barely yielding anything. Global pensions on average have roughly 30% of their money in bonds.Low rates helped pull down assets of the world’s 300 largest pension funds by $530 billion in 2015, the first decline since the financial crisis, according to a recent Pensions & Investments and Willis Towers Watson report.

Funding gaps for the two biggest funds in Europe and the U.S. have ballooned by $300 billion since 2008, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. Few parts of Europe are feeling the pension pain more acutely than the Netherlands, home to 17 million people and part of the eurozone, which introduced negative rates in 2014. Unlike countries such as France and Italy, where pensions are an annual budget item, the Netherlands has several large plans that stockpile assets and invest them. The goal is for profits to grow faster than retiree obligations, allowing the pension to become financially self-sufficient and shrink as an expense to lawmakers. ABP,[Europe’s largest pension fund], currently holds 90.7 cents for every euro of obligations, a ratio that would be welcome in other corners of the world.

But Dutch regulators demand pension assets exceed liabilities, meaning more cash is required than actually needed. This spring, ABP officials had to provide government regulators a rescue plan after years of worsening finances. ABP’s members, representing one in six people in the Netherlands, haven’t seen their pension checks increase in a decade. ABP officials have warned payments may be cut 1% next year. “People are angry, not because pensions are low, but because we failed to deliver what we promised them,” said Gerard Riemen, managing director of the Pensioenfederatie, a federation of 260 Dutch pension funds managing a total of €1 trillion. Benefit cuts have become such a divisive issue that one party, 50PLUS, plans for parliamentary-election campaigns early next year that demand the end of “pension robbery.” “Giving certainty has become expensive,” said Ms. Wortmann-Kool, ABP’s chairwoman.

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Sounds like that’s a good thing for pensions. But my guess is it’s way too late.

• President Trump Will Fumigate The Fed (Mises Inst.)

Trump’s occasional dovish comments do not match the passion and enthusiasm of his repeated hawkish campaign trail rhetoric. For the past year, the president-elect has been railing against the “false economy” that the Fed has created, as well as the political influence that runs rampant throughout the central bank. Perhaps Trump’s most scathing attack on the institution came last October, when he insinuated that Fed actions are crippling the middle class without creating any type of benefit to the economy at large. “[Chairwoman Yellen] is keeping the economy going, barely,” he said. “You know who gets hurt the most [by her easy money policies]? The people that went through 40 years of their life and saved a hundred dollars every week [in the bank].”

He then paused and shook his head for added effect before adding: “They worked all their lives to save and now what happens is they’re being forced into an inflated stock market and at some point they’ll get wiped out.” These anti-Fed talking points were recycled often on the campaign trail. In September, Trump attacked the Fed for putting us in a “big, fat, ugly bubble” and for keeping rates artificially low for political purposes, points that he again repeated in the first presidential debate. The business mogul has also promised to audit the Fed within the first 100 days of his administration and even included a criticism of the central bank in a recent online video ad. Team Trump’s economic advisers paint an even more optimistic picture of his future monetary policy.

Some of today’s most reasonable mainstream economic voices are included in his inner circle. These names include David Malpass of Encima Global, who co-signed a letter with Jim Grant opposing the Fed’s “inflationary” and “distortive” quantitative easing program; John Paulson of Paulson & Co., who made billions from shorting the housing market before the Great Recession; Andy Beal, a self-described “libertarian kind of guy” who blames the Fed for the credit crisis; and the Heritage Foundation’s Stephen Moore, who told CSIN in 2012 that he is a “very severe critic” of the Fed’s “incredibly easy-money policies policies of the past decade.”

While none of Trump’s economic advisers are by any means Austrians, they are far more hawkish than most of Presidents Bush and Obama’s past economic advisers. Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, has even said that these advisers are pushing Trump to nominate two “hard money” candidates to fill the Fed’s current vacancies. “A core view of many Trump advisors is that the extended period of emergency policy settings has promoted a bubble in the stock market, depressing the incomes of savers, scared the public and encouraged capital misallocation,” Shepherdson told Market Watch. “Right now, these are minority views on the Fed policymaking committee, but Trump appointees are likely to shift the needle.”

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Growth like tumors grow.

• Teslas in the Trailer Park: California Faces Its Housing Squeeze (NYT)

For all its imagination about the future, Silicon Valley’s geography looks a lot like the past. Today’s college-educated millennials might be crowding into city centers, but each day employees at companies like Google and Facebook endure hours in cars or on buses commuting to squat office complexes that have all the charm of a Walmart. Many employees say they would prefer to live closer to work. But these companies reside in small cities that consider themselves suburbs, and the local politics are usually aligned against building dense urban apartments to house them. Take Palo Alto, the Silicon Valley city that has become emblematic of the state’s reputation for rampant not-in-my-backyard politics. Palo Alto has one of the state’s worst housing shortages. With about three jobs for every housing unit, it has among the most out-of-balance mixes anywhere in Silicon Valley.

But instead of dealing with this issue by building the few thousand or so apartments it would take to make a dent in the problem, the city has mostly looked to restraining a pace of job growth that the mayor described as “unhealthy.” Farther up the peninsula near San Francisco, the small city of Brisbane told a developer that its proposal for a mixed-use development with offices and 4,000 housing units should have offices for about 15,000 workers, but no new housing. Play that out a thousand times over and the crux of the state’s housing crisis is clear: Everyone knows housing costs are unsustainable and unfair, and that they pose a threat to the state’s economy. Yet every city seems to be counting on its neighbors to step up and fix it.

The results are strange compromises like the one made by Rebecca and Steven Callister, a couple in their late 20s who live in a double-wide trailer in a Mountain View mobile home park whose residents are retirees and young tech workers. Mr. Callister is an engineer at LinkedIn, the sort of worker who, in most places, would own a home. But given the cost of housing in Mountain View and the brutal commute times from anywhere they could afford, a trailer makes the most sense and lets him spend more time with the couple’s two young children. “We joke that it’s the only mobile home park with Mercedeses and Teslas in the driveway,” Mrs. Callister said. “It’s like the new middle class in California.”

In contrast to Palo Alto, Mountain View is trying to wedge new apartments into its office parks. Much of the action centers on the North Bayshore area, a neighborhood of low-slung office buildings surrounded by asphalt parking lots.

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So many stories about market curbs, all the time. But this is still the reality.

