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Debt Rattle April 15 2025

Apr 152025
 
 April 15, 2025  Posted by at 9:32 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , ,  28 Responses »


Mathew Brady Abe Lincoln 1864

 

• Lincoln Was a ‘Threat to Democracy’ (Al Perrotta)
• Trump’s Life’s Work Culminates in Confronting Communist China (Josh Hammer)
• Living on the Edge (Martin Armstrong)
• Temporary Tariff Terror Examined (Steve McKee)
• Zelensky Started The War Then Begged For Missiles – Trump (RT)
• Trump Slams Biden, Zelensky & Putin For Ukraine War: ‘Everybody Is To Blame’ (ZH)
• West Seeks To Partition Ukraine – Senior Russian Diplomat (RT)
• Zelensky Urges Trump To Visit Ukraine Before Pressing Negotiations (ZH)
• Trump Slams ‘Dishonest’ CBS After Zelensky Interview (RT)
• We Have Proof Sumy Strike Targeted Ukrainian Troops and Foreign Mercs – Lavrov (Sp.)
• The Sumy Missile Strike: War, Propaganda, and Hypocrisy (Amar)
• Medvedev Brands Incoming German Chancellor ‘Nazi’ (RT)
• Meta’s Monopoly Trial Kicks Off (ET)
• Now We Know Why Democrats Are Losing the Messaging War (Margolis)
• El Salvador’s Bukele Won’t Return MS-13 Gang Member Mistakenly Deported (JTN)
• Why the Beatified MS-13 ‘Father’ Was ‘Mistakenly’ Deported (Victoria Taft)
• Systemic Considerations (James Howard Kunstler)

 

 


Holy Week at the White House

 

 

Tea

5,000 years
https://twitter.com/Zlatti_71/status/1911706962795831524

Speaker

Left

Homeless

Titan

Tariffs
https://twitter.com/ImMeme0/status/1911513456249127332

Cop

 

 

 

 

Exactly 160 years ago, the US lost a major part of its innocence. That reveberates to this day, and the attempts at Trump’s life.

• Lincoln Was a ‘Threat to Democracy’ (Al Perrotta)

One hundred sixty years ago tonight, at Ford’s Theater, John Wilkes Booth put a bullet in the head of President Abraham Lincoln. What motivated the 26-year-old actor? Fame? No, he had plenty of that. His photos were outsold only by Honest Abe himself. Acclaim? No, contrary to tales told in school that he was jealous of the critical raves afforded his father Junius and brother Edwin, Booth earned reviews any young actor would die for. He even refused to perform under his real name until he earned reviews worthy of the name. To avenge the Confederacy’s defeat? You’re getting closer. Booth raged and despaired over the suffering incurred by the South. Actually, John Wilkes Booth told us his motivation. After shooting Lincoln and making his dramatic leap to the stage, Booth shouted “Sic Semper Tyrannis!” (“Thus always to tyrants.”) Or to put it another way, “Lincoln was a threat to democracy.”

Twice last summer, amid a daily drumbeat from former President Joe Biden, Democrats, and the media that Donald Trump was a “threat to democracy,” a budding tyrant, two would-be assassins came very close to killing him. Ryan Routh was charged Thursday in Florida for his attempt. A recent study indicates 55% of self-described leftists think the assassination of Trump would be “justifiable.” Given the rhetoric, given the vast numbers with a similar heart, it’s no wonder Routh thought he was doing the world a favor. “Everyone across the globe from the youngest to the oldest know [sic] that Trump is unfit to be anything, much less a U.S. president,” Routh wrote in a letter found after his arrest. “U.S. presidents must at bare minimum embody the moral fabric that is America and be kind, caring and selfless and always stand for humanity.”

So did Booth, who wrote while on the run: “Our country owed all her troubles to him, and God simply made me the instrument of his punishment. A country that groaned beneath this tyranny, and prayed for this end, and yet now behold the cold hands they extend to me. ” Booth grew increasingly dismayed at being vilified and rejected. “I am here in despair. And why? For doing what Brutus was honored for. What made Tell a hero? And yet I, for striking down a greater tyrant than they ever knew, am looked upon as a common cutthroat.” In a letter attempting to justify his actions, Booth wrote: “When Caesar had conquered the enemies of Rome and the power that was his menaced the liberties of the people, Brutus arose and slew him. The stroke of his dagger was guided by his love of Rome. It was the spirit and ambition of Caesar that Brutus struck at.”
“Oh, that we could come by Caesar’s spirit,
And not dismember Caesar.
But, alas!
Ceasar must bleed for it.”

Booth, a man steeped since birth in Shakespearean drama, sought the death of Lincoln as Shakespeare’s Brutus did Caesar’s. This fear stemmed not from what the president had done, but from the belief that with his enemies conquered, Lincoln would keep his war powers and reign as a tyrant. This gets to one of the most tragic elements of Lincoln’s assassination, positively Shakespearean in its awfulness. John Wilkes Booth failed to realize that with the war over, Lincoln was the best friend the South had. And Booth had a role to play. The greatest of his life. Lincoln wanted a gentle reconciliation between North and South, “with malice toward none, and charity for all.” Many powerful forces around him had plenty of malice toward the Confederacy, and no mood for charity. Those in the South whose towns had been laid waste and their sons laid to rest by the hundreds of thousands, would also have trouble with reconciliation.

Lincoln’s mission of unifying the country in peace looked to be as difficult as winning the war. He would need all the help he could get. Author Michael Kauffman discovered an intriguing tidbit when researching his book “American Brutus.” A worker at Ford’s Theater saw Booth hand an attendant a card, and the attendant bring the card into the Presidential Box. What happened next is not known. But is it not possible that Lincoln received Booth’s card, and knowing Booth’s fame, his oratory gifts and his sympathies, realized the actor could prove very valuable in helping “bind the nation’s wounds”? Who better than America’s First Family of Theater to help bring the nation together? Perhaps the theater-loving president even knew the three acting Booth brothers would be sharing the stage at a benefit the following week.

With the war over and the comedy romp “Our American Cousin” playing out beneath him, did Lincoln see in Booth’s card a golden opportunity? Is it not likely an excited Lincoln told the attendant, “Yes, send Mr. Booth in”? Rather than summon a potential partner, Lincoln summoned his own executioner. Booth killed not only the president, but all hope for a gentle reconciliation. How much better for his beloved South had Booth pulled up a chair instead of a pistol? How much better for our nation and their own dreams if liberals sought Trump’s cooperation rather than destruction? The future is in their hands. The 55% who believe Trump’s assassination would be justified would heed well the lesson of John Wilkes Booth. After being cornered in a barn in Port Royal, Virginia and shot, Booth looked down at his hands and uttered his final words: “Useless. Useless.”

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Much of what happens with regards to the tariffs surprises people, and they think it’s -largely- new. Donald Trump has been preoccupied with the issues for 40 years. In this 1988 video he says he doesn’t want to be president. But he would probably have been a strong candidate even then. Reagan at that point had just slapped a 100% tariff on a lot of Japanese imports.

• Trump’s Life’s Work Culminates in Confronting Communist China (Josh Hammer)

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump abruptly announced a 90-day pause on most of his planned country-specific “reciprocal” tariffs—with the notable exception of China. In so strikingly singling out China as the focus of America’s economic and geopolitical ire, Trump was not merely clarifying that the United States views China and its regnant Communist Party as our leading 21st-century threat—he was also taking yet another notable step toward fulfilling his own lifelong goal of fundamentally resetting the terms of the U.S.-China bilateral relationship. As an “outer-borough” native New Yorker from Queens, Trump has long seen things differently than most of his white-shoe brethren and fellow one-percenters living across the (literal and proverbial) river in Manhattan.

Throughout virtually his entire career, Trump has served as a “class traitor” archetype—someone who, as I wrote in an essay last year, “may hold ‘elite’ ruling class credentials, but whose hearts, minds, concerns, and general sensibilities are decidedly with the country class.” That is the essence of Trump’s nationalist-populist MAGA political coalition. But it’s also who Trump has been since his earliest interviews with the New York City tabloids and TV hosts all those decades ago. There is no better example than trade, Trump’s most consistently held political position. In the 1980s, he was alarmed at the rise of Japan as an economic superpower, arguing that America’s trade deficit with Japan was problematic and that the U.S. should respond with crippling tariffs. (It seems that Ronald Reagan, who in 1987 slapped a 100% tariff on many Japanese goods, was listening.)

In recent decades, Trump has applied the same logic to the newer threat of China. In 2011, for instance, four years before he launched his successful presidential run, Trump railed against widely practiced Chinese currency manipulation: “They have manipulated their currency so violently towards this country, it is almost impossible for our companies to compete with Chinese companies.” During the first year of his first presidential term, Trump directed his Office of the U.S. Trade Representative to investigate Chinese trade practices. The subsequent report was damning, and Trump implemented numerous tariffs on Chinese goods—tariffs that, to his rare credit, former President Joe Biden largely kept in place and even built upon. In addition to his first-term tariffs, Trump also filed a formal World Trade Organization case against China, alleging deceptive trade practices and intellectual property theft.

As Trump put it at the time in a tweet: “Today I directed the U.S. Trade Representative to take action so that countries stop CHEATING the system at the expense of the USA!” Trump’s tariff escalation this week against Communist China—even as he paused many other tariffs to allow for bilateral trade negotiations and give jittery bond markets some relief—is a natural culmination of the work to reset the U.S.-China economic relationship that he commenced during his first term. For that matter, it is also the natural culmination of his short-lived third-party presidential run in 2000 with the trade protectionist Reform Party, as well as his 1988 “Oprah Winfrey Show” interview, where he teased a future presidential run that would focus on trade. Immigration may be the issue most readily associated with Trump’s MAGA movement, but there is no issue that has been nearer and dearer to Trump’s heart over the decades than trade—first with Japan and then with China. Most important, Trump has not just been outspoken on the issue of trade with China—he has been proven correct.

https://twitter.com/benfergusonshow/status/1909047756183785829

Ever since Richard Nixon’s fateful trip to visit Mao Zedong in Beijing in 1972, American elites of all political stripes promised that welcoming China into the global economy would be good for all parties involved. American consumers, we were reliably informed, would get cheaper and more abundant goods; American exporters would get a massive and exciting new market to peddle their wares; and the Chinese people themselves would soon reap the rewards of the “political liberalization” that could only come about through “economic liberalization.” This was the dominant thinking when Nixon visited China over a half-century ago, when the George W. Bush administration welcomed China into the World Trade Organization in 2001, and when Barack Obama hosted and toasted Chinese leader Xi Jinping at the White House in 2015.

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Martin Armstrong highlights the “lose face” angle, “don’t do it in public”. But China has done very little since Trump’s first term, when he’s certain to have brought it up, though not in public, so why would Trump wait now?

• Living on the Edge (Martin Armstrong)

The U.S.-China trade war is an ongoing economic conflict that began in January 2018, characterized by the imposition of tariffs and trade barriers by both countries. Recently, tensions escalated as the U.S. raised tariffs on Chinese goods to 145%, prompting China to retaliate with tariffs of 125% on U.S. imports, affecting global supply chains and market stability. Trump’s decision not to grant China the same reprieve as other nations explained: “China wants to make a deal, they just don’t know how quite to go about it.” I disagree. If I were China, I would do a full embargo, and the Achilles’ heel in this trade war is more than just the manufacture of values for municipalities – the big ones, steel and aluminum, but also medicines. Personally, I would put a full embargo on everything, and without the medicines, people would be screaming, and their lives would be put in danger. I have dealt with Asia for some 40 years. You do not do this sort of thing publicly. It is an insult and a loss of face that forces China not to yield.

The developing U.S.-China trade war keeps ratcheting up. China has suspended exports of rare earth minerals. Meanwhile, Commerce Secretary Lutnick said that the electronics the Trump administration exempted from reciprocal tariffs could be subject to different levies in the future. This is not good. You do not air your dirty laundry in public.

Beijing’s perspective is dramatically different. Xi Jinping has taken the view that his country would lose face if it simply capitulated to what it calls America’s “unilateral bullying.” The danger with this trade war is that publicly, it only supports fervent nationalism, and that feeds into what will become World War III. China has been quietly preparing for a trade war for quite some time. Trump’s actions may spark negotiation in Western circles, but in Asian circles, they create the image that the US doesn’t want to negotiate. My concern is that Xi is brilliant. This trade war is playing into his domestic approval of anti-Americanism. Like the Russian sanctions that boosted Putin’s approval rating calculation, sources say, China is also seeing a rise in popular support to strengthen its position by preparing not just to fight back. Trump’s trade war with China is definitely strengthening Xi’s own position.

All of my sources have said that Xi fully understands that China has entered a period of protracted struggle in both trade and geopolitics with the United States and Europe. This became painfully obvious, and Europe and the Biden Administration confronted Russia. Xi has taken the position that China needs to prepare for these confrontations ever since the Biden Administration put sanctions on Russia and then threatened China if it dared to help Russia. The Neocon Antony Blinken expressed “serious concern” about China’s support for Russia’s defense industry. He went as far as to threaten Xi that he would impose sanctions if China helped Russia.

The Neocon Antony Blinken threw down the gauntlet and views the world only in his desire for imperial power. He never understood the economy, and this insanity of threatening China and removing Russia from Swift undermined the economy and split it in half, with the formation of BRICS for geopolitical security. I don’t believe Trump understands the damage that the Biden Administration inflicted upon the entire world. Now, go after China with a trade war to bring back manufacturing to America; this is pushing China over the edge.

China previously owned 10% of the US national debt. This is what Trump has not considered. Before this trade war began, in January, foreigners sold a net $13.3 billion of U.S. notes and bonds that had more than one year to maturity. As we approach sovereign debt defaults, I have warned that it may start with Japan and be followed by Europe. We saw almost $50 billion was sold in December 2024 in anticipation of a Trump trade war. Last November saw almost $35 billion dumped following the election.

Canada was the largest net seller in January. The UK needed the cash and was the biggest seller last December. I know some have made the outrageous claim that Japan sold US debt, and that made Trump pause the tariffs for 90 days. These people have ZERO understanding of the markets and even less about Trump. The tariffs over 10% are political, and it is part of his art of the deal. Japan is in economic trouble with its own debt crisis, and selling US debt had nothing to do with the tariffs – this is about creating a real debt crisis. That said, China has the capacity to dump US debt in a big way, and that would send US rates higher on the long-end. U.S. stocks rallied with Trump pausing the tariffs, yet this was cyclically on point, which our computer had forecast months in advance. People just try to come up with some fundamentals to explain each move in a market, whether true or false. Our computer is projecting that 2025 will be the low in Chinese interest rates both on the 2-year and 30-year.

While stocks rallied, Treasury yields rose so much that lower rates benefited stocks. China has been quietly selling U.S. debt, which began over a year ago. This was not something new out of the blue in response to new tariffs. Bond markets were flashing warning signs based on the hidden risks behind the entire dynamics of trade and geopolitics. Behind the scenes, U.S. Treasury yields have been rising during the overnight sessions, indicating foreign market selling. Nevertheless, the prospects of war in Europe are reflected in our models, for they do not support a collapse in the bond markets, implying that war will bring still capital inflows. When we look at the Baltic Freight Index, 2025 was a Double Directional Change, indicating that we would have this trade war. We have a Directional Change in 2026 and a Panic Cycle in 2027, with the culmination of this war extending into 2028. This might also be influenced by the war starting in Europe.

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“No one knows the extent to which he will succeed. But if conventional thinking could solve our existential issues, it would have by now.”

• Temporary Tariff Terror Examined (Steve McKee)

When President Donald Trump made his Liberation Day announcements, his harshest critics immediately declared him an economic arsonist playing with fire he didn’t understand, while his strongest acolytes insisted he was 10 moves ahead, playing 4D chess with geopolitical mastery. Both camps jumped the gun. His was the opening salvo in a high-stakes game. Sometimes, the most effective strategy isn’t conventional. Sometimes it breaks the mold. Trump’s tariff gambit had the same disruptive effect. He was never under the illusion that his first offer would be the last word. That’s not how negotiation works. It’s not even how business works.

Trump’s not playing chess. It’s more akin to Go His announcement was surprising, yes. But that doesn’t necessarily make it wrong. In fact, it was reminiscent of a similarly shocking moment in another high-stakes arena: the legendary 2016 Go match between world champion Lee Sedol and DeepMind’s AlphaGo computer program. In move 37 of Game Two of the board game, AlphaGo played an unexpected, unconventional move. At first, it looked like a mistake. But as the game unfolded, it became clear that move 37 wasn’t just valid; it was, literally, game changing. It altered the way top players—and AI developers—understood the game and, to some extent, AI itself. That’s why chess is the wrong analogy in this tariff situation. No president can be expected to know the implications of every move like chess masters do. But they can know there will be implications from their move and as those implications unfold they will have a window to adjust their next move.

Trump understands negotiation This president, in particular, understands the rhyme and rhythm of negotiation. He knew this negotiation, being played out in full public view, would draw out the critics and opportunists and have real world impacts. That was baked into the cake, and it’s why, I surmise, he waited until just hours after the special House elections were decided to do it. This isn’t a private boardroom deal behind closed doors. It’s an unfolding negotiation taking place on the world stage, with millions of spectators and infinite scrutiny. That complicates things. But Trump, being Trump, accounted for that. He knew pushback would be inevitable. He couldn’t know the exact shape or timing, but he knew the opportunity to respond would come. And when it did, he took it.

Whether you agree with his tactics or not, he’s not capitulating or backtracking, he’s managing an unfolding negotiation. What makes Trump different—and maddening to many—is that he’s not cut from traditional presidential cloth. He’s a developer, a dealmaker, someone for whom negotiation is second nature. His presidency brought that skill set into a realm where every feint and pivot is broadcast and critiqued in real time. It’s a high-wire act, sure. But not one he has entered blindly.

The dynamics of the game needed to change The real takeaway here isn’t about trade policy. It’s about process. About resisting the impulse to rush to judgment based on ideology or tribal loyalty. These are dynamic, complex negotiations with layers most commentators either don’t understand or refuse to acknowledge. Yes, last week was a terrifying ride, but so is our future if something doesn’t change. Lest we forget, we’re going bankrupt. Something needs to happen. The U.S.—and by extension, much of the global economy—is hurtling down an unsustainable path. Somebody had to start changing the dynamics of a game which everybody is about to lose. Trump has done so. You don’t have to like him to see that he understands the stakes.