• China Home Sales Value Rose 38% YoY in October (BBG)

China’s new home sales growth slowed in October from a year earlier, suggesting the push by policy makers to rein in runaway prices is getting traction. The value of homes sold rose 38% to 941 billion yuan ($138 billion) last month from a year earlier, according to Bloomberg calculations based on data the National Bureau of Statistics released Monday. The increase compares with a 61% gain the previous month. Local authorities in nearly two dozens cities have since late September rolled out property curbs ranging from raising down-payments for first and second homes to ruling some potential buyers ineligible.

China’s banking regulator has told banks to review their business related to mortgage lending and property development loans, after China Minsheng Banking Corp. suspended approvals of some non-standard mortgages in Shanghai. Slower home sales have helped moderate credit growth. New medium- and long-term household loans, mostly residential mortgages, stood at 489.1 billion yuan in October, down from 571.3 billion yuan in September, according to central bank data on Friday. New yuan loans edged down to 651.3 billion yuan last month from 1.22 trillion yuan in September.

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It’s just dollars coming home, and that not as positive a sign as many seemt ot hink.

• Emerging Market Bond, Currency Markets Face ‘Meltdown’ After Trump Win (CNBC)

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump appears to have burst the bond bubble, putting emerging markets (EM) from Mexico to Indonesia at the sharp end of a sell-off. Expectations of fiscal stimulus, infrastructure spending and reflationary policies under a Trump administration were fueling inflation fears, sending benchmark U.S. ten-year Treasury yields and the dollar surging. Expectations for tighter monetary policy and a December rate hike by the Federal Reserve were also playing a role. In the wake of last week’s election outcome, the U.S. 10-year Treasury yield climbed above 2% from levels below 1.8% in the days before the result, with many analysts pointing to expectations that Trump’s promised policies would spur a resurgence of inflation and further interest rate hikes from the U.S. Federal Reserve.

That created a negative feedback loop for emerging market assets. Indonesia’s rupiah fell by as much as 3% against the dollar on Friday to five-month lows, hurting local stocks, with the declines extending on Monday. Malaysia’s ringgit also fell to its lowest against the dollar since late 2015, near levels not seen since the Asian Financial Crisis in 1998. Central banks last week in Malaysia and Indonesia intervened to support their currencies, while foreign investors have slashed holdings of sovereign EM bonds perceived as most risky. Analysts were rejigging their outlook for Asian bonds. “Asian fixed income assets have operated on a ‘lower for longer’ assumption’ for U.S. rates since June,” RBS economists led by Vaninder Singh wrote. “This assumption is being challenged. High-yielding currencies will have to re-price to become attractive again.”

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A bit much casino for me.

• Bond Rout Deepens as Trump Bets Boost Dollar, Industrial Metals (BBG)

Routs in global bonds and emerging markets intensified, while the dollar climbed with U.S. equity futures and industrial metals as investors position for the wave of fiscal stimulus that Donald Trump plans to unleash. Sovereign bonds in the Asia-Pacific region slid with U.S. Treasuries, extending a record debt selloff, amid speculation President-elect Trump’s pledge to boost infrastructure spending will trigger U.S. interest-rate hikes as economic growth and inflation pick up. Bloomberg’s dollar index climbed to a nine-month high as an earthquake weighed on New Zealand’s dollar. Japanese shares were set for their best close since April after gross domestic product data, while shares in developing nations fell. Copper surged to a 16-month high and gold slumped.

Trump’s election victory continues to send shockwaves through global markets, having already led to $1.2 trillion being wiped off the value of bonds worldwide last week as equities added about $1 trillion and industrial metals soared by the most in four years. Emerging markets are being hit by an exodus of capital as speculation builds that the U.S. is headed for an era of rising interest rates and more protectionist trade policies. “In the short-term the election of Donald Trump as president is causing a bit of uncertainty and markets tend to overreact to that,” said Shane Oliver at AMP Capital. “I suspect the dust will settle down in the next couple of months and this sort of market overreaction will provide opportunities.”

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Absolutely.

• We Are Living In A Depression – That’s Why Trump Took The White House (G.)

Words matter. The process of understanding why Donald Trump is now heading for the White House starts with the correct description of what has happened in the eight years since Barack Obama became president. Some economists call the turbulent period that followed the collapse of Lehman Brothers the Great Recession. Others say the US along with other developed nations is experiencing secular stagnation. Anything, it seems, to avoid using the D word: depression. The dictionary definition of a depression is a sustained, long-term downturn in economic activity, which sums up precisely what has occurred since 2008. Growth rates globally have remained low despite colossal amounts of stimulus. Living standards have barely risen and the threat of deflation has loomed large.

The depression since 2008 has not been as severe as that of the 1930s but there are echoes of it all the same: in the food banks that are the new soup kitchens; in the mass movements of migrants in search of a better life who are the modern equivalent of the Okies in the Grapes of Wrath; and in Trump, who has tapped into anger that has been bubbling away quietly for decades. The turning point for the average American worker came in the mid-1970s because for the first 30 years after the second world war the gains from rising prosperity were evenly shared. But this trend was broken around the time of Watergate and the end of the Vietnam war. Since 1975, productivity in the US has more than doubled, but average hourly compensation has increased by only 50%. The fruits of growth have been captured by the few, not the many.

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“Created by the wars that required it, the Machine now creates the wars it requires.”

• Deplorables 1, Empire 0 (Edwards)

It’s done. The foolish, arrogant propaganda excreted by the captive press of the Imperial Establishment is flushed, and they and their owners are eating their hubris, choking down the bitter, toxic medicine they inflicted on themselves. The nightmare they swore could never win is the Chosen One. What this may mean to them, to all of us, and to The Empire, no one can guess. The origin, though, of what Michael Moore called the greatest “Fuck You” in our political history, is clear behind the shock and awe of the elite. Between them, Trump and Clinton diligently stripped away the last shreds of the rent and ragged camouflage that disguised our zombie body politic.

Behind the mantra of Exceptionalism, the American Empire has behaved with exactly the same solipsistic arrogance all empires have embraced. Internationally it has raged, as imperial China did, as if with a “Mandate of Heaven”, flaunting self-interest with no regard for other nations or the laws of war. It has inflicted misery, chaos, and death on many millions of the poor and helpless for a Full Spectrum Dominance it could never impose. America’s Capitalist War Machine has raped and destroyed many countries for its profit, and destablized the entire world in its megalomania. Schumpeter said it best, of Imperial Germany’s military industry: “Created by the wars that required it, the Machine now creates the wars it requires.”

America has been transformed over time from a civil democracy with imperial economics to a militarist empire with vaudeville democracy. This was accomplished by binding both wings of the duopoly to the exclusive interest of Predatory Capitalism with corrupting money. A corporate state imposed via political and military power is the essence of Fascism. For generations, Americans have been dosed with the ultra-nationalist poison of Exceptionalism, with its implicit racist subtext, and its sexism buried in a hoo-rah masculinity cult, but it has always been flavored with the sweetening agent that We, The People, were both masters and beneficiaries of our benign, patristic system. The last several decades have painfully taught any conscious observer that this is a cynical fiction.

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I thought he was a straight talker…

• Morgan Stanley: “Trump Policies Are Like Schrodinger’s Cat” (ZH)

As the sellside reports analyzing the post-president Trump world keep pouring in, one that caught our attention was from Morgan Stanley’s Andrew Sheets in which the strategist openly admits that pretty much nobody has any idea what is coming: “Most remarkably, however, after three debates, two conventions and an election that seemed to last forever, there remains a great deal of uncertainty over what type of president Trump will actually be. In an election that was dominated by coverage of tweets, videos and emails, policy questions received surprisingly little airtime. And those questions are now crucial for markets.

“To a remarkable extent, investors we’ve spoken to both before and after November 8 disagree on what President-Elect Trump will actually do. Many have told us, confidently, that they believe that, while he said some extreme things on the campaign trail, he is ultimately a moderate, pragmatic businessman. A deal-maker who will delegate policy to experts, lead with market-friendly (almost Keynesian) fiscal stimulus and ultimately avoid a large fight on trade. Other investors take a less benign view. They say the President-Elect should be taken at his word, and that since the start of his campaign he has defied predictions that he would moderate his tone or policy message.”

The problem, according to Morgan Stanley, is during the campaign, “Trump was a master at keeping both possibilities open, broadening his appeal. Like Schrodinger’s cat, his policies existed in a state of being both pragmatic and radical, all at the same time. Upcoming cabinet appointments offer clues to which interpretation is right. Until then, we promise to keep an open mind, and focus on modelling the different paths a Trump administration could take, and what it means for markets.”

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“The market’s been looking for the fiscal theme to take over,” said Deutsche Bank’s Alan Ruskin. “The burden of responsibility has shifted..”

• It’s Trump Versus New Normal In Play For US Growth (BBG)

Count this among the ways that Donald Trump’s election has rocked the financial world: monetary policy is no longer in charge. The president-elect’s proposals for significant commitments to spending and tax cuts have shifted the burden of stimulating growth from central banks, for the moment at least. “The market’s been looking for the fiscal theme to take over,” said Deutsche Bank’s Alan Ruskin. “The burden of responsibility has shifted,” with those who doubt the market’s recalibration being the ones who need to prove their case. That accounts, in part, for the enthusiasm for equities and commodities. Expectations of faster U.S. inflation are also spreading to Europe and Japan as seen in rising breakeven rates.

Trump may get some of the spending and, especially, the tax cuts he wants from Congress. Whether these will have the effect the market is now betting on remains to be seen. Trump will be pushing against an economy that is on a lower long-term growth trend in what many economists call “the new normal.” As a candidate, he promised an expansion of 3.5% or faster. If it doesn’t materialize, will he double-down on his policies? The upward surge in bond yields across the curve, inflation expectations and the dollar may complicate Trump’s plans. Futures show traders are locking in bets on a December rate increase. It’s possible that tightening financial conditions may slow the Fed from further moves until stimulus bears fruit.

But monetary policy is no longer what’s driving these moves. Increasingly, central banks may see themselves in a defensive role, reacting to events rather than dictating trends. The greenback’s rally is already forcing Asian and Latin American central banks to protect their currencies. More such moves may be in the offing if dollar gains continue. Will Europe and Japan turn to the Trump model in an attempt to boost growth and inflation in ways monetary policy hasn’t? Europe may have a limited ability to increase spending, while Japan has essentially exhausted that growth channel, too, said Robert Tipp of Prudential. But for now, after growing weary of monetary-led slow growth, markets are grasping at Trump’s answer to the New Normal.

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People don’t vote when the only choices are -perceived to be- elites.

• ‘Nobody’ Won the 2016 Presidential Election – and It Was a Landslide(TAM)

“Nobody for President, that’s my campaign slogan,” Nick Cannon asserted in “Too Broke to Vote,” his viral criticism of the American electoral process from March of this year. Now, it turns out nobody for president won the 2016 election in a landslide. According to new voter turnout statistics from the 2016 election, 47% of Americans voted for nobody, far outweighing the votes cast for Trump (25.5%) and Hillary (25.6%) by eligible voters. And the “I voted for nobody” group is actually much larger than the 47% reported because that number only includes eligible voters. How many millions of Americans under the legal voting age – not to mention the countless millions who have lost their voting rights – voted for nobody, as well? Factoring in those individuals, around 193 million people did not vote for Trump or Clinton.

That’s nearly two-thirds of the population of the United States. Nobody also seemingly won the presidential primaries, with only 9% of Americans casting their votes for either Trump or Clinton. So when does nobody take office? Nobody won the majority of votes in the primaries or the general election, and the two main candidates who were running didn’t “win” the popular vote — they simply slightly outcompeted each other considering neither garnered over 50% of the eligible voters’ ballots. That’s where the real debate begins. As I wrote back in August when the primary voter turnout rates came in, one could argue that Trump (and Obama) do not have a legitimate mandate to rule over the people of the United States. Trump did not win the majority of Americans’ votes – not even close.

When all Americans are included, Trump only garnered the votes of about 19% of us. This means the United States will be ruled over by a small minority of voters who elected someone to continually impose their political positions on the other 81% of us. Of course, as is the case with Democrats looking to assign blame for Hillary’s loss, pundits and political pontificators argue the people who didn’t vote have no right to complain about the outcome. After all, a non-vote or a vote for a third-party candidate was, in actuality, a vote for Trump. But that logic is flawed. The majority of Americans don’t vote anymore because the political system no longer represents them. We’ve been disenfranchised by decades of corrupt, unrepresentative politicians.