So sure, scratch your head. Raise your eyebrows. Ask hard questions. That’s part of the process. But don’t assume you’re watching 4D chess, and don’t call the man a fool. Instead, hold back the full ire of your fire. Accept that you may not be seeing the whole game board—none of us are. Call balls and strikes as you see them, but don’t call it “game over” when it has only just begun. There are many moves yet to come, and I don’t pretend to know how it’s all going to turn out. But as events continue to unfold, it’s unhelpful—and frankly unfair—to reduce Trump to either a genius or a fool. He is a man with a unique set of skills, forged in a different fire than most politicians, who is doing his best to deploy them in service of long-term trends in dire need of fixing. And he’s doing it none too soon. No one knows the extent to which he will succeed. But if conventional thinking could solve our existential issues, it would have by now.

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CBS turns on Trump again.

• Zelensky Started The War Then Begged For Missiles – Trump (RT)

Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky should never have started a war with Russia, US President Donald Trump has said. In a press conference alongside El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele in the Oval Office on Monday, Trump commented on Zelensky’s recent offer to finance $15 billion worth of Patriot air defense batteries with the aid of Kiev’s European backers. “He’s always looking to purchase missiles,” the US presided noted. “When you start a war, you got to know that you can win the war,” he said of Zelensky. “You don’t start a war against somebody that’s 20 times your size and then hope that people give you some missiles.” Trump added that he gave Kiev American-made Javelin man-portable anti-tank missiles during his first presidency.

In an interview with CBS News on Sunday, Zelensky called on the US to supply Ukraine with more air defenses. Kiev is ready to buy or lease up to ten Patriot air defense systems, and some European backers have offered to help with the money, he claimed. During the interview, the network suggested that Trump tried to cut Kiev out of peace talks with Russia, and that he lied in his statements about the conflict. Trump allegedly “rewrote history, saying, falsely, that Ukraine had started the war and calling… Zelensky ‘a dictator without elections’,” according to CBS. The US president lashed out at the news network on Truth Social on Monday, calling the interview inaccurate and fraudulent.

Trump has repeatedly claimed that the Ukraine conflict would never have escalated had he been in the White House, rather than his predecessor Joe Biden. According to the US president, the previous administration invested more than $300 billion into supporting Kiev. Trump has promised to “get back” the money, entering talks with Ukraine about jointly exploiting its mineral resources. He also suggested taking over Ukrainian nuclear power plants. The Kremlin has hailed the Trump administration’s peace efforts, but cautioned that resolving long-standing issues will take time and “painstaking work.”

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Keeping Zelensky around is counterproductive.

• Trump Slams Biden, Zelensky & Putin For Ukraine War: ‘Everybody Is To Blame’ (ZH)

President Donald Trump while speaking with the press in the Oval Office on Monday once again blasted President Biden for the start of the Russia-Ukraine war, a war which Trump has repeatedly stressed should have never happened. “That’s a war that should have never been allowed to start and Biden could have stopped it and Zelensky could have stopped it and Putin should have never started it,” Trump said. “Everybody is to blame.” Trump added: “If Biden were competent and if Zelenskyy were competent, and I don’t know that he is, we had a rough session with this guy — he just kept asking for more and more.” But he seemed to reserve his most aggressive criticisms for Zelensky, once again blasting him for asking for more and more weapons and money, while knowing full well Ukraine can’t defeat Russia, which is “twenty times your size” – as Trump said. Watch:

Clearly last month’s Oval Office showdown involving J.D. Vance and Zelensky going at it still looms large in Trump’s mind. Trump had separately in a Monday Truth Social post also lamented that Biden and Zelensky “did an absolutely horrible job in allowing this travesty to begin.” Here’s what he said in the post: “The war between Russia and Ukraine is Biden’s war, not mine. I just got here, and for four years during my term, had no problem in preventing it from happening,” Trump wrote, adding that he “had nothing to do with this war” but is working “diligently to get the death and destruction to stop.” “If the 2020 presidential election was not rigged, and it was, in so many ways, that horrible war would never have happened,” he continued. “President [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy and Crooked Joe Biden did an absolutely horrible job in allowing this travesty to begin. There were so many ways of preventing it from ever starting. But that is the past. Now we have to get it to stop, and fast. So sad!”

Much of this seems in reaction to the Zelensky “60 Minutes” interview from Sunday, wherein the Ukrainian leader claimed that “Russian narratives are prevailing” in the US, while singling out Vance in particular. Zelensky had said, “It’s a shift in tone, a shift in reality, really yes, a shift in reality, and I don’t want to engage in the altered reality that is being presented to me,” And on Vance, he described: “First and foremost, we did not launch an attack [to start the war]. It seems to me that the Vice President is somehow justifying Putin’s actions. I tried to explain, ‘You can’t look for something in the middle. There is an aggressor and there is a victim. The Russians are the aggressor, and we are the victim’.”

Despite Trump’s newest attack on Zelensky, it remains that the United States is still supplying weaponry to Kiev, though reportedly in lesser quantities that previously, and is still providing limited intelligence. Zelensky has likely had to restrain some of the criticisms he wishes to hurl back, give Kiev is deeply fearful the US could once again cut off the flow of arms and ammo, as it did briefly soon after Trump took office.

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“We intended to partition Russia. Since we couldn’t pull that off, let’s divide Ukraine instead.”

• West Seeks To Partition Ukraine – Senior Russian Diplomat (RT)

European nations hostile towards Moscow are advocating for the partitioning of Ukraine, according to Rodion Miroshnik, the Russian Foreign Ministry’s ambassador-at-large overseeing war crime investigations. Last week, The Times of London reported an alleged US proposal to divide the country, reminiscent of Germany’s division following World War II. Keith Kellogg, the US presidential envoy for Ukraine cited by the newspaper, later stated that his remarks had been misinterpreted by the British outlet. Miroshnik criticized the approach on Saturday as an embodiment of what he called the UK’s colonial mindset. “Europe has a habit of slicing up other continents and nations and parceling them out,” he stated in an interview.

He read the underlying message as the West saying: “We intended to partition Russia. Since we couldn’t pull that off, let’s divide Ukraine instead.” The diplomat drew parallels between the proposal in The Times and the aftermath of World War I, noting that turning Arab regions of the former Ottoman Empire into mandate territories governed by the UK and France did not ultimately bode well for the Middle East. Moscow opposes the presence of any NATO member states’ troops in Ukraine, including the post-ceasefire security force suggested by the UK and France. Miroshnik insisted that an “occupation” by those nations would merely confirm Ukraine’s status as a de facto “mandate territory” with a puppet government, primarily handled by the British. He added that Russia would not accept such a “toxic” neighbor.

“The time Kiev needs to lick its wounds may be alarmingly brief,” he cautioned. “It needs to reflect on its experiences, prepare, and train tens of thousands more militants via Britain before going to war again.” Certain European NATO members have advocated for a “resilience force” to be stationed in Ukraine, presenting them as a deterrent. Kellogg said he did not propose dividing the country but rather discussed with the Times the idea of “zones of responsibility,” controlled by Russia, a British-French contingent, and Kiev itself, respectively. Moscow views the Ukraine conflict as a NATO proxy war. Russian officials have argued that a lasting peace can only be achieved by addressing the fundamental issues, including the expansion of the US-led military bloc in Europe since the 1990s and the “neo-Nazi” character of the current Ukrainian government, which discriminates against ethnic Russians.

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Not a word about peace.

• Zelensky Urges Trump To Visit Ukraine Before Pressing Negotiations (ZH)

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is urging for President Donald Trump to visit Ukraine and see the war’s devastation first-hand before pressing for peace negotiations with Russia. “We want you to come,” the Ukrainian president pleaded in reference to Trump while speaking with CBS’ “60 Minutes” on Sunday. Zelensky hit out at what he strongly hinted was Trump’s lack of understanding of the conflict and Russian brutality. “You think you understand what’s going on here. Okay, we respect your position. You understand. But, please, before any kind of decisions, any kind of forms of negotiations, come to see people, civilians, warriors, “Come, look, and then let’s — let’s move with a plan how to finish the war,” he added. He further suggested that with such a trip, Trump will finally grasp Putin’s true nature.

“You will understand with whom you have a deal. You will understand what Putin did,” the Ukrainian leader said. This comes as the US and Russia are seeking diplomatic normalization through a series of bilateral meetings which have cut out any Ukrainian or EU representation. “We will not prepare anything. It will not be theater, with preparing actors in the streets and the [city] center. We don’t do this. We don’t need it,” he continued. “You can go exactly where you want, in any city which been under attacks, just to come and to understand.” The CBS interview aired the same day that Russian ballistic missiles pummeled the Ukrainian city of Sumy, resulting in a mass casualty event which was quickly condemned by the United States and European Union. Ukrainian emergency authorities said the Sumy attack killed at least 34 people and wounded more than a hundred.

Trump’s special envoy to Ukraine, retired lieutenant general Keith Kellogg, reacted by saying it “crosses any line of decency”. He suggested the strikes intentionally targeted civilians. “As a former military leader, I understand targeting and this is wrong,” Kellogg posted on X. He said there are “scores of civilian dead and wounded.” However, Trump’s reaction was one in which the Russians were less singled out and condemned, instead the US president highlighted that this “horrible war” shows the urgency of ending the war before more people die… But the White House has strongly complained over the past months that Zelensky has appeared unwilling to genuinely engage in peace talks with Moscow, also at a moment more hawkish European allies are seeking to fill the gap of waning Washington support. Zelensky knows he’ll have to make serious concessions for peace.

It is especially the tense February meeting in the Oval Office which still stings and looms large. Zelensky in the CBS interview took the opportunity to once again slam Vice President J.D. Vance. “It’s a shift in tone, a shift in reality, really yes, a shift in reality, and I don’t want to engage in the altered reality that is being presented to me,” Zelensky said. “First and foremost, we did not launch an attack [to start the war]. It seems to me that the Vice President is somehow justifying Putin’s actions. I tried to explain, ‘You can’t look for something in the middle. There is an aggressor and there is a victim. The Russians are the aggressor, and we are the victim’.” Below: RT’s Editor-in-Chief responded sarcastically to Zelensky once again complaining that Russian ‘propaganda’ is winning in America…

Meanwhile, Trump has since made clear where he stands concerning 60 Minutes’ repeat efforts to make him look bad.”Almost every week, 60 Minutes … mentions the name ‘TRUMP’ in a derogatory and defamatory way, but this Weekend’s ‘BROADCAST’ tops them all,” the president complained on Truth Social, in apparent reference to both the Ukraine report and another on Greenland. “CBS is out of control, at levels never seen before, and they should pay a big price for this. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

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“..that he “rewrote history, saying, falsely, that Ukraine had started the war and calling… Zelensky ‘a dictator without elections.’”

• Trump Slams ‘Dishonest’ CBS After Zelensky Interview (RT)

CBS News must have its broadcasting license revoked, US President Donald Trump has said. He has accused the network of spreading politically biased misinformation in its coverage of the Ukraine conflict and Washington’s push to acquire Greenland. In a Truth Social post on Monday, Trump lashed out at the broadcaster after it aired an interview with Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky and a segment revisiting the US president’s controversial idea to purchase Greenland. In the Zelensky interview, the network suggested that Trump had sought to exclude Kiev from peace talks with Russia and that he “rewrote history, saying, falsely, that Ukraine had started the war and calling… Zelensky ‘a dictator without elections.’”

The US president’s “dictator” comment in February was referring to the fact that Zelensky’s presidential term expired last year and that he has refused to call a new vote, citing martial law. Trump has since softened his rhetoric about the Ukrainian leader. The CBS report on Greenland focused on the island’s residents’ purported reluctance to become part of the US. “Almost every week, 60 Minutes… mentions the name ‘TRUMP’ in a derogatory and defamatory way, but this Weekend’s ‘BROADCAST’ tops them all,” Trump wrote. “They did not one, but TWO, major stories on ‘TRUMP,’ one having to do with Ukraine, which I say is a War that would never have happened if the 2020 Election had not been RIGGED… and, the other story was having to do with Greenland, casting our Country, as led by me, falsely, inaccurately, and fraudulently,” he added.

“They are not a ‘News Show,’ but a dishonest Political Operative simply disguised as ‘News,’ and must be responsible for what they have done, and are doing,” Trump suggested. “They should lose their license!” The US leader stressed that CBS “should pay a big price” for being “out of control,” recalling his previous stand-off with the network over a heavily edited interview with Kamala Harris, his main Democratic rival prior to the November election. The controversy over the Harris interview erupted in October when CBS aired two versions of an interview with the then-vice president. In one, she gave a long and convoluted answer about the Middle East conflict, but in the other, she gave a much clearer and more concise answer. Trump subsequently lodged a $10 billion lawsuit against CBS, calling the interview “word salad” and accusing the network of “deceitful, deceptive manipulation of news” and favoritism to the Democratic Party. CBS has admitted to editing the interview but rejected allegations that it attempted to doctor it.

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The Sumy narrative (Russia targets civilians!) carried the international airwaves for a whole weekend.

• We Have Proof Sumy Strike Targeted Ukrainian Troops and Foreign Mercs – Lavrov (Sp.)

Russia possesses information that Ukrainian troops met with their foreign counterparts at the facility targeted by Russian forces in the strike on Sumy, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Monday. On Sunday, Russian forces carried out a missile strike on the Ukrainian city of Sumy, targeting a site of a meeting of the Seversk tactical and operational command’s leadership. Earlier on Monday, the Russian Defense Ministry said that the strike killed over 60 Ukrainian servicepeople. “International humanitarian law categorically prohibits the placement of military facilities and weapons around civilian objects. Since the first days of the [Ukraine] crisis, and earlier, even during the Minsk agreements … there have been a million cases of artillery and air defense systems being placed in city blocks near kindergartens.

How many videos are posted online of Ukrainian women shouting for the military to get away from stores and playgrounds? But this practice continues. We have facts about who was at the facility that was hit in Sumy. There was another ‘gathering’ of Ukrainian military commanders with their Western colleagues, who were disguised either as mercenaries or I do not know who,” Lavrov told Russian newspaper Kommersant. It is widely known that NATO forces are present in Ukraine, the minister added. “The New York Times recently reported that Americans have been playing a leading role in strikes on Russia. Without this part, the majority of [Ukrainian] long-range missiles would never have taken off at their deployment sites,” he said.

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“Macron, Merz, Starmer, Kellogg, the New York Times, The Telegraph – to name only a few examples – all follow Zelensky’s and Kiev’s lie that this was a deliberate attack on civilians..”

• The Sumy Missile Strike: War, Propaganda, and Hypocrisy (Amar)

On April 13, Russia launched an attack on a target in the eastern Ukrainian city of Sumy. All reports –Western, Ukrainian, and Russian – agree on some basic facts: The attack consisted of two ballistic missiles; substantial numbers of people were killed (over 60, according to the Russian Defense Ministry; over 20 in Western and Ukrainian reports) and injured (over 80, per Ukrainian reports). Beyond that, however, a thick fog of war has descended. Or rather, a fog of propaganda. Western media and politicians have denounced the Russian strike as, in essence, an atrocity or war crime. The New York Times, for instance, presented it as slamming “into a bustling city center […] on Sunday morning, […] killing at least 34 people in what appeared to be the deadliest attack against civilians this year.” Incoming German chancellor Friedrich Merz (to be sworn in at the beginning of May), speaking on one of his country’s most popular TV shows, condemned what he called a “perfidious act” and “serious war crime.”

In the US, President Donald Trump’s special – if largely sidelined – envoy for Russia and Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, has invoked his experience as a “former military leader” who “understand[s] targeting” to denounce the Russian strike as “wrong,” adding that the attack “on civilian targets in Sumy crosses any line of decency.” Britain’s prime minister, Keir Starmer, is “appalled at Russia’s horrific attacks on civilians in Sumy.” Both Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron saw an opportunity to call for “imposing” a ceasefire on Russia. Merz, for his part, felt the need to talk, once more, about providing Kiev with German Taurus missiles. The fact that Ukraine has made a point of not complying with the partial ceasefire officially already in place seems to make no difference. Neither, clearly, does the fact that neither France nor Britain has the means to compel Moscow. That the use of the German Taurus to strike at, for instance, the Kerch Bridge may well invite – perfectly justifiable – Russian retaliation against German targets, whether in Germany or elsewhere, seems to appear equally irrelevant to Merz.

More examples could be added, but the trend should be clear: In the West, almost everyone agrees that the Russian attack on Sumy was an atrocity and in the EU there is talk – if we are lucky, it will remain just that – of exploiting it as a pretext to escalate further the proxy war in which Ukraine is being used up against Russia. Yet there are two major problems with this escalatory approach: Most importantly, it is not based on facts but on disinformation originating with the Kiev regime, taken over uncritically and spread enthusiastically by Western mainstream media and many political leaders. Though not, actually, all of them. That is the second, as it were, practical problem for the escalation brigade: The single most powerful Western figure is not playing along. Trump has not condemned Russia. He did call the attack “terrible” and “horrible” and claimed that he was told that “they [presumably meaning Russia] made a mistake.”

Whatever basis (US signal intelligence? Hearsay?) he has – or not – for this statement, politically, the key point of Trump’s first reaction was that he demonstratively refrained from joining the rest of the West in escalating, while stressing that the war as such is the issue and ending it the solution. A similar approach in a statement on X by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirms that this is not a fluke but Trump’s and therefore Washington’s policy, at least for now. America’s president has clearly – and unsurprisingly – decided that his halting and open-ended yet still at least ongoing attempt to achieve a normalization with Moscow is more important than joining the latest propaganda campaign against Russia. Trump – so criminally wrong in the Middle East – is right on this one, even if he is pursuing extremely pragmatic purposes. He is also, as it happens, right here in a more fundamental sense, which brings us back to problem number one with the Western mainstream treatment of the Sumy attack:

Despite Kiev’s endless record of deception, the Western claim that the Russian attack was a crime is once again based on that very murky source alone. Ukraine’s past-due-date president Vladmir Zelensky, for instance, has decried a “horrific” attack hitting “an ordinary city street, ordinary life.” Macron, Merz, Starmer, Kellogg the New York Times, The Telegraph – to name only a few examples – all follow Zelensky’s and Kiev’s lie that this was a deliberate attack on civilians. Yet, in reality, Russia struck at a gathering of Ukrainian soldiers. Soldiers, yes, even on Sunday and also on Palm Sunday, are legitimate targets in armed conflict. It is not criminal to attack them. That is an elementary legal reality, rooted in the Law of Armed Conflict. And, when the boot is on the other foot, the West knows this well: No one there decried a Ukrainian “war crime,” when Kiev’s Western-supplied artillery wiped out almost 100 Russian troops sleeping in their quarters behind the front line in January 2023.