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“The dorkiness: the pantsuits. The arrogance: the email server. The smugness: the basket of deplorables. Worse, her mere presence rubs it in that even women from her class can treat working-class men with disrespect. ”

• What So Many People Don’t Get About the US Working Class (Joan C. Williams)

My father-in-law grew up eating blood soup. He hated it, whether because of the taste or the humiliation, I never knew. His alcoholic father regularly drank up the family wage, and the family was often short on food money. They were evicted from apartment after apartment. He dropped out of school in eighth grade to help support the family. Eventually he got a good, steady job he truly hated, as an inspector in a factory that made those machines that measure humidity levels in museums. He tried to open several businesses on the side but none worked, so he kept that job for 38 years. He rose from poverty to a middle-class life: the car, the house, two kids in Catholic school, the wife who worked only part-time. He worked incessantly. He had two jobs in addition to his full-time position, one doing yard work for a local magnate and another hauling trash to the dump.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, he read The Wall Street Journal and voted Republican. He was a man before his time: a blue-collar white man who thought the union was a bunch of jokers who took your money and never gave you anything in return. Starting in 1970, many blue-collar whites followed his example. This week, their candidate won the presidency. For months, the only thing that’s surprised me about Donald Trump is my friends’ astonishment at his success. What’s driving it is the class culture gap. One little-known element of that gap is that the white working class (WWC) resents professionals but admires the rich. [..] Why the difference? For one thing, most blue-collar workers have little direct contact with the rich outside of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.

But professionals order them around every day. The dream is not to become upper-middle-class, with its different food, family, and friendship patterns; the dream is to live in your own class milieu, where you feel comfortable — just with more money. “The main thing is to be independent and give your own orders and not have to take them from anybody else,” a machine operator told Lamont. Owning one’s own business — that’s the goal. That’s another part of Trump’s appeal. Hillary Clinton, by contrast, epitomizes the dorky arrogance and smugness of the professional elite. The dorkiness: the pantsuits. The arrogance: the email server. The smugness: the basket of deplorables. Worse, her mere presence rubs it in that even women from her class can treat working-class men with disrespect.

Look at how she condescends to Trump as unfit to hold the office of the presidency and dismisses his supporters as racist, sexist, homophobic, or xenophobic. Trump’s blunt talk taps into another blue-collar value: straight talk. “Directness is a working-class norm,” notes Lubrano. As one blue-collar guy told him, “If you have a problem with me, come talk to me. If you have a way you want something done, come talk to me. I don’t like people who play these two-faced games.” Straight talk is seen as requiring manly courage, not being “a total wuss and a wimp,” an electronics technician told Lamont. Of course Trump appeals. Clinton’s clunky admission that she talks one way in public and another in private? Further proof she’s a two-faced phony.

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The EU’s hubris is incredible, the disconnect to reality near complete. They’ve all fallen over each other to insult Trump over the past year, and now they come with vows and demands?

• EU Offers Trump Cooperation While Signaling Policy Firmness (BBG)

The EU promised to cooperate with U.S. President-elect Donald Trump while vowing to stand by international agreements he has questioned including United Nations deals to curb climate change and ease sanctions on Iran. After a dinner in Brussels to discuss future EU-U.S. relations in the wake of Trump’s victory in the Nov. 8 American election, European foreign ministers also signaled a determination to maintain their opposition to Russia’s encroachment in eastern Ukraine. “We are looking forward to a very strong partnership with the next administration,” EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini told reporters late Sunday after hosting the gathering. “For us, it’s extremely important to work on the climate-change agreement implementation but also on non-proliferation and the protection of the Iranian nuclear deal.”

Trump’s win last week threatens to upend eight years of EU-U.S. cooperation during the tenure of President Barack Obama and decades of trans-Atlantic relations underpinned by NATO. As the Republican Party’s presidential candidate, Trump raised doubts about UN accords on global warming and Iran’s nuclear program that the Obama administration helped to forge and about the benefits of U.S.-led NATO. Trump also had praiseworthy words for Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose annexation of the Ukrainian region of Crimea in 2014 and support for pro-Russia rebels in eastern Ukraine prompted the U.S. and EU to impose sanctions that remain in place. “The EU has a very principled position on the illegal annexation of Crimea and the situation in Ukraine,” Mogherini said. “This is not going to change regardless of possible shifts in others’ policies.”

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This is the Europe Trump will encounter. No unified voice in sight anymore. And that’s before all the referendums and elections.

• Trump Splinters Europe: UK, France, Hungary Snub EU Emergency Meeting (ZH)

While America’s so-called “establishment”, the legacy political system and mainstream media, appear to be melting, and transforming before our eyes into something that has yet to be determined, Europe also appears to be disintegrating in response to the Trump presidential victory: as the FT reports, in a stunning development, Britain and France on Sunday night snubbed a contentious EU emergency meeting to align the bloc’s approach to Donald Trump’s election, exposing rifts in Europe over the US vote. Hailed by diplomats as a chance to “send a signal of what the EU expects” from Mr Trump, the plan fell into disarray after foreign ministers from the bloc’s two main military powers declined to attend the gathering demanded by Berlin and Brussels.

The meeting, which comes as Trump appointed his key deputies – chosing the more moderate establishment figure, RNC chairman Reince Priebus, to be his chief-of-staff over campaign chairman Stephen Bannon, who becomes chief strategist and counsellor – was supposed to create a framework for Europe in how to deal with a “Trump threat” as Europe itself faces an uphill climb of contenuous, potentially game-changing elections over the coming few months[..] The split in Europe highlights the difficulties “European capitals face in coordinating a response to Mr Trump, who has questioned the US’s commitments to Nato and free trade and hinted at seeking a rapprochement with Russian president Vladimir Putin” much to the amusement of famous euroskeptic Nigel Farage who was the first foreign political leader to meet with Donald Trump at the Trump Tower over the weekend.

Trump’s move infuriated members of Europe’s fraying core, with Carl Bildt, the former Swedish prime minister, tweeting: “If Trump wanted to look statesmanlike to Europe, receiving Farage was probably the worst thing he could [do].” As the FT adds, British foreign secretary Boris Johnson dropped out of the Brussels meeting, with officials arguing that it created an air of panic, while French foreign minister Jean-Marc Ayrault opted to stay in Paris to meet the new UN secretary-general. Hungary’s foreign minister boycotted the meeting, labeling the response from some EU leaders as “hysterical”. Johnson’s refusal to attend will add to an already difficult relationship with his German counterpart Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who has told colleagues that he cannot bear to be in the same room as the British foreign secretary.

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In time for a pardon? Or does Sweden still have darker designs? Why are Swedish people not more enganged in this scandal?

• Julian Assange To Be Interviewed Today Over Sex Assault Claim (G.)

The Ecuadorian government has welcomed moves by the Swedish authorities to interview Julian Assange, who will be questioned on Monday inside its embassy over a sex assault allegation. Representatives from the Swedish prosecutor’s office and the Swedish police will be present while questions are put to the WikiLeaks founder by an Ecuadorian official. Assange has been granted political asylum by Ecuador and has been living inside the embassy for more than four years. He believes that if he leaves the embassy he will be extradited to the US for questioning about the activities of WikiLeaks. He denies the allegation against him and has been offering to be interviewed at the embassy.

Guillaume Long, Ecuador’s foreign minister, said: “We are pleased that the Swedish authorities will finally interview Mr Assange in our embassy in London. “This is something that Ecuador has been inviting the Swedish prosecutors to do ever since we granted asylum to Mr Assange in 2012. “There was no need for the Swedish authorities to delay for over 1,000 days before agreeing to carry out this interview, given that the Swedish authorities regularly question people in Britain and received permission to do so on more than 40 occasions in recent years. “Ecuador has never sought to stand in the way of any legal process in Sweden. “What we have asked from Sweden, and the UK, are guarantees that Mr Assange will not be extradited to a third country, where he could be persecuted for his work as a journalist.

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Debt Rattle September 16 2016

Sep 162016
 
 September 16, 2016  Posted by at 8:56 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  3 Responses »


DPC Maumee River waterfront, Toledo, OH 1910

• Many Presidential Swing States Lag Behind in Income Gains (WSJ)
• Mediocre Fundamentals Mean Meteoric Markets Are 70% Overvalued (GMO)
• US Seeks $14 Billion From Deutsche Bank Over Mortgage Securities Fraud (AFP)
• Deutsche Bank Shares Plunge After Rebuffing $14 Billion US Fine (BBG)
• Observations About US Corporate Debt (ZH/Kestel)
• This is How You Will Bail Out Municipal Pension Funds (WS)
• The Next Bubble: China’s Housing Gets Scarily Expensive (Balding)
• Europe, Japan Banking Sectors Threaten Revolt Over Basel Rules (BBG)
• It’s A Long Way Down In Australia’s Looming Apartment Fall (Aus.com.au)
• EU Leaders Search For Way Out Of ‘Existential Crisis’ (R.)
• Greece Raids Home Of Central Bank Head (ZH)
• Jay Z: ‘The War on Drugs Is an Epic Fail’ (NYT)
• Les Déplorables (WSJ)
• The Cold War Is Over (Hitchens)

 

 

This is it. This will decide the US elections the same way it did Brexit, and many European elections over the next 2 years and change.

• Many Presidential Swing States Lag Behind in Income Gains (WSJ)

Key swing states such as Nevada, North Carolina and Florida have seen some of the weakest income growth in the country since the last non-incumbent presidential contest in 2008, new census figures show. A Wall Street Journal analysis of state-by-state income data set for release on Thursday shows that more than half of the 13 states where the presidential race appears closely contested have seen below-average income growth since 2008. Among the eight laggards, three states saw the lowest wage growth in the U.S. during that time—Nevada, Georgia and Arizona. The new data show how America’s uneven economic recovery is adding another layer of unpredictability to an already volatile electoral map.

The traditional realm of battleground states has expanded, putting into play states such as Arizona and Georgia, which haven’t gone to a Democratic presidential candidate in at least 20 years. The Census Bureau also said income inequality across the country increased in 2015. The recovery’s income gains have been concentrated in central cities, with suburbs and rural areas largely lagging behind for years. “You actually see the bottom and the top pulling apart a little bit more in some of these keys states,” said David Damore, professor of political science at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. On a national basis, most states still haven’t seen income recover to pre-recession levels. Americans’ median household income in 2015 was 2.6% lower than in 2008, census figures show.

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“Much of the run-up over the past few years has been primarily about multiple expansions. And the scary thing about multiple expansions is that they are reliably mean-reverting—if they run too far, the market always takes it back, sometimes with a vengeance. And we are currently almost 70% too far.”

• Mediocre Fundamentals Mean Meteoric Markets Are 70% Overvalued (GMO)

While all eyes were on Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen in Jackson Hole, we were watching something else. In August, the Shiller P/E, a well-regarded metric for measuring the valuation of U.S. equities, breached 27. Given that its normal range is something a bit above 16, valuations are looking rather stretched. Further, the last time the Shiller P/E was above 27 was in October … 2007. And we all know how that movie ended. While nobody here at GMO is saying that a crash is imminent (and there’s no law that says stocks cannot become even more expensive), we continue to maintain our bias against U.S. stocks. We will also take this end-of-summer moment to point out the yawning disconnect between fundamentals (of the U.S. economy and even corporate America) and their stocks. It really is a tale of two cities, one of mediocre fundamentals versus a meteoric rise in markets (see the chart below).

We pulled together some meaningful metrics on the health of the economy and some top-line/bottom-line numbers on the S&P 500 Index: GDP growth, productivity, and household income, as well as a few others, including revenue and earnings for U.S. stocks, for good measure. It is a tale of mediocrity, at best. Then, we contrasted those with the actual market returns of the S&P 500 Index over the past five years. Truly meteoric. (As an aside, we at GMO have always been leery of drawing too many investment conclusions from staring at economic data—we are more valuation-oriented, after all—but even we are struck by the divergence.) Which brings us back to the Shiller P/E. Much of the run-up over the past few years has been primarily about multiple expansions. And the scary thing about multiple expansions is that they are reliably mean-reverting—if they run too far, the market always takes it back, sometimes with a vengeance. And we are currently almost 70% too far.

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“Deutsche Bank has no intent to settle these potential civil claims anywhere near the number cited..” “..the bank is aiming for an amount between $2 billion and $3 billion..”

• US Seeks $14 Billion From Deutsche Bank Over Mortgage Securities Fraud (AFP)

Authorities in the US are seeking as much as $14 billion from Deutsche Bank to resolve allegations stemming from the sale of mortgage securities in the 2008 crisis, the German financial giant confirmed Thursday. The payout would be the largest ever inflicted on a foreign bank in the United States, easily surpassing the $8.9 billion that French bank BNP Paribas paid in 2014 for sanctions violations. But in a quick reaction, Deutsche Bank rejected the $14 billion figure, which the bank said was an opening proposal in settlement talks with US prosecutors. “Deutsche Bank has no intent to settle these potential civil claims anywhere near the number cited,” the statement said. “The negotiations are only just beginning. The bank expects that they will lead to an outcome similar to those of peer banks which have settled at materially lower amounts.”