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“..after he allegedly suggested that Kiev should destroy the Crimean Bridge..”

• Medvedev Brands Incoming German Chancellor ‘Nazi’ (RT)

Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has branded incoming German chancellor Friedrich Merz a Nazi after he allegedly suggested that Kiev should destroy the Crimean Bridge. In an interview with state broadcaster ARD, Merz, the leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party and the likely future leader of Germany, stated that Berlin could supply long-range Taurus missiles to Ukraine, but only if it is done in coordination with other EU nations. Kiev should in the future use Western-supplied missiles to go on the offensive and destroy, for example, “the most important land connection between Russia and Crimea,” Merz said. Merz did not clarify if he meant the Crimean bridge, which stretches from Russia’s Krasnodar Region to Crimea, or the ‘land bridge’ that Russian forces established with the peninsula when the former Ukrainian region off Kherson joined Russia.

However, many critics have interpreted Merz’s words to mean the Crimean bridge, especially given that Kiev has already conducted a number of attacks on it since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022. In a post on X on Monday, Medvedev, who currently serves as the deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, suggested that Merz was following in the footsteps of his Nazi father. “Chancellor candidate Fritz Merz is haunted by the memory of his father, who served in Hitler’s Wehrmacht. Now Merz has suggested a strike on the Crimean Bridge. Think twice, Nazi,” Medvedev wrote. According to media reports, Merz’s father Joachim was conscripted into the Wehrmacht – the unified armed forces of Nazi Germany – around 1941. His grandfather, Josef Paul Sauvigny, had also been a member of the Nazi party since 1933.

Russia’s ambassador to Germany, Sergey Nechaev, warned that delivering Taurus missiles to Ukraine would not alter the battlefield situation but could escalate the conflict, as the missiles would be guided by German specialists. He suggested this might provoke Moscow to take retaliatory measures. Germany is Kiev’s second-largest military donor, after the US. Earlier this month, Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock announced that Berlin would provide the country with an additional $12 billion worth of military aid over the next four years and would continue to support it regardless of the upcoming change of government in Germany. Russia has repeatedly slammed continued foreign assistance to Ukraine, arguing that it only serves to prolong hostilities and cause more bloodshed without affecting the ultimate outcome of the conflict.

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Guess who the judge is? Boasberg.

• Meta’s Monopoly Trial Kicks Off (ET)

The fate of social media giant Meta, billionaire Mark Zuckerberg’s primary company, is on the line as a trial begins in Washington on Monday to determine whether the tech giant is violating antitrust laws. The Federal Trade Commission, which has spent the past six years investigating Meta, is expected to argue before U.S. District Judge James Boasberg that Meta’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp created an illegal monopoly over social networking. In the worst-case scenario for Meta, the company could be forced to divest both subsidiaries in a breakup on a scale not seen since the dismantling of AT&T’s telephone empire more than 40 years ago. Here’s what to know about the most important trial in Meta’s history.

Trial The case is being held at the E. Barrett Prettyman U.S. Courthouse, just a few hundred yards from the U.S. Capitol. It’s a bench trial, meaning Boasberg alone will decide the outcome, not a jury. That gives the judge extraordinary influence over the future of one of the most powerful companies in the world.

FTC Claims The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigation into the company began during President Donald Trump’s first term and was aggressively pursued under President Joe Biden . The FTC has taken issue with the company’s 2012 purchase of the image-based app Instagram and 2014 purchase of WhatsApp, a messaging platform that’s particularly popular outside of the United States. During the trial, the FTC is expected to argue that Meta’s purchase of the two platforms was part of a calculated effort to “buy or bury” any potential rivals to Facebook. In a 2008 email presented by the FTC in a past federal court filing, Zuckerberg wrote, “It is better to buy than compete.” FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson has said that his agency is “raring to go” against Meta but also that he’ll follow lawful orders from the president to close the case.

Meta’s Response Meta has consistently denied the allegations of operating an illegal monopoly and has argued that the FTC’s case is both outdated and out of step with current market realities. A spokesperson for Meta said in a statement to The Epoch Times that the acquisitions were approved by regulators at the time and that the company has always operated competitively. He cited the presence of competitors such as TikTok, YouTube, X, iMessage, and others. The spokesperson said the lawsuit “defies reality” and that it would send a message that “no deal is ever truly final” if Boasberg sides with the FTC. The company has also suggested that dismantling its integrated platforms would harm users, who’ve come to rely on interconnected services and shared back-end systems. Since Trump was elected to a second term, Zuckerberg has visited Mar-a-Lago, ended the company’s controversial fact-checking efforts, rolled back diversity and inclusion programs, and staffed the company with GOP-friendly executives.

‘Creaking Antitrust Precedents ’Boasberg has heard years of pretrial motions in this case and has made clear he isn’t fully sold on the government’s argument He threw out the FTC’s original filing in 2021, citing a lack of clear market definitions. While he allowed the revised case to proceed, he’s continued to express skepticism, warning in recent months that the FTC’s claims “strain this country’s creaking antitrust precedents.” Antitrust statutory law and litigation are among the most labyrinthine areas of the federal code. Boasberg has given both sides a chance to make their case in court. Witness lists include Zuckerberg himself, former Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, and executives from rival platforms such as TikTok and Snapchat. The trial is expected to last through the summer, with a decision potentially arriving by July.

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A curious contortion.

• Now We Know Why Democrats Are Losing the Messaging War (Margolis)

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) just reminded everyone why Democrats are losing the messaging war. In what might be the most awkward attempt at political wit this year, Jeffries recorded himself delivering what he apparently thought was a clever takedown of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Spoiler alert: It wasn’t. Picture a middle schooler trying to land an insult at the lunch table—that’s basically what happened when Jeffries attempted to rebrand “DEI” as “dumb effing individuals” in his attack on Hegseth. That’s right, the House Minority Leader, one of the most powerful Democrats in Congress, thought his comment was the kind of zinger that would go viral. Instead, it went cringey. “The DEI hires in the Trump administration, like Pete Hegseth, the so-called secretary of Defense, dumb effing individuals, continue to try to test our resolve and cancel our history,” Jeffries said in a video shared to X.

The irony is rich. Here we have the leader of a party that lives and dies by the DEI religion suddenly using “DEI hires” as a slur. The same Democrats who spent years insisting that DEI is the highest moral good are now tossing around the term like it’s a smear when it suits their narrative. So which is it? Is DEI a noble pursuit, or is it code for incompetence when someone like Hegseth is in the crosshairs? If you needed more proof that the left’s commitment to its pet causes is purely performative, Jeffries just handed it to you. Making matters worse, Jeffries built his entire rant on a foundation of misinformation about the Naval Academy’s book relocation policy. He breathlessly claimed the Academy was banning books about slavery, civil rights, and the Holocaust while keeping Hitler’s works. That’s cute, but it’s also completely false.

The reality? The books were simply moved to a different location in response to President Trump’s executive orders on DEI policies. They weren’t banned, burned, or whatever other dramatic scenario Jeffries conjured up for his social media performance. Hegseth’s response on “Sunday Morning Futures” was the coup de grâce. “It’s astonishing, not surprising,” he said. “Of course, they don’t like the fact that we’re ripping DEI out of the military and making it colorblind and merit-based. If their whole strategy is, I don’t even know how long the video was, didn’t see it, minute-long videos on TikTok to call us names while we secure the southern border, kick out Chinese influence, provide the warrior culture inside our military, that’s why they lost in a historic fashion to President Trump last time, and their future looks bleak as well.”

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It’s easy to feel sorry for the guy. Maybe don’t.

• El Salvador’s Bukele Won’t Return MS-13 Gang Member Mistakenly Deported (JTN)

President Donald Trump on Monday declined to ask El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele to return an El Salvadoran citizen whom authorities mistakenly deported. Bukele, for his part, suggested that to return the man to the U.S. would be to smuggle a terrorist into the United States and that he would not do so. Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a citizen of El Salvador, was deported by the Trump administration by mistake, though the Supreme Court ruled that the administration must facilitate his return. During an Oval Office meeting between Trump and Bukele, neither leader committed to returning the man. “Well, I’m supposed to have suggested that I smuggle a terrorist into the United States, right?” Buekele retorted when pressed on returning the man to the U.S. “Return him to the United States. I smuggle him into the United States. I’m not going to do it.”

“How can I smuggle a terror[ist] to the United States? I don’t have the power to return him to the United States,” Buekele said. Trump also asked White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller to weigh in. “So it’s very arrogant, even for American media to suggest that we would even tell El Salvador how to handle their own citizens. As a starting point, as two immigration courts found that he was a member of MS-13,” Miller said. “When President Trump declared MS-13 to be a foreign terrorist organization, that meant that he was no longer eligible under federal law… for any form of immigration relief in the United States.”

“So he had a deportation order that was valid, which meant that, under our law, he’s not even allowed to be present in the United States and had to be returned because of the foreign terrorist designation,” he added. “This issue was then by a district court judge completely inverted, and a district court judge tried to tell the administration that they had to kidnap a citizen of El Salvador and flying back here. That issue was raised to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court said the district court order was unlawful and its main components were reversed.”

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“..in 2019, two judges refused to grant him bond because he was a verified member of the MS-13 gang..”

• Why the Beatified MS-13 ‘Father’ Was ‘Mistakenly’ Deported (Victoria Taft)

It’s worth reminding readers of the reasons the man being described as the innocent “Maryland father” was “mistakenly” deported from Los Estados Unidos. Kilmar Abrego Garcia is now cooling his heels in the most famous El Salvadoran prison in the world. He’s gotten more love from America’s left than, say, the 14-year-old girl MS-13 hacked up with machetes in 2019 in Maryland. It’s strange, isn’t it? Ariana Funes-Diaz was hacked with a machete and hit with a baseball bat, and her lifeless and bloodied body was left in a ditch, but nobody seems to remember or care. Now, I’m not suggesting that Abrego Garcia had anything to do with the gang murdering that girl; no one has ever suggested or proven any connection whatsoever. It’s just that MS-13 is tied, if you will, with Tren de Aragua for brutality. They intentionally shock the conscience to stay in power like the Third World knuckle draggers they are.

Rachel Morin was murdered by a man illegally in the country from El Salvador. He was found guilty of her murder by a Maryland jury after one hour of deliberation on Monday evening, after a two-week-long trial. We contend that the United States stop importing violent criminals from other countries. But the left would have us believe that Señor Abrego Garcia is just a normal family man who’s done nothing wrong and has never put a toe out of line and that he’s sorta kinda quasi-legally here. In 2019, his Holiness, St. Abrego, was rolled up by the feds while hanging around in a Home Depot parking lot, allegedly looking for work. Sounds normal. Lots of illegal aliens do this. But don’t ask him why he hadn’t found more than day jobs since he’d illegally come into the country years before because that’s racist. His attorney says he had a job in construction.

Anyway, the truth is, the local Maryland cops didn’t actually believe he was just looking for a day gig. Indeed, he showed up to work in his Chicago Bulls gear. MS-13 shares its affinity with the Bulls’ colors and gear with the Bloods and the Latin Kings. MS-13 also likes to use devil horn symbology in hand signals, and some members carry their tell-tale machetes. And of course, there are always the MS-13 tattoos. There are reports that he has one, but authorities have offered no photos of the granddaddy of all symbols proving unmistakably that he’s an MS-13 gang member. But in 2019, two judges refused to grant him bond because he was a verified member of the MS-13 gang and a “danger to the community.” The conundrum for most is that a guy who came into the U.S. illegally in 2011 and was identified by Maryland police and U.S. immigration officials as an MS-13 member by 2019 isn’t a benign presence in Los Estados Unidos. Capice?

And now in 2025, President Trump has issued a directive that all members of MS-13 and Tren de Aragua are members of designated terrorist organizations. El Salvador President Nayib Armando Bukele Ortez was asked by reporters in the White House Oval Office today if he would bring Abrego Garcia back to the U.S. “How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States?” was his reply. So here’s the issue. St. Abrego was put on a deportation list as an alternate without anyone noticing that he should not be sent back to El Salvador. He was bumped up the list of deportees and was indeed sent to the El Salvadoran prison by mistake.

The “mistake” the feds made in sending this guy out of the country was that they sent him back to El Salvador, where a rival gang threatened him and his family years back. His parents moved to other Central American countries, but he moved to the U.S. at the age of 16. If DOJ officials had sent him to another country, such as Guatemala with which we have a third-party agreement, we likely wouldn’t be having this issue right now, and St. Abrego would have disappeared into the ether — maybe even with his family in tow. Issues involving due process are serious. We should demand that people receive theirs. Attorney General Pam Bondi in the above video said Abrego received two court hearings when he was designated an MS-13 member. Thanks to President Trump, illegal immigration into our great country has virtually stopped. Despite the radical left’s lies, new legislation wasn’t needed to secure our border, just a new president.

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“The vast bottom of humanity already has plenty of nothing, and their abundance will abide…”

• Systemic Considerations (James Howard Kunstler)

Whatever else you think is happening in our world, contraction is the reality-based order-of-the-day, and everything else is downstream of that. The world has to get by with less. Nothing is going to fix this for everybody, though any number of schemes for redistributing what’s left will preoccupy the political mojo. Right now, it’s tariffs, which are an attempt to restore industry ceded to the formerly left-behind people elsewhere in the world — taking back what we used to do. You are correct to wonder if this is even possible. The wish is surely understandable, if a bit fuzzy and over-simplified: to be again a nation of people occupied purposefully in the service of a bright future. Redemption stories are deeply appealing.

Many of us are aware that the hour for this is late. We’ve already lived through our decades of pumping cheap oil out of American ground, extracting the ores, fashioning the metal into I-beams and rails, raising the skyscrapers, laying the asphalt ribbons of highway, and strewing the landscape with split-level houses and strip-malls. Let’s not try a re-run of that. What have we got to work with? An overly-complex matrix of systems and subsidiary systems operating on the verge of failure at excessive scale. For example, our cities and their asteroid belts of suburbs. The rot is already well-advanced in many of them from their centers outward, and we can see the process underway of strip-mining the remaining assets on-the-ground. Detroit, Cleveland, Baltimore. . . all occupy important geographically strategic sites. All are populated by dwindling societies of the cope-less, floundering their way out of existence. The geographies will abide without them. Others will come along and make something of these places’ virtues.

Agri-business is a method for strip-mining the value from what remains of our fruited plains. Everything about it is on an arc of failure, mortgaged to a futureless giantism. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and now that time has passed. The remaining soil itself can probably be rescued with heroic ant-like peasant labor over generations, which is to say a long and rather desperate project with no quick resolution. Even if Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., hadn’t come along to read America the riot act on food, anyone can see that the age of Froot Loops is drawing to a close. Town and country, what human society at its best was composed of, has got to be rearranged. This is something that MAGA is not talking about. MAGA looks like it is seeking a reenactment of the years 1950 to 1964. That isn’t going to happen. What then? The tech broz propose something that looks like an A-I printed robotic future. They are drunk on their own Stanford University brand Kool-Aid, hallucinating a future that is little more than math dressed in spandex.

It is nearly impossible to grok the size of their vast fortunes, their billions. Thousands upon thousands of millions. From what? From marshaling squadrons of lawyers to draw up ownership documents for this and that venture enabling idiots with nose-rings to lecture each other about sexual etiquette on cell-phone screens? Warning: don’t become infatuated with singularities, journeys beyond biology and the ecology of planet earth. That’s a story for saps, cargo-cultists, the mentally ill. Speaking of all that money, one thing you can surely depend on is a violent unwinding of global finance. The vast bottom of humanity already has plenty of nothing, and their abundance will abide. The hedge fund broz and related broz in the shared hallucinations of capital can make some provision for wealth preservation if they have half-a-brain. It’s the great wad in the middle that has the worst problem: they get wiped out and then they discover they have no Plan B. That’s when the fun really kicks off in America (and other sovereign lands, of course.)

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Hep B
https://twitter.com/VigilantFox/status/1911479588535882235

 

 

Vax

 

 

Bhattacharya
https://twitter.com/sophiadahl1/status/1911580633035334115
https://twitter.com/Humanspective/status/1911680285772849217

 

 

https://twitter.com/mamboitaliano__/status/1911367206371275242
https://twitter.com/mamboitaliano__/status/1911512270149919189

 

 

AI Jesus
https://twitter.com/mamboitaliano__/status/1911292594669425151

 

 

Amur
https://twitter.com/gunsnrosesgirl3/status/1911392004862263730

 

 

Orangutan

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle February 4 2023

Feb 042023
 
 February 4, 2023  Posted by at 9:45 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  66 Responses »


Henri Matisse Olive trees at Collioure 1906

 

• Building A New World Order Is Now An Existential Issue For Russia (Trenin)
• US-China War By 2025: A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy? (Fomenko)
• Pentagon Allows Ukraine To Fire Long-range Missiles At Will (RT)
• Russia Responds To Latest US ‘Escalation’ (RT)
• From Imperial Failures to Imperial Excuses (Batiushka)
• UK MIlitary Could Run Out Of Ammo In Single Afternoon – Ex-commander (RT)
• Serbia Names ‘Greatest’ Mistake By West (RT)
• RAND Gets It, Sort Of (Helmholtz Smith)
• The Arsenal of Democracy Isn’t (Schryver)
• Sanctions On Russian Oil Not Working – Analysts (RT)
• Lose-Lose (Jim Kunstler)
• Republicans to Force Nancy Pelosi to Testify About Jan 6 (TP)
• Musk Wins Lawsuit Over ‘Funding Secured’ Tweet (ZH)
• Thai Princess Coma Mystery – World Expert Says It’s A Covid Jab Injury (DTNZ)
• Biden Announces U.S. Surrender To Chinese Balloon (BBee)

 

 

 

 

OH SH*T, HERE WE GO (MacGregor)

 

 

 

 

What Becomes of NATO After The Loss In Ukraine

 

 

 

 

Trump Ukraine

 

 

 

 

“..a defeat – if it is hypothetically possible – could provoke a destabilization of the country, accompanied by the disintegration of Russian statehood.”

• Building A New World Order Is Now An Existential Issue For Russia (Trenin)

Let us begin by assessing the current situation. One effect of the conflict has already been a fundamental change in the external environment in which Russia finds itself. Its political relations with the collective West, and its allies, have become openly hostile and the armed conflict in Ukraine is a proxy war by the West against Russia. Economic relations with this part of the world have been permanently undermined and are shrinking like Mars bars. Cultural, scientific, sporting and humanitarian ties have been severely curtailed, the information war has reached maximum intensity, and the Iron Curtain in Europe has been rebuilt – this time by the West. However, Russia is not completely isolated. It maintains and develops partnerships in many areas with the world’s new centers of power, and other countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

This part of the world community includes most of the world’s states, where the majority of the human population lives and where more than half of the global economy is concentrated. It can rightly be called a world majority with the clear understanding, of course, that this majority is not a bloc and that its members are not allies of Russia. They are guided primarily by national interests and are deeply integrated into the global economy and the Western-centric institutions that serve it, which significantly limits interaction with Moscow. The dramatic shift in the external cycle has led to profound changes within Russia. The old model of mainly exporting raw materials and importing technology no longer works. The political system, which was built on liberal American-French models and then adapted more or less successfully – in substance, not in form – to domestic traditions, is obviously in need of a profound overhaul.

The quasi-ideology of pragmatism and the cult of money, which dominated the country after the collapse of the USSR, proved to be flawed and harmful. In short, the end of the historical orientation towards integration with the Western world logically requires Russia to reorient itself. But what does this mean? To which “self”? Soviet, tsarist or otherwise? A prerequisite for Russia’s long-term strategy is victory in the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. The most important criterion for such a victory is a state that is guaranteed not to lead to a renewed war after some time. On the contrary, a defeat – if it is hypothetically possible – could provoke a destabilization of the country, accompanied by the disintegration of Russian statehood. The stakes for Russia in the current conflict are therefore existential and fundamentally higher than those of the US and its allies. This in itself is a factor working in Russia’s favor, but it certainly does not guarantee its success.

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“..It also sees the competition catching up, however, and is ready to use all means necessary, and to take massive risks, to prevent the rise of rival powers. ”

• US-China War By 2025: A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy? (Fomenko)

American Four-Star General Mike Minihan, head of the US Air Force Air Mobility Command (AMC) believes the US and China will go to war by 2025. “I hope I am wrong. My gut tells me we will fight in 2025,” Minihan reportedly wrote in a memo to his officers, obtained by media outlets. The message instructs AMC personnel to train and get their affairs in order so that they are “legally ready and prepared.” This prediction is the most direct and blunt yet from an American official on the prospect of a potential conflict between the US and China, besides President Joe Biden’s indications that the US would intervene on the side of Taiwan if China invaded.

Of course, Minihan is not a policymaker, and the memo is not an official statement of US military policy towards China. But the influence of the US military and by extension, the military-industrial complex, on US foreign policymaking and on the mood in Washington in general, should not be underestimated. The reality is, especially as seen in Ukraine, that the risk of a major-power conflict is arguably at the highest it has ever been since the end of World War II or the height of the Cold War. That is because the US sees itself as a rightful and permanent global hegemon. It also sees the competition catching up, however, and is ready to use all means necessary, and to take massive risks, to prevent the rise of rival powers. As such, the US and China risk falling into the so-called, “Thucydides Trap,” which is described as “an apparent tendency towards war when an emerging power threatens to displace an existing great power as a regional or international hegemon”.

The current distribution of power in the world is described as “emerging multipolarity”. Following three decades of American unipolarity, when the US ruled unchallenged, a number of emerging powers are changing the international order. Multipolarity differs from “bipolarity,” where two powers compete for hegemony, the best known example being the US and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. While bipolarity brings a form of stability, as the military capabilities of both powers are evenly matched and the stakes of a potential conflict are extremely high, history shows multipolarity typically brings instability as it creates an insecure, unpredictable, and competitive international environment. The world of 1914, where a theatre of competing European powers scrambled for international dominance, ultimately combusted into the First World War. As competing world powers expanded their imperialist ambitions, they sought to contain others by forming alliances and starting arms races.

Sounds familiar? It should. Today’s world has some disturbing parallels. The US – an insecure hegemon whose relative power is diminishing as other world powers emerge – is desperately seeking to degrade, undermine and contain its rivals by triggering arms races and expanding alliance systems. Already, the focus on expanding NATO has provoked the conflict in Ukraine, but worse still, the Biden administration is actively seeking to expand that model to East Asia against China, in the form of blocs such as the Quad and AUKUS.

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“..Moscow will “push back” the Ukrainian troops to a range at which they will not be a threat.”

• Pentagon Allows Ukraine To Fire Long-range Missiles At Will (RT)

It is up to the government in Kiev to decide how to use the new rockets for the US-supplied HIMARS launchers, the Pentagon said on Friday, confirming that the latest batch of munitions the American taxpayers are funding will include Ground Launched Small Diameter Bombs (GLSDB).The Boeing-manufactured munitions consist of a rocket motor mated with an airplane bomb, with an estimated range of up to 150 kilometers. While Friday’s announcement listed “additional ammunition” for the HIMARS and “precision-guided rockets,” Brigadier-General Patrick Ryder told reporters that this indeed included the GLSDB, confirming the information leaked to Reuters earlier this week. Ryder also confirmed that the US won’t stand in the way of Ukrainians using the missiles to strike deep inside Russia.

“When it comes to Ukrainian plans on operations, clearly that is their decision. They are in the lead for those,” he said on Friday. “So, I’m not going to talk about or speculate about potential future operations, but again, all along, we’ve been working with them to provide them with capabilities that will enable them to be effective on the battlefield.” The GLDSB are produced by Boeing in cooperation with Swedish Saab AB, and combine the GBU-39 small-diameter bomb with the M26 rocket motor. It was unclear how many of the munitions the Pentagon intended to send, or whether they would come from the US military stockpile or need to be freshly produced. Reuters claimed to have seen a Boeing document saying the first deliveries could be “as early as spring 2023.”

Meanwhile, Bloomberg cited unnamed officials who said the timeline could be as long as nine months, depending on when the US Air Force issues the contract. Bloomberg also reported the GLSDB order would account for $200 million of the $1.75 billion in the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative funding, referring to contracts for weapons and ammunition not coming out of the Pentagon stockpile. Whenever the missiles actually arrive, Russia has already hinted at how it will respond. On Wednesday, President Vladimir Putin tasked the military with “eliminating any possibility” of Ukrainian artillery strikes on Russian territory. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview on Thursday that Moscow will “push back” the Ukrainian troops to a range at which they will not be a threat. “The longer range the weapons supplied to the Kiev regime have, the further the troops will need to be moved,” Lavrov said.

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“the longer range the weapons supplied to the Kiev regime have, the further the troops will need to be moved.”

• Russia Responds To Latest US ‘Escalation’ (RT)

The decision to supply Ukraine with longer-range missiles marks a “deliberate escalation” by the United States, Russia’s ambassador to Washington has said, warning that Moscow would not tolerate strikes on Russian cities. In a statement on Friday evening, Ambassador Anatoly Antonov commented on the latest round of US military aid approved for Ukraine earlier in the day, which is set to include Ground Launched Small Diameter Bombs (GLSDB) – munitions with an operational range of 93 miles (150 kilometers). “Washington sees no boundaries in seeking to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia. The transfer of increasingly powerful weapons to the Kiev regime is a deliberate escalation of the conflict by the United States,” he said, adding “Any attempt to harm the Russian Federation is doomed to failure. The sooner the United States realizes this, the sooner the current conflict will end.”

Though the Pentagon did not mention the GLSDB by name in announcing the weapons transfer, Brigadier-General Patrick Ryder later confirmed that it would be included in the next round of aid, also noting that US officials would not stop Kiev from using the missiles to strike inside Russia. Fired from the US-supplied HIMARS missile launcher, the GLSDB is among the longest-range weapons authorized for Kiev to date, and could theoretically reach targets deep within Russian territory. Antonov went on to say the United States is “de facto inciting its proteges to attack Russian regions,” arguing that Moscow makes no distinction between newer territories which voted to join the Russian Federation last year and other Russian lands.

“For us there is no difference when we talk about a possible attack by Kiev criminals on the Zaporozhye or Bryansk regions, the Crimea or the Smolensk region,” he continued. Though the new weapons could take up to nine months to reach the Ukrainian battlefield, Russia has already suggested how it might react, with President Vladimir Putin ordering the military to eliminate “any possibility” of Ukrainian strikes on Russian territory earlier this week. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, meanwhile, said Russian forces would repel Ukrainian soldiers to a distance from which they would not pose a threat, declaring: “the longer range the weapons supplied to the Kiev regime have, the further the troops will need to be moved.”

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“..Only through such a crushing defeat for Western hubris can further crazy adventures, including nuclear ones, be avoided.”

• From Imperial Failures to Imperial Excuses (Batiushka)

Western support for the Ukraine, the most corrupt country in Europe, has done nothing for America’s authority. It had already been undermined by war crimes, water-boarding, economic decline, a drugs epidemic, mass shootings, a trashed health system for 40 million in poverty and military debacles from Vietnam to Afghanistan. The ‘regime changes’, assassinations, electoral frauds, black propaganda (also called PR), massacres, torture in global black sites, proxy wars and military interventions carried out by the United States since 1945 have resulted in over 20 million dead and planetary revulsion for U.S. imperialism. ‘Yanks go home’. Blood lies on the US. Did they really expect to get away with this?

The conflict in the Ukraine is effectively World War III, or if you prefer, World War I, Part III. A proxy hot war between Washington and Moscow. Yes, the military phase is local, having started between Russia and the Ukraine in 2014. But the repercussions for Russia are enormous. They mark the end of a 300-year period when Russia was enamoured with the West. Now Western deceit means that Russians have lost their illusions and naivety for ever. Now Russia will fight on until the Armed Forces of Ukraine and all those who took up arms and have been fighting Russians for almost nine years are no longer a threat to anyone. The Kiev Army will be routed and Russia will return to its roots of over 300 years ago.

However, the political and economic repercussions for the Western world, held on a tight leash by its feudal US owner, are even more enormous: the end of the rule of the dollar. True, there are those who predict a second military phase between Iran and the US colony of Israel. And a third could be between China and the US, the pretext being the Chinese Ukraine, Taiwan. But nothing is certain. After the coming Russian victory in the Ukraine, all could still be averted, for that victory will be sobering for the Western world. This indeed is the last hope, that defeat here will at last bring the Western world back to its senses and reality. Only through such a crushing defeat for Western hubris can further crazy adventures, including nuclear ones, be avoided.

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“..British armed forces “are smaller and less ready to fight than at any time in living memory.”

• UK MIlitary Could Run Out Of Ammo In Single Afternoon – Ex-commander (RT)

The UK could deplete its ammunition stocks in mere hours should it be drawn into large-scale fighting, a former British general warned on Thursday. This and other issues make the UK military unfit to be regarded as a “top tier” NATO member, he said. Retired General Richard Barrons, who formerly headed the UK’s Joint Forces Command, sounded the alarm in an op-ed published by The Sun in which he said the fighting force has been “hollowed out by spending cuts.” Barrons claimed that the British armed forces “are smaller and less ready to fight than at any time in living memory.” He also warned that the UK Army is on course to slip below 76,000 troops. However, even these service members often do not receive inadequate training, Barrons noted.

British tanks, armored vehicles, and artillery pieces mostly date to the previous century, while “years of cuts to ammunition production mean that, for some types of key weapons, the army would run out in a busy afternoon,” the general said. Barrons added that the Royal Navy and Air Force are “in better shape” and boast some “outstanding modern equipment,” but cautioned that without experienced personnel, ammunition, and spare parts they might turn out to be just a “glittering shop window” without much to show for it on the actual battlefield. The former commander said the UK should focus on Europe, arguing that the “tilt to Asia can wait.” He urged London to invest in modern capabilities, including drones, missiles, and cyber and electronic warfare capabilities.

Britain should also double its reserves to 60,000 troops, he said. Regarding Russia, Barrons estimated that to be able to handle a “surprise attack,” the British Army will need to spend “£3 billion ($3.67 billion) this year, and every year for the next ten years.” British Defence Secretary Ben Wallace admitted in the House of Commons on Monday that the military has been “hollowed out and underfunded.” His comments followed a Sky News report alleging that a top US general had told Wallace that British forces are “barely tier two” in terms of fighting capabilities.

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“..the West’s “biggest” political mistake because it effectively manages to “unite the Russians like never before.”

• Serbia Names ‘Greatest’ Mistake By West (RT)

The West’s recent announcement that it would be supplying Ukraine with main battle tanks marks a major miscalculation, Serbian president Aleksandar Vucic said on Friday. That’s as Moscow has threatened to burn any Western equipment that enters Ukraine and has vowed to retaliate “far beyond the scope of armored vehicles.” Vucic noted that the decision to supply Ukraine with tanks, especially with the “terrifying” German Leopard 2s, is the West’s “biggest” political mistake because it effectively manages to “unite the Russians like never before.” Last month, Germany and the US agreed to provide a number of heavy tanks to Kiev. Washington has promised between 30 and 50 of its M1 Abrams tanks, while Berlin pledged 14 Leopard 2A6s from the Bunderswehr’s own stocks.

An additional 51 of the same model and 88 of the older Leopard 1 model may also come from Rheinmetall as they get refurbished, Germany said. Berlin also gave the green light to countries that have expressed a desire to export their own Leopards to Ukraine. Those include Poland, Finland, Spain, Norway and the Netherlands. The UK and Canada have also said they would be sending their heavy equipment to Kiev. The decision has been heavily criticized by Russia, which has called it an “extremely dangerous” move that threatens to escalate the conflict in Ukraine. On Thursday, Russian President Vladimir Putin likened the new threat of “German Leopard tanks with crosses on their hulls” to the Soviet Union’s struggle against Hitler’s forces and warned that Moscow’s response would not be limited to weapons.

Other countries have also voiced their concerns about the West’s move. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that the delivery of NATO tanks to Ukraine was a “high-risk endeavor” that would fail to help end the conflict and only “line the pockets of gun barons.” Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban also slammed Germany’s decision, noting that these Western countries are “drifting” towards becoming active participants in the conflict. Orban has insisted that instead of arming Kiev, the West should be pursuing “a ceasefire and peace talks” in Ukraine. Moscow has repeatedly objected to Western weapon deliveries to Ukraine, arguing that non-stop arms shipments only serve to prolong the conflict and risk direct confrontation with NATO. The Kremlin has also insisted that no amount of military aid will prevent Moscow from reaching its objectives and warned that the tanks would “burn like the rest of Western weapons” supplied to Kiev.

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“morally repugnant Russian invasion”, “international community”, “illegitimate and illegal”, “aggression”, “humanitarian reasons”, “international norms.”

• RAND Gets It, Sort Of (Helmholtz Smith)

A few years ago RAND put out a report Overextending and Unbalancing Russia. “This brief summarizes a report that comprehensively examines nonviolent, cost-imposing options that the United States and its allies could pursue across economic, political, and military areas to stress—overextend and unbalance— Russia’s economy and armed forces and the regime’s political standing at home and abroad.” One of the things recommended was exploiting Russia’s “greatest point of external vulnerability” by “providing lethal aid to Ukraine.” (Only someone as paranoid as Putin, of course, could see any hostility in this). Well, they did it and it’s time for a new RAND report – Avoiding a Long War.

To save you the bother of reading this trivial effort, I will summarize – they start with the usual posturing – “morally repugnant Russian invasion”, “international community”, “illegitimate and illegal”, “aggression”, “humanitarian reasons”, “international norms.” Then on to how Russia is losing – “Russia’s conventional capabilities have been decimated in Ukraine”, “the weakened state of Russia’s conventional military”, “It will take years, perhaps even decades, for the Russian military and economy to recover from the damage already incurred.” But, as you wade on, you begin to suspect that the authors aren’t as triumphant after all – perhaps victory is not quite so close “given the slowing pace of Ukraine’s counteroffensives in December 2022, restoring the pre-February 2022 line of control—let alone the pre-2014 territorial status quo—will take months and perhaps years to achieve” or even so certain “Continued conflict also leaves open the possibility that Russia will reverse Ukrainian battlefield gains made in fall 2022.”

The authors spend some space explaining why a long war is not to America’s advantage. So, RAND, they followed your advice but things aren’t going very well. Time to try and get out of it. “Since avoiding a long war is the highest priority after minimizing escalation risks, the United States should take steps that make an end to the conflict over the medium term more likely.”

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“..the US armaments industry is effectively a modestly scaled high-end boutique..”

• The Arsenal of Democracy Isn’t (Schryver)

You see, for all its massive plunder of the public purse, the US armaments industry is effectively a modestly scaled high-end boutique. And there is simply no way this domestic US industry can expeditiously expand its production. It would literally take years – probably a full decade – for the US to expand its military production to a seriously potent industrial scale. For one, the labor pool for these industries is extremely finite and highly specialized. In the overwhelmingly financialized and service-oriented US economy, there is a shocking dearth of technical expertise of ALL kinds. It’s not simply a boomer cliché that “kids these days are innocent of almost any mechanical know-how”. If the US wants to staff new armaments factories any time soon, it will have to import the skilled labor from Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea.

Beyond that, the permitting of new factories, with the attendant bureaucratic delays, public hearings, environmental impact studies, and various special interest road-blocking … well, everyone knows how these things work now in America. It took five years to build the Hoover Dam in the early 20th century. It would take FIFTY here in the early 21st century – if it could be built at all. Those clamoring for the US to intervene in the Ukraine war in order to “teach those filthy Russians a lesson they’ll never forget” simply have no conception of the catastrophe that would ensue were their dreams to be fulfilled. If the Pentagon consented to such an undertaking, it could probably amass no more than 250,000 combat-capable troops in the theater, and to do so would entail the evacuation of virtually every major US military base on the planet (and most of the minor ones).