The US investment bank Goldman Sachs in April agreed to pay more than $5 billion to settle similar allegations. US authorities have accused major banks of misleading investors about the values and quality of complex mortgage-backed securities sold before the 2008 financial crisis. Much of the underlying lending was worthless or fraudulent, delivering billions of dollars in losses to holders of the mortgage bonds when the housing market collapsed, bringing down numerous banks and touching off the country’s worst recession since the 1930s. According to securities filings, Deutsche Bank as of June 30 had set aside $5.5 billion to resolve pending legal matters. In the mortgage-backed securities matter, the bank is aiming for an amount between $2 billion and $3 billion, according to knowledgeable sources.

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“They have declined about 46% this year.”

• Deutsche Bank Shares Plunge After Rebuffing $14 Billion US Fine (BBG)

Deutsche Bank shares slumped after receiving a $14 billion claim from the U.S. Justice Department to settle an investigation into the firm’s sale of residential mortgage-backed securities, a figure the German lender said it won’t pay. “Deutsche Bank has no intent to settle these potential civil claims anywhere near the number cited,” the company said in a statement early Friday in Frankfurt. “The negotiations are only just beginning. The bank expects that they will lead to an outcome similar to those of peer banks which have settled at materially lower amounts.” Bank of America paid $17 billion to reach a settlement in a similar case in 2014, the biggest such accord to date.

Goldman Sachs agreed to a $5.1 billion settlement with the U.S. earlier this year, including a $2.4 billion civil penalty and $875 million in cash payments, to resolve U.S. allegations that it failed to properly vet mortgage-backed securities before selling them to investors as high-quality debt. The settlement included an admission of wrongdoing. “Overall it’s very negative for the share price if you look at the Justice Department figure but you don’t know where it will end up,” said Andreas Plaesier at Warburg Research with a hold recommendation on the shares. “If you come down to the Goldman amount they may not need to do much in terms of reserves.” The shares dropped as much as 8.2% and were down 7.8% at 12.08 euros at 9:04 a.m. in Frankfurt. They have declined about 46% this year.

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“..we project global corporate credit demand (flow) of $62 trillion over 2016-2020, with new debt representing two-fifths and refinancing the rest.”

• Observations About US Corporate Debt (ZH/Kestel)

Extraordinary low interest rates around the world have delivered a monumental blow to many investors. Falling interest rates have translated into rising liabilities for (defined benefit) pension plans and, secondly, millions of retirees, who depend on income from savings to take them through retirement, are struggling to make a decent living. Consequently, investors take risks that they weren’t previously prepared to take. Take US corporate high yield bonds. The prevailing view seems to be that US corporates (ex. energy) are in very good shape with loads of cash on their balance sheet, and that they therefore offer a relatively attractive, and a comparatively safe, investment opportunity. I beg to disagree. Firstly, we are late in the economic cycle, and it is usually a bad idea to buy corporate high yield bonds late in an economic upturn. Secondly, let me share some facts with you that undermine the perception outlined above:

  1. The 1% most cash-rich of all US companies control over 50% of all US corporate cash.
  2. The five most cash-rich US companies (Apple, Microsoft, Google, Cisco and Oracle) control 30% of all US corporate cash.
  3. Total US corporate debt (the other side of the balance sheet) was $5.03 trillion at the end of 2015- up from $2.62 trillion at the end of 2007.
  4. Net debt (i.e. debt ex. cash) amongst US corporates was $3.39 trillion at the end of 2015 vs. $1.88 trillion at the end of 2007.
  5. US corporate debt has risen by $2.8 trillion over the last five years, while corporate cash has only risen by $600 billion.
  6. If you back out the top 1% referred to in (1) above, the cash holdings of the remaining 99% fell 6% in 2015 to stand at just $900 billion by the end of December vs. $6.6 trillion of debt.

Based on those numbers, I think it is fair to say that, with the exception of a few extremely cash-rich companies, corporate America is increasingly indebted and not at all as cash-rich as widely perceived. This also explains why corporate investments in the US are at a 60-year low.

Governments globally are persisting with monetary expansion to support economic growth and prop up inflation, to the detriment of credit quality, particularly for over-indebted Chinese corporates and U.S.leveraged borrowers. In our base-case scenario, we project global corporate credit demand (flow) of $62 trillion over 2016-2020, with new debt representing two-fifths and refinancing the rest. Outstanding debt would expand by half to $75 trillion, with China’s share rising to 43% from 35%.

We estimate that two-fifths (43%) to half (47%) of nonfinancial corporates (unrated and rated) are highly leveraged-of which 2% to 5% face negative earnings or cash flows, based on a sample of about 14,400 corporates. With weakened borrower credit quality, a credit correction is inevitable. Our base case is for an orderly credit slowdown stretching over several years (‘slow burn’ scenario), but a series of major economic or political shocks, such as the recent Brexit vote in the U.K., could trigger a more system-wide credit contraction (‘Crexit’ scenario).

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I see big protests in the offing as public pensions get bailed out by taxpayers who see their private plans left to die.

• This is How You Will Bail Out Municipal Pension Funds (WS)

[..] the beneficiaries are voters and employees of the government, and politicians of all stripes bought their votes with promises of low contributions and rising benefits. They got away with it for decades because no one cares about “underfunded pensions.” Even the term makes people’s eyes glaze over. But someone is going to pay. And it’s not going to be the politicians. This is how they will pay for it in Chicago – the city whose credit rating Moody’s cut by two notches to junk in April last year, and whose interest payments, despite historically low interest rates, have continued to skyrocket as it borrows more and skids deeper into the sinkhole of its own making.

On Wednesday, the City Council approved Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s scheme to bail out its largest and worst-off pension fund, the Municipal Employees’ Annuity and Benefit fund, which would otherwise be insolvent within ten years – and a lot quicker if markets have a hissy fit. Despite seven years of rampant asset price inflation, and asset bubbles nearly everywhere, the fund’s obligations are only 20% funded. It forms part of Chicago’s $34 billion in retirement debt, accumulated over the decades by politicians making promises to buy votes and support from special interest groups. But neither the beneficiaries nor taxpayers via the city contributed enough to pay for those promises.