It could probably assemble an additional quarter million troops from the active reserves and National Guard units in the United States. That said, it is empirically impossible that 500,000 combat troops could be satisfactorily equipped for high-intensity conflict such as would be the scenario in a war between the US and Russia in eastern Europe. And even if they could be assembled and equipped, it would be an insufficient force to face over a million Russian troops, close to a third of which are already “battle-hardened” from almost a year of high-intensity combat in Ukraine. In anticipation of the casualties attendant to great power warfare, it would become necessary for the United States to reinstitute conscription almost immediately. If a strong anti-war movement had not already been incited by its previous actions, conscription in America would almost certainly induce a widespread political upheaval, with large and aggressive public protests cropping up in all the major cities of the nation.

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“oil friendships are greasy”

• Sanctions On Russian Oil Not Working – Analysts (RT)

Sanctions imposed by the West on Russian crude oil exports have so far “failed completely,” and new price caps could also prove ineffective, according to a CNBC report on Friday, citing analysts. The conclusions come as the European Union plans to ban imports of Russian refined petroleum products, including diesel and jet fuel, from February 5. The bloc had already prohibited imports of seaborne crude oil from Moscow in December. The EU, G7 countries, and Australia have also set a $60-per-barrel price cap, which blocks Western companies from providing insurance and other services to shippers of Russian oil unless the cargo is purchased at or below the set price. The price cap “was invented by bureaucrats with finance degrees. None of them really understand oil markets,” Paul Sankey, president and lead analyst at Sankey Research, told CNBC.

“It’s been a total bomb; it has failed completely,” he stressed. According to Sankey, Russian oil supplies have not been significantly interrupted and “they’ve sustained exports at high levels.” “I heard it from a great source that the Saudis have been asking around as to how come Russian oil is still flowing,” he said. “That brings the question of what will happen with the sanctions coming up on products, because it just doesn’t seem to work.” The founder of analytics firm Vanda Insights, Vandana Hari, also told the US broadcaster she was skeptical about the upcoming restrictions on Russian refined oil products, noting that “the crude price cap was pretty inconsequential.” “I think the refined product caps that they’re planning – about a $100 [per barrel] for diesel and clean products and perhaps around $45 for dirty fuels like fuel oil – are probably going to be immaterial as well,” the analyst explained.

According to Hari, Russian oil will find its way into the markets that are “still welcoming it” such as China and India. “China and India have benefited quite a big deal last year from heavily discounted Russian crude prices and the same’s going to happen to Russian refined products,” Hari predicted, adding that it could be more complicated for Moscow to find markets for such products. Paul Sankey also noted that “oil friendships are greasy” and there’s a lot of different ways to move Russian oil around the world, bypassing the price caps. Meanwhile, the EU has been struggling to agree on the price cap for Russian oil products, with some members reportedly claiming the proposed level is too generous for Moscow, and seeking a lower ceiling. The measures are expected to come into effect on February 5 after gaining the approval of all 27 EU member states.

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“..The USA has tossed its national identity on the garbage barge of “diversity, equity, and inclusion..”

• Lose-Lose (Jim Kunstler)

For those of you not paying attention the past thirty-odd years, Russia, incorporated as the Soviet Union, collapsed in 1991. The USSR was a bold experiment based on the peculiar and novel ill-effects of industrialism, especially gross economic inequality. Alas, the putative remedy for that, advanced by Karl Marx, was a despotic system of pretending that individual humans had no personal aspirations of their own. That business model could be reduced to the comic aphorism: We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us. It failed and the USSR gurgled down history’s drain. Russia reemerged from the dust, minus many of its Eurasian outlands. Remarkably little blood was shed in the process. Mr. Orlov’s book points to some very interesting set-ups that softened the landing. There was no private property in the USSR, so when it collapsed, nobody was evicted or foreclosed from where they lived.

Very few people had cars in the USSR, so the city centers were still intact and people could get around on buses, trams, and trains. The food system had been botched for decades by low-incentive collectivism, but the Russian people were used to planting gardens — even city dwellers, who had plots out-of-town — and it tided them over during the years of hardship before the country managed to reorganize. Compare that to America’s prospects. In an economic crisis, Americans will have their homes foreclosed out from under them, or will be subject to eviction from rentals. The USA has been tragically built-out on a suburban sprawl template that will be useless without cars and with little public transport. Cars, of course, are subject to repossession for non-payment of contracted loans. The American food system is based on manufactured microwavable cheese snacks, chicken nuggets, and frozen pizzas produced by giant companies.

These items can’t be grown in home gardens. Many Americans don’t know the first thing about growing their own food, or what to do with it after it’s harvested. There’s another difference between the fall of the USSR and the collapse underway in the USA. Underneath all the economic perversities of Soviet life, Russia still had a national identity and a coherent culture. The USA has tossed its national identity on the garbage barge of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” which is actually just a hustle aimed at extracting what remains from the diminishing stock of productive activity and giving the plunder to a mob of “intersectional” complainers — e.g. the City of San Francisco’s preposterous new plan to award $5-million “reparation” payments to African-American denizens of the city, where slavery never existed.

As for culture, consider that the two biggest cultural producers in this land are the pornography and video game industries. The drug business might be a close third, but most of that action is off-the-books, so it’s hard to tell. So much for the so-called “arts.” Our political culture verges on totally degenerate, but that is too self-evident to belabor, and the generalized management failures of our polity are a big part of what’s bringing us down — most particularly the failure to hold anyone in power accountable for their blunders and turpitudes. This might change, at least a little bit, as the oppositional House of Representatives commences hearings on an array of disturbing matters. Meanwhile, be wary of claims in The New York Times and other propaganda organs that our Ukraine project is a coming up a big win, and that the racketeering operations of the Biden family are a right-wing conspiracy theory. These two pieces of the conundrum known as reality are blowing up in our country’s face. It will be hard not to notice.

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“… Nancy, we’ll get you, and we’ll fly you back from Italy once you’re the ambassador.”

• Republicans to Force Nancy Pelosi to Testify About Jan 6 (TP)

As the Biden Documents Scandal continues to build and the Chinese spy balloon over Montana dominates the headlines, some Republicans are still focused on holding Nancy Pelosi to account for the failures of security at the US Capitol on January 6th, failures to which they claim she is connected. One such Republican is Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), who said: “The reason there wasn’t a proper security presence on that day goes right to the speaker’s staff and the speaker’s office. As you go back and look at the communications, there’s this pattern that develops where the Sergeant of Arms is meeting with Pelosi’s staff. Many of those meetings, Republican staff wasn’t allowed to be there, but they had this pattern where everything had to run through her office, her staff, before the Sergeant of Arms could make a decision.”

Joining Rep. Jim Jordan was Rep. Troy Nehls, who said “And Nancy Pelosi. You do have questions you need to answer … Nancy, we’ll get you, and we’ll fly you back from Italy once you’re the ambassador.” The statements from Jordan and Nehls follow a late-December of 2022 report released by Republicans that blamed Pelosi for the security failures at the Capitol on that day, faulting her for creating “political pressures” that led to lackluster security and inadequate preparations. The New York Post, reporting on that report, said: “Leadership and law enforcement failures within the U.S. Capitol left the complex vulnerable on January 6, 2021,” says the report, which is based on a trove of texts and email messages, and testimony from Capitol Police leaders and rank-and-file officers.

House Sergeant at Arms Paul Irving, who answered to Pelosi as one of three voting members of the Capitol Police Board, “succumbed to political pressures from the Office of Speaker Pelosi and House Democrat leadership,” was “compromised by politics and did not adequately prepare for violence at the Capitol.” Pelosi and her staff “coordinated closely” with Irving on security plans for the Joint Session of Congress on Jan. 6, but Republicans were deliberately left out of “important discussions related to security.” And, in an apparent attempt to hide from Republicans the fact that they were being excluded from discussions, Irving asked a senior Democratic staffer to “act surprised” when he sent “key information about plans for the Joint Session on Jan. 6, 2021, to him and his Republican counterpart.”

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“..Musk testified that the “funding secured” tweet was “absolutely truthful..”

• Musk Wins Lawsuit Over ‘Funding Secured’ Tweet (ZH)

Having previously noted the absurdity of the trial, Elon Musk has defeated a shareholder lawsuit alleging that tweets claiming he had the “funding secured” to take Tesla private cost investors billions of dollars in losses. As The Wall Street Journal reports, the nine-person San Francisco-based jury said the investors who brought the class-action case failed to prove that Mr. Musk hurt them by tweeting about a possible deal. “The jury got it right,” Alex Spiro, a lawyer for Musk, said after the verdict. Musk testified that the “funding secured” tweet was “absolutely truthful,” touting what he described as an “unequivocal” commitment by Saudi Arabia even though he had nothing in writing. As Bloomberg reports, Musk gave jurors other reasons to believe him.

He said he felt compelled to reveal that he was considering taking Tesla private because earlier that day, the Financial Times reported that Saudi Arabia was building a sizable stake in Tesla. He testified he was afraid his going-private plans might also be leaked, and that he wanted to put all Tesla investors on equal-footing by broadcasting his plans on Twitter. Musk also said that if required, he could’ve divested his ownership stake in his closely held rocket-ship company, SpaceX, to fund the transaction. This case is unusual for having gone to trial. From 1997 to 2001, less than 0.2% of federal securities class-action cases, excluding those involving mergers or acquisitions, were tried to a verdict, according to Cornerstone Research.

Musk, who had taken the stand as a witness in the case, was present in court during closing arguments. As The FT reports, the “funding secured” tweet has already proven costly for Musk. He and Tesla each paid $20mn to settle legal action from the Securities and Exchange Commission. Musk also had to resign as the carmaker’s chair, although he kept his position as chief executive. However, Musk has criticized the SEC in the years since, saying he felt pressured to settle and suggesting that doing so made him appear guilty. This case, he said in a deposition, was an opportunity to “clear the record.” And now he has!

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“.. Pfizer BioNTech is going to have to pay back those billions to Thailand, with which Thailand will recompensate those peoples that have lost their existence…”

• Thai Princess Coma Mystery – World Expert Says It’s A Covid Jab Injury (DTNZ)

44 year old Princess Bajrakitiyabha of Thailand collapsed while out walking her dogs on 14 december last year. According to sources she had not felt well after receiving her 3rd booster. After her collapse she lost consciousness and remains in a coma. According to a report in The Independent, she is ‘on medical equipment supporting her heart, lungs and kidneys.’ Princess Bajrakitiyabha is the eldest child of current King Rama X. The law graduate is a senior diplomat in the Thai government. The Thai palace confirmed she had suffered a ‘heart issue’. But the explanation given by the authorities and a local university that it was caused by a bacterial infection has been called ‘ridiculous’ by medical expert Professor Sucharit Bhakdi.

Thai-born Bhakdi, a former professor of microbiology at the University of Mainz in Germany had a celebrated career in medical science as a world expert on the immune system and arterial disease, until mainstream narratives and ‘fact checkers’ labelled him a ‘conspiracy theorist’ for his strong opposition to the COVID ‘vaccines’. According to Bhakdi, who claims he and his contacts have been in direct contact with the Thai Royal Family over the matter, the princess’ collapse was an adverse reaction to the COVID jab. She was previously healthy with no known medical conditions. Speaking on the ‘neutralswiss‘ Rumble channel yesterday, Bhakdi said:

“This whole COVID-19 agenda is a fake… And I was able to lay out for them the proof that the COVID vaccinations were based on fraud… The EMA declared that safety pharmacological studies were never performed – never. And they were never deemed necessary. So now we have it. So, when I told the Thais this, you know guys, they jumped up. They jumped up in the room. And so they said to me ‘we will see to it that Thailand is the first country in the world that is going to declare this contract null… Which means that Pfizer BioNTech is going to have to pay back those billions to Thailand, with which Thailand will recompensate those peoples that have lost their existence…”

“‘One daughter of the present king Rama X collapsed and is in a coma… within 23 days after the third shot, 44 years old, never been seriously ill, collapsed and is now in a coma. The diagnosis that was given by the authorities and by the university is so ridiculous – she’s supposed to have a bacterial infection that will never do what she suffered from. And so we are determined, and the activists in Thailand who have been on this many many months now – great guys, also a professor from the University of Bangkok, he’s gotten in touch with the Royal Family, and we are sending information to the Royal Family to alert them to the fact that in all probability the princess is suffering as a victim of this jab, as so many people around the world have been suffering.’

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Whenever a story this crazy comes along, we suspect something’s hiding behind it.

• Biden Announces U.S. Surrender To Chinese Balloon (BBee)

In a surprise statement to the world from the White House Situation Room, President Biden has announced America’s unconditional surrender to the Chinese Spy Balloon. “Listen, folks, it’s over,” said Biden as a single tear ran down his face. “We’re outgunned here. There’s no hope that we can match the awesome power of this giant balloon.” Biden’s voice was drowned out by the dozens of weeping journalists gathered outside the room. “I urge you all to hug your loved ones and embrace your children, for the end is near. God help us all,” Biden finally said before signing off for the last time. At publishing time, Americans had been urged by the administration to start learning Mandarin.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

 

Sika deer
https://twitter.com/i/status/1621524781127573509

 

 

Water is life
https://twitter.com/i/status/1621438461151526912

 

 

Gallop croc
https://twitter.com/i/status/1621580255835181064

 

 

Dog doc
https://twitter.com/i/status/1621730772670349313

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle January 10 2020

Jan 102020
 
 January 10, 2020  Posted by at 10:23 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , ,  15 Responses »


Jack Delano Main street intersection, Norwich, Connecticut 1940

 

• Iran Invites US To Join Probe Of Ukrainian Jet Disaster (R.)
• Missile System Suspected Of Bringing Down Airliner – Short Range, Fast And Deadly (R.)
• Trump’s Iran De-Escalation Succeeds (Flores)
• Tulsi Gabbard: ‘Iran Is Closer Now To A Nuclear Weapon Than Ever Before’ (NW)
• Iran Could Have Nuclear Weapon Within One To Two Years: French Minister (R.)
• Matt Gaetz Voted With Democrats On War Powers Resolution (SAC)
• Democrats To Press For Impeachment Witnesses Throughout Trial (R.)
• The Justice Department Is Devoid of Justice (PCR)
• Internal Boeing Messages Raise Serious Questions About 737 MAX (R.)
• Boeing Emails Show Workers Mocking FAA, Ridiculing 737 MAX Safety (MW)
• White House Unveils Plan To Speed Big Projects Permits (R.)
• China To Become First To Realize UN Goal Of ‘No Poverty’ (CD)

 

 

There are still far too many people out there with opinions derived from confirmation bias. Please stop it, open your minds. Whether it’s Soleimani or this downed jet, it’s fine if you need some time to figure things out. WWIII? Attacking Iran? These things would cost Trump the presidency. And he knows it.

Meanwhile, why are the US and Canada falling over themselves to declare the shooting down of the 737-800NG (if that’s even what happened) “unintentional” and “accidental”? That brings back memories of MH17. Where the opposite happened.

And why did Iran go from refusing to hand over black boxes, to inviting the US and others in, within 24 hours? Detente?

 

• Iran Invites US To Join Probe Of Ukrainian Jet Disaster (R.)

The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has accepted an invitation from Iran to take part in its investigation into the crash of a Ukrainian airplane in Tehran, the agency confirmed late on Thursday. The NTSB said in a statement its Response Operations Center had received formal notification from Iran of Wednesday’s crash of the Boeing 737-800 that killed all 176 on board. “The NTSB has designated an accredited representative to the investigation of the crash,” the agency said. The NTSB confirmed it would take part in the probe after an Iranian official told Reuters of the agreement. “The NTSB has replied to our chief investigator and has announced an accredited representative,” Farhad Parvaresh, Iran’s representative at the International Civil Aviation Organization, part of the United Nations, told Reuters.

A person briefed on the matter said it was unclear what if anything its representative would be able to do under U.S. sanctions. NTSB said in its statement it “continues to monitor the situation surrounding the crash and evaluate its level of participation in the investigation.” The United States is allowed to take part under global rules since the Boeing 737-800NG jet was designed and built there. Canada, which had dozens of passengers onboard, has also assigned an expert, while a team from Ukraine held discussions in Tehran on Thursday, Parvaresh said in a telephone interview. Iran is ready to provide consular facilities and visas for accredited investigators, he added.

Sweden and Afghanistan, which had some passengers on board, have also been notified. France may also be involved as it was one of the countries where the engines were made, Parvaresh said. He denied U.S. and Canadian claims that the jet had been shot down accidentally and said Iran was committed to a full and transparent investigation for the accident, adding it was too early to speculate on the cause. “As Iranians we feel this tragedy and disaster for us and for the families,” Parvaresh said, expressing condolences to the relatives of the people who died. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said earlier the jet was probably brought down by an accidental Iranian missile strike, citing intelligence from Canadian and other sources.

The U.S. government believes Iran shot down the plane by mistake, three U.S. officials told Reuters. The Ukraine International Airlines flight to Kiev from Tehran crashed hours after Iran fired ballistic missiles at two U.S. military bases in Iraq. Parvaresh said expert testimony indicated that the aircraft could not have been hit by a missile and that it was important to keep the crash investigation non-political. “I think we should keep this purely technical and not confuse it with political tensions in the region. We should leave it to experts to investigate and make their report.”

Read more …

And Russian.

• Missile System Suspected Of Bringing Down Airliner – Short Range, Fast And Deadly (R.)

Canada said on Thursday that a surface-to-air missile brought down a Ukrainian airliner in Tehran, while the Ukrainian government said it was investigating reports of debris from a Russian-made Tor-M1 missile. The Tor, also called the SA-15 Gauntlet by NATO, is a short-range “point defense” system that integrates the missile launcher and radar into a single tracked vehicle. It is designed to be mobile and lethal against targets at altitudes up to 6,000 meters (20,000 feet) and at ranges of 12 km (7.5 miles), according to the Federation of American Scientists, which researches and analyses “catastrophic threats to national and international security”.

Military aircraft and cruise missiles – which the Tor system is designed to destroy – typically plot their courses to avoid being spotted on radar. They are equipped with systems such as chaff, which confuses radar, and flares, which act as decoys for heat-seeking missiles. The jet that crashed on Wednesday, Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752, a Boeing 737-800, would have filed a flight plan and had no defensive features. It was unlikely the flight crew had time to react to any missile, said Michael Duitsman, a research associate at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. “They probably wouldn’t have even seen it coming,” Duitsman said. “Right after takeoff, the pilots were probably preoccupied with other things.”

To attack a target, the Tor operator must identify it on the radar screen and direct the missile to launch. There were several other civilian aircraft nearby when Flight 752 crashed just a few kilometers from the airport. All of those aircraft would have been visible on the radar screen of the Tor battery as well as civilian radar at the airport. [..] Tor missiles are guided by radar and fly at almost three times the speed of sound. That means that if launched at a target 5 km (3 miles) away, they will arrive within about five seconds. They have a small warhead – about 15 kg (33 lb) of high explosive – but are designed to spray fragments of shredded metal, like bullets, into a target upon detonation.

Read more …

Most intriguing piece of the day. Do read it from A to Z. Was Trump tricked into killing Soleimani? Just so anti-war voters would move away from him?

• Trump’s Iran De-Escalation Succeeds (Flores)

Impeachment against Trump has now been used several times to push him to act aggressively in the middle-east, contrary to his policy and self-interest. On all the ‘impeachment threat – then strike’ occasions, Trump ordered strikes on predictable targets – targets so predictable and oddly executed, that Syrian and Iranian forces barely felt them. There appears to be at the very least an ‘unspoken communication’ at play, where strikes are made to assuage political needs but not to inflict serious damage. If Trump really wanted an excuse to strike Iran, he’s had it before.

There was precisely such an opportunity when subversives in government hatched a plan to push Trump into a war with Iran, when two planes were sent to violate Iranian airspace – one manned, the other unmanned – flying in close proximity. This created the chance that Iran’s downing of either plane could be used as a pretext for a major war-creating strike on Iran.

Despite Trump’s acting reasonably, government actors and media attempted to create a sensation where Trump was ridiculed for ‘calling off’ a planned retaliation in the aftermath of the downed drone. The same liberal media and Democratic Party establishment that attacked Trump’s de-escalation then from a hawkish perspective, today manifest as doves who suddenly oppose Trump’s reckless hawkishness. Here, in the aftermath of the drone incident, a Trump policy was formulated – and it’s a policy that figures prominently in de-escalation in the aftermath of the assassination of Soleimani and Iran’s measured response. The policy is this – if Iran kills Americans, then the U.S escalates. If the U.S does something provocative, then Iran is actually allowed to respond militarily, so long as American personnel are not killed.

[..] A war with Iran would push the anti-war sentiments of independent voters away from Trump, and towards a more revitalized and mobilized Democrat Party anti-war base. Trump needs an anti-war base to be re-elected, and war with Iran pushes that base towards nearly any Democrat candidate. At the same time, Trump also needs the continued support from America’s Christian Zionist evangelical ‘Israel Firsters’, as well as the infamous AIPAC, not only to be re-elected, but to maintain the support in the senate against impeachment. That conflict between Trump’s two greatest populist strengths – between Trump’s anti-war base and his Christian Zionist base – largely defines his weakest political spot. That’s why it’s the best place to attack him.

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Easy, Tulsi!

Scott Ritter on Twitter: “I’m a huge @TulsiGabbard fan, but she is treading on dangerous ground. The implication here is that Iran has nuclear weapons ambition. If you buy into this fallacy, you empower those who will use this as a justification for war.”

• Tulsi Gabbard: ‘Iran Is Closer Now To A Nuclear Weapon Than Ever Before’ (NW)

Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard blasted President Donald Trump’s actions toward Iran, claiming that his decisions has brought the Persian Gulf nation closer “than ever before” to obtaining a nuclear weapon. “Trump’s war with Iran is undermining our national security and putting all Americans in greater danger,” Gabbard, a Hawaii congresswoman and Iraq War veteran, warned in a Thursday tweet, sharing a clip of herself discussing recent tensions with Iran on CNN. “Iran is closer now to a nuclear weapon than ever before. And it’s opening the door to resurgence of ISIS/Al-Qaeda,” she claimed.

Iran is believed to be closer today to possessing a nuclear weapon than it has been under the restrictions of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), commonly known as the Iran nuclear deal, which Trump withdrew from in May 2018. Still, it appears to be an exaggeration to say the country is closer than “ever before” to obtaining such a weapon. The JCPOA successfully reduced Iran’s uranium enrichment program, with U.S. intelligence leaders saying last year it would take the Islamic Republic at “about one year” to create a nuclear weapon. Before that agreement, Iran was believed to be within two to three months of creating highly enriched uranium that could be used in a weapon, according to a July 2018 report by the Congressional Research Service.

[..] Aniseh Bassiri Tabrizi, a research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based security think tank, told CBS News that Iran could now develop a nuclear weapon within six months. She noted, however, that Iran has still expressed support for the JCPOA but plans to no longer abide by its obligations under the deal. Iran “is still allowing the verification by [International Atomic Energy Agency] inspectors,” she told CBS.

Read more …

Sometimes you might just get the idea that NATO wants nothing more than for Iran to develop nukes.

• Iran Could Have Nuclear Weapon Within One To Two Years: French Minister (R.)

Iran could have nuclear weapons in one to two years if the country carries on violating the 2015 nuclear accord, French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said on Friday. “If they continue with unravelling the Vienna agreement, then yes, within a fairly short period of time, between one and two years, they could have access to a nuclear weapon, which is not an option”, Le Drian said on RTL radio. EU foreign ministers will hold an emergency meeting on Friday to seek ways to guide the United States and Iran away from confrontation, knowing that a miscalculation on either side could leave the bloc facing a war and a serious nuclear proliferation crisis on its doorstep.

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It’s toothless anyway.

• Matt Gaetz Voted With Democrats On War Powers Resolution (SAC)

“I spoke to the president today,” Rep. Matt Gaetz, (R-FL) said on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” “The president told me he is more antiwar than I am, and I love the president for that. The thing is, I think a few of the advisers of the president are trying to slow-walk the administration into war. When the president relies on his instincts and we have the Trump doctrine, we kill the terrorist and we come home.” “I think this War Powers Resolution was worthy of support because it did not criticize the president,” Gaetz said. “It did not say he was wrong in killing [Quds Force Gen.] Soleimani. But…it did say that if any president wants to drag our nation into another forever Middle East war that they require the approval of the United States Congress.”


“That’s something I deeply believe. And I think it’s something the president deeply believes,” Gaetz explained. Tucker Carlson questioned Gaetz’s claim that his vote had Trump’s support. “Just to be totally clear,” Tucker Carlson asked, “you are one of three Republicans who voted, in effect, against the president’s stated position but you just talked to the president and he said that he is on your side?” “Well, the president probably would have preferred that I vote with the other Republicans,” Gaetz responded. “He [Trump] certainly said that. I think on these broader questions of war and peace, Donald Trump understands that the pro-war candidate loses presidential elections … it’s typically the anti-war candidates that win.”

Read more …

Inviting Biden and Schiff onto the stage.

• Democrats To Press For Impeachment Witnesses Throughout Trial (R.)

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said he will press Republicans to accept four witnesses, including John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, even if the Senate rejects testimony at the start of the trial to determine whether Trump should be convicted of abusing his power and obstructing Congress over Ukraine. “Those votes at the beginning of the trial will not be the last votes on witnesses and documents. Make no mistake, we will continue to revisit the issue,” Schumer said on the Senate floor. Schumer, who needs only four of the 100-seat Senate’s 53 Republicans to join Democrats on the witness question, could succeed by pressuring vulnerable Republicans such as Senator Susan Collins and Senator Cory Gardner, who face re-election challenges in swing states in November.


Without witnesses, Democrats fear Senate Republicans could move quickly to dismiss the charges against Trump. But securing witnesses could also open a Pandora’s box for Democrats. Trump has said he would like to hear from former Vice President Joe Biden, his businessman son Hunter Biden, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff and the anonymous whistleblower whose complaint launched the impeachment inquiry. Trump also has said he might try to block Bolton from testifying. “When we start allowing national security advisers to just go up and say whatever they want to say… We can’t do that,” he told reporters at the White House.

Read more …

“This is how corrupt American law has become. A man is being put in prison for 6 months for not cooperating with an investigation of an event that did not happen!”

• The Justice Department Is Devoid of Justice (PCR)

In the United States the criminal justice (sic) system is itself not subject to law. We see immunity to law continually as police commit felonies against citizens and even murder children and walk away free. We see it all the time when prosecutors conduct political prosecutions and when they prosecute the innocent in order to build their conviction record. We see it when judges fail to prevent prosecutors from withholding exculpatory evidence and bribing witnesses and when judges accept coerced plea deals that deprive the defendant of a jury trial.

We just saw it again when federal prosecutors recommended a six month prison sentence for Lt. Gen. Flynn, the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency accused of lying to the FBI about nothing of any importance, for being uncooperative in the Justice (sic) Department’s effort to frame President Trump with false “Russiagate” charges. The Justice (sic) Department prosecutor said: “The sentence should adequately deter the defendant from violating the law, and to promote respect for the law. It is clear that the defendant has not learned his lesson. He has behaved as though the law does not apply to him, and as if there are no consequences for his actions.”

That is precisely what the Justice (sic) Department itself did for years in their orchestration of the fake Russiagate charges against Trump. The prosecutor’s hypocrisy is overwhelming. The Justice (sic) Department is a criminal organization. It has no sense of justice. Convicting the innocent builds the conviction rate of the prosecutor as effectively as convicting the guilty. The Horowitz report of the Justice (sic) Department’s lies to the FISA court did not recommend a six-month prision sentence for those Justice (sic) Deplartment officials who lied to the government. Horowitz covered up the crimes by converting them into “mistakes.” Yes, they are embarrassing “mistakes,” but mistakes don’t bring prison sentences.

Now that we know the only Russiagate scandal was its orchestration by the CIA, Justice (sic) Department, and Democrats, failing to cooperate with the special counsel investigation of alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election is nonsensical as we know for a definite fact that there was no such interference. [..] This is how corrupt American law has become. A man is being put in prison for 6 months for not cooperating with an investigation of an event that did not happen! If Trump doesn’t pardon Flynn (and Manafort and Stone), and fire the corrupt prosecutors who falsely prosecuted Flynn, Trump deserves no one’s support. A president who will not defend his own people from unwarranted prosecution is not worthy of support.

Read more …

Clowns and monkeys. Are these people still working at Boeing?

• Internal Boeing Messages Raise Serious Questions About 737 MAX (R.)

Boeing on Thursday released hundreds of internal messages that raise serious questions about its development of simulators and the 737 Max that was grounded in March after two fatal crashes, prompting outrage from US lawmakers. In an April 2017 exchange of instant messages, two employees expressed complaints about the Max following references to issues with the plane’s flight management computer. “This airplane is designed by clowns who in turn are supervised by monkeys,” one unnamed employee wrote. In one message, dated November 2015, which appears to shed light on lobbying methods used when facing demands from regulators, a Boeing employee notes regulators were likely to want simulator training for a particular type of cockpit alert.

“We are going to push back very hard on this and will likely need support at the highest levels when it comes time for the final negotiation,” the employee writes. The planemaker said some communications “raise questions” about Boeing’s interactions with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in connection with the simulator qualification process. In releasing redacted versions of what it called “completely unacceptable” communications, Boeing said it was committed to transparency with the regulator. Unredacted versions of the messages were turned over to the FAA and Congress in December.

Peter DeFazio, the House transportation committee chairman, who has been investigating the Max, said the messages “paint a deeply disturbing picture of the lengths Boeing was apparently willing to go to in order to evade scrutiny from regulators, flight crews, and the flying public, even as its own employees were sounding alarms internally”. He added: “they show a coordinated effort dating back to the earliest days of the 737 Max program to conceal critical information from regulators and the public”.

Read more …

“Would you put your family on a Max simulator trained aircraft? I wouldn’t.”

• Boeing Emails Show Workers Mocking FAA, Ridiculing 737 MAX Safety (MW)

Newly released internal emails from Boeing Co. paint a disturbing picture of its 737 Max program, with employees bragging about fooling FAA regulators and ridiculing its safety. The emails were part of more than 100 pages of documents sent Thursday by Boeing to House and Senate committees that have been investigating the aircraft maker in the wake of two crashes in 2018 and 2019 that killed a combined 346 people. The 737 Max family has been grounded for nearly a year, with no return date yet. “This airplane is designed by clowns who in turn are supervised by monkeys,” read one email.


Some messages detail problems with the development of Boeing’s 737 Max simulator and suggest the planes got FAA approval under false pretences. “I still haven’t been forgiven by God for the covering up I did last year,” one of the employees says in a 2018 email, apparently referring to interactions with the Federal Aviation Administration. “Would you put your family on a Max simulator trained aircraft? I wouldn’t,” one employee emailed a colleague. “No,” the co-worker responded. “These newly-released emails are incredibly damning,” Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., said in a statement Thursday night. “They paint a deeply disturbing picture of the lengths Boeing was apparently willing to go to in order to evade scrutiny from regulators, flight crews, and the flying public.”

Read more …

They’ll be buried in ever more lawsuits, and many courts will choose the other side. It’s simply too late, and opinion on fossil fuels etc. is against deregulation.

• White House Unveils Plan To Speed Big Projects Permits (R.)

The Trump administration on Thursday unveiled a plan to speed permitting for major infrastructure projects like oil pipelines, road expansions and bridges, one of the biggest deregulatory actions of the president’s tenure. The plan, released by the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), would help the administration advance big energy and infrastructure projects like the Keystone XL oil pipeline or roads, bridges and federal buildings that President Donald Trump and industry groups complained have been hampered by red tape. “For the first time in over 40 years today we are issuing a new rule under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) to completely overhaul the dysfunctional bureaucratic system that has created these massive obstructions,” Trump said at the White House on Thursday.

The proposal to update the how NEPA, the 50-year bedrock federal environmental law, is implemented is part of Trump’s broader effort to cut regulations and oversight to boost industry. “This proposal affects virtually every significant decision made by the federal government that affects the environment,” Interior Secretary David Bernhardt said, adding that the NEPA reform would be the “most significant deregulatory proposal” of the Trump administration. The proposed rule says federal agencies would not need to factor in the “cumulative impacts” of a project, which could include its impact on climate change, making it easier for major fossil fuel projects to sail through the approval process and avoid legal challenges.

[..] Trump’s efforts to cut regulatory red tape have been praised by industry. But they have so far largely backfired by triggering waves of lawsuits that the administration has lost in court, according to a running tally here by the New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity. Over the last few years, federal courts have ruled that NEPA requires the federal government to consider a project’s carbon footprint in decisions related to leasing public lands for drilling or building pipelines.

Read more …

The author is a senior fellow at the think tank Center for China and Globalization. That explains a lot. But yes, China achieved a lot re: poverty. Question is: at what price?

• China To Become First To Realize UN Goal Of ‘No Poverty’ (CD)

China is poised to realize a dream that a few decades ago most experts would have dismissed as wishful thinking. For centuries, China dreamed of building a “moderately prosperous society” in all respects. And this year, under the leadership of the Communist Party of China, China will realize that dream despite having a population of more than 1.3 billion. Late leader Deng Xiaoping resurrected this ancient but never-realized goal when reform and opening-up were launched. Chinese leaders who followed adopted it, adding additional details. President Xi Jinping included it in his seminal “four-pronged comprehensive strategy” in 2014. Xi explained the notion in great detail at the 19th National Congress of the CPC in October 2017 in a speech titled, “Secure a Decisive Victory in Building a Moderately Prosperous Society in All Respects”, mentioning the concept 18 times.

He said that building a moderately prosperous society in all respects meant promoting social fairness and justice, as well as ensuring steady access to childcare, education, employment, medical service, elderly care, housing and social assistance. He pledged to “intensify poverty alleviation, see that all our people have a greater sense of fulfillment as they contribute to and gain from development, and continue to promote well-rounded human development and common prosperity for everyone.” Now, a little more than two years later, the results are in, and China is about to eradicate absolute poverty. In 1979, China’s per capita GDP was $200. It is now estimated to be $10,000, a 50-fold increase – with GDP growth averaging just shy of 10 percent a year.

Over the past four decades, China has lifted about 800 million people out of poverty, which is 70 percent of the global total. Little wonder China is set to become the first developing country to achieve the first of the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals: No poverty. China’s rural population living under the currently defined poverty line of $1.90 per person per day fell from 770 million in 1978 to 16.6 million in 2018, and the rural poverty level declined from 97.5 percent to 1.7 percent, a decrease of 95.8 percent. In 2019 alone, about 340 impoverished counties and 10 million people were lifted out of poverty. And Xi has pledged that after the eradication of absolutely poverty in 2020, China will launch a campaign to eliminate relative poverty.

Read more …

 

In the same way that you ARE the climate. Or the war.

 

 

 

Include the Automatic Earth in your 2020 charity list. Support us on Paypal and Patreon.

 

Debt Rattle April 14 2018

Apr 142018
 
 April 14, 2018  Posted by at 9:54 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  8 Responses »


Robert Capa Anti-fascist militia women defending a street barricade, Barcelona 1936

 

• US Media Love War More Than They Hate Trump (Khalek)
• US Defence Secretary Mattis Says ‘This Was A One-Time Shot’ – For Now (Ind.)
• Why Is ‘Bad Guy’ Putin So Popular At Home? (Steve Keen)
• Trump’s Actions in Syria Violate US Constitution (Kucinich)
• Long Wars (Claire Connelly)
• The Deep State Takes A Hostage (Stockman)
• Irish High Court Sets Out 11 Questions For ECJ on EU-US Data Transfers (IT)
• Mark Zuckerberg’s Testimony Lurched From Easy Ride To Headache (G.)
• Making America More Indebted (Roberts)
• JPMorgan Profits Soar 35% Thanks To Donald Trump’s Tax Cuts (Ind.)

 

 

How many people actually believe the Skripal and Douma stories they are being fed?

• US Media Love War More Than They Hate Trump (Khalek)

American media outlets can’t help themselves. They love war. They love war more than they hate Trump. They love war so much, they are cheering on the president they hate to militarily escalate in Syria. And if he doesn’t escalate in Syria, it proves he is controlled by the Kremlin, they tell us. If he wants to demonstrate that Russia isn’t calling the shots, he must bomb Syria. And he must bomb Syria to punish Assad for an alleged chemical attack that has yet to be properly investigated to determine whether it took place and who is responsible. The US media isn’t interested in evidence, they have been repeating that Assad was behind this alleged attack from the beginning and through repetition it has become a truth.