To save this one pension fund out of its four pension funds from insolvency, the city is jacking up water and sewer levies by 33%, phased in over a few years. Property owners in Chicago will pay, one way or the other, $3 billion into the fund by 2022, up from $1 billion under the prior scheme. Despite these billions of dollars involved, the fund covers only 77,000 workers and retirees.

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“A 100-city index compiled by SouFun surged by a worrisome 14% in the last year.”

• The Next Bubble: China’s Housing Gets Scarily Expensive (Balding)

For many years, China’s authorities took a Goldilocks approach to housing prices: They wanted a market that was neither too hot nor too cold, and took measures as needed to control prices. Although an explicit asset-price target was never announced, it was widely assumed that the government wanted home prices to grow in line with the rate of economic growth. To accomplish this, technocrats in Beijing deployed a combination of monetary stimulus and regulatory measures. When prices overheated, they put the brakes on credit growth, required higher down payments for mortgages and placed administrative restrictions on who could buy in which cities. When prices started to drop, they tried loosening credit and boosting the number of units people could own.

But in the past few years, with economic growth sluggish, the planners became much more tolerant of rising prices, even as signs of a bubble emerged. Official data shows the price-to income-ratio hitting 9.2 at the end of 2015; housing prices have continued to rise significantly since. All this has led to some widespread distortions. China’s homeowners have come to see near double-digit real-estate returns as a birthright, a bet on par with death and taxes. According to one study, more than 70% of Chinese household wealth is in housing. Investors believe there’s an implicit guarantee that the government won’t let home prices drop, even as many buildings sit empty.

Meanwhile, banks have gone on a lending spree: Total outstanding mortgage loans rose more than 30% and new mortgage growth clocked in at 111% in the past year. Since June 2012, outstanding mortgage loans have grown at an annualized rate of 30%. Predictably, that’s pushed prices higher and higher. In urban China, the average price per square foot of a home has risen to $171, compared to $132 in the U.S. In first-tier cities such as Beijing and Shenzhen, prices have increased by about 25% in the past year. A 100-city index compiled by SouFun surged by a worrisome 14% in the last year. Developers are buying up land in some prime areas that would need to sell for $15,000 per square meter just to break even.

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Break their power!

• Europe, Japan Banking Sectors Threaten Revolt Over Basel Rules (BBG)

Europeans told the world’s top banking regulator that they’ve had enough. In two heated meetings in the past week, regulators from countries including Germany and Italy told the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision that proposed changes to how banks assess credit, market and operational risks must be scaled back and slowed down, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. Some European officials went so far as to say they wouldn’t adopt the proposals on the table, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the deliberations were private. If the EU – home to nearly half of the world’s most systemically important banks – balks at implementing the Basel Committee’s rules, it could undermine the global regulator’s authority and contribute to fragmentation of the industry.

The Basel Committee is racing to finish work on the post-crisis capital framework known as Basel III by the end of the year, and it’s under instructions not to increase capital requirements significantly in the process. The debate in Basel pits bank regulators from Tokyo to Frankfurt against a U.S.-backed push for stiffer standards, which take effect when they’re implemented by national governments. The industry says the proposed revisions to risk-assessment rules and limits on banks’ use of their own models to make these calculations would send capital requirements spiraling. Key policy makers have heeded their message. German FinMin Schaeuble last week insisted that the Basel Committee not only keep any overall increase in capital requirements to a minimum, but also ensure the rules have no “particularly negative consequences for specific regions,” such as Europe.

Shunsuke Shirakawa, vice commissioner for international affairs at Japan’s Financial Services Agency, has said the regulator needs to “make adjustments” to bring the new rules in on target. The Basel Committee’s members include Japan’s FSA, Germany’s Bundesbank and the U.S. Federal Reserve. Large European banks may be more vulnerable than their global peers to the changes under discussion. The biggest European banks had an average common equity Tier 1 capital ratio – a key measure of financial strength – higher than their global peers at end-2015, according to data from the European Banking Authority and the Basel Committee.

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“..mass failure of many Chinese buyers to settle on apartment contracts..”

• It’s A Long Way Down In Australia’s Looming Apartment Fall (Aus.com.au)

While Australia debates its interest rate policy, the mass failure of many Chinese buyers to settle on apartment contracts is looming as a much bigger catastrophe than markets are expecting. This emerged from the comments of a reader to my commentary yesterday on the Sydney and Melbourne apartment markets. One of my readers who did not allow his full name to be published but used the name “James” complained that I had grossly understated the problem. James revealed that he owned and ran a debt and equity funding business that is on the frontline of the apartment settlement problem. His business deals with the developers of the apartment complexes rather than rather than the investors. James describes what is ahead this way:

“The problem is much worse than what you have described. Our analysis of every development in the country suggests that settlement failures will be between $1 billion and $1.5bn every month for the next 12 months. This is from the Chinese alone, but when settlement prices start coming more than 10% under purchase prices, we will also start to see local buyers attempting to walk away from settling. As Julius Caesar famously said: ‘the die is cast.’” To understand the implication of what James’ analysis reveals we need to step back and see how the apartment boom was funded. Most developers of apartments in Australia collect their Chinese off-the-plan deposits and then use them to gain security for a bank loan. Those bank loans can constitute 40, 50 or even 60% of the cost of the apartment complex.

The developers obtain the rest of their funding from businesses like those operated by James. This is an area of finance which we know very little about because it is hidden from public view. The banks feel they are safe in their loans to developers because there is a big difference between their loans and the cost of the buildings. But the banks are often funding other players in the apartment development. Apart from the developer, the people at risk include unsecured suppliers and the enterprises that are providing the second mortgage funding. If the Chinese fail to settle on the scale that Harry Triguboff is warning about, then there will be a deep problem. But if James’ study is correct that deep problem will develop into an economic catastrophe.

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It’s over. Wind it down peacefully please.

• EU Leaders Search For Way Out Of ‘Existential Crisis’ (R.)

Shaken by Britain’s decision to leave the European Union, the leaders of its other 27 countries meet on Friday to try to inject new momentum into their ailing communal project amid deep-seated divisions over migration and economic policy. The Brexit vote in June ended more than half a century of EU enlargement and closer integration. Long seen as a guarantor of peace and prosperity, the bloc is now struggling to convince its citizens that it remains a force for good. Years of economic and financial crisis have pushed up unemployment in many member states, while a spate of attacks by Islamist militants and a record influx of refugees from the Middle East and Africa have unsettled voters, who are turning increasingly to populist, anti-EU parties.