NBC recently published claims fed to them by anonymous US intelligence officials claiming to have proof that the attack did indeed take place and that Assad is responsible. It’s not as if US officials have ever lied about weapons of mass destruction in the past to justify war, so why should NBC be skeptical of this? Meanwhile, CNN—when it isn’t busy obsessing over Stormy Daniels—has hosted a parade of war hawks agitating for military escalation against Syria, against Iran, even against Russia. For example US Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, who has never seen a country he doesn’t want to bomb, was allowed to go on air and call Assad a legitimate military target, saying Trump should take him out to “send a strong message other bad actors like North Korea and Iran.”

He went largely unchallenged by the CNN host whose only qualm was where the US could bomb in Syria to properly punish the Assad government. “It’s tough to decide what option to hit. What is a good option? You’d be forced to take out the air force but it doesn’t sound like taking out the air force will stop if it’s chemical attacks coming out of a helicopter,” she said to Graham. The editorial board at the Washington Post, a newspaper that is owned by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos who has a $600 million contract with the CIA that is never disclosed by the paper on stories related to the intelligence agency despite the clear conflict of interest, agitated for Trump to go further than just bombing Syria once.

The Post wants to see a longer term plan for regime change and US military domination over Syria. “The reality Mr. Trump has not yet faced is that as long as the dictator he called “Animal Assad” remains in place, Syria’s wars will continue, breeding Islamist terrorists and propelling refugees toward Europe,” said the Post. But the reality is the opposite: it is the US’ war of regime change in Syria that has prolonged the war, bred Islamist terrorists, and propelled refugees toward Europe, and the Post is calling for continuing that regime change operation.

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The story is they struck chemical weapons facilities. That means the OPCW has zero credibility from now on; they stated just a few years ago that Syria had none anymore.

• US Defence Secretary Mattis Says ‘This Was A One-Time Shot’ – For Now (Ind.)

The US military has revealed the three-nation stake on Syria targeting alleged chemicals assets is over for now – declaring “right now this is a one-time shot”. Defence Secretary James Mattis said the US, UK and France had acted together, having determined that Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad had used chemical weapons against civilians a week ago. He said it would depend on Mr Assad if there were further strikes. “Right now this is a one-time shot,” he told a briefing on Friday night at the Pentagon. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Joseph Dunford, said the targets included a Syrian research facility, a chemical weapons storage facility and a command post. The first of these was located in Damascus, the first time that the US had struck close to the capital.

Asked whether the US and its allies was planning further attacks, Mr Mattis said: “That depends open Assad.” The Defence Secretary said he was “certain” the Syrian regime had used chemical weapons in an attack on civilians, something that Mr Assad and its Russian allies have denied. He said the US was still investigating what sort of chemical weapons had been used. “We are aware of one of the chemical agents” that was used, but further assessments were continuing. While it was reported that Russian forces were not warned in advance of the strike, he said that usual deescalation communications did go ahead, the process Moscow and Washington use to avoid unintentional attacks on each other’s forces, or accidental clashes or their aircraft.

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“..an extra 2.5-3 million Russian adults died in middle age in the period 1992-2001 than would have been expected based on 1991 mortality..”

• Why Is ‘Bad Guy’ Putin So Popular At Home? (Steve Keen)

The destructive impact of the far-too-rapid transition was an increase in the mortality rate, which medical researchers concluded meant that “an extra 2.5-3 million Russian adults died in middle age in the period 1992-2001 than would have been expected based on 1991 mortality. ” In strict economic terms, the transition was an abject failure – that is, if you think it was intended to improve Russian living standards. GDP virtually halved between 1990 and 1998, living standards plummeted, crime proliferated, and Russian society almost collapsed. Even today, output is barely above pre-transition levels.n

The failure of the rapid transition policies forced on Russia by the US is even more apparent when Russia’s transition performance is compared with China’s, where the communists remained firmly in control, and where the transition was deliberately undertaken at a measured pace. Russia’s per capita GDP today is only slightly above its level at the end of the Soviet period. China’s per capita GDP is ten times what it was in 1990. However, viewed from the very bottom of this brutal process in 1998, Russia has made remarkable progress: from 1998 until now, GDP has more than doubled, in both total and per capita terms. For almost all of this time, Russia’s president or prime minister has been Vladimir Putin.

Prior to his election in 2000, Putin rose to prominence in part because of his successful repression of the Chechen revolt. This hardly endeared Putin to the Chechens. But it gave him the aura of a strongman at the time most Russians believed their country desperately needed one, to eliminate the low-level mafia who tormented the public directly, to subdue the Oligarchs who exploited them, and to stand up to the West when his predecessor Yeltsin had effectively been a puppet. Putin can’t be solely credited with starting the economic turnaround, but his strongman approach to running Russia was welcomed, and is still welcomed, by the majority of his countrymen.

Russia is far from perfect under Putin, and Putin is far from perfect himself. But its economy and its national pride have been restored under his rule, and the Russian public cannot be faulted for feeling substantial antipathy towards the West, and the US in particular. Given that Russia has legitimate grievances about how the West treated it after it decided to join the capitalist camp, and the disastrous outcomes of all previous Western attempts at regime change, I’d rather our so-called leaders aimed for rapprochement with Russia, and yes, with Putin, instead of heightened animosity.

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So what is Congress going to do?

• Trump’s Actions in Syria Violate US Constitution (Kucinich)

President Trump acted without congressional authorization in ordering a military attack against Syria tonight. This is a clear violation of the United States Constitution, Article 1, Section 8 which makes it clear that only Congress has the power to declare war. The President’s Article II authority as “Commander in Chief” does not give him the authority to act independent of Congress on matters of war. This is not a mere technicality. The doctrine of separation of powers is the only thing which protects the US from becoming a dictatorship. The President is subject to the law. The gas attack on Douma must be dealt with in an international court of law. If the US does not stand for the rule of law, how can we demand other countries to do so?

The attack on Syria will embolden ISIS. Our military power should not be used to help, directly or indirectly, ISIS and those elements whose philosophy is inimical to the United States of America. The President has violated the Constitution, usurping the power of Congress. This is not about whether or not the President hates Syria’s leaders. It is about whether or not he loves the US Constitution, which he took an oath to defend. The President chose to order a military attack almost a week after the gas attack on Douma. He had plenty of time to seek congressional approval, but he chose not to do so, even though he himself specifically said “The President must get congressional approval before attacking Syria – big mistake if he does not.” (Twitter, August 30th, 2013).

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“.. the Arab world under the control of those who live and work in the Arab world.”

• Long Wars (Claire Connelly)

From Syria, to Iraq, Iran to Libya, our understandings of the long-wars in the Middle-East as moral, humanitarian interventions designed to democratise and civilise are the result of a carefully crafted propaganda campaign waged by the US and its allies. Each of these uprisings were launched by US proxies, designed to destabilize the regions, justifying regime change that suit the economic interests of its investors, banks and corporations, captured comprehensively in a new book by Canadian author and analyst, Stephen Gowans, Washington’s Long War on Syria. You might be surprised to know that both the Libyan, Syrian and Iraqi government, led by Muammar Gaddafi, Hafez Al Assad, (succeeded by Bashaar Al Assaad) and Sadaam Hussein respectively, were socialist governments.

Or Ba’ath Arab Socialist governments, to be precise. Ba’ath Arab Socialism can be summed up in their constitutions supporting the values of: ‘freedom of the Arab world, freedom from foreign powers and freedom of socialism’. Its doctrine was supported in Libya, as it was in Iraq and Syria. Of course, particularly in Hussein’s case, we cannot claim that these governments were without their problems. Ethnic cleansing is not to be overlooked, but condemned on the strongest grounds. But of course these were not the reasons the US and its allies decided to get into it. “For the last quarter of a century, the US and its allies have waged highly destructive campaigns of economic warfare against Syria and Iraq, the economic equivalent of nuclear war,” writes Gowans,

“and have done so because they are opposed to Ba’ath Arab Socialist efforts to bring politics and the economics of the Arab world under the control of those who live and work in the Arab world.” In the case of Iraq, it had combined its oil wealth with public ownership of the economy, leading to what is known as ‘The Golden Age’, where, according to a State Department Official: “Schools, universities, hospitals, factories, museums and theatres proliferated employment so universal, a labour shortage developed.” When the Ba’ath Arab Socialists were driven from power in Iraq, the US installed military dictator, Paul El Briener who set about a ‘de-Ba’athification’ of the government, expelling every member of the Ba’ath Arab Socialist party and imposed a constitution forbidding any secular Arab leader from ever holding office in Iraq again.

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It ain’t over.

• The Deep State Takes A Hostage (Stockman)

The Donald seems to be taking a Deep Breath on his Syria bombfest, but the Deep State has him by the orange hairs. So we doubt the delay will last much longer. That’s because our Art of the Deal genius is getting bamboozled yet again. They are telling him that wiping out up to a dozen Syrian airfields, military installations and a dog-eared factory or two that can be identified as chemical weapons sites will amount to some pretty serious Shock & Awe where it counts: That is, the mere witnessing of it will cause the Fat Boy of Pyongyang to brown his ample trousers, thereby getting his “mind right” for the upcoming summit. That’s exactly the kind of macho-bargainer stuff that the Donald thrives on, and is further proof that the Deep State has figured out exactly how to press his buttons.

To be sure, Trump is no innocent victim. He voluntarily made himself hostage to the War Party by surrounding himself with failed generals and the most rabid war-mongers to be found in the Imperial City—-John Bolton, Mike Pompeo and Gina Haspel. Indeed, you have to wonder. How could anyone with even a half-baked notion of America First think that a hard core interventionist like John Bolton should be brought up right close and personal to the POTUS ear lobes, Walrus mustache and all? But whatever the Donald was thinking when he made such horrendous choices for his top national security posts, these denizens of the War Party have wasted no time shoving their own agenda right down his throat.

And at the top of that agenda is systematic, relentless escalation of provocations against Russia and Iran. That’s because confrontation with these demonized states is the best way to keep Imperial Washington (and therefore the entire country) on a war-footing and the national security gravy train overflowing with fiscal largesse. As we indicated in Part 1, the impending attack on Syria is actually a shot across the bow aimed at Tehran and Moscow. The cover story is simply a humanitarian sounding ruse. Ostensibly, Bashar Assad is being administered a good hard spanking via a barrage of cruise missile birch switches.

That begs the question, of course, of how homeland security is actually enhanced by selectively spanking some malefactors and not others. In this case, even the surely bogus claim that 40 civilians were gassed in Douma hardly compares to the 10,000 civilians that have been slaughtered by American bombs delivered by the Saudi air force in Yemen; or the thousands of anti-government prisoners that have been summarily executed by General al-Sisi in Egypt under this stewardship of Washington’s $1.2 billion annual stipend; or the thousands of civilians that Israel has killed during its periodic “lawn-mowing” exercises on the Gaza Strip.

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Huge challenge to Facebook and the CIA. How come only the Irish Times reports on it? The EU top courts is about to ban transfer on personal data from Europe to the US.

• Irish High Court Sets Out 11 Questions For ECJ on EU-US Data Transfers (IT)

Legal uncertainty surrounds the capacity of companies such as Facebook to transfer European users’ data to the US after a High Court judge asked the most senior EU court to consider 11 questions on the issue. The referral stems from a case taken by Austrian privacy activist Max Schrems. The questions raise significant issues of EU law with huge implications, including whether the High Court has correctly found there is “mass indiscriminate processing” of data by US government agencies under the PRISM and Upstream programmes authorised there. The questions also ask whether EU law applies to the processing of personal data for national security purposes regardless of whether that data processing takes place in the EU or US or other third country.

Other questions concern whether the Privacy Shield Decision and other measures in the US afford adequate protection for EU citizens whose data is transferred there. The ECJ is also asked to decide the extent of a data protection authority’s (DAA) power to suspend data flows if it considers a third country is subject to surveillance laws which conflict with EU law. After Ms Justice Caroline Costello set out the questions on Thursday in a formal request to the ECJ for a preliminary ruling, Paul Gallagher SC, for Facebook, asked for time to consider that in the context of possibly seeking an appeal against the judge’s decision to make a reference to the CJEU in the first place.

Michael Collins SC, for the Data Protection Commissioner (DPC), queried whether there was any entitlement to appeal a High Court decision to direct a reference but did not object to Facebook being given a short time to consider its approach. The judge, noting she had given judgment last October sanctioning a reference, said she was anxious to make the referral but would allow Facebook time to April 30th. Among the questions for reference include whether, when deciding if data privacy rights of an EU citizen are breached, the issue must be examined against the EU Charter and EU law or the national law of one or more EU states, or an amalgam of the laws of all member states. The High Court had found the appropriate comparator was EU law despite Facebook disputing that.

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The challenege is in Europe, not the US.

• Mark Zuckerberg’s Testimony Lurched From Easy Ride To Headache (G.)

As Mark Zuckerberg left Congress on Tuesday after testifying to the Senate, he may have felt relieved. The four-hour Q&A session had been largely dominated by mundane questions of fact about how Facebook works, requests for apologies and updates he had already given and was happy to repeat, and shameless begs for the social network’s cash pile to be used to expand broadband access in senators’ home states. Less than 24 hours later, however, a very different pattern of questioning in front of 54 members of the House of Representatives suggested a much more worrying outcome for Facebook – that this could be the week its crisis moves from being about mistakes in the past to inherent problems in the present.

Perhaps, the representatives implied, Facebook doesn’t just have a problem. What if it is the problem? Questions were still asked about Cambridge Analytica, the 9m other apps the company has to investigate for historical data sharing, and the revelation that more than a billion users had their data scraped by third parties abusing a phone or email lookup feature. But just as many were asked about problems that revolved less around mistakes and more around fundamental facets of Facebook’s business. Unsurprisingly, Zuckerberg appeared less inclined to answer those. “Will you make the commitment to change … all the user default settings to minimise, to the greatest extent possible, the collection and use of users’ data,” asked Frank Pallone, the panel’s top Democrat.

Zuckerberg, declining to give a yes or no, eventually agreed to follow up with an answer after the hearing. “Are you willing to change your business model in the interest of protecting individual privacy,” asked the Democratic congresswoman Anna Eshoo. “I’m not sure what that means,” was Zuckerberg’s reply. Europe’s general data protection regulation, Democrat Gene Green noted, gives EU citizens the right to opt out of the processing of their personal data for marketing purposes. “Will the same right … be available to Facebook users in the United States?” Zuckerberg: “Let me follow up with you on that.”

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“..an additional dollar of deficit spending will reduce private GDP by $1.01, resulting in a one-cent decline in real GDP..”

• Making America More Indebted (Roberts)

In December of last year, as Congress voted to pass the “Tax Cut & Jobs Act,” I wrote that without “real and substantive cuts to spending,” the debt and deficits will begin to balloon. At that time, I mapped out the trajectory of the deficit based on the cuts to revenue from lower tax rates and sustained levels of government spending.

Since that writing, the government has now lifted the “debt ceiling” for two years and passed a $1.3 Trillion “omnibus spending bill” to operate the government through the end of September, 2018. Of course, since the government has foregone the required Constitutional process of operating on a budget for the last decade, “continuing resolutions,” or “C.R.s,” will remain the standard operating procedure of managing the country’s finances. This means that spending will continue to grow unchecked into the foreseeable future as C.R.’s increase the previously budgeted spending levels automatically by 8% annually. (Rule of 72 says spending doubles every 9-years) The chart below tracks the cumulative increase in “excess” Government spending above revenue collections. Notice the point at which nominal GDP growth stopped rising.

Trillion dollar deficits, of course, are nothing to be excited about as rising debts, and surging deficits, as shown, impede economic growth longer-term as money is diverted from productive investments to debt-service. While many suggest that “all government spending is good spending,” the reality is that “recycled tax dollars” have a very low, if not negative, “multiplier effect” in the economy. As Dr. Lacy Hunt states: “The government expenditure multiplier is negative. Based on academic research, the best evidence suggests the multiplier is -0.01, which means that an additional dollar of deficit spending will reduce private GDP by $1.01, resulting in a one-cent decline in real GDP. The deficit spending provides a transitory boost to economic activity, but the initial effect is more than reversed in time. Within no more than three years the economy is worse off on a net basis, with the lagged effects outweighing the initial positive benefit.“

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Oh boy, are we doing great.

• JPMorgan Profits Soar 35% Thanks To Donald Trump’s Tax Cuts (Ind.)

JPMorgan’s profits jumped 35 percent in the last quarter, compared to a year ago, partly thanks to a huge tax cut. Congress slashed the corporate tax rate from 35 per cent to 21 per cent in December as part of a major overhaul pushed for by President Donald Trump that also cut taxes for wealthy individuals. Higher interest rates also helped to boost profits, JPMorgan said. The bank earned $8.7bn (£6.1bn) in the first quarter, or $2.37 a share, up from $6.45bn, in the same period a year earlier. Analysts had predicted JPMorgan would earn $2.28 a share.

Pre-tax income rose by $2.6bn to $28.52bn in the quarter, the company paid $240 million less in taxes compared to a year earlier. “2018 is off to a good start with our businesses performing well across the board, driving strong top-line growth and building on the momentum from last year,“ chief executive Jamie Dimon said. “The global economy continues to do well, and we remain optimistic about the positive impact of tax reform in the US as business sentiment remains upbeat, and consumers benefit from job and wage growth.”

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Debt Rattle April 11 2018

Apr 112018
 
 April 11, 2018  Posted by at 8:50 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , ,  11 Responses »


Jan van Eyck The Last Judgement (detail) 1430

 

• Hussman’s Script For A 60% Tumble In The Stock Market (MW)
• World Trade System In Danger Of Being Torn Apart – Lagarde (G.)
• Eurocontrol Warns Airlines Of Possible Missile Strikes Into Syria (R.)
• Russian Envoy: Any US Missiles Fired At Syria Will Be Shot Down (R.)
• We All Need To Unite Against War In Syria (CJ)
• Zuckerberg Deflects Senators’ Questions, Gets $3 Billion For The Effort (MW)
• Ban Targeted Advertising (Dayen)
• EU Top Court Backs France Ban Of Uber (AFP)
• Barclays Says Bitcoin Behaves Like An Infectious Disease (BBG)
• The Failures of Anti-Trumpism (NYT)
• Save the Children Faces Formal Investigation Over Staff Misconduct (G.)
• Greece at Bottom of Eurozone Growth Rate (GR)
• More Than Half Your Body Is Not Human (BBC)

 

 

“Investment is about valuation. Speculation is about psychology,” Hussman said. “Both factors are unfavorable here.”