“After the vote in the UK the only thing that makes sense is to have a sober and brutally honest assessment of the situation,” European Council President Donald Tusk told reporters in Bratislava on the eve of the meeting. “We must not let this crisis go to waste.” European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said earlier this week the EU was in an “existential crisis”. Despite the pressure to lay out a new vision, leaders have played down expectations of real breakthroughs in the Slovak capital, in part because of intractable differences on the biggest issues, notably how to handle the influx of migrants.

Instead they are expected to focus on areas where there is common ground, pledging closer defence cooperation, bolstering security at the EU’s external borders and boosting the capacity of an EU investment fund meant to generate growth and jobs. The aim is to present more concrete proposals at a summit in March of next year that coincides with the 60th anniversary of the bloc’s founding Rome Treaty. But some officials admit in private that major initiatives may not be possible until elections in the Netherlands, France and Germany are out of the way by late 2017.

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Many Greeks accuse Stournaras of exaggerating deficits in order to bring in the Troika.

• Greece Raids Home Of Central Bank Head (ZH)

While the US the media lashes out at Trump every time he dares to tell the truth that the central bank is a biased, engaged, political member of the decision-making landscape, other “developed” countries are happily willing to demonstrate just how apolitical the central bank truly is. Take Greece, for example, where today the chief prosecutor ordered a raid of the home of the governor of the Greek central bank, Yannis Stournaras and the company office of his wife, Lina. The searches were part of a probe conducted by the Financial Police in connection to the alleged mismanagement of more than €1 million in state funding by the Hellenic Center for Disease Control and Prevention, KEELPNO.

The investigation related to funds that KEELPNO allegedly received through a company owned by Nikolopoulou as well as complaints regarding the disappearance of documents tied to the case. According to the WSJ, the raid was part of a continuing investigation into business Stournaras’ wife has done with a state entity, officials said, in a probe that may heighten tension between the top bank official and the left-wing government. Lina Nikolopoulou-Stournaras, the wife of central bank Governor Yannis Stournaras and owner of an communications company specializing in the medical sector, is under investigation from Greek authorities for business she has done with the Hellenic Center for Disease Control and Prevention, or Keelpno.

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Any and all wars declared on nouns are epic fails. But follow the money.

• Jay Z: ‘The War on Drugs Is an Epic Fail’ (NYT)

This short film, narrated by Jay Z (Shawn Carter) and featuring the artwork of Molly Crabapple, is part history lesson about the war on drugs and part vision statement. As Ms. Crabapple’s haunting images flash by, the film takes us from the Nixon administration and the Rockefeller drug laws – the draconian 1973 statutes enacted in New York that exploded the state’s prison population and ushered in a period of similar sentencing schemes for other states – through the extraordinary growth in our nation’s prison population to the emerging aboveground marijuana market of today. We learn how African-Americans can make up around 13% of the United States population – yet 31% of those arrested for drug law violations, even though they use and sell drugs at the same rate as whites.

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Quite a statement for the Wall Street Journal to publish.

• Les Déplorables (WSJ)

To repeat: “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic.” Those are all potent words. Or once were. The racism of the Jim Crow era was ugly, physically cruel and murderous. Today, progressives output these words as reflexively as a burp. What’s more, the left enjoys calling people Islamophobic or homophobic. It’s bullying without personal risk. Donald Trump’s appeal, in part, is that he cracks back at progressive cultural condescension in utterly crude terms. Nativists exist, and the sky is still blue. But the overwhelming majority of these people aren’t phobic about a modernizing America. They’re fed up with the relentless, moral superciliousness of Hillary, the Obamas, progressive pundits and 19-year-old campus activists.

Evangelicals at last week’s Values Voter Summit said they’d look past Mr. Trump’s personal résumé. This is the reason. It’s not about him. The moral clarity that drove the original civil-rights movement or the women’s movement has degenerated into a confused moral narcissism. One wonders if even some of the people in Mrs. Clinton’s Streisandian audience didn’t feel discomfort at the ease with which the presidential candidate slapped isms and phobias on so many people. Presidential politics has become hyper-focused on individual personalities because the media rubs them in our face nonstop. It is a mistake, though, to blame Hillary alone for that derisive remark. It’s not just her.

Hillary Clinton is the logical result of the Democratic Party’s new, progressive algorithm—a set of strict social rules that drives politics and the culture to one point of view. A Clinton victory would enable and entrench the forces her comment represents. Her supporters say it’s Donald Trump’s rhetoric that is “divisive.” Just so. But it’s rich to hear them claim that their words and politics are “inclusive.” So is the town dump. They have chopped American society into so many offendable identities that only a Yale freshman can name them all. If the Democrats lose behind Hillary Clinton, it will be in part because America’s les déplorables decided enough of this is enough.

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Lovely piece.

• The Cold War Is Over (Hitchens)

Perhaps we would understand Russia’s situation better if we imagined that NATO has been dissolved and that the Confederate States and the territories conquered in the Mexican-American War have declared independence. The U.S. retains a precarious hold on the naval station at San Diego, sharing it with the Mexican Navy on an expensive lease that Mexico regularly threatens to cancel. Americans still living in San Diego are compelled to adopt Spanish names on their drivers’ licenses, and movie theaters are instructed to show films only in Spanish. Schools teach anti-American history. Quebec has seceded from Canada, and is being wooed by a Russo-Chinese economic union, with a pact including military and political clauses.

Russian politicians are in the streets of Montreal, urging on a violent anti-American mob, which eventually succeeds in overthrowing Quebec’s pro-American president and replacing him with a pro-Russian one—violating Quebec’s constitution in the process. This brings military forces aligned with Russia right up to the border with New York, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. In such a case, I cannot see the U.S. sitting about doing nothing, especially if it had repeatedly warned in major diplomatic forums against this expansion of Russian power on its frontiers, and been repeatedly ignored over fifteen years or so. If a Marxist takeover in Grenada was considered good enough reason for military action, what would these circumstances provoke?

Mikhail Gorbachev’s feline spokesman, Gennadi Gerasimov, once teased suspicious Western correspondents by sneering at them in the early days of the great perestroika and glasnost experiment, “We have done the cruelest thing to you that we could possibly have done. We have deprived you of an enemy.” He was laughing at us, but he was dead right. The Cold War was a period of moral clarity when the other side really was an evil empire, and when armed resolve for once succeeded in defeating the expansion of evil in the world. It allowed my own poor country to feel more important than it really was, and it suppressed the seething impulses and rivalries of the European continent.

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