• Hussman’s Script For A 60% Tumble In The Stock Market (MW)

Enjoy days like this while they last, warns longtime bear John Hussman, because the volatility we’re seeing on the Dow and the S&P 500 only serves to reinforce his pessimistic view that the stock market is careening toward a painful drop of at least 60% and a decade or more of zero to negative returns. “We’re observing the very early effects of risk-aversion in a hypervalued market,” the Hussman Trust president wrote in his latest missive. “To some extent, the actual news events are irrelevant. I certainly wouldn’t gauge market risk by monitoring the day-to-day news on potential tariffs or even prospects for rate changes by the Fed.”

For those of you feeling a bit queasy because of what Hussman describes as the “rather minimal level of volatility” we’ve seen lately, it’s time to make some changes and rebalance your portfolio with some hedges, or at least lighten up by adding cash. “But do so knowing one thing in advance: you will experience regret,” he says. “If the market advances after you rebalance, you’ll regret having sold anything. If the market declines after you rebalance, you’ll regret not having sold more.”

The driving factor he frequently cites for the top-heavy market is that the Fed’s quantitative easing has inflated valuations to unsustainable levels, and as the free money goes away, the bottom will fall out, leaving a trail of blown-up investors in its wake. “Investment is about valuation. Speculation is about psychology,” Hussman said. “Both factors are unfavorable here.” He used this chart or the median price/revenue ratio of S&P components to show just how overvalued stocks are at this point, even after the recent tumble:

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Because the trade system benefits everyone, right?

• World Trade System In Danger Of Being Torn Apart – Lagarde (G.)

The head of the IMF has warned of “darker clouds looming” for the global economy amid simmering trade tensions between the US and China, urging governments around the world to steer clear of protectionism or face negative consequences. Christine Lagarde said the current system for world trade was “in danger of being torn apart”, with the potential to upset the present global economic upswing and make consumers poorer. Speaking in Hong Kong amid signs the standoff could be abating, Lagarde said it would be an “inexcusable, collective policy failure” for world trade to break down with nations erecting punitive tariff systems against their rivals. “Let us redouble our efforts to reduce trade barriers and resolve disagreements without using exceptional measures,” she said.

[..] Using language that could be interpreted as a veiled attack on Trump in the speech ahead of the meeting, Lagarde said nations could make domestic policy changes to address trade imbalances and use international forums to settle disputes. “We can all do more – but we cannot do it alone,” she said. “Unfair trade practices have little impact on a country’s overall trade deficit with the rest of the world. That imbalance is driven by the fact that a country spends above its income.” Identifying the US as an example of a nation that could benefit from reforms, she said Washington could help tackle its trade imbalances by gradually curbing public spending and by increasing revenue, which she said would help reduce future fiscal deficits.

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Jamming.

• Eurocontrol Warns Airlines Of Possible Missile Strikes Into Syria (R.)

Pan-European air traffic control agency Eurocontrol on Tuesday warned airlines to exercise caution in the eastern Mediterranean due to the possible launch of air strikes into Syria in next 72 hours. Eurocontrol said that air-to-ground and/or cruise missiles could be used within that period and there was a possibility of intermittent disruption of radio navigation equipment. U.S. President Donald Trump and Western allies are discussing possible military action to punish Syria’s President Bashar Assad for a suspected poison gas attack on Saturday on a rebel-held town that long had held out against government forces.

Trump on Tuesday canceled a planned trip to Latin America later this week to focus instead on responding to the Syria incident, the White House said. Trump had on Monday warned of a quick, forceful response once responsibility for the Syria attack was established. The Eurocontrol warning on its website did not specify the origin of any potential missile threat. “Due to the possible launch of air strikes into Syria with air-to-ground and/or cruise missiles within the next 72 hours, and the possibility of intermittent disruption of radio navigation equipment, due consideration needs to be taken when planning flight operations in the Eastern Mediterranean/Nicosia FIR area,” it said, referring to the designated airspace.

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Clear as that.

• Russian Envoy: Any US Missiles Fired At Syria Will Be Shot Down (R.)

Russia’s ambassador to Lebanon said any U.S. missiles fired at Syria would be shot down and the launch sites targeted, a step that could trigger a major escalation in the Syrian war. Russian Ambassador Alexander Zasypkin, in comments broadcast on Tuesday evening, said he was referring to a statement by Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Russian armed forces chief of staff. The Russian military said on March 13 that it would respond to any U.S. strike on Syria, targeting any missiles and launchers involved in such an attack. Russia is Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s most powerful ally.

The United States and its allies are considering whether to hit Syria over a suspected poison gas attack that medical relief organizations say killed dozens of people in the rebel-held town of Douma near Damascus on Saturday. “If there is a strike by the Americans, then…the missiles will be downed and even the sources from which the missiles were fired,” Zasypkin told Hezbollah’s al-Manar TV, speaking in Arabic. He also said a clash “should be ruled out and therefore we are ready to hold negotiations”.

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Yes, we do. But it’s very late in the game.

• We All Need To Unite Against War In Syria (CJ)

Last night Fox’s Tucker Carlson did what may have been the most amazing thing that has ever happened on American television. As the drums of war beat louder than they have in years, Carlson stared right into the camera and did the exact opposite of what every mainstream US pundit is doing right now: he told the truth. He told the truth about Syria. He told the truth about Yemen. He told the truth about the alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma. He told the truth about the bipartisan war machine which drops all pretense of opposition the instant it’s time for bloodshed. He told the truth about what war is, what it costs, and what it does to our world.

He stood in stark, unequivocal opposition to the trajectory the Trump administration appears to be moving along. And he did it on Fox News. I have a deep and abiding hatred in my heart for Fox News and all things Murdoch. I will never forget nor forgive the key role the Murdoch press played in deceiving our world into the unimaginable evil that was the Iraq invasion. But if I’d held a reflexive rejection of anything with the Fox News logo in the corner, I never would have seen Carlson’s epic monologue, never would have shared it with my social media following, never would have embedded it in this article, and this bright flash of truth would have been diminished by that much in the impact it was able to have on public consciousness.

And I know that there are many leftists who declined to help spread awareness of that Carlson monologue based solely on the fact that he’s a conservative pundit on a conservative network who has said things they disagree with in the past. This is stupid. We should be able to throw any weapon at all at the war machine, not fight with one hand tied behind our backs just because we don’t like conservatives.

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It was even worse than imagined.

• Zuckerberg Deflects Senators’ Questions, Gets $3 Billion For The Effort (MW)

Mark Zuckerberg has come far since the early days of Facebook, and that growth was extremely apparent in how deftly the chief executive dealt with several hours of inscrutable questioning by U.S. senators Tuesday over the social network’s role in presidential election-meddling and the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. Wearing a conservative suit and light blue tie, an outfit he would rarely wear in Silicon Valley, Zuckerberg sat ramrod straight in his witness chair for most of the many hours of questions. He responded to each questioner by first addressing them as senator or chair. He looked earnest and serious for almost every question, even during some of the laughable questions from some of the less tech-savvy members of the Senate, such as the one by Sen. Orrin Hatch, who asked how Facebook makes money if it doesn’t charge users anything.

“Senator, we run ads,” Zuckerberg said with a smile. That calm response was in marked contrast to when Zuckerberg faced another type of grilling, at the All Things D conference in 2010, when he gave vague and rambling answers about Facebook’s changes to its privacy controls at the time, and had to take off his famous hoodie while wiping sweat from his face under the lights on stage. Part of his preparedness for the Senate hearing, where he managed to repeat several core phrases that the company has been perpetuating in the media, came as a result of Facebook’s information bombardment over the past month.

Some of the company’s obvious talking points have been repeated throughout the past weeks, such as how sorry Zuckerberg is, how much control Facebook users actually do have over their own data, how Facebook is trying to build a positive community and constant reminders of how the company started in a Harvard University dorm when he was 19. According to the New York Times, Facebook hired a team of experts to give Zuckerberg — who can be combative and defensive — a crash course in humility and charm ahead of the hearing in sessions that included mock hearings with its communications team and outside advisers. That preparation paid off: After the first two hours of questions were nearing an end and there was a call for a potential break, Zuckerberg took a sip of water and said he could keep going for a bit longer.

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Exactly. Stop that and all the Facebok nonsense stops. But those in power don’t want it to stop.

• Ban Targeted Advertising (Dayen)

For the first 35 years of my life, like most Americans, I was exposed to lots of advertising. I absorbed billboards and print ads and direct mailers and television commercials and radio jingles. I learned about available products and services, and chose which ones I wanted. Some businesses I patronized survived and others didn’t. The economy mostly proceeded apace. Then, over the last decade, this form of marketing became seen as insufficient—or rather, the rise of digital media made a more invasive form of marketing too irresistible. Instead of having to cast a wide net in searching for potential customers, advertisers now could know every intimate detail about those customers beforehand.

They began targeting people geographically and behaviorally, based on common interests or things they liked in social media or what they wrote in emails to friends. The surveillance economy was born. The surveillance economy should die. This manner of advertising doesn’t serve the public and it’s not even clear it serves advertisers. It facilitates monopoly, as those with the biggest data troves receive all the ad dollars. That centralizes the potential for and magnitude of abuse, with Big Data used to discriminate against groups, steer vulnerable people to financial scams, and meddle in U.S. elections.

Cambridge Analytica’s scraping of 87 million user profiles through a simple personality quiz, and then weaponizing that information on behalf of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, revealed how information on social media is inherently insecure. Now Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is appearing before Congress on Tuesday to explain how this won’t happen again. But instead of leaving regulation to Facebook, or devising one Rube Goldberg scenario after another to try to protect consumer data, the U.S. can take one simple, legal step to roll back this dystopian nightmare: ban targeted advertising.

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App or transport?

• EU Top Court Backs France Ban Of Uber (AFP)

The EU’s top court on Tuesday backed the right of member states like France to ban a service by ridesharing firm Uber without notifying Brussels, in a fresh setback to the US giant. The European Court of Justice ruled in favour of France’s ban of the UberPop service, which links amateur drivers with customers, comparing it to a December decision backing traditional taxi firms in the Spanish city of Barcelona. “Member States may prohibit and punish, as a matter of criminal law, the illegal exercise of transport activities in the context of the UberPop service, without notifying the Commission in advance,” the European Court of Justice ruled. [..]

Uber France is facing criminal proceedings in a court in the northern French city of Lille for its UberPop service. It argues that member states like France were required to notify the European Commission about the criminal legislation under which the case was brought because it concerned a technical regulation of an information society service. But the court of justice said the French case resembled one it ruled on in December when it classified Uber as an ordinary transportation company instead of an app and should be regulated as such. “In the Court’s view, the UberPop service offered in France is essentially identical to the service provided in Spain,” the court of justice statement said.

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True or not, a nice angle.

• Barclays Says Bitcoin Behaves Like An Infectious Disease (BBG)

Is the rise of Bitcoin analogous to the spread of an infectious disease? Analysts at Barclays saw enough similarities to develop a pricing model for the cryptocurrency that takes its cues from the world of epidemiology. Their diagnosis: Bitcoin has probably peaked. The Barclays model divides the pool of potential Bitcoin investors into three groups: susceptible, infected and immune. It assumes that as prices rise, “infections” spread by word-of-mouth (nobody likes missing out when their friends and colleagues are getting rich). Barclays analysts led by Joseph Abate in New York explained the rest in a note to clients on Tuesday:

“As more of the population become asset holders, the share of the population available to become new buyers – the potential ‘host’ population – falls, while the share of the population that are potential sellers (‘recoveries’) increases. Eventually, this leads to a plateauing of prices, and progressively, as random shocks to the larger supply population push up the ratio of sellers to buyers, prices begin to fall. That induces speculative selling pressure as price declines are projected forward exponentially.” A similar dynamic plays out with infectious diseases when the so-called immunity threshold is reached, “the point at which a sufficient portion of the population becomes immune such that there are no more secondary infections,” the analysts wrote.

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Does David Brooks realize that anti-Trumpism, of which he’s a proud supporter, is what won Da Doland da election?

• The Failures of Anti-Trumpism (NYT)

Over the past year, those of us in the anti-Trump camp have churned out billions of words critiquing the president. The point of this work is to expose the harm President Trump is doing, weaken his support and prevent him from doing worse. And by that standard, the anti-Trump movement is a failure. We have persuaded no one. Trump’s approval rating is around 40%, which is basically unchanged from where it’s been all along. We have not hindered him. Trump has more power than he did a year ago, not less. With more mainstream figures like H. R. McMaster, Rex Tillerson and Gary Cohn gone, the administration is growing more nationalist, not less. We have not dislodged him.

For all the hype, the Mueller investigation looks less and less likely to fundamentally alter the course of the administration. We have not contained him. Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party is complete. 89% of Republicans now have a positive impression of the man. According to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, 59% of Republicans consider themselves more a supporter of Trump than of the Republican Party. On trade, immigration, entitlement reform, spending, foreign policy, race relations and personal morality, this is Trump’s party, not Reagan’s or anyone else’s. A lot of us never-Trumpers assumed momentum would be on our side as his scandals and incompetences mounted. It hasn’t turned out that way.

I almost never meet a Trump supporter who has become disillusioned. I often meet Republicans who were once ambivalent but who have now joined the Trump train. National Review was once staunchly anti-Trump, and many of its writers remain so, but, tellingly, N.R. editor Rich Lowry just had a column in Politico called “The Never Trump Delusion” arguing that Trump is not that big a departure from the Republican mainstream. The surest evidence of Trump’s dominance is on the campaign trail. As The Times’s Jonathan Martin reported, many Republicans, including Ted Cruz, are making the argument that if Democrats take over Congress, they will impeach the president. In other words, far from ignoring Trump, these Republicans are making defending him the center of their campaigns.

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Et tu, Brute?

• Save the Children Faces Formal Investigation Over Staff Misconduct (G.)

Save the Children, the global charity mired in allegations that it failed to investigate sexual abuse and inappropriate behaviour by staff, is to be formally investigated by the Charity Commission. In a statement announcing a statutory inquiry, the commission said it had been prompted by “concerns about the charity’s handling, reporting and response to serious allegations of misconduct and harassment against senior staff members in 2012 and 2015”. The commission describes a statutory inquiry as its “most serious form of engagement” with a charity.

The news, announced on Tuesday night, will be another blow for the charity two months after it emerged that both Justin Forsyth, its former chief executive, and Brendan Cox, the former policy director and widower of the MP Jo Cox, left the charity in 2015 following allegations of misconduct. The two men knew each other from their years working for Gordon Brown and the Labour party. After he left Save the Children, Forsyth went on to a senior role at Unicef. He resigned in February after the reports of inappropriate behaviour emerged. Cox also resigned from the charities More in Common and the Jo Cox Foundation, set up in the aftermath of his wife’s murder.

The commission, which itself has been criticised for failing to follow up allegations involving the charities it polices, has been working with Save the Children since the facts about Forsyth and Cox emerged in the wake of the scandal involving Oxfam workers in Haiti. Save the Children is already reviewing its workplace culture and the implementation of recommendations made by a previous review. But the Charity Commission said its recent work with it, and new information from other sources that has recently come into the regulator’s possession, meant that the commission wanted to make further inquiries.

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It’s crazy to think the Greek economy is growing.

• Greece at Bottom of Eurozone Growth Rate (GR)

Greece’s growth was the lowest among eurozone countries for 2017, with a GDP rise of just 1.4% while the eurozone average was 2.3%, according to European Central Bank figures. The ECB annual report released on Monday showed Ireland at the top of the growth chart among eurozone member states with a 5% GDP increase. Overall, 2017 was a year of growth for the whole of the single-currency bloc. According to the report, the main reason Greece fared so low in 2017 was that it showed only 0.1% growth in private consumption, compared to an average 1.6% increase in the rest of eurozone states.

At the same time, Greece showed a 1.1% decline in government spending, while the average in the euro area was a 1.2% increase. In terms of per capita GDP at current prices and adjusted for the cost of living, Greeks have an average annual income of €19,900 ($24,527) compared to €54,600 for each Irish citizen. In Portugal, average income amounted to €23,100, compared to €18,100 before the economic crisis. In Cyprus, the average income was €24,600 compared to €29,900 before the crisis. The “before the economic crisis” figures refer to the 1999-2008 period. On average in the euro area, per capita GDP stood at €31,700 according to the latest figures (2016), compared to €24,400 before the crisis.

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Bugs as drugs. “Originally it was thought our cells were outnumbered 10 to one.”

Well, our genes are outnumbered 1000 to 1.

• More Than Half Your Body Is Not Human (BBC)

More than half of your body is not human, say scientists. Human cells make up only 43% of the body’s total cell count. The rest are microscopic colonists. Understanding this hidden half of ourselves – our microbiome – is rapidly transforming understanding of diseases from allergy to Parkinson’s. The field is even asking questions of what it means to be “human” and is leading to new innovative treatments as a result. “They are essential to your health,” says Prof Ruth Ley, the director of the department of microbiome science at the Max Planck Institute, “your body isn’t just you”. No matter how well you wash, nearly every nook and cranny of your body is covered in microscopic creatures.

This includes bacteria, viruses, fungi and archaea (organisms originally misclassified as bacteria). The greatest concentration of this microscopic life is in the dark murky depths of our oxygen-deprived bowels. Prof Rob Knight, from University of California San Diego, told the BBC: “You’re more microbe than you are human.” Originally it was thought our cells were outnumbered 10 to one. “That’s been refined much closer to one-to-one, so the current estimate is you’re about 43% human if you’re counting up all the cells,” he says. But genetically we’re even more outgunned. The human genome – the full set of genetic instructions for a human being – is made up of 20,000 instructions called genes. But add all the genes in our microbiome together and the figure comes out between two and 20 million microbial genes.

[..] Antibiotics and vaccines have been the weapons unleashed against the likes of smallpox, Mycobacterium tuberculosis or MRSA. That’s been a good thing and has saved large numbers of lives. But some researchers are concerned that our assault on the bad guys has done untold damage to our “good bacteria”. Prof Ley told me: “We have over the past 50 years done a terrific job of eliminating infectious disease. “But we have seen an enormous and terrifying increase in autoimmune disease and in allergy. “Where work on the microbiome comes in is seeing how changes in the microbiome, that happened as a result of the success we’ve had fighting pathogens, have now contributed to a whole new set of diseases that we have to deal with.”

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